Medieval studies

Medieval studies is the academic interdisciplinary study of the Middle Ages.

Institutional development

The term 'medieval studies' began to be adopted by academics in the opening decades of the twentieth century, initially in the titles of books like G. G. Coulton's ''Ten Medieval Studies'' (1906), to emphasize a greater interdisciplinary approach to a historical subject. In American and European universities the term provided a coherent identity to centres composed of academics from a variety of disciplines including archaeology, art history, architecture, history, literature and linguistics. The Institute of Mediaeval Studies at St. Michael's College of the University of Toronto became the first centre of this type in 1929; it is now the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (PIMS) and is part of the University of Toronto. It was soon followed by the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, which was founded in 1946 but whose roots go back to the establishment of a Program of Medieval Studies in 1933. As with many of the early programs at Roman Catholic institutions, it drew its strengths from the revival of medieval scholastic philosophy by such scholars as Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain, both of whom made regular visits to the university in the 1930s and 1940s.

These institutions were preceded in the United Kingdom, in 1927, by the establishment of the idiosyncratic Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, at Cambridge University. Although Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic was limited geographically (to the British Isles and Scandinavia) and chronologically (mostly the early Middle Ages), it promoted the interdisciplinarity characteristic of Medieval Studies and many of its graduates were involved in the later development of Medieval Studies programmes elsewhere in the UK.

With university expansion in the late 1960s and early 1970s encouraging interdisciplinary cooperation, similar centres were established in England at University of Reading (1965), at University of Leeds (1967) and the University of York (1968), and in the United States at Fordham University (1971).G. McMullan and D. Matthews, ''Reading the medieval in early modern England'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 231. A more recent wave of foundations, perhaps helped by the rise of interest in things medieval associated with neo-medievalism, include centres at King's College London (1988), the University of Bristol (1994), the University of Sydney (1997) and Bangor University (2005).

Medieval studies is buoyed by a number of annual international conferences which bring together thousands of professional medievalists, including the International Congress on Medieval Studies, at Kalamazoo MI, U.S., and the International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds. There are a number of journals devoted to medieval studies, including: ''Mediaevalia'', ''Comitatus'', ''Viator'', ''Traditio'', '' Medieval Worlds'', ''Journal of Medieval History'', ''Journal of Medieval Military History'', and '' Speculum'', an organ of the Medieval Academy of America founded in 1925 and based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Another part of the infrastructure of the field is the International Medieval Bibliography.

Historiographical development

The term "Middle Ages" first began to be common in English-language history-writing in the early nineteenth century. Henry Hallam's 1818 ''View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages'' has been seen as a key stage in the promotion of the term, along with Ruskin's 1853 ''Lectures on Architecture''. The term ''medievalist'' was, correspondingly, coined by English-speakers in the mid-nineteenth century.

European study of the medieval past was characterised in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by romantic nationalism, as emergent nation-states sought to legitimise new political formations by claiming that they were rooted in the distant past. The most important example of this use of the Middle Ages was the nation-building that surrounded the unification of Germany. Narratives which presented the nations of Europe as modernizing by building on, yet also developing beyond, their medieval heritage, were also important facets underpinning justifications of European colonialism and imperialism during the New Imperialism era. Scholars of the medieval era in the United States also used these concepts to justify their westward expansion across the North American continent. These colonialist and imperialist connections meant that medieval studies during the 19th and 20th centuries played a role in the emergence of white supremacism.

However, the early twentieth century also saw new approaches associated with the rise of social sciences such as economic history and anthropology, epitomised by the influential Annales School. In place of what the Annalistes called '' histoire événementielle'', this work favoured study of large questions over long periods.Graham A. Loud and Martial Staub, 'Some Thoughts on the Making of the Middle Ages', in ''The Making of Medieval History'', ed. by Graham Loud and Martial Staub (York: York Medieval Press, 2017), , pp. 1-13.

In the wake of the Second World War, the role of medievalism in European nationalism led to greatly diminished enthusiasm for medieval studies within the academy—though nationalist deployments of the Middle Ages still existed and remained powerful.Patrick Geary, 'European Ethnicities and European as an Ethnicity: Does Europe Have too Much History?', in ''The Making of Medieval History'', ed. by Graham Loud and Martial Staub (York: York Medieval Press, 2017), , pp. 57-69. The proportion of medievalists in history and language departments fell, encouraging staff to collaborate across different departments; state funding of and university support for archaeology expanded, bringing new evidence but also new methods, disciplinary perspectives, and research questions forward; and the appeal of interdisciplinarity grew. Accordingly, medieval studies turned increasingly away from producing national histories, towards more complex mosaics of regional approaches that worked towards a European scope, partly correlating with post-War Europeanisation. An example from the apogee of this process was the large European Science Foundation project The Transformation of the Roman World that ran from 1993 to 1998.

Amidst this process, from the 1980s onwards medieval studies increasingly responded to intellectual agendas set by critical theory and cultural studies, with empiricism and philology being challenged by or harnessed to topics like the history of the body.

In the twenty-first century, globalisation led to arguments that post-war Europeanisation had drawn too tight a boundary around medieval studies, this time at the borders of Europe, with Muslim Iberia and the Orthodox Christian eastMichael Borgolte, 'A Crisis of the Middle Ages? Deconstructing and Constructing European Identities in a Globalized World', in ''The Making of Medieval History'', ed. by Graham Loud and Martial Staub (York: York Medieval Press, 2017), , pp. 70-84. seen in western European historiography as having an ambivalent relevance to medieval studies. Thus a range of medievalists have begun working on writing global histories of the Middle Ages—while, however, navigating, the risk of imposing Eurocentric terminologies and agendas on the rest of the world. By 2020, this movement was being characterised as the 'global turn' in Medieval Studies. Correspondingly, the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, founded in 1963, changed its name in 2021 to UCLA Center for Early Global Studies.

Centres for medieval studies

Many Centres / Centers for Medieval Studies exist, usually as part of a university or other research and teaching facility. Umberella organisations for these bodies include the Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Etudes Médiévales (FIDEM) (founded 1987) and Co-operative for Advancement of Research through Medieval European Network (CARMEN). Some notable ones include:
* The Centre for Medieval Studies, Bangor at Bangor University
Official site

* The Centre for Medieval Studies, Bergen at the University of Bergen
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* The Centre for Medieval Studies, Bristol at the University of Bristol
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* The Department of Medieval Studies, CEU at the Central European University
Official site
On the origins of the department, see Gábor Klaniscay, 'Medieval Origins of Central Europe. An Invention or a Discovery?', in The Paradoxes of Unintended Consequences, ed. by Lord Dahrendorf, Yehuda Elkana, Aryeh Neier, William Newton-Smith, and István Rév (Budapest: CEU Press, 2000), pp. 251-64.
* Groupe d'Anthropologie Historique de l'Occident Médiéval at the '' École des hautes études en sciences sociales''
Official site

* The Centre for Medieval Studies, Exeter at the University of Exeter
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* The Center for Medieval Studies, Fordham at Fordham University
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* The Center for Medieval Studies, Freiburg at the University of Freiburg
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* The Center for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, or CLAMS, at King's College London
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* The Institute for Medieval Studies, Leeds at the University of Leeds
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* The Liverpool Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Liverpool
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* CMRS Center for Early Global Studies, at University of California, Los Angeles
Official site

* The ''Centre d'Études médiévales de Montpellier'' or Center for Medieval Studies at the university of Montpellier
Official site

* The Center for Medieval Studies, Minnesota at the University of Minnesota
Official site

* The Medieval Institute, Notre Dame at the University of Notre Dame
Official site

* The ''Laboratoire de médiévistique occidentale de Paris'' or Paris Laboratory for Western Medieval Studies at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University
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* The Center for Medieval Studies, Pennsylvania at Pennsylvania State University
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* The ''Centre d'études supérieures de civilisation mediévale'' or Center of Advanced Studies in Medieval Civilization at the University of Poitiers
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* The Centre for Medieval Studies, Prague at Charles University in Prague and the Czech Academy of Sciences
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* The Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies, Reading at the University of Reading
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* The Institute for Medieval Studies, Lisbon at the Nova University of Lisbon
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* Institut für Realienkunde des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit at the Paris Lodron Universität Salzburg
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* The Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Culture at the University of Southampton
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* The Centre for Medieval Studies, Sydney at the University of Sydney
Official site

* The Centre for Medieval Studies, Toronto at the University of Toronto
Official site

* The Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies at the University of Toronto
Official site

* The Utrecht Centre for Medieval Studies at the Utrecht University
Official site

* The Centre for Medieval Studies, York at the University of York
Official site

* The Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University
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* The Center for Medieval and Byzantine Studies at The Catholic University of America
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* The Centre d'études médiévales, Montréal à l'Université de Montréal
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* The Medieval History Research Centre at Trinity College, Dublin
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* The Turku Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Turku
Official site

* The Centre for Medieval Studies at Tallinn University
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* The Center for Medieval Studies at the University of Bucharest
Official site

See also

*Medievalism
* Canadian Society of Medievalists
* Conferences in medieval studies
* Digital Medievalist
* Medieval Academy of America
*Renaissance studies
* 12th Century Renaissance
* Continuity thesis

Notes

External links

The Medieval Academy of AmericaThe Medieval ReviewMedieval Studies links from Voice of the ShuttleMedieval Studies projects from British AcademyProsopography of Anglo-Saxon EnglandMedieval Studies
;Library guides to Medieval studies
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FIDEM

Carmen: The Worldwide Medieval Network

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European studies
Historiography