Once upon a time, everyone believed in the Middle Ages. Humanists established the concept of a medium aevum to describe the gulf that separated them from the classical authors they adored. Imagined, first, as a dark wood between two bright centers of civilization, the Middle Ages became medieval (or mediaeval) when the Romantics and Victorians reimagined it as an alternative to the alienations of modernity. Medievalism thus refers, not to a barbarous medium aevum, but to the works and conditions of a more artistic and authentic age.
But we no longer believe in the Middle Ages: not at least, in the historical narratives that distinguished Renaissance rebirth from the moribund medieval. In recent years, early modern has served as a term that spans both ages, opening up avenues for fuller, richer interpretations of the relationship between the two periods. New collections such as Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England (ed. Gordon McMullan and David Matthews [2007]) and Shakespeare and the Middle Ages (ed. Curtis Perry and John Watkins [2009]), however, reveal the pendulum swinging back, acknowledging the distinctions and differences of the Middle Ages within and despite continuities with the Renaissance.
Originating as a conference at the University of Toronto in 2006, Renaissance Medievalisms participates in this effort to give renewed and reinvigorated attention to the distinctiveness of the Middle Ages, establishing a concept of Renaissance medievalism that reflects less a sense of borders and boundaries than a productive ongoing conversation. The volume's fifteen essays are organized according to the broad questions that remain: To what extent do the medieval and the Renaissance constitute a “constantly changing continuum”? How does the Renaissance appropriate and transform the Middle Ages? And how, alternatively, does the Renaissance extend or build on the Middle Ages? The chapters represent a diverse range of disciplines, from literary studies, to geography, to the history of art, science, and philosophy, and offer a fascinating set of case studies that illustrate the interplay between change and continuity.
Many of the essays highlight the ongoing appeal of medieval literature, from the influence of a medieval author, Boccaccio, on Neoplatonic writer Leone Ebreo (Novoa), to the ancient Fables of Bidpai, a fifth-century Persian text that came to Europe via a medieval Arabic source (Beecher). Other examples include the appearance of Middle English and medieval Latin poetry in Elias Ashmole's alchemical treatise, Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (Feola); the reworking of medieval poetic complaints by Isabella Whitney (Vecchi); the deployment of medieval allegory and epistle for contemporary political ends (Radi); and John Bale's use of the medieval morality play to promote religious reform (Gourley). We learn, as well, of Shakespeare's revisionist transformations of the iconic figures of Joan of Arc and the Virgin Mary into the devilishly alluring Machiavel of Henry VI, Part One (Sheppard) and the pregnant Helena, a symbol of female reproductive independence in All's Well That Ends Well (Waller).
Others describe the interactions of medieval institutions, concepts, and beliefs with the rapidly transforming Renaissance world. Renaissance universities, for example, maintained their medieval structure, but they were transformed by expansion and major curricular changes (Grendler). Medieval traditions about fabulous animals coexisted with firsthand descriptions of animals encountered in the New World (Broedel), while medieval preconceptions about the world and its peoples were often unaltered by the contradictory reports of contemporary explorers (Raiswell). The Copernican hypothesis about alternate worlds that produced a new vision of the universe actually returned to a longstanding medieval debate (Sugar). An Istanbul-born Venetian diplomat deployed medieval myths of Turkish origins alongside humanist discourse on the Ottoman (Rothman), and Scholastic philosophy maintained its relevance through the Renaissance (Edwards).
Medievalism began as a value judgment, but the essays collected in this volume reveal interesting and dynamic engagements and responses that go well beyond admiration or distaste. However, the volume's most startling insight dispenses with the idea of the medieval altogether. Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood reveal how Renaissance art historians attached the term antique to some medieval works of art and architecture. They even propose classifying these works in the census of antique works of art known in the Renaissance. Dismantling the antithetical binary of classical and medieval that produced the idea of the Renaissance in the first place, this arresting chapter confirms the mutually constituted as well as arbitrary nature of historical periodization.
