In my new role as a contributor to The Dictionary of Received Ideas, I decided to run a Technorati search on the words medieval history. (Don’t do just ‘history’, you’ll be there forever…) The fruits of that search should appear over at TDRI soon – lots of interesting things I’ve never seen before.
But it also threw up what might be an interesting ‘cultural’ research topic for someone: using blog writing to explore how we use the idea of the ‘medieval’.
The rat became the unit of currency, a post that begins “What happened to our economy?” (Just read it to get the gist.) This is the final paragraph:
There was no more money by this stage. Value was represented by information, so that people stopped losing loose change down the back of their sofas, much to the detriment of their national economy. This sofa problem was the kind of inocuous event, that, when multiplied ten million times, began to have a big effect. Like farting cows contributing about 15% of the methane production in the world, much to the horror of the ozone layer. So no more copper-forged engraved discs of money. How medieval it all was! Ingots were still big, because of a collective paranoia in the elder classes. They also made nice book-ends.
So, “medieval” here is associated with barter and money-less societies… Does this writer really believe there was no coinage in the medieval period? And I think that’s a nice example of what ‘medieval’ tends to stand for: extremely primitive, probably savagely violent, not to mention crazily superstitious and deeply oppressive. Especially if you mix in some orientalism. How about the medieval mullahs of Iran today; or comparing mujahidin to medieval caliphs (and that’s a quote from a newspaper)?
I’ve written about this kind of thing before, when looking at films on early modern witch hunts (which also contains a reference to a very interesting article on ‘medieval’ films). Historical films, I’ve long thought, are an interesting source for examining this kind of question. Things like IMDB and Amazon consumer reviews can be very revealing about our assumptions about the pre-modern past, as I’ve also noted in passing: “A brief perusal of viewer comments online [about the film The Return of Martin Guerre] is illuminating. Perhaps the most striking was an Amazon.com respondent’s surprise at learning that the period [sixteenth-century France] possessed such civilised, modern things as ‘laws and jurisprudence as well as thoughtful judges’.” Oh, dear. I’ve never quite forgotten that one.
I don’t know if simply teaching more medieval (and early modern!) history would help very much. These ideas run deep; they’re perhaps a key part of understanding ourselves as ‘modern’. (Just as we ‘Westerners’ need ‘the East’.) So, it’s just a thought if any cultural studies folks are looking for a new research project…
Update: this online article on teaching ‘Renaissance’ films is also worth looking at (you can play hunt the “medieval Christian repressiveness”, apart from anything else).
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By the way, Technorati does some weird stuff with this blog in the same search: post titles don’t match URLs and neither match the content summary… What on earth is going on there?