The Medieval Academy of America (of which I am a Fellow) is coming up on its 100th anniversary, so it seems appropriate to think about the past and future of medieval studies, particularly in the US. The topic is considered in a number of pieces in the January 2025 issue of Speculum, the Academy's journal.
Americans have both an advantage and a disadvantage compared to Europeans in studying the Middle Ages. On the one hand, we have to travel thousands of miles to get to most medieval evidence. Some medieval art, a few bits of architecture (like the Cloisters in Manhattan), and the occasional document are found in the US, but the castles, the churches, the medieval street layouts, and almost all the archives require extensive travel to access. The saying, "The past is a foreign country" certainly applies.
On the other hand, it is much easier for Americans to try to look at medieval evidence as itself, without having to consciously avoid back-extrapolating from the present to medieval times. For example, we can study the rule of Henry II of England without having to think about how English property titles were until recently traced back to Henry's time. We can look across international borders far more easily than, say, the French, who know that the English and the Germans are The Other Guys, national enemies for centuries.
This does not of course mean that American medievalists, like other historians, do not always have presentist issues lurking when they study the past. Industrialization in the nineteenth century created a backlash where people wanted to pursue and celebrate hand crafts, and such crafts were labeled medieval. There was also a sense that society had become too coarse, and many dreamed of a bygone age of courtesy and chivalry, identified as medieval. (I here stifle a snort.)
In the early twentieth century, in the aftermath of World War I, Americans wanted to justify becoming involved in a war fought thousands of miles away. The justification was western civilization, now identified with Europe, considered to have begun with Greece and Rome, with ideals and institutions that developed during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, culminating of course with American democracy. The eighteenth-century founders of the United States had all had a classical education and used Athenian democracy, Plato's Republic, and the Roman Senate as models, but now the gaps between the year 1 or so and the present were to be filled in with medieval culture and Christianity.
Western Civ is still with us, though it's less and less likely to be a foundational course for all college students. In the 1960s everything was supposed to be modern and relevant. We're going to the moon! Who wants to worry about "dark times beyond the sea"? Medieval studies however staged a resurgence in the following decades, due to a combination of Tolkien and a desire for an imagined past full of traditional values, rather than all this disturbing new stuff.
(I realized the 60s were officially over during the Ford administration, when I saw a toothpaste ad, done in sepia tones, of a white haired grandma giving a child in a white nightie baking soda to brush her teeth with. And at a basin, not a sink. The advertised toothpaste was said to contain baking soda, just like Grandma used to use. You would never have seen that half a dozen years earlier. Mini skirts went out at exactly the same time.)
Most students still get their primary exposure to medieval studies via a Western Civ course, though such courses are more and more being replaced by Global Studies. Global Studies has its own challenges, like how are we going to cover 10,000 years of the history of an entire planet in 30 weeks? Initial efforts were awkward, like Western Civ textbooks where all the ancient and medieval history chapters were still there, just shorter, and interleaved with other chapters. So a chapter on Charlemagne was followed by a chapter on Great Zimbabwe in Africa, and one on the Italian Renaissance by one on the Inca of South America. Efforts were made to "compare European and Japanese feudalism," feudalism being roughly defined as fortified dwellings and guys with swords, and resulting in unsatisfactory results. The Global Studies folks are still trying to figure out how to do this better.
In spite of minimal academic exposure to the Middle Ages, a lot of young people try to learn about it on their own. Tolkien, including the "Lord of the Rings" movies, have been a major influence, joined more recently by the "Game of Thrones" shows and George Martin's books. With or without the admixture of magic, medieval society looks like one in which the individual can make a difference, and where big issues, beyond paying the electric bill or doing the laundry, can dominate. In spite of its name, members of the Society for Creative Anachronism try to learn (and cosplay) something fairly close to real medieval culture.
Meanwhile academic medieval studies have pulled away from Western Civ to follow its own direction. When "dark times across the sea" had been declared irrelevant, medievalists initially responded by emphasizing Rise of the Nation State. After all, neither ancient Greece's little city-states nor Rome's Empire were a good model for modern nationalism, but Europe's countries of today have clear medieval antecedents.
More recently, medievalists have decided we've said all that's needed to be said about the nation state. Medieval studies have gone off in all sorts of interesting new directions, like gender, or memory studies, or the history of agriculture, or the relationship of the church and secular society. Stay tuned as I address this in my next post.
© C. Dale Brittain 2025
For more on approaches to the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available in paperback.
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