ABSTRACT
The Middle Ages are always changing. That is because the Middle Ages come alive for us in the books, articles, lectures, classes, and documentaries of our contemporaries. Like music played on Wallace Stevens’ blue guitar, the notes themselves may not change from age to age, but the tone and emphasis and tempo do change, depending on who plays that guitar. In the Toller Lecture at the University of Manchester in 1992, Professor Roberta Frank of Yale asked her audience to consider the temper and dispositions of scholars of the Middle Ages and to “observe the swings back and forth between credulity and doubt, between creative optimism and cognitive agnosticism.” She warned, “The errors in our predecessor’s evocations turn out to be as varied, unexpected and revealing as our own.”2 Frank remarked that misconceptions arise in a particular time and place. We have taken her observation as the theme of this book: In describing the past to a contemporary audience, one needs to be aware of the distorting effects of one’s own convictions, concerns, and ideals. In unguarded moments, one risks projecting contemporary faults or ideals onto the data and records of the past. A past said to be teeming with fools may reveal our own intellectual insecurities; a past said to be teeming with heroes, our desire for reform.3 Thus do our own insecurities and desires become a part of academic history. As Allen J. Frantzen wrote in his groundbreaking Desire for Origins, “The ideas and attitudes of readers accumulate around texts; the scholarship of each generation adheres to the subject and becomes part of the subject that the next generation then studies.”4 Scholarship today and for the last century has borne the double burden of assessing the context of ancient books as well as the accumulated, serial prejudices of their readers. As we sift through scholarly inaccuracies and half-remembered critical goals, we come slowly to an
agnostic position. In the pendulum swing of scholarship, we move from a waning credulity to a confi dent doubt. And as we begin to appreciate the canny, clever, and inventive minds of medieval Europe, we lose a misconception about the past that for centuries set our purported sophistication against their purported naiveté. So, we fi nd that textbooks and introductory studies today rarely begin by deprecating medieval intellectual life; fewer of us look down our noses at the giants on whose shoulders we stand. The opposite view we are content to call a misconception. This book is dedicated to describing some of the ways that we have misconceived the Middle Ages.
