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In his book, The Middle Ages Never End, Valentin Groebner elucidates a variety of interpretations of medieval history as reflections of their successive political milieux. This is not a study of the Middle Ages themselves, but of what became of them in the course of their subsequent reception. From the fifteenth century to the present day, our image of the epoch has served in no small measure as a mirror to each society that studies it.
Groebner demonstrates that in the various representations of the Middle Ages there is also always an element of self-representation. Across the centuries, from Petrarch to the National Socialists, “the Middle Ages” have been rewritten in accordance with the spirit of the times. In one age it may be a utopian echo chamber, in another a politically burdened counter-world. In this connection, Groebner reverts to the two leitmotifs that characterize almost every reading of the Middle Ages: the barbarian “dark ages,” as opposed to the sentimental, romanticized Middle Ages with their “rediscovery” of the emotions. And both versions of the epoch are consistently viewed in contrast with the viewer’s own times. For the Enlightenment, the Middle Ages were synonymous with groping in darkness – by way of showing how enlightened we had supposedly become by the eighteenth century. For the Romantics, on the other hand, they served as the key to a subjective, heightened sensibility and a paradigm of innocent simplicity. Romantics constructed the medieval epoch as something “more intrinsic,” as Groebner calls it – a more authentic counter-image to their own times.
He cogently traces the personal and political motives of the various “inventors of the Middle Ages.” Petrarch, for example, used the image of the benighted Middle Ages as a foil, yet based his own work on the intellectual achievements of his medieval precursors. By conscious omission of source references, he cast himself as an original genius unindebted to the past. It was different with the young German nation more than 400 years later, in search of roots that could distinguish it as sharply as possible from its European neighbors. The Middle Ages were reinvented here as “national history.” The interests of medieval research were often economic in nature, too. Thus, for example, a historian could charge a handsome price for drawing up a family tree showing that this or that local prince traced his ancestry back to Charlemagne. And the Benedictine order made an especially thorough study of its own history in the Middle Ages with the object of recovering its former land holdings.
Every age creates its own Middle Ages. Today, the “secondary Middle Ages,” as Groebner calls them – movies and computer games like The Lord of the Rings and World of Warcraft – fulfill a compensatory function and are used as a means to retreat from hectic modern life. Retreat and simplification are closely related concepts, and the Middle Ages evidently promise a respite from complexity: “Speaking about the Middle Ages was rather a chance to adopt several, even contradictory, positions at the same time without having to resolve the contradictions.” This principle is still valid today: The more imprecisely one speaks of the past, the easier it is for that past to be utilized for one’s own (political) purposes.
And of course these views of the Middle Ages were also quite decisively shaped, over the course of centuries, by the medievalists themselves. Groebner draws a critical picture of “the guild,” as the medieval historians refer to themselves. In the interviews he records here, they speak frankly: resigned senior professors, grim tenured colleagues, and skeptical lecturers. He doesn’t pull punches with his guild either, calling them ventriloquists who imagine that they hear original sources in their own pronouncements.
But Groebner remains pleasantly self-critical. He is familiar with the temptation to fault his colleagues for self-deception in order to feel himself less vulnerable. That is a recurring pattern not only in the history of scholarship. He doesn’t exclude himself from it, and his candor enables the reader to follow his line of argumentation easily. Groebner’s own study, too, has an underlying political motive. For one thing, he means to show that interpretation of the Middle Ages always was and always will be a subjective undertaking – not a new idea, but presented here in a novel way. Secondly, he means to call attention to the fact that the “great narratives,” including those of medieval studies, have depended upon the exclusion of “the other.” Groebner has made a point of bringing ethnological perspectives to bear on historical studies as well. “I am learning Turkish now,” he tells us in his concluding remarks. That will enable him to study Ottoman sources that have been largely disregarded up to now and, over the longer term, to establish a trans-cultural European study of the Middle Ages.
If there is anything to fault about Groebner’s book it is that he does not elaborate on the extent to which medieval studies in Germany already share his views, at least partially. The German Research Foundation (DFG), for example, initiated a program in 2005 to study the integration and disintegration of Latin-Christian, Greek-Orthodox, Islamic, and Jewish cultures in the Middle Ages.
Groebner’s The Middle Ages Never End is appealing for its perceptive observations and excellent analysis of the various “spirits of the age.” In contrast with Herder’s dictum that “an orderly past [is] the only useful future,” Groebner makes clear, with witty language and epigrammatic points, just how changeable the past is when it is rewritten in accordance with the future we are striving for. After all: “We always have exactly the roots that suit us best for the moment.”
Andrea Müller
July 2008
[Translated by Michael Ritterson]
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