Medieval Studies in Troubled Times: The 1930s

Medieval Studies in Troubled Times: The 1930s By D a v i d W a l l a c e This essay considers medieval studies in troubled times, specifically the decade leading into World War II. It begins with the Great War of 1914–18, which globalized European territorial rivalries, with St. Petersburg, and with France and Germany—then key to developing philological and historical disciplines, now at the committed core of European constitutional identity. Observing the dynamics of the Danube, the Rhine, and the Alps, it passes through some key locales such as Belgium, Réunion, Iceland, Ireland, Italy (with Ethiopia and Somalia), England, and the USA. It finds imaginings of globalism that we might hesitate to embrace, with racializing terminology freely employed and little discussed; it considers possibilities of female academic employment. Pondering the status of Jewish studies, and the study of Islam, it ends at the knife edge (then as now) of Istanbul. It considers both academic medievalism, as Speculum gets into stride through the 1930s, and uses of the medieval which, then as now, could deploy creatively, or foster violence. It evaluates amateurism, good and bad. It is hard to know how this essay might read just a decade from now, as current graduate students come to assume leadership of our profession. I would like to begin with a graduate student. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Albert Demangeon was conducting research on Picardy, that region of France centered on Amiens and bisected by the river Somme. His book of the thesis, published in 1905, includes multicolored pullout maps showing regional rainfall, according to place and season; the blotch of red unhappily hints at the mud of the Somme battlefield in 1916.1 Demangeon was one of the few who carried his professional training, as a regional geographer, directly into war service; he drafted maps and topographical memos for the French army, and also for the politicians who would later divide up territories. The word Picardy, he argued in 1905, has no geographical sense, but rather indicates an area where a language, Picard, is spoken; it is only in the fourteenth century that Picardy emerges in documents as an administrative term. Later, writing in 1920, Demangeon argues that in contemplating the disasters of the Great War, set to hobble Europe and its economy for years to come, one turns back to the most miserable epochs in the history of humanity: for France, the Hundred Years War.2 Demangeon goes on to suggest that the intensity and especially the scale of recent destruction are without precedent: terrifying new engines of war have broken This presidential address was delivered on 9 March 2019 at the annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Specific thanks to Panagiotis Agapitos, Talya Fishman, Clare Lees, Ora Limor, Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir, Sif Rikhardsdottir, Helen Leith Spencer, Ryan Szpiech, and to Anne Cherry, Laura Ingallinella, and Sarah Spence. And with apologies to Iberian, Australasian, and many other scholars for what remains to be said. 1 2 Albert Demangeon, La Picardie et les régions voisines: Artois—Cambrésis—Beauvaisis (Paris, 1905). Albert Demangeon, Le déclin de l’Europe (Paris, 1920), 19. Speculum 95/1 (January 2020). Copyright 2020 by the Medieval Academy of America. doi: 10.1086/706097, 0038-7134/2020/9501-00XX$10.00. 190556.proof.3d 1 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 2 millions of human lives, wiped away centuries of labor and economic effort, while destroying “la terre des champs.”3 This last phrase unwittingly evokes a French poet of the Hundred Years War, who renamed himself on being “burned out” of the fields of his country estate by marauding English soldiers, “brulé des champs”; thus Eustache Morel became Eustache Deschamps.4 Such raiding as carried out by English soldiery was known as chevauché, a form of economic warfare waged through the destruction of human settlements and lines of supply. The poet Chaucer, who fought in this region in this war, declares the Squire of his Canterbury Tales to be expert in chyvachie, as exercised or inflicted “in Flaundres, in Artois, and Pycardie.”5 Such synergies between the Great War and the endless medieval war were keenly felt by poets and writers in the trenches, and long after. Albert Demangeon’s book of 1920 strongly registers recent destructiveness while also, from a European point of view, foreseeing a diminished future: its title is Le déclin de l’Europe. The species of decline foreseen here is imperial: for the overseas colonial subjects of England and France will notice, he argues, that the European powers could not win the recent war without help from overseas—by which he means, chiefly, the United States. Writing eighty years before Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, Demangeon speaks of “a displacement of the center of gravity of the world outside Europe,” toward “the peoples of America and of Asia.”6 Europe has dominated globally for centuries, he says, through “the superiority of its noble and antique civilization”; but will not the massive losses of the war strike a fatal blow for the hegemony of Europe through the world, over the world (“un coup fatal à l’hégémonie de l’Europe sur le monde?”7 Albert Demangeon thus situates himself in a difficult mental space that Paul Saint-Amour brilliantly characterizes as tense future: mindful of horrors from the immediate past, while yet intuiting upsets to come from the immediate future.8 These are the troubled times through which European medieval studies will unfold through the 1930s. The Jerusalem War Cemetery provides a resting place for soldiers from the British West Indies Regiment, from India, from Australia, from Britain, and from many other places. There are 2,515 burials here, along with a memorial to a further 3,300 with no known grave. Memorialization again fuses medieval and modern, with a helmeted St. George above the entrance gate standing in for the helmeted men of the Great War. Some 1,680,000 Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu men and women served in the Great War, along with some 173,000 animals; some 62,060 men died (6,670 in France and Belgium), plus 98 Indian army nurses.9 In the Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, it Demangeon, Le déclin de l’Europe, 20. See David Wallace, Premodern Places (Oxford, 2004), 48–61. 5 Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales 1:86, ed. Larry D. Benson, The Riverside Chaucer (Boston, 1987). 6 Demangeon, Le déclin de l’Europe, 12; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, rev. ed. (Princeton, 2007). 7 Demangeon, Le déclin de l’Europe, 14. 8 Paul K. Saint-Amour, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (Oxford, 2015). 9 Roger D. Long, “Introduction,” in India and the Great War: A Centennial Assessment, ed. Roger D. Long and Ian Talbot (London, 2018), 1–42; Krishnan G. Saini, “The Economics Aspects of India’s Participation,” in India and World War I, ed. DeWitt C. Ellinwood and S. D. Pradhan (New Delhi, 1978), 141–76, at 143; Anne Bostanci, “How Was India Involved in the First World War?,” British Council, 3 4 Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 2 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 3 was reasonably hoped that such service might secure greater rights to self-determination; Woodrow Wilson, the American president, heading for the Paris Peace Conference, was known to uphold the principle of national self-determination. Negative consequences foreseen by Albert Demangeon, following American entry into the Great War, might thus be read positively in Egypt and Algeria, in Jamaica and elsewhere in “the British West Indies.” Alas, it was not to be. Woodrow Wilson did support self-governing nationhood at Paris, but chiefly for those abutting western Europe, such as Poles, Czechs, and Yugoslavs, and those affected by the disintegrated Austro-Hungarian empire. The victorious imperial powers, France and England, opposed self-determination for Flemings because of German collaborationism; and they did not support comparable aspirations in their own colonies, either, even though colonial subjects had contributed mightily to winning the war. The German-trained sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois was, however, present in Paris in 1919 to argue for the creation of a central African state.10 Given that European imperial structures will unravel so rapidly after 1946, following the Royal Indian Navy uprising,11 it is perhaps not surprising that the scholarly surfaces of medieval studies in the 1930s—and not just in Berlin, Munich, and Rome—are so frequently crossed by terminologies of race. This holds true for uses of the medieval, what we now call medievalism, although the boundary between medievalism and medieval studies, then as now, proves blurry. Woodrow Wilson, sometime president of Princeton University, became the first serving American president to visit Europe when he came to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. He brought with him three chief advisers, one being Charles Homer Haskins, who served as “Chairman of the Division of Western Europe.”12 Haskins, the most influential of American medieval historians, became a founding Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America just a few years later. Much will be written about the Medieval Academy’s early years as we approach its centenary, in 2025, but for now we might simply note its ebullience, viewed from the perspective of its chief object of study, namely Europe. When Albert Demangeon’s work of 1920, Le déclin de l’Europe, came to be published the following year in the USA, it appeared as America and the Race for World Dominion.13 This in no way betrays 30 October 2014, https://www.britishcouncil.org/voices-magazine/how-was-india-involved-first-world -war (last accessed 12 August 2019); Rakhshanda Jalil, Indian Writings on the Great War (New Delhi, 2019). Women doctors were employed in the army for the first time: see S. D. Pradhan, “Indian Army and the First World War,” in Ellinwood and Pradhan, India and World War I, 49–67, at 59. 10 See Heather Blurton, “An American in Paris: Charles Homer Haskins and the Paris Peace Conference,” in Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of “The Middle Ages” Outside Europe, ed. Nadia Altschul and Kathleen Davies (Baltimore, 2010), 265–85, at 274. For acute meditations on Du Bois and national belonging, see Cord J. Whittaker, Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking (Philadelphia, 2019), 146–51. 11 See V. M. Bhagwatkar, Royal Indian Navy Uprising and Freedom Struggle (Amravati, 1989); David Wallace, “General Introduction,” in Europe: A Literary History, 1348–1418, ed. Wallace, 2 vols. (Oxford, 2016), 1:xxxvi. 12 Thus the obituary notice in Speculum signed by R. P. Blake, G. R. Coffman, and E. K. Rand: “Charles Homer Haskins,” Speculum 14/3 (1939): 413–15, at 414. Blurton, “An American in Paris,” 266, notes that as head of the Northwest Europe Division, Haskins was tasked with making American suggestions for redrawing boundaries along German borders (including Alsace-Lorraine, the Saarland, and the Rhineland); he also “had a hand in the creation of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia.” 13 Albert Demangeon, America and the Race for World Dominion (New York, 1921). Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 3 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 4 Demangeon’s vision, since he had detected a tilt in the direction of the world in favor of “the peoples of America and of Asia.” Ebullience and rising confidence can be read in the early direction and production of Speculum, including the use of heavy, high-quality paper and a design so compelling that it has changed little in ninety years—and we know, deep down, that the printed Speculum models an archaic gorgeousness of layout and detail that we are not yet quite ready to renounce. The initial impetus for a Medieval Academy was somewhat narrow, reflecting its origin as a breakout movement from the Modern Language Association, led by medieval Latinists. But its remit widens quickly. At the first annual meeting, Francis Peabody Magoun is already urging Speculum to embrace “mediaeval music, law, science, art, and education, together with a recognition of Byzantine culture.”14 Magoun himself soon submits an article on a Czech prose translation of the Historia de Preliis, and this neighbors an article in Speculum 3.2 on “Mozarabic melodics;” the next Speculum sees Pio Rajna writing in Italian, Étienne Gilson in French, and a book written in Czech reviewed in English. This confident internationalism counterbalances an infranationalism, since the strong centering upon Cambridge, MA, where Haskins taught, is supplemented by representation from universities and small colleges across the Midwest, to the West Coast; the logic of CARA makes itself felt early on.15 The determination that Speculum should be widely inclusive, a Gesamtkunstwerk of medieval studies, reflects Germanic inspiration seen elsewhere in Medieval Academy structures, such as its peculiar mechanisms of Fellowship. When Medium Aevum was launched at Oxford in 1932, it was determined that “history and antiquities will be treated in its pages only in so far as they illustrate an author or a text.”16 The journal Medieval Studies opened its pages in 1939 with a letter from the Archbishop of Toronto, followed by an imprimi potest, a nihil obstat, and an imprimatur; five of the first seven contributors were professional religious. Speculum would eventually settle into an Anglo-French pattern of domination, complementing the Anglo-Italian domination of the Renaissance Society of America, but plenty of space in the early years is dedicated to Spanish and Italian, Slavics and Arabic. The first issue of 1930 features an article by Olga Dobiaš -Rož destvensky, who had received a doctorate in 1918 and then worked as a professor at Petrograd University, and among manuscripts in the illustrious Public Library (founded in 1795). In 1929 she published at Leningrad a descriptive catalogue of the Latin manuscripts in her workplace library (Fig. 1).17 She confines herself to manuscripts from the fifth to seventh centuries, and she writes in French. Her appearance in Speculum allows her to dwell at length on just one of these manuscripts, with much better illustrations.18 Working Ralph Adams Cram, “Report on the First Annual Meeting,” Speculum 1 (1926): 451–53, at 452. The Committee for Centers and Regional Associations (CARA) became a standing committee of MAA in 1969: see “About Cara,” The Medieval Academy of America, https://www.medievalacademy .org/page/AboutCARA (last accessed 12 August 2019). 16 C.T. Onions, “Editorial,” Medium Aevum 1 (1932): 1. 17 Olga Dobiaš -Rož destvensky, Les anciens manuscrits latins de la Bibliothèque publique de Léningrad (Leningrad, 1929). 18 Dobiaš -Rož destvensky, “Le Codex Q. v. I. 6–10 de la Bibliothèque Publique de Leningrad,” Speculum 5/1 (1930): 21–48. 14 15 Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 4 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 5 Fig. 1. cover detail from Olga Dobiaš -Rož destvensky, Les anciens manuscrits latins de la Bibliothèque publique de Léningrad (photograph by David Wallace). conditions for Leningrad librarians deteriorated through the Stalinist 1930s, with many of them murdered or disappeared. When the siege began in 1941, many library staffers signed up to fight. One hundred thirty-eight of them died during the winter of 1941, yet the library never ceased functioning as a library. Olga Dobiaš Rož destvensky died in 1939, and it was not discovered until 1965 that she had carried right on working on her early Latin manuscripts, covering the eighth and early ninth centuries. Her work was translated from Russian and published by CNRS in 1991, following the editorial principles she had laid down in the 1920s and 1930s, with her “admirable érudition.”19 The first issue of Speculum in 1930, then, shows active commitment to internationalist scholarship as Europe heads steadily back into troubled times.20 19 Xénia Grichine, “Avant-Propos” to Olga A. Dobiaš -Rož destvenskaja and Wsevolod W. Bakhtine, Les anciens manuscrits latins de la Bibliothèque Publique Saltykov-Š č edrin de Leningrad, VIIIe–début IXe siècle (Paris, 1991), 11. 20 The final issue of Speculum for 1930 includes four “Notes” that again show wide geographic range in subject matter and authorship: Charles Homer Haskins (Harvard), “Orleanese Formularies in a Manuscript at Tarragona”; “Some Mediaeval Spanish Terms of Writing and Illumination,” submitted from State College of Washington, Pullman; “The Welsh Texts of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia,” from Illinois; “Ein Unveröffentlichtes Lateinisches Liebeslied,” from Duisberg. Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 5 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 6 At the heart of Europe’s troubles, American scholars might observe, lay intense rivalries between France and Germany, sharpened by the disciplinary exercise of philology and history. Which nation “owns” the Strasbourg oaths, and whose edition of the Song of Roland—newly edited, on each side, with each new outbreak of war—can be held definitive?21 Medieval texts were put to populist ends, as we shall see, although the Francophone and Germanic scholars who drew them from manuscript could not help but recognize—if only to themselves—shared methodological terrain. And in better times, such rivalry, playing out at border locales such as Strasbourg, might be seen as a dialectic keeping each side sharp, obviating the lazy amateurism that might pass for scholarship in England. When Carey Thomas of Bryn Mawr22 wished to become a philologist she headed for Leipzig and then Zürich; when Haskins wanted to study deeper he headed for the École des Chartres. Karl Lachmann, who died in 1851, synthesized Hellenist methods to produce a newly “scientific” way of editing texts, one favoring recensio over emendatio, the comparative study of several manuscripts, and the forming of stemmata, over any subjective séance between opinionated scholar and individual exemplar.23 Gaston Paris, “the patriarch of French Romance studies,”24 mainstreamed this Germanauthored method into French editing tradition while yet refusing (as Lars Boje Mortensen observes) suggestions of subordination: “the Niebelungenlied,” Gaston Paris says, referring to Lachmann’s magisterial edition of 1841, and speaking amid the 1870 Franco-Prussian war, “is a human poem, while the Chanson de Roland is a national poem.”25 It is not until the beginning of our period, in 1928, that Joseph Bédier decisively asserts the “best manuscript” tradition that has broadly replaced Lachmannian genealogism (except in Italy). Bédier, Frencher than the French, was a lifelong Germanophobe;26 one first major fruit of this new method is Edmond Faral’s edition of a French crusading text, from 1938.27 21 The issue of German, Latin, and French origins of the Oaths was raised in the first year of Speculum: see James Westfall Thompson, “The Romance Text of the Strassburg Oaths: Was It Written in the Ninth Century?,” Speculum 1/4 (1926): 410–38. For Franco-German rivalries more broadly, but in compelling detail, see Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, ed. R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols (Baltimore, 1996). See further the new work of Elizabeth Tyler, “Connected Vernaculars,” especially on MS Valenciennes 150; and the project of Simon Gaunt et al., “The Values of French,” https://tvof.ac.uk/ (last accessed 12 August 2019). 22 Carey Thomas was to become first dean and second president of Bryn Mawr; her doctorate on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was completed at Zürich in 1882. Philological standards at Bryn Mawr were notoriously high; Hope Emily Allen, who was to identify and indeed name The Book of Margery Kempe in 1934, failed one set of exams. 23 Bernard Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant: A Critical History of Philology, trans. Betsy Wing (Baltimore, 1999), 48–49. Originally published as Éloge de la variante: Histoire critique de la philologie (Paris, 1989). See further D. C. Greetham, Textual Scholarship: An Introduction (New York, 1992), 324–25. 24 Paolo Trovato, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lachmann’s Method: A NonStandard Handbook of Genealogical Textual Criticism in the Age of Post-Structuralism, Cladistics, and Copy-Text, trans. Federico Poole (Padua, 2014), 50. 25 Cited by Lars Boje Mortensen, “The Canons of Medieval Literature from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century,” Analecta Romana Instituti Danici 42 (2017): 47–63, at 55. 26 See Per Nykrog, “A Warrior Scholar at the Collège de France,” in Bloch and Nichols, Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, 286–307. 27 On Faral’s Bédiériste edition of La Conquête de Constantinople as told by Geoffroy de Villehradouin, see Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant, 72. Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 6 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 7 In turning from philology to history, we find a comparable pattern of long methodological domination by a German Meister followed, as the 1930s begin, by French rebellion. The Meister here is Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), whose scientific study of primary textual sources had finally supplanted older traditions of narrating the nation as if she were a maturing person, a method owing much to Sir Walter Scott.28 Popular appetite for old-style national history never died, and professional medieval historians were isolating themselves through their very professionalism. Rebellion against élite scientific textual method was staged in bookshops, where élite historians failed to sell, but also finally at an élite place in French society: the Collège de France. It was here, on 13 December 1933, that Lucien Febvre gave his inaugural lecture, a wonderfully colloquial and dialogic performance that models a new kind of popular appeal.29 “History is made with texts,” he intones early on, a mantra long uniting élite philologists and historians. The dreary life of young men (only men) aspiring to become élite historians is comically evoked, with every life stage confined to the reading of texts, the study of texts, the interpretation of texts, and examination by knowledge of texts. The French of the final sentence is too good to miss, evoking an ABD life of sitting in a small space, with windows closed and blinds drawn: . . . les jeunes hommes, façonnés intellectuellement par une culture à base unique de textes, d’études de textes, d’explications de textes, passaient, sans rupture d’habitudes, des lycées où leurs aptitudes de textuaires les avaient seules classés, a l’École Normale, à la Sorbonne, aux Facultés où le même travail d’étude de textes d’explication de textes leur était proposé. Travail sédentaire, de bureau et de papier; travail de fenêtres closes et de rideaux tirés.30 Febvre bursts from this text-bricked prison by first repeating the standard formula— history is made with texts—and then flipping it to pose a question. This works neatly in French, as the term fait shifts from verb to noun: “L’histoire se fait avec des textes.” *** Mais par les textes on atteignait les faits? History is made (“se fait”) with texts; but can we reach facts (“les faits”)—realities on the ground—through texts? Earlier, Febvre had probed at the strange consequences of binding history so tightly to writing, l’écriture: what then of the bizarre notion of prehistory—which would purport to write, without texts, the longest chapter in human history? Economic history, human geography, and archaeology should fill this lacuna, liberating young pale male historians from stuffy confinement. Febvre speaks of examining “the footprints left on a landscape humanized by the intensive labor of [many] generations” [“l’examen des empreintes laissées sur la 28 See Patrick Geary, “Writing the Nation: Historians and National Identities from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Centuries,” in The Middle Ages in the Modern World, ed. Bettina Bildhauer and Chris Jones, Proceedings of the British Academy 208 (2017), 72–86; Anne-Marie Thiesse, La création des identités nationales: Europe XVIIIe–XXe siécle, 2nd ed. (Paris, 2000), 136–37. 29 Lucien Febvre, “Examen de conscience d’une histoire et d’un historien,” in Combats pour l’histoire (Paris, 1953), 3–17. 30 Febvre, 5–6. Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 7 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 8 Fig. 2. Albert Demangeon, c. 1935. (acknowledgment to be added) terre humanisée par le labeur archané des générations,”31 and we might return here to the graduate student we began with, the “open air geographer” Albert Demangeon,32 seen reading the landscape of Picardy, in an iconic image (Fig. 2). Demangeon is by now a Sorbonne professor, and in 1933 Febvre was working with him on a joint project, on the River Rhine.33 Its aim, as Febvre says in his lecture, is to get beyond, or before, a Rhine “charged with national hatreds, a frontier Rhine,” that which separates Gaul from Germany (p. 10). Toward the end of his talk Febvre references Marc Bloch, so now we have all the elements of what became known as Febvre, 5. Such was the title of the Bibliothèque Mazarine exhibition (2018) dedicated to Demangeon, and to its catalog: Nicolas Ginsburger et al., Un géographe de plein vent: Albert Demangeon (1872–1940) (Paris, 2018). 33 The work appeared as Albert Demangeon and Lucien Febvre, Le Rhin: Problèmes d’histoire et d’économie (Paris, 1935). On their bumpy, cross-disciplinary collaboration see Marie-Claire Roboc, “Légitimer la géographie face à l’histoire et à la sociologie: Échanges et débats entre disciplines,” in Ginsburger et al., Un géographe de plein vent, 95–118. 31 32 Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 8 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 9 Fig. 3. Lucie Varga (acknowledgement to be added) Annales, a movement that began on the Rhine, at Strasbourg, before sealing its ascent to institutional power by moving to Paris. Febvre effectively secured the secondgeneration future of Annales when, in sailing back from Brazil in 1937, he met Fernand Braudel. Braudel taught French and Mediterranean history in Algeria from 1923 to 1932; from 1935 to 1937 he worked at the University of São Paolo. Febvre soon adopted Braudel as “un enfant de la maison,” adding to the stable of young men he had gathered about himself in Paris.34 One cannot help but notice here that Annales, for all its collaborative spirit, forgot to include women.35 So let us consider the life and work of Lucie Varga. It has been said that “individually, neither Bloch nor Febvre was the greatest French historian of the time, but together both of them were.”36 Lucie Varga (Fig. 3) arrived in Paris at about the time Febvre was giving his inaugural lecture, and three months later Febvre writes enthusiastically to Bloch about her, employing a curious term: she is his entraineuse, his . . . female personal trainer.37 She had grown up near Vienna as Rosa Stern until, as a schoolgirl, she changed her name to Lucie, hence becoming 34 Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The “Annales” School, 1929–1989 (Cambridge, UK, 1990, rev. ed. 2015), 32–33. 35 The first prominent female Annaliste is perhaps Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, who arrives in the third generation. 36 “Marc Bloch,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, David L. Sills and Robert K. Merton, 18 vols. (1968–79), 2:92–5, cited in Burke, The “Annales” School, 110. 37 See Peter Schöttler, “Lucie Varga: A Central European Refugee in the Circle of the French ‘Annales,’ 1934–1941,” History Workshop Journal 33 (1992): 100–20, at 101. Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 9 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 10 “Light Star,” Lucie Stern. She had a daughter, then studied for a PhD at the University of Vienna, publishing her thesis on the expression Dark Ages in 1932.38 She moved to Paris to escape Nazism, to connect with Annales, and to pursue research on Cathars. Writing and reviewing increasingly for Febvre, she also contributed a long lead-off piece on National Socialism, particularly its origins, for the Germanfocused issue of Annales in 1937. It was in 1937, however, that Susanne Febvre demanded the end of all contact between Lucie and Lucien: Varga, aged thirty-two, and Susanne’s husband, fifty-eight. And it was later that same year that Lucien Febvre met his new “enfant de la maison,” Fernand Braudel. Lucie Varga, now unemployed, worked as a traveling salesman and factory worker, and later as farm laborer and teacher of German. Malnourished and diabetic, she died in 1941 after a village doctor apparently misdiagnosed a diabetic coma as the aftereffects of an abortion. She was thirty-six years old. Lucie Varga did pursue research on the Cathars, and continued publishing in Annales and elsewhere when she could. Her most distinctive work focused on two Alpine valleys, as local folk traditions and religiosity began intertwining with fascism.39 Thus, as Demangeon chose Picardy, and then worked on the Rhine with Febvre, so Varga chose the Alps, anticipating later developments in ethnography, sketching the cultural logic of “witchcraft as a profession,” and apologizing to the readers of Annales for not having properly qualified—as a local witch. Many influences flowed into her writings: “German, Austrian, and French academic traditions, intellectual and social history, folklore and ethnology, Jewish, Catholic, and materialist points of view, academic and journalistic modes of writing.”40 This baggy profusion puts one in mind of another Jewish Viennese writer of this period, and of the vanishing Austro-Hungarian culture he so much missed. “The Vienna of Yesterday,” says Stefan Zweig in 1940, was from the start invitingly capacious: “From Moravia, Bohemia, the mountainous regions of Tyrol, from Hungary and Italy came artisans and merchants; Slavs, Magyars, Italians, Poles and Jews arrived in greater numbers into the ever-widening circle of the city.”41 Claudio Magris, in his “drowned novel” Danubio, characterizes the river flowing through Vienna as “German-Magyar-Slavic-Romanic-Jewish Central Europe;”42 he pushes its hybridizing qualities further when contrasting it with the other major river: Ever since the Song of the Niebelungs the Rhine and the Danube have confronted and challenged each other. The Rhine is Siegfried, symbol of Germanic virtus and purity, the loyalty of the Niebelungs, chivalric heroism, dauntless love of the destiny of the Germanic soul. The Danube is Pannonia, the kingdom of Attila, the eastern, Asiatic tide which at the end of the Song of the Niebelungs overwhelms Germanic values.43 38 Lucie Varga, Das Schlagwort vom “Finsteren Mittelalter” (Baden, 1932). Lucie Stern had married Josef Varga, a Jewish-Hungarian doctor, in 1923, aged nineteen. 39 See Schöttler, “Lucie Varga,” 112–15. 40 Schöttler, 16. 41 “Das Wien von gestern,” a lecture given in Paris at the Théatre Marigny in April 1940, translated as Stephan Zweig, “The Vienna of Yesterday,” in Messages from a Lost World: Europe on the Brink, trans. Will Stone (London, 2016), 185–206, at 188. See further Stefan Zweig: Abschied von Europa, ed. Klemens Renolder (Vienna, 2014). 42 Claudio Magris, Danube, trans. Patrick Creagh (London, 2001), 29. 43 Magris, 26. Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 10 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 11 Others imagined the Danube quite differently: Hölderlin and, in our period, Heidegger envisioned it redolent not of Attila the Hun, and the Eurasian steppes, but of ancient Greece, a conduit of purer inspiration.44 And whereas the Rhine researches of Demangeon and Febvre would accentuate complexity and hybridity, the Rhine Institute founded by historian Hermann Aubin at Bonn in 1920 was singularly German.45 As the 1930s advanced, Aubin began bending his geographic thinking eastward while acknowledging Charlemagne as the first to take up “the Western task of civilizing the sub-germanic zone.”46 By this “zone” Aubin, now an Ostforscher, is thinking of Slavic countries, especially Poland, and he was to speak of a continuity of movement of Germanic peoples, from west to east, beginning in the Middle Ages, and ripe to revive.47 In 1929 he successfully migrated east himself, taking up a professorship at Breslau (Wrocław). After the war, recalibrating his skills in Ostforschung, Aubin served Cold War opposition to the Eastern Bloc and enjoyed a long and successful career. By now we are seeing politics strongly intrude upon medieval studies in the 1930s, so let us directly consider some uses of the medieval in this region—first Germany, then France. In the Bavarian Alps, the Oberammergau Passion Play has been performed every new decade since the seventeenth century; the next opportunity to see it comes in 2020. The year 1934, however, would represent the three hundredth anniversary of its first performance, so an extra season was mooted. Planning began late in 1932, with political conditions changing rapidly, and with scriptwriters pressured to accentuate Gospel-based anti-Semitism. Two newspaper reviews published on the exact same day, 18 May 1934, offer very different impressions. “Little in the village of Oberammergau and nothing in the Passion Play,” says the Times of London, “has been affected by the changed conditions of Germany. The tercentenary performance . . . is completely free from the political distortions rumored in England.”48 Frederick Birchall saw things quite differently in the New York Times: “Never have Oberammergau’s Jewish mobs been more virulent, never have the Pharisees and scribes who invoke the mob been more vehement than this year.”49 American attendance at Oberammergau was down some eighty percent in 1934, but Britons made up more than one-third of all foreign visitors.50 A pocket-sized guide published by the Catholic press of Burns Oates and Washburn in 1934 tutors English visitors in the appropriate mores: “Inside the theatre,” it says, “a quiet, respectful attitude should prevail—no audible remarks, no passing round of chocolates, no rustling of papers. Smoking is not allowed.” It warns of affective intensities that English visitors, even 44 See Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister,” ed. Walter Biemel (Frankfurt am Main, 1984), lectures prepared for delivery at the University of Freiburg in 1942. 45 The Institut für geschichtliche Landeskunde der Rheinlande was founded by Aubin in 1920; he served as director until 1925. 46 From Aubin, “Die historisch-geographischen Grundlagen der deutsch-polnischen Beziehungen,” in Deutschland und Polen: Beiträge zur ihren geschictlichen Beziehungen, ed. Albert Brackmann (Munich, 1933), 13–25, at 14; as trans. in Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of “Ostforschung” in the Third Reich (Cambridge, UK, 1988), 66. 47 See Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards, 304. 48 As cited in Helena Waddy, Oberammergau in the Nazi Era (Oxford, 2010), 139. 49 Cited in Waddy, 144. 50 Waddy, 151. Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 11 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 12 Catholic ones, might never have known: “the fact that the Play is conducive to great emotional excitement, and at times almost unbearably poignant, should not be lost sight of. Smelling salts are not out of place.”51 This promise is borne out by the “Official guide,” issued by the Parish of Oberammergau and printed in an English edition of 35,000 copies.52 Marketing of medievalia begins right away, opposite the contents page, with an ad for “the glamour of ‘Meier Helmbrecht,’ the mediaeval drama of knights and peasants.” This is adapted from a mock epic of c. 1250 by the local poet Wernher der Gartenaere; its protagonist, Meier, is a farm boy who aspires to be a knight, steals freely, and learns a smattering of foreign words; he ends up being blinded, losing a hand, losing a foot, and then being hanged by peasants (for presuming to abandon the plow).53 Later in the guide we find further ads, for Hamelin and its 650th Pied Piper anniversary, and for Würzburg, the town of Walther von der Vogelweide. You can even go skiing when all the Passion Play excitement is over. But the guide’s main aim is to inculcate expectation of an intense collective experience. We begin with a view of the hall, the communal viewing space, and then progress to an extraordinary series of high-affect actor portraits. The owner of the guide now in Cambridge University Library sought out Anni Rutz, who played Mary, and got her autograph (Fig. 4). The pocket-sized book seems designed for such pursuits, and for the kind of intensive viewing experience we might now associate with video artist Bill Viola.54 All this was channeled by the visit, and immersive participation, of Adolf Hitler in 1934. According to the New York Times he arrived with a ticket issued anonymously to a “Nordic travelling group,” and sat among his “beloved folk” as “a Passion Play pilgrim, full of desire for total concentration.”55 This was a delicate moment for Hitler. Six weeks earlier, Ernst Röhm and a hundred or so members of his Sturmabteilung had been murdered just fifty miles from Oberammergau. Hindenburg had died just days before, and a few days later Germans would vote in a plebiscite that would make Hitler both president and chancellor. Hitler’s concordat with Pope Pius XI had effectively ended political Catholicism, and he was hoping that this visible immersion in Catholic dramatic tradition would seal the deal with Catholic voters. James Shapiro, writing at the time of the 2000 Oberammergau, finds the village broadly aligned with the Nazification of their passion play. Helena Waddy, ten years later, seeks instances of local resistance to Third Reich ideologizing, and of enduring Catholic-Jewish friendship. Strong nuances of interpretation are applied to other ongoing medievalisms in this period, such as the processing and display of the four cloth relics at Aachen. This tradition, beginning in 1349, takes place for ten summer days every seven years: Dorothea of Montau traveled from Danzig for the sixth showing in 1384, and Margery Kempe from Lynn caught the twelfth, in 1433; the ninety-fourth showing takes place in 2021. Die Aachener Nachrichten, Elisabethe H. C. Corathiel, Oberammergau, Its Story and Its Passion Play (London, 1934), 134–35. Franz X. Bogenrieder, Jubilee of Passion Play 1634–1934: Official guide, issued by the Parish, trans. Margaret Senft-Howie (Munich, 1934). 53 See Wernher der Gartenære, Meier Helmbrecht, ed. Friedrich Panzer, 4th ed. (Halle, 1932); a fifth edition was published in 1941. 54 See for example Bill Viola, The Quintet of the Unseen (2000). 55 New York Times, 14 August 1934, as quoted in Waddy, Oberammergau, 153 and note 97 (287) . 51 52 Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 12 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Fig. 4. image of Anni Rutz as Mary, with her autograph, from Franz X. Bogenrieder, Jubilee of Passion Play 1634 –1934: Official guide, issued by the Parish, trans. Margaret SenftHowie (Munich, 1934), Cambridge University Library exemplar, 2010.7.787, p. 51, with permission. 190556.proof.3d 13 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 14 a daily paper published at this citadel of Charlemagne, makes the case that the 1937 procession was staged as a protest against the Nazi regime.56 “By 1930,” says Helen Solterer, “almost every Christian community across France had medieval drama brought home to them, performed by fellow parishioners.”57 She tells how Gustav Cohen refreshed his teaching at the Sorbonne by offering “something other than routine textual analysis.”58 Averse to the rote learning parodied by Lucien Febvre, Cohen taught through modernizing and acting out texts such as Aucussin and Nicolette, the jeux of Adam de la Halle, the Mystery of the Passion, or Rutebeuf’s Miracle de Théophile, after which his famous acting troupe was named. Students came from across the Francophone world, and notable Théophiliens in the 1930s included Paul Zumthor and Roland Barthes. Reims, burial place of kings and home to Guillaume de Machaut, is one of the greatest French lieux de mémoire.59 In 1938, before a cathedral facade newly redeemed from the damages of World War I, the Théophiliens performed Gustav Cohen’s idiomatic realization of an Anglo-Norman play from the 1120s. As Carol Symes notes, such plays were treated as prototypically “modern,” “secular,” and “French,”60 clearly challenging the adaptive traditions of the religious right. Among the performers in 1938 was the Syrian Moussa Abadi, “a religiously minded Jewish actor,” says Solterer, “who used medieval roles to enact the secular, universal values of the French Republic at the very time when they had failed him.”61 When German troops occupied Paris, Abadi transferred to Nice, performing medieval plays by day and smuggling away children by night, saving more than two hundred.62 When Marc Bloch was shot by the Vichy militia on 16 June 1944 he was carrying a volume of French fabliaux in his back pocket;63 for both Abadi and Bloch, living out a medievalist vocation was braided with resistance to fascism. Let us exit this Franco-German sphere by touching on Ernst Kantorowicz: briefly, since Robert E. Lerner has provided a full and excellent Life.64 The tensioning of love and loyalties to Greece and Rome seen in Kantorowicz can be read in other German scholars at this time: in Ernst Robert Curtius, for example, whose European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages has been read as “filial sacrilege,” given 56 See “Aachener Heiligtumsfahrt 1937: Protest der Pilger gegen das Nazi-Regime,” Aachener Nachrichten, 9 July 2017, https://www.aachener-nachrichten.de/nrw-region/aachener-heiligtumsfahrt-1937 -protest-der-pilger-gegen-das-nazi-regime_aid-24553579 (last accessed 12 August 2019). 57 Helen Solterer, Medieval Roles for Modern Times: Theatre and the Battle for the French Republic (University Park, PA, 2010), 7. 58 Solterer, Medieval Roles, 12. 59 See Jacques Le Goff, “Reims, ville du Sacre,” in Les Lieux de mémoire, II: La Nation, ed. Pierre Nora, 3 vols. (Paris, 1986), 1:89–184. “Dans le mémoire des Français,” says Le Goff, “Reims c’est une ville, une cathédrale, une cérémonie” (89). The city was besieged by an English army that included Chaucer in 1360. 60 Carol Symes, “The Appearance of Early Vernacular Plays: Forms, Functions, and the Future of Medieval Theatre,” Speculum 77/3 (2002): 778–831, at 787. 61 Solterer, Medieval Roles, 20. 62 Solterer, Medieval Roles, 20. 63 As reported in Marc Bloch, L’Étrange défaite: Témoinage écrit en 1940 (Paris, 1990), 279, and cited by Solterer, Medieval Roles, 19; see further Carole Fink, Marc Bloch: A Life in History (Cambridge, UK, 1989). 64 Robert Lerner, Ernest Kantorowicz: A Life (Princeton, 2017). Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 14 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 15 that his grandfather was a renowned Greek scholar who directed excavations at Olympia.65 Kantorowicz became more deeply Hellenophile even while seeking out sites in Sicily associated with Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. Kantorowicz was inspired by Stefan George, a poet who enthralled pedigreed young men through musk-scented visions of a new Germany, distilling from the old.66 Frederick II, king of Jerusalem, uniting Judaism and Christianity, Greek-templed Sicily with Roman and German rule,67 was a perfect subject, especially since the Stauffenberg brothers who formed part of the George circle claimed descent from the Hohenstauffen emperor. George oversaw publication of Kantorowicz’s Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite in 1927. It appeared with a Hakenkreuz on cover and title page, an ancient mystical motif favored by publisher Georg Bondi, who was Jewish. As the 1930s wore on, the symbol acquired new meanings, some activated within Stefan George’s last poetic collection, from 1928, Das neue Reich.68 Swastika symbolism coexists in The New Kingdom with remarkable poems such as “Der Mensch und der Drud” (“The Man and the Faun”), which foresees mass destruction, ecological disaster.69 By 1936 Kaiser Friedrich had sold 10,000 copies, but Kantorowicz could no longer work in Germany. On 20 July 1944 Claus Stauffenberg tried to kill Hitler. Popular success handicapped Kantorowicz because, as noted, historians after Ranke were suspicious of books written with novelistic flair and no footnotes. Ernst felt forced to concoct a supplementary volume to his best-seller, investing much Sitzfleisch in the library of the Monumenta Germanica Historica.70 Once retooled he did find work at the new Goethe-Universität of Frankfurt, at a time when the Frankfurt School was gathering speed under Max Horkheimer.71 In December 1933 a Nazi student boycott forced him to stop teaching, and the following month he arrived at Oxford. His unlikely liaison with the Germanophobe and Greek scholar Maurice Bowra played out between Oxford and Berlin right up to 1938; in 1939 Kantorowicz escaped Berlin and sailed to the United States. Here he found some encouragement, but feared that “there is going to be some new arrangement about refugees not being granted a job.”72 In 1931 Henri Pirenne completed his seven-volume Histoire de Belgique, an ironwilled history of a nation created (so he argues) by act of will.73 This sounds 65 Carl Landauer, “Ernst Robert Curtius and the Topos of the Literary Critic,” in Bloch and Nichols, Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, 334–54, at 342. 66 See Robert E. Norton, Secret Germany: Stefan George and His Circle (Ithaca, 2002); A Companion to the Works of Stefan George, ed. Jens Rieckmann (Rochester, NY, 2005). 67 See Norton, Secret Germany, 662. George remarked that, despite everything, the Italians were likable as “the custodians of old treasures. They sit in our Italy” (cited by Norton, 663). 68 Stefan George, Das neue Reich (Berlin, 1928), republished in 1934 by Bondi as volume 9 of Stefan George, Gesamt Ausgabe der Werken, 15 parts in 18 vols. (Berlin, 1934). 69 “So hör nur dies: uns tilgend tilgt ihr euch,” says the Faun, finally: “So hear just this: wiping us out, you erase yourselves too”: George, Gesamt Ausgabe 9:71–75, at 75. 70 The MGH was installed in the Prussian State Library, Berlin: see Lerner, Ernest Kantorowicz, 124, 133. 71 Horkheimer, born in 1895 (the same year as Kantorowicz), was appointed director of the Institut in 1930: see Phil Slater, Origin and Significance of the Frankfurt School (London, 1977), xiv; Thomas Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis, 2009). 72 Cited by Lerner, Ernest Kantorowicz, 218. 73 See Henri Pirenne, Histoire de Belgique, 7 vols. (Brussels, 1900–32); Geary, “Writing the Nation,” 82–83. Pirenne’s “Avant-Propos,” signed off at Sart-les-Spa on 28 August 1931, speaks admiringly of Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 15 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 16 alarming in the 1930s, although Pirenne roots his claims for Belgium not as a racial, cultural, or geographical entity, but as a community of commerce, a region of exchange that—rather like the medieval dukedom of Burgundy—breaks from Germany and France. Such primary emphasis upon economic history proved congenial to Annales,74 if problematic to Dutch and Flemish scholars (to say nothing of those living under Belgian rule in central Africa). Also still challenging is his posthumous book of 1937, Mohammed and Charlemagne, a late-life favorite of Edward Said.75 Gustav Cohen was born in Belgium, but would look to Paris as bastion of those values acted out by his Théophiliens. The most distinguished Belgian philologist of the period, and long after, was Rita Lejeune. Her father was a Walloon poet from Liège, she studied and then taught in the ’30s (from 8 February 1939) at the University of Liège, and became expert on Jean Renart, a poet from the early thirteenth century who, she argued, was likely from Liège.76 Expert on chansons de geste, especially the Song of Roland, she published on Joseph Bédier in 1938.77 Bédier, whom I earlier described as “Frencher than the French,” became closely identified with Paris. He grew up in Saint-Denis, reading the Chanson de Roland. But his reading was shaded by a mango tree, and his Saint-Denis was the capital of Réunion, an island in the Indian ocean, east of Madagascar. He was awarded the Roland as a school prize, for excellence in French composition, within a centralized educational system that bound colonies tightly to Paris. Michelle R. Warren has articulated Bédier’s creole medievalism, in which nationhood, expressed through foundational literature, is most carefully cultivated at the periphery, free from contaminations of the metropole.78 His Song of Roland edition, published in 1922 and reissued in 1937, accentuates originary Frenchness being challenged from Africa, hence mirroring ongoing French pursuit of dominance in Algeria.79 Bédier, Warren observes, made his native island “the sole colonial guardian of France’s most exalted imperial all periods of Belgian history, “du haut Moyen Age jusqu’à nos jours”: Pirenne, Histoire de Belgique 7: vii–xii, at ix. A lavish, quarto-sized postwar edition beds down Pirenne’s nation-making narrative by uniting it with hundreds of “Belgian” images: Pirenne, Histoire de Belgique, with “iconographie” collected and annotated by Franz Schauwers and Jacques Paquet, 4 vols. (Brussels, 1948–52). See Burke, The “Annales” School, 21. “The Arab conquest,” says Pirenne, “which brought confusion upon both Europe and Asia, was without precedent . . . This [Islamic] religion still has its faithful today in almost every country where it was imposed by the first Caliphs. The lightning-like rapidity of its diffusion was a veritable miracle as compared to the slow progress of Christianity”: Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne (London, 1939), 149. 76 Two massive volumes, some 128 articles, mark her academic influence but also her work in the Belgian resistance: see Mélanges offerts à Rita Lejeune, 2 vols. (Gembloux, 1969), esp. Fred Dethier, “Rita Lejeune,” 1: ix–xiv, at xiii. 77 Rita Lejeune, “Joseph Bédier,” Le Flambeau 21 (1938): 407–16. 78 Michelle R. Warren, Creole Medievalism: Colonial France and Joseph Bédier’s Middle Ages (Minneapolis, 2011), xviii. In his doctorate on French fabliaux, Bédier resists comparativism that might sometimes suggest Indian origins for French tales. Throughout Fabliaux, his book of the thesis, he repeatedly resents, Warren tells us, “being ‘brought back to India,’” repudiating “the ‘caravan of tales’ that Gaston Paris saw travelling from the banks of the Ganges to the banks of the Seine” (125). 79 Warren, 24. Colonial dominance might induce Frenchmen to forget homeland defeats (along with the debt owed to Germanic philology). Warren gives us this from Paul Morand in 1931: “Haven’t the colonies always consoled us, we French, from our reversals? It’s after the sad end of the reign of 74 75 Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 16 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 17 origins.”80 This notion of a nation rejuvenated at its core by scholars from the imperial periphery plays out in England, too, through the long Oxbridge dominance of Australasian male medievalists. Réunion was colonized from France in 1638 without genocidal violence, as Iceland was colonized from Norway in 874. For both islands, medieval literature loomed large in the 1930s through arguments over national identity. Iceland had seen its imperial power, Denmark, gradually weaken since 1918. In 1924, the literary scholar Sigurður Nordal remarked that “no nation in Northern Europe has a medieval literature which in originality and brilliance can be compared with the literature of the Icelanders from the first five centuries after the settlement period.”81 In 1933, the first volume of a series known as the Íslenk fornrit saga editions, still in business today, was published: Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, edited by Nordal. In 1929, Iceland’s major conservative political party renamed itself the Independence Party, and in 1934–35 Halldór Laxness, later a Nobel laureate, published his epic novel Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People).82 This opens in 874, suggesting seamless continuity over a millennium of croft farming and turf huts. But Iceland was changing rapidly, with eighty percent of its population living rurally in 1901, but only thirty-five percent by 1940.83 Debates over Iceland’s future were caught up, inside and outside parliament, with arguments over who gets to edit, perhaps modernize, the sagas—communists or conservatives? And the family sagas were special, said Nordal in 1931, as “spun from entirely Icelandic thread.”84 Such discussions played out through the 1930s as the international situation worsened: in 1940 first Denmark and then Norway fell to Nazi occupation, and Iceland was strategically exposed. British troops invaded, replaced in 1941 by Americans—who came to outnumber the entire population of adult Icelandic males. On 9 December 1941, the Alþingi passed a law stipulating that all copyright for Icelandic texts published before 1400 should pass to the Icelandic state. Fears of linguistic miscegenation loomed large, given daily contact with English-speaking warriors. For, as Helgi Jónasson said in parliament in 1943, supporting a national saga edition, “we have one asset, our old literature.”85 Key England-based medievalists, as we shall see, developed strong affinities for Nordic, north-based cultures in the 1930s. And in 1936, the poet W.H. Auden actually travelled to Iceland, harboring—like many pasty persons of his generation—fantasies Louis XIV that the Regency develops the charter companies; after Waterloo, our comfort is Algeria; after 1871, our real revenge (Germany understood this) was Indochina and Tchad” (5). Warren, 55. Cited in Jesse L. Byock, “Modern Nationalism and the Medieval Sagas,” in Northern Antiquity: The Post-Medieval Reception of Edda and Saga, ed. Andrew Wawn (Enfield Lock, UK, 1994), 163– 87, at 167. 82 See Jón Karl Helgason, “‘We who cherish Njáls saga’: The Alþingi as Literary Patron,” in Wawn, Northern Antiquity, 143–61, at 156–57; Byock, “Modern Nationalism,” 170. 83 See Helgason, “‘We who cherish Njáls saga,’” 144–45. The population of Reykjavík grew from 6,700 in 1901 to almost 40,000 in 1940. 84 Nordal conceded that kings’ sagas about Norway and Denmark could be shared, along with Eddic and Skaldic poetry, as common Scandinavian heritage: Byock, “Modern Nationalism,” 184. 85 “It must be almost without parallel,” continues Jónasson, “that a small nation such as ours should possess the kind of pearls beyond price which our ancient literature represents”: cited in Helgason, “‘We who cherish Njáls saga,’” 144, 148. 80 81 Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 17 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 18 of Norse descent. He was born in York, Yorvik, and as a boy his father read him Norse sagas:: “the name Auden is common in the sagas,” he said, “usually spelt Audun.” His mother came from Normandy, “which means,” she said, “she was half Nordic.”86 The young Auden had blond or tow-colored hair, plus “an iceberg glare he liked to claim from his Norse ancestors.”87 His Letters from Iceland, published in 1937, refers three times to the “Nordic glare,”88 and one couplet from that collection, excised from the 1965 edition, sees him identifying thus: “In fact I am the great white barbarian, / The Nordic type, the too too truly Aryan.”89 We might remember that in 1935 Auden had married Erika Mann, daughter of Thomas and a prominent critic of Nazism, to get her out of Germany. But it is also worth noting that during his Iceland trip of 1936, Auden actually shared a bus with Hermann Göring’s brother and other Nazis, all keen to trace their Nordic roots.90 And that Hitler, in preparing to cross the English Channel, showed increasing interest in his Nordic forebear, William the Conqueror. In June 1941, a team of art historians, archaeologists, and artists were dispatched from Berlin to Bayeux, to study the tapestry.91 Norse whale-roads lead more plausibly to Dublin, and a potent memorialization of 1935, the unveiling of a statue in Dublin’s General Post Office on Easter Sunday.92 This statue, by Oliver Sheppard, is of the dying Cúchulainn, greatest hero of the Ulster cycle as preserved by two twelfth-century manuscripts, and by The Yellow Book of Lecan.93 Yeats had known the sculptor Shephard from student days, and his last play, The Death of Cuchulainn, explicitly references the statue.94 A year earlier, in 1938, Yeats’s poem “The Statues” imagines the revolutionary Padraig Pearse summoning Cúchulainn to his side in 1916, in the Dublin Post Office; Pearse had himself proclaimed the Cúchulainn story to be “the finest epic in the world.”95 Cúchulainn’s continuing potency, as Eamon Byers, Stephen Kelly, and Kath Stevenson suggest, is proven by his adoption by Loyalist muralists of the last thirty years, 86 Auden speaking to Michael Newman in 1972, as recorded by Sveinn Haraldsson, “ ‘The North Begins Inside’: Auden, Ancestry and Iceland,” in Wawn, Northern Antiquity, 255–84, at 259. 87 As recalled by Cyril Connolly in 1975 and quoted in Haraldsson, 257. 88 See Haraldsson, 257. 89 W. H. Auden and Louis MacNiece, Letters from Iceland (London, 1937), 201. 90 See A. L. Rowse, The Poet Auden: A Personal Memoir (London, 1987), 40–42. 91 See R. Howard Bloch, The Right Hand of God: The Norman Conquest of 1066 and the Making and Meaning of the Bayeux Tapestry (New York, 2006), xii, 22–26. 92 Seamus Heaney’s North would later tap buried vestiges of Norse violence, and in 1916 the Red Hand of Ulster’s symbolic charge was deepened by the carnage of the Somme: see Eamon Byers, Stephen Kelly, and Kath Stevenson, “‘The North Remembers’: The Uses and Abuses of the Middle Ages in Irish Political Culture,” in Bildhauer and Jones, The Middle Ages in the Modern World, 45–72. 93 See Paula Murphy, “916 Centenary: Warriors and Statesmen,” Irish Arts Review (2016), https:// www.irishartsreview.com/centenary-1916-warriors-and-statesmen/ (last accessed 12 August 2019); Byers, Kelly, and Stevenson, “‘The North Remembers,’” 49. 94 See Murphy, “916 Centenary”; W. B. Yeats, The Death of Cuchulainn (1939), in The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats (London, 1952). 95 See W. B. Yeats, “The Statues,” in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London, 1971), and for helpful commentary on this enigmatic poem, including its reference to “a fat / Dreamer of the Middle Ages,” see Peter Ure, “‘The Statues’: A Note on the Meaning of Yeats’s Poem,” The Review of English Studies 25 (1949): 254–57. On Pearse (his words) see Byers, Kelly, and Stevenson, “‘The North Remembers,’” 51. Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 18 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 19 buoyed by the fantastical suggestion—in the UDA newspaper—that he was in fact the indigenous ancestor of Ulster Protestants (who must somehow have left for a while, and then come back).96 Mention of migrating Ulstermen affords neat segue to C. S. Lewis. But first let us consider a culture that, in the 1930s, troubled Lewis as essentially un-English—that is, Italian. Towns in Italia still draw identitary cohesion from the Middle Ages, and from 1929 there was remarkable revivalism of medieval palios and calcios, giostre and giochi at places such as Asti, Florence, Arezzo, Ferrara, Pisa, and Legnano.97 Such localism was counterbalanced by assertions of empire, with inevitable reference to ancient Rome. Thus the Companion to Italian Studies, published in London in 1934 and prefaced by obeisance to “the great leader of contemporary Italy, Benito Mussolini,” asserts that “the people of Italy remain the purest representatives of the Latin race, and their speech is the speech of imperial Rome grown to maturity.”98 This is not Dantean thinking, but Dante inevitably gets drawn into such spheres of argument: the first ever Medium Aevum leads off in 1932 with “Dante and the regnum italicum.”99 Mussolini envisioned a single historical axis of culture extending from Turin through Sicily to Malta. Britain abolished Italian as an official language of Malta in 1934; the Archivio storico di Malta, assigned a historical palazzo in Rome, had in 1929 begun publishing articles emphasizing Malta’s historical links with Italy.100 Scholars such as Giovanni Praga revived claims for the purely Roman identity of Dalmatia, ruined by the arrival of Slavs, with their “frightful faces.”101 Mussolini, mindful that medieval Venetians had built and decorated churches all the way down the Adriatic, often featuring the lion of San Marco, declared that “where there’s a lion, there is Italy.” This inspired the erasure, whitewashing, or chiseling away of lions all the way to Montenegro.102 One medieval figure acquires an unrivaled combination of local, national, and celestial authority in the 1930s: Catherine of Siena. The Lateran Accords of 1929, engineered between Mussolini and Pius XI, were seen as a “return to Rome” that resonated with Caterina’s prophetic call to the Avignon papacy. Corriere della Sera suggested that Italy should now have a santa nazionale, just as France, since 1920, See Byers, Kelly, and Stevenson, 55–58. See Tommasso di Carpegna Falconieri and Lila Yawn, “Forging ‘Medieval’ Identities: Fortini’s Calendimaggio and Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life,” in Bildhauer and Jones, The Middle Ages in the Modern World, 186–215, at 196–97. 98 Camillo Pellizzi and Edmund G. Gardner, “Italy, the Italian People, the Italian Language,” in Italy: A Companion to Italian Studies, ed. Gardner (London, 1934), 1–26, at 4. 99 B. H. Sumner, “Dante and the regnum italicum,” Medium Aevum 1 (1932): 2–23. 100 See Pietro Ardizzone, “Le iniziative culturali italiane negli anni ‘30 per Malta e per le comunità maltesi all’estero,” in Studi maltesi: Lotte per l’egemonia culturale e politica a Malta; Aspetti linguistici ed istituzionali (Rome, 2005), http://www.intratext.com/IXT/ITA2413/_P6.HTM (last accessed 12 August 2019), esp. 86–92. 101 Giovanni Praga, born in 1893 at Santa Eufemia on the island of Ugliano, across from Zadar, studied at Zadar’s Ginnasio Superiore and at Padua; his most important research work was conducted between 1925 and 1940. His Storia di Dalmazia was first published in 1954; the English translation was begun in 1985, translated from the Italian edition of 1981, when “no one . . . could have perceived the rapidity of the disintegration of Yugoslavia”: Praga, History of Dalmatia, trans. Edward Steinberg (Pisa, 1993), 329. 102 See David Wallace, “Itinerari europei medievali e moderni,” Studi migranti 9–10 (2015–16): 199–227. 96 97 Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 19 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 20 had Saint Joan of Arc; Studi Cateriniani commended the “holy work” of the pope, and the “genius” of Mussolini, who like Caterina sought “the unity of the nation in the unity of faith.” Catherine had also vigorously advocated crusading, and her popularity grew during Italy’s invasion and conquest of Ethiopia, in 1935–36. Copies of three famous images of Catherine were sent to Ethiopia and to Somalia, to be placed in churches used by Italian troops. Catherine was formally pronounced Patron of Italy by Pope Pius XII on 18 June 1939; Mussolini pledged support for improvement of her sanctuary.103 The editor of the 1934 Companion to Italian Studies, who commends Mussolini as a “great leader,” was Edmund G. Gardner, a professor at University College, London. Like Mussolini he much admired Catherine of Siena, publishing a book on her in 1907.104 The ODNB characterizes his late-life “enthusiasm” for fascism as “ingenuous,” and Gardner was mystically inclined, known to his friends as “St. Edmund.”105 But otherworldliness in this period could serve as a seedbed for fascism, as we have seen with the Stefan George circle. Excessive attachment to things Italian might also, in certain English contexts, call manliness into question, especially in a man who never married, and the obituary memoir for Gardner in the Proceedings of the British Academy is keen to set the record straight: “He was a sturdy Englishman himself—his ways, his outlook, and his thought were, and remained, English to the core.”106 Volume 2 of the Manchester-based journal Italian Studies, from 1938, offers an admiring review of volume 1 of the Journal of the Warburg Institute, newly established by immigrants from Germany: the Warburg’s Journal, it says, must be looked upon as “a more prosperous and more fully developed twin.”107 Italian Studies was a poor relative: its first number, from 1937, runs to just forty-eight pages.108 Its insecurity may be judged from the last page, where Italian Studies is defined as “an English organ,” and where a whimsical “apology for errata” adopts a strange blackletter rotunda to recall an earlier pedigreed Englishing, or taking in, of Italian matter. Men pursuing Italian in England in the 1930s might then court suspicions of unmanliness, of being un-Germanic. The taking in of Italian on English soil is stoutly resisted by C. S. Lewis’s “What Chaucer Really Did to Il Filostrato” (1932), an essay that pairs neatly, in its pro-northern, pro-Nordic anti-Mediterraneanism, with J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (1936). These pieces never pass out of fashion; Lewis still leads off the critical essays in the latest Norton Troilus and Criseyde.109 Here he discusses the Temple scene in Il Filostrato, Book I: 103 See Gerald Parsons, The Cult of Saint Catherine of Siena: A Study in Civil Religion (Aldershot, 2008), 58–62, 68–9, 73, 83. 104 Edmund Garratt Gardner, Saint Catherine of Siena : A Study in the Religion, Literature, and History of the Fourteenth Century in Italy (London, 1907). 105 Jonathan Usher, “Gardner, (John) Edmund Garratt (1869–1935),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 21 (Oxford, 2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/65483 (last accessed 12 August 2019). 106 Cesare Foligno, “Edmund Garratt Gardner, 1869–1935,” Proceedings of the British Academy 21 (1935): 464–79, at 474. 107 Cesare Foligno, review of Journal of the Warburg Institute 1, in Italian Studies 2 (1938–39): 33–4. 108 The first volume of the Journal of the Warburg Institute, as reviewed by Foligno, runs to pp. ii, 371. 109 Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Stephen Barney, Norton Critical Editions (New York, 2006). Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 20 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 21 The whole passage is an example of that Latin spirit which in all ages (except perhaps our own) has made Englishmen a little uncomfortable; the hero must be a lady-killer from the very beginning, or the audience will think him a milksop and a booby. To have abashed, however temporarily, these strutting Latinisms is not least among the virtues of medieval Frauendienst: and for Chaucer, as its poet, this stanza was emphatically one of those that “would never do.”110 Sexual inadequacy felt here by the Oxford Irishman, on behalf of “Englishmen,” bids us flee from Italic to Germanic, to Frauendienst, a term Lewis repeats in picturing Chaucer at work within “the charmed circle of Frauendienst.”111 Such a circle derives its charm from holding out against “the cynical Latin gallantries of Boccaccio.”112 The final spell of Germanic protection is cast against birth control clinics and oversexed novels with words from Beowulf: “For real stagnancy and isolation we must turn . . . to the more popular corporation swimming baths of Dr Marie Stopes; or to the teeming marshlands of the late D. H. Lawrence, whose depth the wisest knows not and on whose bank the hart gives up his life rather than plunge in: ‘Þær mæg nihta gehwæm niðwundor seon, fyr on flode!’”113 If Lewis had plunged into that marsh, Clare Lees reminds me, he would have found Grendel’s mother. But let’s not wade in there. Enough to say that Lewis writes here not so much as literary critic but as immigration officer, inspecting a foreign text and finding it “would never do.” For all his identification with milksops and boobies, Lewis’s title proposes aggressive, one-way instrumentalism: “What Chaucer Really Did to . . .” (emphasis added). Boccaccio’s Filostrato has no life before England; it will only be read, by Lewis before the English Association, as an immigrant text. Tolkien, speaking to the British Academy four years later, is similarly dismissive of any cultural source that might predate Beowulf: inquiry into “original or aboriginal source material” should be laid aside, he says, in favor of “what the poet did with it.”114 Tolkien follows this sympathetic chime with Lewis’s title by making derogatory reference to “southern myths.” North is better: “While the older southern imagination has faded forever into literary ornament, the northern has power, as it were, to revive its spirit even in our own times.”115 Tolkien is bedding down his northernism here in treacherous times. Lewis’s direct embrace of the Germanic in 1932 is harder to countenance by 1936. A Dane first discovered Beowulf, and a Dane first translated it, into Danish, in 1820; the 110 C. S. Lewis, “What Chaucer Really Did to Il Filostrato,” Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association 17 (1932): 56–75, at 68. 111 Lewis, 73. 112 Lewis, 75. 113 Lewis, 75; this passage is sometimes cut from anthologies (but not from the Norton: see Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Barney, 464). 114 J. R. R. Tolkien, “‘Beowulf’: The Monsters and the Critics; Sir Israel Gollancz Lecture 1936,” Proceedings of the British Academy 22 (1936): 245–95, at 250. 115 Tolkien, 268. Stephen Colbert, a lifelong Tolkien devotee, suggests reading Lord of the Rings as the (Nordic-Germanic) national epic that England should have had but, somehow, did not: David Marchese, “Stephen Colbert on the Political Targets of Satire,” The New York Times Magazine, 31 May 2019, https:// www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/03/magazine/stephen-colbert-politics-religion.html (last accessed 12 August 2019). Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 21 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 22 poem, written in “basically a kind of Old German,” unfolds (Tolkien admits) across Denmark, Geatland, and Sweden, c. 500 CE. Tolkien’s delicate task is to take the poem away from the Scandinavians while rejoining them under a common canopy of northernness while yet finding Beowulf definitively English. This last quality he finds in the very structure of the poem, denoted as “simple and static . . . solid and strong.”116 Tolkien italicizes static here as a keystone virtue, and the one fault he finds in Beowulf is internationalism, or an excess of movement: “it would probably be better,” he says, “if we had no journeying.”117 Now “we” must hunker down, since there are dragons about—not cutesy creatures, but agents of destruction. Insular emphasis resounds through the essay’s last sentence, which is manipulative, exclusionary, and magnificent: “Yet it [Beowulf ] is in fact written in a language that after many centuries has still essential kinship with our own, it was made in this land, and moves in our northern world beneath our northern sky, and for those who are native to that tongue and land, it must ever call with a profound appeal—until the dragon comes.”118 The dragon coming in 1936 is German. Many Oxford medievalists found this hard to compute, being so strongly wedded to a narrative of Old English, Middle English, modern English succession.119 Their bid to coopt Scandinavianism to embellish national genealogy was shared, we have noted, in Berlin. “Advocates of Anglo-Saxon England,” noted R. W. Chambers in 1939, bid us “look to the pit whence we are digged.”120 But when Germanic grave goods were unearthed in 1939, they were quickly reburied beneath the Aldwych tube. Sutton Hoo’s ship lived on through the war years only as a ghostly mud-impression, photographed by Mercie Lack and her companion, Barbara Wagstaffe.121 Lewis’s and Tolkien’s inclination to value the Germanic and Nordic so strongly above the Mediterranean-Latin derives chiefly, I would suggest, from Sir Walter Scott. As a much-loved writer of popular prose, like Lewis and Tolkien, Scott developed a form of Bildungsroman in which the true protagonist is a young nation. Many European historians acknowledge Scott’s influence: François Guizot (1787–1874) and Jules Michelet (1798–1874) in France, for example, Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–59) in Scotland and England, and Cesare Balbo (1789–1853) in Italy.122 Tolkien, “‘Beowulf,’” 272. Tolkien, “‘Beowulf,’” 272. 118 Tolkien, 278. 119 An attitude still informing the blockbuster exhibition at the British Library, Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, that ran from 19 October 2018 to 19 February 2019. “The kingdom of England which emerged in the 10th century,” said the welcoming signage, “was conquered by Cnut of Denmark in 1016 and by William of Normandy in 1066. And yet it survived, along with the English language brought by the early Anglo-Saxon migrants.” The Angles and the Saxons, it is suggested, arrived as a pre-hybridized group; French-speaking Normans came too late to the party, since “the English language” would survive any influence they might care to exert. 120 Raymond Wilson Chambers, Man’s Unconquerable Mind: Studies of English Writers, from Bede to A. E. Housman and W. P. Ker (London, 1939), 55. 121 See The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial, ed. Rupert Bruce-Mitford, 4 parts in 3 vols. (London, 1975–83), 1:xxxiii and plate. J. Lack and her companion photographer, Barbara Wagstaff, worked with Leica cameras and AGFA 35mm color slide film. The German company AGFA (Actien-Gesellschaft für Anilin-Fabrikation) was founded near Berlin in 1867. 122 Some, like Balbo, a leading figure of the Risorgimento, wrote novels before turning to history: see Geary, “Writing the Nation,” 76. 116 117 Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 22 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 23 Even after Leopold von Ranke’s revolutionizing of historical method, we have noted, the book-buying public continued to consume the kind of history, and historical fiction, purveyed by Scott. The year 1932, in which Lewis delivered “What Chaucer Really Did,” marked the centenary of Scott’s death, and on 21 September the Prince of Wales, no less, led a procession through Edinburgh to the Scott monument, followed by all officials of the city, plus a pageant of schoolchildren.123 Sir Walter Scott shows an impish genius that compares, in certain respects, with that of Seamus Heaney: much as Heaney, having fashioned his own poetic corpus, lays Ulster pawprints on Beowulf, the urtext of English literary tradition, so the Scotsman Scott—having shaped his own native corpus through the Waverly novels—reinvents the English historical novel and, through it, England. Most influential here is Ivanhoe, and the polarizations that Lewis sees between slick Latins and stolid “Englishmen” map remarkably closely onto Scott’s differentiation of Normans from Saxons. “Far better,” laments the Saxon Cedric in Ivanhoe, “was our homely diet, eaten in peace and liberty, than the luxurious dainties, the love of which hath delivered us as bondsmen to the foreign conqueror.”124 Englishmen are ruined, it seems, by éclairs and cannoli. Later on the same Cedric declares that he knows “no language . . . but my own, and a few words of their mincing Norman.”125 “Strutting Latinisms,” “mincing Norman”: both foreign to “the far more manly and expressive AngloSaxon.”126 Womanly Anglo-Saxonism (about which Lewis has nothing to say) is for Scott embodied by Rowena, whose exemplary whiteness sets off the acceptable blackness of Rebecca.127 Early on in Ivanhoe, Scott offers a “premise for the information of the general reader,” concerning the continuing “existence of the Anglo-Saxons as a separate people.”128 “The great national distinctions betwixt them and their conquerors,” he says, the recollection of what they had formerly been, and to what they were now reduced, continued, down to the reign of Edward the Third, to keep open the wounds which the Conquest had inflicted, and to maintain a line of separation between the descendants of the victor Normans and the vanquished Saxons.129 Down to the reign of Edward the Third can be read as into the works of Chaucer. This might help explain the pro-Germanic, anti-Latin policing which C. S. Lewis imagines Chaucer to be conducting before shaping to write Troilus and Criseyde. Besides Tolkien and Lewis, a third work of 1930s medievalism still claims space in English bookshops: 1066 and All That. This libretto of misremembered history, written by two public (private) school teachers, still sells in England like Alfredian 123 See Ann Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford, 2012), 209–10. Rigney does emphasize that Scott’s repute was waning in 1932, especially as compared to the 1871 celebrations. See further and wider The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe, ed. Murray Pittock (London, 2006). 124 Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, ed. Ian Duncan (Oxford, 1998), 227. 125 Scott, , 272. 126 Scott, 27. 127 For contextualization and critique of such terms, see Whitaker, Black Metaphors, esp. 130. 128 Scott, Ivanhoe, ed. Duncan, 27. 129 Scott, Ivanhoe, ed. Duncan, 27. Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 23 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 24 hotcakes. The Middle Ages takes up fully one-third of their book, right down to chapter 29 (“Cause of the Tudors”). Their book is funny: consider, for example, the genealogy of the aquatic King Canute (pictured paddling a canoe).130 And it assumes deep readerly grounding in English history: for if you do not know the official line of English history, you cannot appreciate deviant or misremembered forms. Much assumed knowledge is impressively arcane: how many of us know much about Poyning’s law, as passed by the Irish parliament, under English pressure, in Drogheda in 1494?131 Comedy in 1066 beds down complacently in Anglocentric, imperial identity while wobbling into absurdity: “it was in the 18th Century,” we are assured, “that Indian History started.”132 1066 and All That was first published in October 1930, and by 1931 had passed through nine editions. In December 1934 it opened as a musical comedy at the Birmingham Rep, and in 1935 transferred to the Strand Theatre, in Aldwych, London. A new protagonist called COMMON MAN presents a more proletarian perspective, as from down in the trenches, as he sings this refrain: “But somehow or other it keeps dragging on / This Hundred Years War what we’ve started upon.”133 Act I ends as the Hundred Years War ends, and with VETERANS singing a chorus of homecoming “to dear old England, Home and Beauty.”134 This “musical comedy” continued performing down the 1930s, with audiences sensing inevitable return to that cross-Channel war “that keeps dragging on.” Darker foreboding, looking back toward medieval England, is voiced near the end of a very long essay from 1932: “Into an age that knew nothing of it,” we are told, “we read our own feeling of impending catastrophe.”135 This is R. W. Chambers, a dominant figure in the Early English Text Society, and eventually its director. Chambers shares with Lewis and Tolkien deep attachment to Anglo-Saxonism as core English value, and deep suspicion of Mediterraneanism, or Romance sensibility. If all three neurotically adhere to such attachments as the 1930s advance, it is the neurosis (to adopt the emergent analytical terms of that very decade) of a scholarly establishment. EETS was then firmly London based, and Chambers strongly aware of his role, or mission, as apologist for English at the imperial center. If we seek global medievalism we will find it in Chambers, albeit in a version that sees all roads leading to London. Here he is celebrating the “King’s English of the South,” that of King Alfred (or is it King George V?): And this King’s English, standard all over England, was intelligible over the whole of Northern Europe. “There was one speech only in the North, before William the Bastard won England,” says the Gunnlaugs Saga, when it tells of the welcome which a Scandinavian traveler could find in London. For at London the ways crossed: the ancient route 130 W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That: A Memorable History of England, 9th ed. (London, 1931), 14. 131 Sellar and Yeatman, 52. 132 Sellar and Yeatman, 85. 133 Reginald Arkell and Alfred Reynolds, 1066 and All That: A Musical Comedy of English History (London, 1938), 29. 134 Arkell and Reynolds, 31. 135 R. W. Chambers, “The Continuity of English Prose from Alfred to More and His School,” in Nicholas Harpsfield, The life and death of Sir Thomas Moore, knight, sometymes Lord high Chancellor of England, ed. Elsie Vaughan Hitchcock, EETS OS 186 (London, 1932), xlv–clxxiv, at clxviii. Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 24 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 25 which led from Rome to York and the North, and the Viking sea-route which stretched, by the Baltic, through Russia to Byzantium. In the streets of early Eleventh-Century London, a man who had visited Rome might easily have met a man who had visited Micklegarth by the way through Ryzaland, who might also have talked with a man who had stepped upon what is now the territory of Canada and the United States.136 Spatial is complemented by temporal imperialism as Chambers makes extraordinary claims, in a later publication, for George V’s successor: for “it comes to pass,” he says, “that King George VI is descended from that very King Offa who reigned over the English in Sleswick in the Fourth Century of our era, and who is praised in Beowulf as ‘best of all mankind, as I have heard, betwixt the seas.’”137 Chambers’s very long 1932 essay, on “The Continuity of English Prose,” early on defines prose as “an institution, part of the equipment of a civilization, part of its heritable wealth, like its laws, or its system of schooling, or its tradition of skilled craftsmanship.”138 Chambers borrows this definition from an article published in the Dublin Review, three years before the Easter rising—when Ireland was still governed, so to speak, by English prose. Toward the end, the article affirms that “alike in the Eleventh and in the Fifteenth Century, the symbol of our civilization lies in the power of English prose.” And in between it celebrates writers who extend Alfredian King’s English while deprecating those too fond of French, or of “augmenting” the language with foreign matter: Malory, for example, or Caxton.139 R. W. Chambers strives, like Lewis and Tolkien, to square the circle of impossible cultural allegiances through the 1930s, and like them senses a dragon coming: “It is not to be thought of that . . . this most famous Stream . . . should perish” says his Man’s Unconquerable Mind, by way of epigraph, in 1939.140 He is a medievalist at once insular and global. He locates himself in the British Museum, an institution that did not then isolate books from other artifacts.141 He thus challenges readers to test what he says of writing by examining stonework, needlework, embroidery, all part—like the prose—of “the equipment of a civilization.”142 Such commitment Chambers, lxxvi. R. W. Chambers, Man’s Unconquerable Mind (London, 1939), 58. First published in March 1939, this book was reprinted in September 1939, and reissued in 1952. To be fair, Chambers does recognize the folly of “the controversy between ‘Mediterranean’ and ‘Anglo-Saxon’” (56), but cannot help himself from favoring the latter. 138 Chambers, “The Continuity of English prose,” lviii. 139 Chambers, cxvii–cxli. In 1939, Chambers affirms that “Earl Baldwin found in Piers Plowman ‘the Englishman immutable and eternal.’” Earl Baldwin was Stanley Baldwin, UK prime minister, ennobled only in 1937. It worked nicely for Chambers that both his surname and his title, eorl, have echt Germanic pedigree—for continuity of language bespeaks enduring national character: “Baldwin perceived in Piers Plowman,” Chambers elaborates, “the same Englishman with whom you have to work today— the same Englishman in his strength and in his weakness, in his heroism and in his humor”: Chambers, Man’s Unconquerable Mind, 15. 140 Wordsworth’s sonnet, from which Chambers culls his lines, goes on to claim that “In our halls is hung / Armoury of the invincible knights of old: / we must be free or die.” 141 Attempts to close current pedagogical distancing between libraries, universities, and museums were demonstrated at the 2019 CARA meeting in Philadelphia by Elina Gertsman (Art History, Case Western Reserve) and Sonya Mace (The Cleveland Museum of Art), and by Bryan Keene (Getty Museum). 142 Chambers, “The Continuity of English Prose,” lxix; the phrase is apparently lifted from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. 136 137 Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 25 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 26 to globalism of method, what we might more tamely call interdisciplinarity, prompts him to urge us to put on our walking shoes: “Let anyone (if possible with a strong “Granny’s glass”) mount the stairs of the British Museum to the Exhibition of English Coins and Medals, and there look at the coins of the Confessor and of Harold, varying, but all well made.”143 Coins made in England after 1066, once the Anglo-Saxon coin makers had died out, are far less impressive. As with coins, so with English prose: “The contrast can only be attributed to the goodness of the pre-Conquest tradition, and to the damage done to this tradition consequent upon the Norman Conquest.”144 Chambers later confesses to the lifelong habit of slipping out of the British Museum Reading Room to wander the galleries.145 This teaches him “not to suppose that ‘Europe’ and ‘the world’ are synonymous,” especially when confronting “the marvels of the T’ang dynasty.”146 Two “supreme” artifacts from “the Age of Bede” especially move him: the Lindisfarne Book, and “the Chinese pottery statue of a Buddhist apostle [that] sits in the center of the Edward VII Gallery.”147 Both artifacts are “near perfection,” but the Chinese is better: “Compared to the Chinese apostle the Lindisfarne Book belongs to a primitive—almost barbaric—culture. But it is the most beautiful thing the West could do in that age.”148 Comparatism here breeds humility while yet celebrating the long reach of English imperium, gathering in the globe beneath the high, neoclassical dome of the British Museum. Medieval globalism of a very particular kind, then. One that sometimes comes close adopting the view of 1066 and All That, that history never really starts, nor does a continent exist, until the English get there.149 Chambers’s 1932 essay “On the Continuity of English Prose” is egregiously long and strangely placed: erupting suddenly within the introduction to an EETS edition of Nicholas Harpsfield’s life of Thomas More, OS 186, it goes on for 129 pages. The editor interrupted here is Dr. Elsie Vaughan Hitchcock: what might she have thought? It is hard to know: Hitchcock, a distinguished editor of Reginald Pecock, worked around the edges of her male mentor’s career, living in his household with his sister and nursing him through his final illness.150 Female scholars in England as elsewhere were often eased into auxiliary roles. The Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite dictated by Kantorowicz to a “typing girl,” or Tippmädchen, in 1925 was in 1930 commissioned for translation by Helen Waddell, who worked for Constable and Company, and translated by E. O. Lorimer—aka Emily Lorimer, Germanist, Arabist, Chambers, lxix. Chambers, lxix. 145 See Chambers, Man’s Unconquerable Mind, 27. 146 Chambers, 24. 147 Chambers, 28. 148 Chambers, 29. 149 Compare, for example, this from Sellar and Yeatman, 1066 and All That, 85—“It was in the eighteenth century that Indian History started”– with this from Chambers, Man’s Unconquerable Mind, 344: “It was the opening up of India and the discovery of Sanscrit by European, and especially English, scholars at the end of the eighteenth century which brought about a new view.” 150 A fully researched account of Chambers and EETS will shortly be provided by Helen Leith Spencer, A History of the Early English Text Society, vol. 1, Frederick James Furnivall and the early years of the Early English Text Society, 1864–1910; vol. 2, The Early English Text Society in the Twentieth Century, 1910–ca.1984, EETS, OS 358, 360 (Oxford, 2021–22). 143 144 Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 26 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 27 and sometime editor of the Basra Times.151 Comparable divisions of labor emerge during the single greatest year for English medieval studies, namely 1934, which saw the discovery of the Winchester manuscript of Malory and Hope Emily Allen’s identification of the Book of Margery Kempe. Title page credits for these works go to Eugene Vinaver and Sanford Meech, respectively, although the labor of transcription was done by Sonia Brownell, working from rotographs of Malory in the Euston Road, London, and Ruth Meech, working from rotographs in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Much has been written on all this, so let me just say two things about Margery Kempe and the 1930s London milieu which “discovered” her. Firstly, Edmund Gardner, the Italianist admirer of both Mussolini and Catherine of Siena, had in 1910 published an anthology called The Cell of Self-Knowledge. It was by knowing this book, and specifically Henry Pepwell’s 1521 extracts from “the Ancress of Lynn,” that Allen was able to recognize the full Margery Kempe; she got to read extracts from the manuscript to Gardner in 1934, when he was terminally ill.152 Secondly, a major new work of English prose inevitably attracted the attention of R. W. Chambers—who then writes the introduction to the modernized version of Margery Kempe in 1936. In a section of his “Continuity” essay called “Prejudice,” Chambers admits that Middle English prose was long dismissed as the work of “sottishly ignorant papists.”153 Early reception history subjects The Book of Margery Kempe to tremendous pressures of expectation. She must be an English Joan of Arc. She must be found free of German influence, since she is a Norfolk native, and her wisdom is home-grown.154 She must not be too mystical. The cost of all this is high, and passages deemed “wearisome” are excised and assigned to an appendix, in smaller type.155 Margery Kempe meets her public, in 1936, in partlobotomized form. In 1939, as war broke out, Chambers and other EETS luminaries decamped to Aberystwyth. Mabel Day stayed on, proofreading the scholarly edition of Margery’s Book in air-raid shelters. Dr. Day served EETS for almost thirty years, but apparently no photograph survives.156 Beryl Smalley and Dorothy Whitelock were laying ground through the ’30s for later scholarly distinction, but the most impressive medievalist of the decade—male or female—is Eileen Power. Tolkien, Lewis, and Chambers are worthy pageboys or runners-up to Eileen Power, but their path was easier. Each writes in hortatory, idiomatic, highly rhetorical fashion, with few footnotes, as if performing on speech day at a boy’s private school. 151 See Lerner, Ernest Kantorowicz, 98, 172. Information on Emily Martha Lorimer (née Overend, 1881–1949) is available in ODNB only as subordinated to the entry on her husband: see Peter Sluglett, “Lorimer, David Lockhart Robertson (1876–1962),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 34 (Oxford, 2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/58306 (last accessed 20 August 2019). 152 See The Times, 24 November 1936, issue 47540, p. 15, and David Wallace, Strong Women: Life, Text, and Territory 1347–1645 (Oxford, 2011), 83–84. 153 Chambers, “The Continuity of English Prose,” clxvii. 154 On this earliest critical reception see Wallace, 66–80. 155 W. Butler-Bowdon, ed., The Book of Margery Kempe, with an introduction by R. W. Chambers (London, 1936), 16, 345–74. 156 See Helen Leith Spencer, “The Early English Text Society 1930 to 1950: Wartime and Reconstruction,” in Probable Truth: Editing Medieval Texts from Britain in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Vincent Gillespie and Anne Hudson (Turnhout, 2013), 15–35, at 18–20. Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 27 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 28 Their auctoritas grounds itself upon themselves, and their institutional Heft; colorful style and the pursuit of extracurricular fiction seem not to compromise their scholarly reputation. Marcia Colish once suggested to me that women of this period, given such circumstances, often chose to be economic historians, since stats and hard facts dispel suspicions of frivolity; no woman wants to be mistaken for a Strickland sister.157 Eileen Power became a major economic historian—but she did not start there, and she worked happily with more popular modes of history. Her portrait on the stairway of fame at the Institute of Historical Research, London, has her just one step above her sister, Rhoda, with whom she wrote children’s history books, and also children’s history programs for BBC radio. Her radio broadcasting went on until 1936, although (sadly) no recording seems to survive. Eileen Power was brilliant from the beginning, taking a double first at Oxford before studying at the Écoles des Chartres. She traveled on fellowship to India and China, remarking problematically and suggestively that “India is the Middle Ages.”158 Her comparatist internationalism is quite unlike the melancholic, Nordic-Germanophile insularism of Lewis—Tolkien—Chambers. She paid close attention to what was happening in her discipline over the Channel—which was, simply put, Henri Pirenne and the Annales School. This prompted an admirable decision: to retool, and to cocreate a school of economic history in London, at the LSE. Earlier successes, such as Medieval English Nunneries from 1922, meant she had no need to do this, professionally speaking. But the need for harder history—geographically savvy, collaborative, and closer to social science—grew clearly apparent to her in the 1930s. The finest outcome is perhaps The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. I, The Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages, published in 1941. “Work of this kind can only be done,” says the preface to Power’s Economic History, “on an international basis.”159 Accordingly, chapters are submitted from a whole range of insecure locations, from Vienna and Ghent to Helsinki and Poznán. A sad long paragraph, detailing the last known whereabouts of refugee scholars, comes to an especially poignant end: “Of Professor Rutkowski all that we know with certainty is that he cannot be at his University of Poznán; we believe that Professor Ganshof, an officer of the reserve, is alive in Belgium; and that Professor Marc Bloch, after serving with the armies, is safe in America.”160 Sadly, Eileen Power did not live to see her Cambridge Economic History of Europe: she died suddenly in 1940 of a heart attack.161 Her co-editor remembered the time he had seen her at “psome learned gathering” in a glittery dress: “Eileen,” he said, “you look like Semiramis.” Power replied: “I thought I looked like a Professor 157 See Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, from the Norman Conquest, 2nd ed., 6 vols. (London, 1864–65). Agnes, much influenced by Sir Walter Scott, tried historical romance before turning to history; she was assisted by her sister Elizabeth. 158 See Billie Melman, “Under the Western Historian’s Eyes: Eileen Power and the Early Feminist Encounter with Colonialism,” History Workshop Journal 42 (1996): 147–67, at 154. 159 John Harold Clapham, “Preface,” in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe: From the Decline of the Roman Empire, vol. 1, The Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages, ed. J. H. Clapham and Eileen Power (Cambridge, UK 1941), v–viii, at vii. 160 Clapham, viii. 161 “She was struck down in an instant of time,” says her co-editor, “not by that which may strike down anyone to-day but by utterly unexpected disease” (Clapham, v). She died on 8 August. Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 28 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 29 of Economic History.”162 A remarkable succession of women were influenced by Eileen Power, including Alice Clark, Dorothy George, Ivy Pinchbeck, and Dorothy Marshall.163 Her student Nora Carus-Wilson, who carried forward her work on the cloth trade, later followed her into a chair of economic history at the LSE.164 Carolyn Dinshaw has celebrated the medievalist amateur, finding a great representative in Lady Raglan, who in 1939 found a foliate head in a Welsh parish church and called it a “Green Man.”165 But there is a kind of amateurism in our period that is not benign. I am thinking here principally of Arnold Toynbee, and his twelvevolume A Study of History, which begins rolling out through the 1930s: the first three volumes, on the “geneses” and “growths” of civilizations, appear in 1934, and the next three, on their “breakdowns” and “disintegrations,” in 1939.166 In volume 1, Toynbee speaks of “the Jews” as “an extinct society which survives only as a fossil,” as “one of the fossil remnants of the Syriac society.”167 Later we find long stretches of racial classifying, of bowel-shriveling awfulness. Following the rubric Race and Civilization,168 we find a table summarizing “the contributions which the several races of Man, as classified by color, have actually made to our twentyone civilizations.”169 How on earth was Toynbee moved to compose this monstrous work, leading him into speculative areas where he had no expertise? In 1954, he at least tells us when and where he was so moved: on 17 September 1921, while riding on the Orient Express from Constantinople to England. Landscapes speeding by revivify loci of classical history; a Bulgarian peasant wearing a fox-skin cap prompts reference to headgear described by Herodotus. By the end of the day Toynbee has jotted down his grand plan “on half a sheet of note paper.”170 This is bad amateurism. It is founded on the assumption that winning a hatload of prizes in Latin and Greek as a boy sets you up for life, qualifying you to go anywhere, to write about anything, anybody. Naturally we wish to honor Eileen Power and forget Toynbee, but we should recognize the range and duration of his influence. From a powerful Victorian family dynasty, he served as director of studies at the Royal Institute of Public Affairs from 162 J.H. Clapham, “Eileen Power, 1889–1940,” Economica, n.s. 7/28 (1940): 351-59, at 355, cited in Marjorie McCallum Chibnall, “Eileen Edna Le Poer Powell (1889–1940),” in Women Medievalists and the Academy, ed. Jane Chance (Madison, WI, 2005), 310–21, at 319. 163 Maxine L. Berg, “Power [married name Postan], “Eileen Edna Le Poer,” ODNB, vol. 45 (Oxford, 2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/35581 (last accessed 12 August 2019). 164 See Chibnall, “Eileen Edna Le Poer Powell,” 318–19. 165 She was apparently the first person to apply such a name: see Carolyn Dinshaw, “Black Skin, Green Masks: Medieval Foliate Heads, Racial Trauma, and Queer World-Making,” in Bildhauer and Jones, The Middle Ages in the Modern World, 276–304, at 294. 166 Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History, 12 vols. (London, 1934–61). 167 Toynbee, 1:135–39. 168 Toynbee, 1:227. 169 Toynbee, 1:232. Under the rubric Race, four subdivisions of “White” are presented, but just one of “Black.” Under the rubric “contributing to Civilizations,” the entry for Black is “None.” Archaeologist Louis Leakey’s first finds in the Olduvai Gorge, northern Tanzania, date from 1931. Such discoveries affirm, says Neil MacGregor, “that every one of us is part of a huge African diaspora—we all have Africa in our DNA and all our culture began there”: Leakey, A History of the World in 100 Objects (London, 2010), 11. See further, by way of anticipation, L. S. B. Leakey, Adam’s Ancestors, 3rd ed. (London, 1934), 125. 170 Toynbee, 7:ix–x. Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 29 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 30 1926 until retirement, and was often on the BBC. In opening his vastly influential Europäisches Literatur in 1948, E. R. Curtius unquestioningly adopts Toynbee’s twenty-one civilizations schema, commends “the richness and illuminating power” of his work, and acclaims it “the greatest intellectual accomplishment in the field of history in our day.”171 A two-volume abridgement of Toynbee’s first six volumes for OUP had by 1947 sold 100,000 copies. His sales in the US ran to a quarter of a million copies, and he made the front cover of Time magazine (17 March 1947) with the inscription “Our civilization is not inexorably doomed.” He remained highly influential into the 1950s. In seeking American medievalists to push back against Toynbee’s league table racial profiling and bad amateurism we find Margaret Schlauch. “Even scholars who have done extremely good work in their own specialty,” she says, “have been known to lose their heads and write very foolishly on the subject of race and racial superiority.”172 Schlauch writes here as an associate professor at NYU in a short text, published by the Anti-Fascist Literature Committee in New York City in 1935, called Who Are the Aryans? Her phenomenal philology debunks Nazi notions of Arianism while also deploring American treatment of “the Japanese.”173 And she turns satirical when describing the search for the ur-Aryan, the ancient ancestor: “It is very difficult to argue soundly,” she says, “about people whose speech is lost forever, and whose skin and hair became dust long ago. The fact remains that no skull of 6000 BC will open its silent jaws and let us hear what sounds it used to make before history began.”174 Margaret Schlauch had traveled to Denmark, Germany, and Iceland during a Guggenheim year. In 1934 she published Romance in Iceland, and during World War II prepared a manual of Icelandic for all those GIs piling into Reykjavík.175 A full professor of English at NYU from 1940, she was well placed to observe the steady arrival of scholarly émigrés fleeing “fanatical nonsense.”176 New York intellectual life was then fantastically rich and contradictory. At Columbia, President Butler, later of library fame, sponsored the new Casa Italiana, conceived as an American platform for Mussolini.177 Yet this same President Butler brought the Frankfurt School, headed by Max Horkheimer, to effectively share campus space with the Fascist Casa Italiana—why was that? Most members of the Frankfurter Schule were Jewish, and their Institute in Frankfurt was closed by the Nazis in 1933.178 Butler, and Colombia’s sociologists, recognized that the Marxian 171 E. R. Curtius, Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalater (Berne, 1948), 14–16; translated as European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (London, 1953), 4–6. Curtius, Europäische Literatur, 11, dates his first work on this volume to 1932. 172 Margaret Schlauch, Who Are the Aryans? (New York, 1935), 27. 173 Schlauch, 3. 174 Schlauch, 17. 175 Christine M. Rose, “Margaret Schlauch (1898–1986),” in Chance, Women Medievalists, 523– 39, at 524. 176 Schlauch, Who are the Aryans?, 29. 177 In 1939 its director, Giuseppe Prezzolini, published an essay aligning Italian—as the “modern classical language”—with Mussolinian fantasies of renewed Roman empire. See David Robey, “Italian Studies: The First Half,” Italian Studies 67 (2012): 287–99, at 290. 178 See Wheatland, Frankfurt School in Exile, 29. Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 30 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 31 Frankfurters were no amateurs: headed by Horkheimer, they had pioneered new quantitative, survey-based methods that Columbia’s social scientists desperately needed. Walter Benjamin, like Marc Bloch, almost made it to New York City. Eighty blocks south, Belle Da Costa Green continued work as director of the Pierpont Morgan Library. Between 1930 and 1935 she put on twenty-six exhibitions, increasing public attendance by over 400 percent. In 1937 she secured cataloguing of the Coptic manuscripts she had herself acquired, and in 1939 became Fellow of the Medieval Academy. She was dogged throughout the decade by speculations about her origins.179 In 1934, a mile or so from the Morgan, an opera called Four Saints in Three Acts played for sixty performances, over six weeks.180 Written by Gertrude Stein and with a score by Virgil Thomson, this production employed an exclusively AfricanAmerican cast of singer-actors to portray Western, premodern saints and to explore European themes. Ira Gershwin, an admiring spectator at the Broadway premiere, staged his Porgy and Bess the following year. Lee Miller took highly stylized studio portraits of the performers in Four Saints; this is the same year, 1934, as those Oberammergau cast portraits. Is Four Saints some kind of Manhattan medievalism? Does it dialogue with Langston Hughes’s poem of 1932, “Goodbye Christ,” which rejects traditions of Western saintliness?181 Colleagues expert in the field will frame better questions; best not to speak “very foolishly,” Schlauch might say, as a bad amateur.182 Much of what I know about Margaret Schlauch comes from Christine Rose’s chapter in Women Medievalists and the Academy, edited by Jane Chance, and much more can be learned from that volume. One person to add might be Jeanette Meisel, a graduate student in economics who in 1933 met Salo Wittmayer Baron at Columbia and then threw herself into his Social and Religious History of the Jews, published in 1937. Which brings us to a large question: Did Jewish studies exist as integral to medieval studies in the 1930s? The answer is, I think, as with Islamic studies, not quite yet.183 Baron writes as a rabbi, observing the internal logic 179 See Heidi Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life: Belle Da Costa Greene’s Journey from Prejudice to Privilege (New York, 2007), 275, 428, 438. 180 Four Saints ran for four weeks at the 44th Street Theatre before moving to the roomier and more prestigious Mercury Theatre for the last two weeks. Written and composed in Paris by Gertrude Stein and Vergil Thompson in 1927, it opened in Hartford, CT, on 7 February 1934, with an all-African American cast, and accompanied the first exhibition in the USA of Picasso’s paintings. Following the New York shows it transferred to Chicago. See Four Saints in Three Acts: A Snapshot of the American Avant-Garde in the 1930s, ed. Patricia Allmer and John Sears (Manchester, 2017), xxiv, 3, 64, 147. 181 See John Sears, “‘As if they were the saints they said they were’: Gertude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts and serial resemblance,” in Allmer and Sears, Four Saints, 119–35, at 119–20. 182 On the medievalist amateurism of Jessie Redmon Fauset, prolific novelist and first editor of Langston Hughes, see Cord J. Whitaker, “The Middle Ages in the Harlem Renaissance,” in Whose Middle Ages? Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past, ed. Andrew Albin et al. (New York, 2020). 183 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi acclaims the appearance in 1932 of an entire chapter dedicated to Jewish history in the Cambridge Medieval History as a “landmark of sorts”: the History had begun in 1911, and this was its seventh volume. Cecil Roth’s chapter on medieval Jewry, however, does stand in “splendid isolation,” in effect “a historiographical ghetto”: Yerushalmi, “Introduction,” in Bibliographical Essays in Medieval Jewish Studies, The Study of Judaism, vol. 2 (New York, 1976), 1–14, at 8–9. Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 31 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 32 of Judaism while yet narrating Judaism as part of general history. Setting himself against “lachrymose” strains of Jewish historiography, he celebrates Islam for its “marvelous rejuvenation of . . . decaying countries,” from “central Asia to Morocco and southern France.”184 His first volume ends with these words: “The Jewish people thus continued their march through history, quickened, rather than hindered, by the epoch-making rise of Islam.”185 For Baron, the “middle period”186 between ancient Israel and Jewish modernity is huge, and of huge importance, and for Jacob Marcus it lasts even longer, as suggested by his anthology that appears the following year, 1938: The Jew in the Medieval World: A Sourcebook; 315–1791. For Marcus, a Jewish “Middle Ages” begins with Constantine the Great’s Christian totalitarianism, his disabling of Jewish civil rights, and does not end until March 1791, with the civic emancipation of the French Revolution.187 Baron of course recognizes the benefits of this “emancipation,” for “millions of Jews,” while yet arguing that it “was attended by the destruction of Jewish self-government, the material limitation of the applicability of Jewish law, and a partial disintegration of traditional religious and cultural patterns.”188 And if Baron challenges settled teleologies of progress, so Marcus redefines what “counts” as a literary or documentary source: of the 79 items he translates to anthologize, 47 are from Hebrew, 17 from German, 6 from Latin, 5 from French, and 2 each from Yiddish and Italian, with legal, historical, official, popular, and fantastical texts plucked from Jewish, Christian, and Islamic sources. In England, “Jewish studies,” even in proto-embryonic form, proves harder to recognize. In 1935, Cambridge University Press published Adversus Judaeos: A Bird’s Eye View of Christian Apologiae until the Renaissance. Its author, A. Lukyn Williams, was Fellow of Jesus College and vicar of Guilden Morden, sixteen miles away. His book, as its title implies, “is concerned solely with the endeavors of certain Churchmen to win Jews to Christ by their writings, or, at least, to protect Christians against the arguments of their Jewish neighbors.”189 The arguments advanced by such “Churchmen” are of limited utility, Williams says, since they “too often resemble the armor of medieval knights.”190 Crusading and imperial connotations are further enhanced not only by the CUP imprint (“London, New York, Toronto; Bombay, Calcutta, Madras; Tokyo”) but by memory of the book’s origins in Australia as lectures given “to young men preparing for Christian work among the Jews.”191 Apologies for that definite article; Williams’s preface does not acknowledge the help of any Jewish person or scholar. Williams does recognize a book from 184 Salo Wittmayer Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 3 vols. (New York, 1937), 1:307. 185 Baron, 1:377. 186 Baron, 1:vi. 187 See Marc Saperstein, “Introduction” in Jacob Rader Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World: A Source Book, 315–1791, rev. ed. Marc Saperstein (Cincinnati, 1999), xiii–xxv, at xxiv. 188 Thus in the opening paragraph to the book proper, Baron, A Social and Religious History, 1:3. 189 A. Lukyn Williams, “Adversus Judaeos”: A Bird’s Eye View of Christian “Apologiae” until the Renaisance (Cambridge, UK, 1935), xiii. 190 Williams, xv. 191 Williams, xv. Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 32 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 33 the previous year, 1934, that justifies his own narrowed focus, namely The Conflict of the Church and Synagogue: A Study in the Origins of Antisemitism, by Dr. James Parkes. Its preface opens thus: “the publication of a study of the causes of antisemitism needs neither justification nor explanation at the present time.”192 Parkes’s book began as an Oxford DPhil, and he was awarded a postdoc at Exeter College, Oxford. It is a substantial work, with an impressive, penultimate chapter on “The Jews in Visigothic Spain.” But it was published not by Oxford University Press, but rather by the Soncino Press, based at Gower Street, London. Soncino is a famous name in Jewish publishing, dating back to 1484, but it is worth noting that only Williams’s book gains the Oxbridge imprimatur. Jewish scholarly diasporas of the 1930s trace strange itineraries, none stranger than that of Karl Löwith, who in 1936 found himself teaching in Japan, at Tohuku University, with a teaching assistant devoted to medieval German literature.193 The most famous itinerary leads, of course, to Istanbul. Leo Spitzer has been commended for mixing with local scholars and learning Turkish: a more authentic protopostcolonialism, surely, than that of Erich Auerbach, huddled in exile with his select Western masterpieces. But, as Kader Konuk has shown,194 from her research in Turkish archives, Auerbach was doing just what he was asked in order to support the modernizing program of Mustafa Kemal, which included the abolition of Ottoman script, the fez, and the veil. Much has been said about Auerbach in Istanbul, and all that flows from that moment, so I will conclude with a much less iconic figure: Thomas Whittemore. His career began patchily, with a BA in English from Tufts and some graduate work at Harvard; he apparently inspired Edith Wharton’s imagining of Professor Archivio for her Glimpses of the Moon (1922). In 1914, and again in 1915, he joined archaeologist Bogdan Filov on expeditions scouting out early Christian, Byzantine, and old-Bulgarian monuments on territory that had been Ottoman for five hundred years.195 Filov, inevitably educated in Germany, eventually became Bulgarian prime minister; Whittemore, having founded the Byzantine Institute of America in 1930, was in 1932 summoned to the presence of Kemal Atatürk in Istanbul, and to the great mosque of Hagia Sophia (Fig. 5). His brief, like that of Auerbach, was to speed Western-friendly secularization. Whittemore himself best summarizes the before and after of his meeting with Atatürk: “Santa Sophia was a mosque the day that I talked to him. The next morning, when I went to the mosque, there was a sign on the door written in Ataturk’s own hand. It said: ‘The museum is closed for repairs.’”196 Whittemore and his co-workers built a steel scaffold, forty feet high, and set to work uncovering the great Byzantine mosaics. They had last been seen in the 1840s, 192 James Parkes, The Conflict of the Church and Synagogue: A Study in the Origins of Antisemitism (London, 1934), xiii. 193 See Yasunari Takada, “Translatio and Difference: Western Classics in Modern Japan,” in Classics and National Cultures, ed. Susan A. Stephens and Phiroze Vasunia (Oxford, 2010), 285–301, at 289–90. Löwith moved to the USA in 1941 and to Heidelberg in 1952. 194 Kader Konuk, East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey (Palo Alto, 2010). 195 Fani Gargova, “Medievalism, Byzantinism, and Bulgarian Politics through the Archival Lens,” in Bildhauer and Jones, The Middle Ages in the Modern World, 152–67, at 156–57. 196 Patrick Balfour Kinross, Hagia Sophia (New York, 1972), 128. Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 33 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 34 Fig. 5. Turkey, Istanbul, Hagia Sophia view from northeast with Thomas Whittemore in the foreground (Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection). when the Fossati brothers uncovered them, sketched them, showed them to the sultan, and then sealed them beneath new layers of paint, plaster, and gold leaf. It was these nineteenth-century layers that Whittemore’s team gently worked away at for the rest of his life, and beyond.197 And it seems right to end at this moment of 197 Kinross, 116–20, 127–33. Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 34 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13 Medieval Studies in Troubled Times 35 exhilaration and discovery, as obscuring layers are removed, mindful that this is also a moment of anxiety, of “tense future,” intuiting troubles to come. For it is not certain that Whittemore’s “uncovering” is irreversible, that Hagia Sophia will always be a museum, open to all.198 President Erdoğan balances his polity on this edge of uncertainty, a reminder that in Istanbul, as in Budapest and in the United States, we are living through medieval studies in troubled times. 198 The Hagia Sophia of Trabzon (Trebizond), built as a church in the thirteenth century, became a mosque in the Ottoman period and then a museum in 1964; it became a mosque again in 2013 (with church frescoes still visible in the narthex). David Wallace is Judith Rodin Professor of English & Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania (e-mail: [email protected]) Speculum 95/1 (January 2020) 190556.proof.3d 35 Achorn International 09/07/19 04:13