Chapter 1 Modern medieval languages: reading in and out of time

Transnational modern languages and the politics of periodisation

In recent years, there has been a ‘transnational turn’ within modern languages teaching and research. Increasingly aware of the dangers of ‘exclusivist, nationalist, and territorial thinking’ in language-specific disciplines, and that ‘German’, ‘French’, ‘Spanish’, ‘Italian’ (etc.) run the risk of sounding like monolithic national concepts they have never been, scholars have sought ways of exposing the interconnectedness and fluidity of perceived linguistic, geographic and national boundaries.⁴ Modern languages disciplines emerged in the nineteenth century, in a time of what Braun and Schofield, citing Ulrich Beck, refer to as ‘methodological nationalism’, and the specific contexts that shaped their foundation still persist today, particularly in terms of canon and genre formation.⁵ There has been widespread dissatisfaction with what we might term the ‘traditional’ curriculum for some time now, but the growth of nationalist populism in contemporary politics has made a rethinking of the subject all the more urgent, and has led to approaches that both explore nation-formation and rejoice in its inadequacies, as well as in the multiplicity and diversity inherent in the languages and cultures we study. As Hodkinson and Schofield put it in the introduction to their volume German in the World, for instance, the aim of a transnational German studies is ‘to grasp that while German-language culture can always be historically, linguistically, and geographically contextualized, its value, legacy and impact can never be entirely constrained by those temporal, linguistic, and geographic borders.’⁶

The transnational turn is fundamentally connected to projects that aim to ‘decolonise’ or ‘expand’ the curriculum and also stands in close relation to ‘worlding’ projects within English and comparative literature, in all their critical complexity. Its political stance is different, however, because of its direct connection to both nationhood and to the discipline of modern languages. The very essence of modern languages is working with difference: it is about crossing the divide between languages and cultures, and exploring critically the forms of connection and dislocation this crossing brings about.⁷ This interconnected, messy discipline of studying language(s) and cultures (which, itself, can mean literature, film, history, politics and so on) is always one that involves radical destabilisation through the removal or marginalisation of the mother tongue, as well as through the process of cultural translation that unsettles us and forces us to think anew about the web of references that make up the way we understand the world and our place within it.

The transnational is often read as a contemporary phenomenon: it is a product of (and response to) globalisation, as well as to the related re-emergence of nationalist, populist political movements.⁸ Yet the transnational cannot only be understood in the now.⁹ Braun and Schofield draw attention to the intricate connection between the transnational and the transperiod, stressing the ‘crucial awareness that the transnational is both the precursor as well as the result of the nation’ and reminding us that critical reflection on nationhood has to draw into consideration historical situations before the emergence of the nation-state.¹⁰ This connection they identify, amplified by the use of the prefix ‘trans’, draws attention to the fact that ‘period’ is just as much of a construct as ‘nation’, and is a term that is just as politically and historically loaded – and worthy of deconstruction.

Despite such recognition of the connection between the transnational and the transperiod, this is not a connection that has been sufficiently explored. While geographical broadness and cross-cultural thinking are key to the conceptualisation of modern languages teaching and research today, historical depth is not, and is rarely an element of our degree programmes that is marketed by our universities or expected by undergraduate students.¹¹ I would like to suggest, however, that historical depth is a vital component of thinking across languages and cultures, and that a truly transnational study of modern languages has to take seriously the politics of time. The fear of (ir)relevance is perhaps one of the reasons for the dogged contemporaneity in so much of the self-presentation of our subject. Yet a greater consideration of the politics of periodisation, as well as the way in which it interacts with nation-making (and breaking), would contribute in a very real way to the politics of relevance and offer new perspectives on contemporary social constructs and problems.

Periodisation is, in itself, a political act, not a neutral depiction of the course of history. Period units are constructs created to write narratives of ostensibly ‘universal’ concepts and, as scholars such as Dipesh Chakrabarty have shown, can result in the normalisation of problematic (Euro)chronologies that render particularly non-European forms of historical experience insignificant or less ‘progressive’.¹² Modernity, so often treated as an apparently universal concept, is, Chakrabarty argues, in fact always already conditioned by particular histories. Political modernity is deeply contingent, yet it tends to be disguised as universal, which results in a tendency to think in terms of some nations ‘catching up’ while others are shown to be more normatively progressive.¹³

Chakrabarty writes from the perspective of subaltern studies, advocating for new ways of writing histories that take into account the politics of periodisation and their intersection with other constructed models of (Western) ‘progress’. Yet he gestures in his writing towards a connection with the study of the Middle Ages, and, in fact, medieval studies can make a powerful and complementary contribution to this discussion.¹⁴ The medieval plays a significant, if often unrecognised, part in contemporary conceptualisations of modernity; it is commonplace, for example, to use the term ‘medieval’ in a derogatory fashion to describe social practices that are excessively violent or that seem in some way to be unsophisticatedly primitive or barbaric. Not unconnected is the ahistorical and highly problematic appropriation of conceptualisations of the medieval and medievalism by contemporary far-right groups across the West in order to promote the politics of nationalism and white supremacy.¹⁵ A recent – and frequently cited – instance is the adoption of crusading insignia and ‘Viking’ dress at the Capitol riots in January 2021.¹⁶ It is not the purpose of this chapter (although it should go without saying) to promote a deeper and more nuanced historical education in contemporary society; the point I rather want to make here is to stress the fact that the ‘medieval’ is a construct that, in itself, helps us to grasp the shape of the equally constructed modernity.

The most sophisticated discussion of the role of the constructed ‘medieval’ in the politics of time is Kathleen Davis’s Periodization and Sovereignty.¹⁷ Focusing on feudalism and secularisation, Davis shows that the conceptualisation of modernity is governed by a period divide from the monolith of the medieval – in essence, that the ‘formation of some of our most basic historical and political assumptions’ (in other words, the emergence of secularism and sovereignty) is shaped by a relationship with the ‘defining attributes’ of the medieval.¹⁸ The ‘medieval’ or the ‘Middle Ages’, that is, stands as an oppositional monolith to modernity and acts as a construct or idea characterised by sacrality and feudalism from which the modern can distinguish itself. For some time now, medievalists have from various angles been complicating the assumptions of this monolithic idea of the Middle Ages, arguing forcefully for a more nuanced understanding of the medieval for both our own consumption and that of a wider public.¹⁹ Yet Davis’s argument deconstructs the medieval from a different perspective, in other words, from that of modernity. If we want to understand modernity, she argues, then we need to consider the historicity of fundamental concepts such as religion, secularism or democracy that shape the logic of the ‘now’ in often unthinking ways. In order to achieve this, we need to understand how these concepts are determined by the construction of an oppositional Middle Ages.

The creation of a divide between a medieval and a modern period, originally a European invention, has thus transformed into a ‘global category of time’, which ‘intensively assumes world-historical implications for categories such as the sovereign state and secular politics’.²⁰ The medieval has, Davis shows, become a ‘mobile category, applicable at any time to any society that has not “yet” achieved modernity or, worse, has become retrograde’;²¹ equally, modernity, however implicitly, is dependent on this monolith of a sacred, feudal, retrograde medieval for its own self-understanding.

Davis’s work is closely related to postcolonial approaches to historiography, as exemplified by Chakrabarty: as she shows, the medieval/modern divide is a European invention, a political act of periodisation that must be understood together with colonialism and nationalism in the creation of a white, Eurocentric idealisation of modernity.²² Indeed, the dialogue between medieval and postcolonial studies is an extraordinarily productive one that has enriched both disciplines considerably, offering new temporal depth to the postcolonial and a vital conceptual and geographical diversity to the medieval.²³ It is also helpful for clarifying the real value of the kind of argument Davis makes for the disciplinary identity of modern languages.

The point I want to make here is not, of course, to try to make a case for the marginalised medieval in practices of expanding and decolonising the curriculum; this could quickly turn out to be rather crass and, of course, medieval studies can (and should) be made more diverse in its own right.²⁴ Rather, the point is to stress the vital interconnection between thinking across space and thinking across time. Davis’s work is primarily a theoretical reflection on the politics of time, that argues for a greater and more careful consideration of how many of the assumptions of modernity are better understood with recourse to the historical shaping of the medieval. And she is, of course, not the only person who has discussed the vital political work of medieval studies, and how it can make a powerful contribution to understanding the contemporary world.²⁵

This argument, I suggest, is peculiarly relevant to the discipline of modern languages: because how can we think across cultures and languages without considering how vital the politics of time and periodisation are for the establishment and persistence of Eurocentric thinking, and how they continue to shape conceptualisations of modernity and the nation? As Emily Apter states, ‘the politics of periodization defines how “globalization” is mapped onto the humanities, often producing institutional and disciplinary configurations that reproduce economic inequality’.²⁶ Her conclusion that ‘literary history needs to open up to radical re-sequencing, through anachronic timelines, non-Eurochronic descriptions of duration, and a proliferation of new names for periods as yet unnamed’ is not an easy task, but one that all literary historians should take seriously.²⁷ It is also one to which modern linguists are peculiarly well-suited to respond.

Much of the work that explores the complicated relationship of the medieval to contemporary literature and culture, exposing collapsing, layered temporalities, focuses primarily on the anglophone world.²⁸ From within medieval studies there have been powerful statements about the importance of transnational approaches, particularly Simon Gaunt’s exploration of the postcolonial Middle Ages, which he argues must not be confined within the anglophone or anglo-centric context.²⁹ Yet the important connection between the politics of time and the politics of space is one that is rarely made, and this is where a powerful opportunity lies for modern languages.³⁰ If modern languages is about crossing borders – linguistically, culturally, geographically – then it must contend seriously with the historical mechanisms behind the formation of these borders, and articulate its value in comprehending and analysing the world through cultural differences that are inflected through time as well as through language, culture and nationhood. If modern languages can tackle contemporary global challenges, then it needs to contend with time, and it needs to contend with the past – and this is both a challenge and an opportunity.

Medieval literature in the modern languages classroom

Apter makes a plea for the rewriting of literary history, but what about the teaching of medieval literature in the modern languages classroom? Following on from the arguments made in the previous section, I would like to suggest that reading medieval literature (or, by extension, any literature of the past) can – and should – function as a fundamental part of the practice of modern languages of looking askance at the familiar and performing acts of critical destabilisation. Much like learning new languages, the study of literature is always destabilising, an activity that challenges and promotes an imaginative response. Medieval literature complements this practice through the added dimension of pastness, and thus through a temporal destabilisation that refocuses the familiar and the unfamiliar, showing how the ‘now’ is shaped by the past and how the past is always present.

Medieval literature tends to make this way of thinking obvious in itself. Medieval theories of time are diverse, yet rarely linear, and often manifest in cyclical or layered conceptualisations of temporality that attempt to grapple with creation, salvation, worldly history and eternity.³¹ Perhaps the two most widely received theories of time throughout the Middle Ages – those of Augustine and Boethius – make this abundantly clear. For Augustine, as expressed most famously in Book 11 of his late-fourth-century Confessions, time is something we experience in our minds, not something that actually exists: the past is gone, the future yet to arrive and the present so fleeting that it is impossible to grasp. When we talk about past and future, therefore, what we really describe is a kind of recollection or extension of the mind (distentio animi). In his work The Consolation of Philosophy, written in 523, Boethius offers a different perspective: for God, the future and past are just as ‘present’ as the present moment, rendering temporal reality tenseless.³²

These and other complex ways of thinking about time are, of course, made manifest in art. Medieval saints’ lives and visionary narratives, for instance, tend to be constructed around an insistence on both the historical past of the narrative and its continued presence through the active reception of the audience; this reception then shapes the future but contributes to the possibility of salvation.³³ From a broader perspective, Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood describe what they term the ‘anachronicity’ of the premodern work of art.³⁴ Focusing primarily on the visual arts and on the Renaissance, but in an argument that can easily be (and has been) stretched back to the Middle Ages, they explore how premodern artworks ‘fold’ time through the ways in which they shift between temporal anchoring and a rejection of linearity. The result is a complication (or folding) of pasts, presents and futures, and a temporal instability on which artworks often reflect explicitly. The anachronic work, they argue, can summon or create pasts and futures, and ‘hold incompatible models in suspension without deciding’.³⁵

It is not, of course, necessary to deal with this kind of theoretical complexity in the classroom (although there is no reason why one couldn’t). In a more general sense, though, it is helpful to recognise and reflect on the fact that works of art always outlive those who make them and take on new forms of meaning with new audiences: they always become different through time, shaped by the experiences and contexts of their recipients. The extreme difference of medieval literature, which on first read can feel bizarre, freakish and wild, rams home just how far away modern readers are from conditions of reception. The difference is partly thematic – from the frankly mad plots of romance, to casual encounters with dragons, shapeshifting, accidental incest, etc. – and partly formal (versification, manuscript transmission, anonymity, textual instability). This strangeness of medieval literature is often described, following Hans Robert Jauss, in terms of ‘alterity’. For Jauss, medieval alterity is primarily understood with respect to aesthetic pleasure; readers may need to shift their horizons of expectation to access this pleasure, but an acceptance of the aesthetics of difference and surprise allows, he argues, a recognition of the modernity of medieval literature.³⁶ Jauss does not refer here to the constructed idea of modernity I discussed above (he is more interested in aesthetics), but his exploration of alterity is a reminder to think differently and to reset expectations when approaching medieval literature – not to judge it on the same terms as forms of contemporary cultural production. I am more interested here in how that difference forces us to think about ourselves and to recognise the context in which we read; how it fosters, if you will, a heightened awareness of our own positionality and of the critical assumptions of the society in which we live. Medieval literature, through its very strangeness, is an excellent tool for encouraging self-reflection and for thinking critically about the social structures we might otherwise take for granted; for understanding the contingency of our own status as moderns and, as discussed above, of modernity itself.

Like all of the cross-cultural work in modern languages, the sideways perspectives offered by medieval literature act as forms of destabilisation that lead us to question radically our norms and assumptions. Medieval literary texts resonate strikingly with many of the concerns that shape our lives in the modern West: from race and gender to ecology and subjectivity. And, of course, their very status as literary texts – creative forms rather than historical sources – doubles down on their potential for experimental (re)thinking. Let us just take two examples to explore these possibilities further: Hartmann von Aue’s early-thirteenth-century Iwein, a story of a knight that is one of the most famous German Arthurian romances and a reworking of Chrétien de Troyes’s Old French Yvain; and the twelfth-century narrative Herzog Ernst, which tells of the adventures of an exiled duke in a fabulous East inhabited by hybrid and monstrous beings.³⁷

Iwein, set in the Arthurian court where knights must constantly state and restate their own prowess, plays out in a context of competitive (and highly fragile) hypermasculinity, where honour can be lost and regained in seconds. This hypermasculine environment is interspersed with the appearance of female figures who exert their own specific, often unusual, forms of power: one has a ring that makes its wearer invisible, another has access to a miraculous healing salve, and most possess an ability for strategic thinking seemingly unknown to male characters. As well as reading the text through a specific context of medieval ethics of ‘courtliness’ (much of which is a later scholarly invention), it can be productive to use Iwein as a relatively straightforward way into thinking about the nature of gender as performance, as well as the slipperiness and interchangeability of gender roles, in both medieval and modern contexts. Iwein is married to a powerful, rather uncanny woman, Laudine, whose feelings for him are perhaps more transactional than his for her. After he is dismissed by her for breaking his promise to return to her within an allotted period of time, he undergoes a kind of total breakdown, often referred to as ‘madness’, in which he loses all sense of self and lives in the forest in a primitive and animalistic state. This scene can lead to productive classroom discussions around the socially determined construction of subjectivity and identity, and how this intersects with public understandings of mental health; together with Iwein’s later ‘befriending’ of a lion (Is it a ‘real’ lion? Is it a component of Iwein’s reforming selfhood?), it helps us to conceptualise the blurred boundaries between the human and the animal – and, accordingly, the constructedness of both categories.

Herzog Ernst tells a different kind of story. Here, the protagonist becomes embroiled in a political conspiracy (largely not of his own making), that results in him having to leave his lands, ostensibly to join the Crusades. His ships are quickly blown off course and the majority of the narrative consists of a journey through distant, ‘wondrous’ lands, which enables reflection on medieval geographies, both real and imagined, as well as worldmaking, colonisation and the postcolonial. The inhabitants of these lands – from hybrid crane-men who inhabit an astonishingly civilised and beautiful city (with hot and cold running water!) yet peck a (Christian) princess to death, to giants, pygmies and beings with enormous feet to shade them from the sun or enormous ears to wrap themselves in – lead us to think about processes of racialisation through imagined physical difference, as well as the construction of humanity, animality and normativity. This text, which exists in multiple forms, in German and Latin, from the twelfth century to the twentieth century, also invites reflection on acts of reception, rewriting, recontextualisation and translation across languages and media. Much like Iwein, there is also the potential to introduce dialogue with contemporary critical theory. I have found that Herzog Ernst offers a good opportunity to introduce students to postcolonial and critical race theory; Iwein, with its highly performative gender roles, provides a helpful way in to the work of Judith Butler.

Neither of these examples is a particularly radical choice – many more creative options are available, from a variety of different genres. But I have chosen these because they highlight peculiarly strongly what we might want to term the productive strangeness of medieval literature: the way in which its content seems radically strange to the modern world yet nonetheless resonates sharply with many of its central concerns. My own experience in the classroom is that distance from the present moment can allow for more openness and critical reflection in discussion, leading to a broadening of perspectives and opportunities for creative rethinking of urgent contemporary topics. These opportunities can be brought into sharper relief through comparative or transperiod teaching or through dialogue with other forms of cultural production. Herzog Ernst, for instance, could be read comparatively with texts from multiple periods that explore and (de-)construct forms of racial and physical difference. From a broader perspective, reading in dialogue medieval and modern texts that deal with similar themes (but are not otherwise related) can push the productive practice of destabilisation even further and encourage new, imaginative ways of thinking.³⁸

Another reason I chose the two examples above is because they both have published translations that are of good quality and are highly accessible; online editions can be acquired easily by institutions via JSTOR. Yet language is clearly the elephant in the room here: how do we overcome the simple linguistic obstacle of medieval (or any premodern) literature? Strange plotlines are one thing, but strange words pose a different challenge altogether. Linguistic difficulty is not only an issue for teaching medieval literature in the modern languages classroom, but for teaching any kind of challenging, authentic material in a context of increasing predominance of ab initio learners. This is partly beyond the remit of this chapter, but the interconnection between language learning and what is often (unfortunately) termed ‘content’ is becoming an increasingly urgent subject of discussion, especially given that long-held assumptions of the language level of new students no longer stand. In my mind, the answer is not to avoid challenging material (from any period) until an adequate language aptitude has been reached, but rather to compromise; it is possible to work creatively with and in translation and to build in language learning slowly, moving away from the assumption that students will (and must) read complex literary material in the original language right from the start of their degree. In an ideal world, students would have the opportunity to take specific classes aimed at reading Middle High German, but I am not so naïve as to think that this could be possible other than in a very few institutions; at my own university it would be impossible, and, in fact, teaching in translation is an essential way of meeting module floors and allowing material to be taught at all.³⁹ Compromises must therefore be sought: there are ways of scaffolding language-learning while teaching in translation, increasing expectations throughout the course of the degree, and of introducing (optional, unassessed) reading groups and seminars that focus more on linguistic challenges. There are some excellent resources, such as An Introduction to Middle High German by Howard Jones and Martin H. Jones.⁴⁰ And we should all get translating to allow a wider diversity of texts to become accessible to a wider range of students; there are rich opportunities, for instance (if we can find time and money) for collaborative translation activities with students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, and across institutions.⁴¹

Conclusion

One of the dangers of the argument I have been making is that I might be perceived to be suggesting that languages degrees should teach everything. Of course, this is impossible – there will always be an element of compromise, of contingency, of practicality. But what I am asking us to question is the assumption behind what is left out automatically; to question why we implicitly (because it is almost always implicit) prioritise certain areas over others. And to those of us who are pre-modernists, I ask us to think about what we teach, and how we teach it.

One of the greatest values of modern languages – or whatever we want to call it, now and in the future – is the fact that it forces critical engagement with other ways of looking at the world, usually through the lens of linguistic and cultural difference. ‘Difference’ in this sense is never about simple comparison, nor is it ever straightforwardly ‘other’; rather, it destabilises, unsettles, forces a rethink of assumptions and perspectives. The medieval world was just as complicatedly transnational and multilingual as the modern one. In a present day in which it is all too easy to get caught up in the urgency (and ease) of the immediate, the now, the quick fix, a moment that is obsessed with itself and its own currency, modern languages has a vital opportunity that it must seize: an opportunity to promote a truly transnational way of thinking and working that has serious historical as well as geographical depth.

Notes

1.   Simon Gaunt and Nicholas Harrison, ‘Integrated Learning: Teaching Literature in French’, in French Studies in and for the 21^st Century, ed. by Philippe Lane and Michael Worton (Liverpool University Press, 2011), pp. 107–17 (pp. 107–8).

2.   I am thinking particularly of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Open World Research Initiatives projects, or the AHRC Future of Languages Fellowships, as well as the works of, for example, the British Academy and the University Council for Languages (UCFL). The UCFL website is a vital source of information on new projects and their outcomes: https://university-council-for-languages.org [accessed 25 April 2025].

3.   See, for instance, the recent name changes of the Institute of Modern Languages Research (to the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies) and the University Council of Modern Languages (to the University Council for Languages).

4.   James Hodkinson and Benedict Schofield, ‘Introduction: German in its Worlds’, in German in the World: The Transnational and Global Contexts of German Studies, ed. by James Hodkinson and Benedict Schofield (Camden House, 2020), pp. 1–14 (p. 2).

5.   Rebecca Braun and Benedict Schofield, ‘Introduction: Transnationalizing German Studies’, in Transnational German Studies, ed. by Rebecca Braun and Benedict Schofield (Liverpool University Press, 2020), pp. 1–14 (pp. 5–6).

6.   Hodkinson and Schofield, ‘Introduction’, p. 8.

7.   See Jennifer Burns and Derek Duncan, ‘An Introduction’, in Transnational Modern Languages: A Handbook, ed. by Jennifer Burns and Derek Duncan (Liverpool University Press, 2022), pp. 1–8 (pp. 5–6): ‘The possibilities opened up by strangeness and discomfort, as well as awareness of the pain and exclusion that they may bring, are what there is to be explored and gained through the conjoined study of languages and cultures’.

8.   See Hodkinson and Schofield, ‘Introduction’, p. 6 for useful examples of the contemporaneity of the transnational. Their own conclusion that German studies can learn productively from world literature, where Goethe features widely, in order to ‘broaden our temporal range of enquiry’ (p. 7) as far back as the early nineteenth century comes as something of a disappointment.

9.   Burns and Duncan’s recent Transnational Modern Languages: A Handbook is exemplary in this regard, ranging widely and (vitally) without distinction between historical moments, and including a chapter by Sharon Kinoshita on ‘Premodernity’ – which reminds us, if we needed reminding, of the fact that the premodern world was just as multilingual and interconnected as the world today, and just as complicatedly.

10.   Braun and Schofield, ‘Introduction’, p. 12.

11.   Such expectations are, inevitably, at least partly connected to languages curricula in secondary education, the vast majority of which focus on contemporary life; if cultural topics have a historical dimension, this tends to be restricted to the twentieth century. Challenges of marketing in higher education are a different matter and one beyond the subject of this chapter, but it suffices to say that I have been told in my own institution by a colleague in marketing that medieval languages ‘look bad’ and that our degree programmes, both undergraduate and postgraduate, would be ‘more attractive’ if I had never been employed.

12.   See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton University Press, 2000).

13.   This argument is stated forcefully in the preface to the 2007 edition of Provincializing Europe, pp. xi–xxi.

14.   Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, pp. 109–11.

15.   See Andrew B. R. Elliott, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century (Brewer, 2017).

16.   For an overview, see Matthew Gabriele, ‘Vikings, Crusaders, Confederates’, https://www.historians.org/perspectives-article/vikings-crusaders-confederates-misunderstood-historical-imagery-at-the-january-6-capitol-insurrection-january-2021/ [accessed 23 April 2025].

17.   Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

18.   Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty, p. 6.

19.   On feudalism, see fundamentally Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford University Press, 1994). The complexities of medieval secularism and religious belief are widely discussed; for a recent important intervention see Barbara Newman, Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred (Notre Dame University Press, 2015).

20.   Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty, p. 5.

21.   Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty, p. 5.

22.   As Chakrabarty states, ‘Can the designation of something or some group as non- or premodern ever be anything but a gesture of the powerful?’. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. xix.

23.   For a good summary, see Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul, ‘The Idea of “the Middle Ages” Outside Europe’, in Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of ‘the Middle Ages’ Outside Europe, ed. by Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul (Johns Hopkins Medieval Press, 2009), pp. 1–24.

24.   This is not to say that the parallel is entirely without validity – yet a comparison between the ‘othering’ of the Middle Ages and of (post)colonial spaces is always going to be a highly problematic one. See Simon Gaunt, ‘Can the Middle Ages Be Postcolonial?’, Comparative Literature, 61.2 (2009), pp. 160–76 (pp. 161–2).

25.   See, for instance, Carolyn Dinshaw’s classic Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Duke University Press, 1999), which exposes the queerness of the medieval in narrations of modernity and the vital role it has to play in contemporary cultural and queer theory.

26.   Emily Apter, ‘Rethinking Periodization for the “Now-Time”’, in Being Contemporary: French Literature, Culture and Politics Today, ed. by Lia Brozgal and Sara Kippur (Liverpool University Press, 2016), pp. 29–42 (p. 30).

27.   Apter, ‘Rethinking Periodization’, p. 35.

28.   Some important recent interventions include Joshua Davies, Visions and Ruins: Cultural Memory and the Untimely Middle Ages (Manchester University Press, 2018); Robert Mills, Derek Jarman’s Medieval Modern (Brewer, 2018); Alexander Nagel, Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time (Thames and Hudson, 2012).

29.   Gaunt, ‘Can the Middle Ages’. For a recent example of the productive possibilities of transnational work within medieval studies and postcolonial studies, see Doriane Zerka, Imagining Iberia in Medieval German Literature (Legenda, 2023).

30.   Davis’s edited volume with Nadia Altschul draws explicit connection between the idea of the Middle Ages and the idea of Europe; see Davis and Altschul, ‘The Idea’, p. 1: ‘ “the Middle Ages,” like “Europe,” is an idea rather than an internally unified entity and […] to an important extent the histories of the Middle Ages and Europe as ideas have over the course of centuries been mutually constitutive’. The volume as a whole is an interesting provocation, exploring the construction of the Middle Ages from non-European perspectives.

31.   For an excellent and accessible new introduction, see Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm, Alle Thyng Hath Tyme: Time and Medieval Life (Reaktion, 2023).

32.   See Almut Suerbaum and Annie Sutherland, ‘Introduction’, in Medieval Temporalities: The Experience of Time in Medieval Europe, ed. by Almut Suerbaum and Annie Sutherland (Brewer, 2021), pp. 1–13; Sarah Bowden, Lea Braun, and George Younge, ‘Time in the Twelfth Century’, Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures, 10 (2023), pp. 1–16.

33.   Anfang und Ende: Formen narrativer Zeitmodellierung in der Vormoderne, ed. by Udo Friedrich, Andreas Hammer, and Christiane Witthöft (Akademie, 2014); Sarah Bowden, ‘Time and Textuality in Visionary Writing: Narrating the Afterlife in Alber’s Tnugdalus’, Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures, 10 (2023), pp. 38–58.

34.   Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (Zone Books, 2010).

35.   Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, p. 18. The authors argue that the Renaissance is a particularly vital time for encapsulating this temporal characteristic of art: it is, they argue, the time when authorial presence becomes institutionalised, which leads to a heightened self-awareness of temporal complexity and a tension between the pre-Renaissance ‘substitutional’ and the new ‘authorial’ model of production. One could easily think about twelfth-century Europe in the same light, however.

36.   Hans Robert Jauss, ‘The Alterity and Modernity of Medieval Literature’, trans. by Timothy Bahti, New Literary History, 10.2 (1979), pp. 181–229.

37.   Hartmann von Aue, Gregorius. Armer Heinrich. Iwein, ed. and trans. by Volker Mertens (Deutscher Klassiker, 2008). English translation: German Romance Volume III: Iwein or The Knight with the Lion, ed. and trans. by Cyril Edwards (Brewer, 2007). Herzog Ernst, ed. and trans. by Mathias Herweg (Reclam, 2019); English translation in Three Political Tales from Medieval Germany: Duke Ernst, Henry of Kempten, and Reynard the Fox, trans. by Brian Murdoch (Camden House, 2024).

38.   Asking students to write comparatively across periods is challenging, but highly productive. New comparative perspectives can result in entirely new readings of individual works, bolstering student confidence and allowing them to demonstrate their capabilities as independent and original researchers.

39.   With a current module floor of fifteen (and it’s not going to go down), it is essential for me to offer modules with translated material so that they can be taken without German; these courses often attract highly motivated students studying (for example) English or Liberal Arts, adding to the diversity of the seminar room. It also means it is possible to teach together with colleagues working in other language areas.

40.   Howard Jones and Martin H. Jones, An Introduction to Middle High German (Oxford University Press, 2024). This is a dedicated student edition of their earlier The Oxford Guide to Middle High German (Oxford University Press, 2019).

41.   A good example is the Global Medieval Sourcebook, based at Stanford University, https://sourcebook.stanford.edu [accessed 23 April 2025].

References