On Calling Things "medieval"
Going historian on yo ass
In Pulp Fiction, the character Marcellus Wallace, wielding a shotgun, declares that he is going to “get medieval on yo ass.” He’s not referring to the use of a shotgun. This is a colourful way of saying he is going to be exceptionally cruel. A more scholarly source puts it thus: by “the 1840s it too became a byword for barbarity and obscurantism.”
Now, using the term ‘medieval’ to describe things which are barbaric, obscure, cruel, dirty, chaotic, or otherwise unpleasant, has a surprising effect. It upsets medievalists.
Why does calling things “medieval” as a pejorative upset medievalists? The basic answer would be because medievalists rather like the middle ages. That is not the reason that medievalists will actually give you, but I think it is at least partially true. In my modest academic output thus far, I’ve been a medievalist. I’m fascinated in the medieval period, I think it produced some absolutely beautiful and curious works of art and architecture. To that extent, I rather like the middle ages. There is a certain partisanship to this. In ‘liking’ the middle ages, there is a very well greased downward slope towards approving of the middle ages in a broader sense: in seeing it as a model, an exemplar.
Medievalists will not admit to this. I don’t want to admit to it, either. But they get very close when they noisily protest to people using the word ‘medieval’ as a pejorative. It’s not just medievalists which come to the defence of the medieval period, in fairness. Other public historians (e.g. Tom Holland of The Rest is History podcast) do it too.
What’s the historian’s argument against “medieval” as a term of abuse? There are a few possibilities:
The medieval period was good
The medieval period wasn’t bad
The medieval period wasn’t exceptionally bad
In all of these possible arguments, the rhetoric is going to suggest that the medieval pejorative is a ‘popular misconception’, and that the scholarly consensus proves it wrong or is otherwise against the ‘medieval’ as a term of abuse.
You’ll note from what I’ve said above that 1) is an unlikely option. It requires the historian to defend the record of the whole medieval period. The medieval period runs from about 500AD to 1500AD, in other words, a thousand years. If you were a barrister, this would be a difficult client to take on! Given the rhetorical force of “medieval”, a lot of readers would jump to the conclusion that the historian is in favour of torture, barbarism, theocracy, etc.
Argument 2) is fundamentally similar to 1) except it sets the bar a bit lower. Maybe there was some torture, but there wasn’t too much and on the whole the period was OK, morally and technologically. This is quite a hedged position to defend, and quite difficult to articulate in such a way that it doesn’t just turn into 1) “it was good” or 3) “it wasn’t uniquely terrible”.
Argument 3) is the most sophisticated and easiest to defend. For this, all we have to say is that the medieval period is being unfairly singled out as an exemplar of very bad times. It’s not to say that it wasn’t terrible, it is just that it makes no sense to say that it was peculiarly terrible. The logic follows that our use of ‘medieval’ as a shorthand is suggesting a special quality of the middle ages, and that’s the thing we disagree with.
In a short tweet, Tom Holland made exactly this argument:
“God, 20th century history is DEPRESSING. How could anyone think to use 'medieval' as a pejorative?”
By comparison to the 20th century, the ‘medieval’ doesn’t look outstandingly bad and we could just as easily say that “20th century-style” crimes are being committed, or that a justice system somewhere is “20th century.”
A more discursive argument is made by the eminent scholar Hannah Skoda, whose career began specialising in medieval violence and particularly violence of the students of universities. In this (very good) bit of popular history writing, she details the high rates of violence (14th century Oxford having 10 times the homicide rate of today), the culture of honour-based violence, and the impossibly high bar set for acts to be considered sexual violence. Nevertheless, she comes to the defence of the medieval period in the end by arguing that they had similar appalled reactions to violence that we do today. Therefore, violence was not “acceptable or normal” and as a result, the ‘medieval’ pejorative is a “stereotype”. I should add that Skoda doesn’t explicitly say in this article that the pejorative is wrong—hers is an unusually nuanced and honest account of the problem. However, it does demonstrate that even a historian of medieval violence still has at least a whiff of partisanship towards the period.
Here is my take: there’s nothing wrong with using ‘medieval’ as a pejorative. Let me justify this perspective by looking back at the three ‘pro medieval’ stances in order.
The medieval period was good.
As I’ve suggested, this position is untenable. People are unlikely to buy this argument for most centuries in history that you might try to defend, let alone a millennium. Some of the most famous events of the middle ages, such as the black death, are just objectively bad.
The medieval period wasn’t bad.
This position is slightly better in that there is less to defend, but it still fails. The reason is that the medieval period does have important characteristics which are ‘bad’. Feudalism is outstandingly ‘bad’ according to our morality based on equality of opportunity. The black death was bad. The lack of an effective justice system was bad.
I should add at this point that not all old things which are bad are necessarily medieval. An important case in point is witch hunts, which seem to be ‘medieval’ in the modern imagination, but, these literally (and I mean literally) were not medieval, because witch hunting was an overwhelmingly early modern sport.
The medieval period wasn’t exceptionally bad.
Almost no historian would be able to defend the idea that the middle ages were the ‘worst period of all time’. The simple reason is that no historian knows enough history to ever be sure they’re right. Was Archaic Greece a bit ‘worse’ than the middle ages? Was Imperial Rome slightly ‘better’ on balance? Would any two historians ever agree on the comparisons? In the words of Margaret Thatcher, “No, no, no!” Argument 3 seems pretty strong as a result.
However, argument 3 is getting its strength from the fact it cannot realistically be falsified by the highly specialised historians of today. This isn’t very impressive.
Although we can’t say the medieval period was the worst time to be alive, we can say the following. The medieval period was characteristically ‘bad’ in several different ways that we care deeply about. I will sketch out the following characteristic features of the medieval period:
A. Theocracy. The medieval period was characterised by the power of the papacy. This was in dynamic tension with the power of the ‘secular’ states, but no state was ever truly secular and ones which did things the papacy did not like were doomed. Frederick II Hohenstaufen angered the papacy by being comparatively ‘liberal’ towards Jews and Muslims, among other things, and was labelled the antichrist and the Pope was overjoyed at his death.
B. Inequality. Slavery was widespread in the medieval period, combined with serfdom, and general levels of ‘social mobility’ were extremely low. Literacy was rare because of the expensiveness of books: the west had lost access to papyrus and the word had to be written on vellum—whereas in ancient Rome books were ‘cheap’. The printing press may be a medieval invention (which required paper, only brought in the 13th century via Arabia), but it was invented ca 1450, at which point the medieval period is nearly over.
C. Injustice. The injustice of the medieval period was deep, not only because of a lack of application but by design. Here I’m disagreeing with Skoda’s ‘reaction to violence’ argument. As Skoda (and R W Southern before her) points out, the medieval period had no police. Justice was administered ‘locally’ and required one to make a petition to the local lord. More importantly, and this relates to A., the justice system was split in half. One half was ‘secular’, the other half was 'ecclesiastical’.
The split in justice made it fundamentally corrupt and non-credible. Reports of monks murdering young boys and similar infractions would lead to an inside-job of a trial, which would lead to a failure to prosecute, and then to rioting. I’ve described before how this applied to the universities (students getting off scott free as they were under ‘ecclesiastical’ law).
D. Violence. Hanna Skoda’s article mentioned above lays this out.
E. Persecution. This has been forcefully argued to be a medieval innovation by a landmark book called The Formation of a Persecuting Society. The book argues that the creation of a persecuting society began in the twelfth century: one which sought out Jews, Muslims, heretics, and lepers as a unified ‘diseased’ group to be banished, deprived of office, separated and discriminated against.
Characteristic qualities A-E all add up, and in many ways they enhance one another. The co-habitation of extreme violence and an extremely weak judicial system are an obvious example. The power of the church emboldened persecution by the state, and made it thorough and permanent, like the expulsion of the Jews from England. This expulsion lasted more than 360 years.
These loathsome and yes, barbarous or uncivilized characteristics exist to a greater or lesser extent in all societies. However, it was the distinctive way they were mixed and reinforced one another that made the medieval period ‘medieval’.
If only there were a quick, one word way of referring to all of these distinctive characteristics…