Gafney Response to Arnold, “Reading the Middle Ages”

Response to Arnold, “Reading the Middle Ages”

In this third chapter of his What is Medieval History? Arnold explores several other fields that impact the work of medieval historians: anthropology, numbers and statistics (economics), archeology, and literary texts/literary theory. I’ll focus on this last area.

In each case, Arnold examines the valuable additions that each external field has made to the study of medieval history, particularly highlighting the productive and often revelatory work that can be done when work is done across disciplines. For the most part, I find his analyses clear and well reasoned. The weakest section of the chapter is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the one that examines the relationship between medieval history and medieval literary texts. Arnold implies that the study of medieval history and that of medieval literature (if I may be allowed the use of this term) is reciprocal in nature. History may be pressed into the service of the interpretation of literature, and literary texts may be thought of as something akin to historical artifacts, to be mined for further insights into the period. Arnold mentions that these relationships must be carefully moderated; in terms of the latter, for instance, he writes: “Thus whilst a literary text may not often provide a fact, it can tell us about ways of talking and writing and hence thinking” (81). Medieval texts may not be viewed as purely historical documents; their tropes, their heavy symbolic investment, and their uses of irony, hyperbole, fantasy, and the like preclude their functioning as truthful accounts of the world during a particular period in time. For Arnold, however, literary texts are useful tools for historians because they “give insight in to the shape of [medieval people’s] thought and feelings” (80).

It seems to me that in describing the use of medieval literature thus, Arnold allows medieval historians the liberties that few literature scholars would take. An author’s intention, and a text’s reception are, of course, inherent aspects of the study of literature. It is not to be imagined, however, that scholars of literature feel these aspects of study to be the most important, the most fruitful, or even the most responsible. Many, if not most, literary scholars today avoid commenting on the ways that a particular literary text helps them imagine the ways that medieval people spoke or thought. It is possible to discuss the ways that characters speak, feel, and think, and it is also possible to discuss the ways in which various aspects of a text function to produce a reaction in us, its readers. But to ascribe a character’s emotions and expressions to a living person in the Middle Ages, or to equate our response to a medieval text to the response of a person who was hearing or reading that text at the time it was penned, may not be casually done, if it is to be done at all. As Arnold himself writes at the end of the chapter, “I do not wish to state dogmatically that medieval people were essentially different from modern people, any more than I would want to assume the reverse. The question of sameness of difference- identification or alterity- is an important and continuing debate” (85). It is strange to me, then, that Arnold would say that medieval literary texts may be used to gauge the shape of medieval people’s thoughts, since this assertion necessarily equates our perception of characters in medieval texts with living medieval people, and our responses to medieval texts to the responses that medieval people would have had upon res