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Modernity's Classics pp 315–329Cite as

Middling Ages and Living Relics as Objects to Think with: Two Figures of the Historical Imagination

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Summary

Classical pasts were not the only pasts to be repositioned in the modern period through the double framing of historicism and nationalism: medieval pasts were subject to the same treatment, especially in Protestant northern Europe which had been marginal in antiquity. The paper studies two ‘figurations’ in which the tensions of remoteness and re-presentification are particularly clear: the construction of ‘middling ages’ as between antiquity and modernity, and the attempt to emphasize their links to modernity by the identification of ‘living relics’, labelled “backward” or “traditionalistic” by forward-looking modernizers but ambiguously valued also as preserving virtues threatened by development.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Lehmann 1914; Gordon 1925; Günther 1984; Neddermeyer 1995. There is a spate of recent interest in medievalism and its various national shapes, partly documented in Boydell and Brewer’s book series Studies in Medievalism. In the following, however, it is not the changing images of the Middle Ages I’m interested in. It is the function, the operation—not the label—that is at stake here.

  2. 2.

    Leach 1954: 265–266, 277–278; Goody 1977.

  3. 3.

    For an attempt to lay out a set of formal constraints for invoking the past, see Appadurai 1981, esp. p. 203.

  4. 4.

    See Pocock 1962, esp. pp. 213–214.

  5. 5.

    A similar observation has been made by Cohen 2000: 5 (“interminable, difficult middle”).

  6. 6.

    Note Émile Littré’s conception of the Middle Ages as a “philological ring” (anneau philologique) linking the classical period to modern times, thereby positioning French “as simultaneously the most ancient and the most modern of the major Romance tongues.” Nichols 1996, 25–56, and esp. 34–40.

  7. 7.

    After the reformation, it was not the mere presence of the remains of dissolved monasteries that counted but the extent to which monasticism was perceived as a relevant option, which made it so central an element in the perception of “the Middle Ages;” see Thomas 1983.

  8. 8.

    Different Middle Ages have been constructed; India’s Middle Ages are a case in point. In Jewish history, an influential nationalist perspective decreed similarly that “traditional” Jewish society in Eastern Europe existed until the end of the “Middle Ages”—that is, until the crisis brought about by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. On the Japanese case, see Keirstead 2004; on India, see Inden 1990.

  9. 9.

    In that respect, they go beyond Tylor’s “doctrine of survivals;” see Hodgen 1936.

  10. 10.

    Fabian 1983; Wolf 1982. See also McNiven and Russell 2005.

  11. 11.

    Inden 1990: 138; Maine 1875: 237; see also Ganim 2000: 123–134.

  12. 12.

    For a recent useful critique, see Gerber 2003.

  13. 13.

    See Wolfe 1991, 1997, 1999, on “repressive authenticity” and the colonial representation of indigenous Australians’ land rights as belonging to “dreamtime” (with 1999: 55 on the double irony of the colonial setting of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, 1872: utopist colonists displacing local inhabitants). Cf. also Mabey 2007 on the effort required to produce “natural” trees.

  14. 14.

    Jauss 2005, esp. 360–363.

  15. 15.

    I do not intend here to assess Riehl’s work as a whole—a fascinating mixture of astute observations and flawed interpretations interspersed with uncommon insights—but to reconstruct the logic of one of his main arguments. From the wealth of existing scholarly literature on Riehl, see Stein 2001.

  16. 16.

    For contemporaneous attempts to take up Riehl’s challenge and cultivate memory among noble families, see Crane 1996.

  17. 17.

    Wilhelm Riehl, Naturgeschichte des Volks als Grundlage einer deutschen Social-Politik (1851–1869, with several successive editions); the second volume, Land und Leute, appeared in 1854. All subsequent references, unless otherwise stated, are to the first edition: Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft (Stuttgart & Tübingen: Cotta, 1851), bk 1, pt. 1, pp. 33–115.

  18. 18.

    “In dem Bauernstande allein noch ragt die Geschichte alten deutschen Volksthums leibhaftig in die moderne Welt herüber. Der Bauer hat keine Geschichte gelernt, aber er ist historisch. Alle anderen Stände sind aus ihren ursprünglichen Kreisen herausgetreten, haben ihre uralten Besonderheiten gegen die Ausebnungen einer allgemeinen Zivilisation dahingegeben, die Bauernschaft allein existirt noch als unberührbarer, organisch selbstständiger Stand. Die bäuerlichen Zustände studiren, heißt Geschichte studiren, die Sitte des Bauern ist ein lebendiges Archiv, eine historisches Quellensammlung von unschätzbarem Wert.” Riehl, p. 35.

  19. 19.

    Riehl, pp. 33, 35.

  20. 20.

    “In Zeitläufe, zu welchen keine Geschichtsschreibung mehr hinausreicht nur noch die dunkle Tradition, welche uns die Bauern bewahrt haben.” (Riehl, p. 39); in the later editions, the term “dunkle Tradition” was replaced by “dunkle Kunde,” obscure knowledge.

  21. 21.

    Riehl, pp. 35–36, 42.

  22. 22.

    Riehl, p. 51. In the later editions, Corporationsgeist was replaced by Standesgeist, estate-spirit.

  23. 23.

    “allein, wie wir es bei Völkern, deren Stamm und Wesen bedrängt ist, häufig finden: die Frauen und Mütter bringen den Männern wieder aus dem Sinn, was von fremden Einfluß sich festgesetzt hat. Daheim am Herde mag die Frau leicht das ererbte Volksthum bewahren, während der Mann gezwungen ist, im Verkehr und Wandel die schroffe Eigenthümlichkeit abzustreifen.” (Riehl, p. 38).

  24. 24.

    On constructions of women’s sphere in response to social change, see Welter 1966; Cott 1977.

  25. 25.

    “Ein Bauer, der im Sinne des rationalistischen Polizeistaates aufgeklärt geworden, ist gleich einem philosophierenden Frauenzimmer, ein Blaustrumpf im Kittel.” (Riehl, p. 72).

  26. 26.

    Cf. the analysis of the contradictions involved in the Swadeshi movement’s construction of the peasant as the true Hindu in Sartori 2008.

  27. 27.

    “Denn er hat ja keine Geschichte studirt, er ist überhaupt kein Geschichts- oder Alterthumsfreund, seine Sitte nur ist seine Geschichte, und er selber und was an ihm hängt, das einzige Alterthum, welches er ästimirt.” Riehl, p. 44.

  28. 28.

    “…der Druck des Mittelalters ist für den deutschen Bauernstand eine Zuchtschule des Lebens geworden, und eine seiner kostbarsten Tugenden, seine unendliche Zähigkeit, hat er dieser zu danken.” Riehl, p. 45.

  29. 29.

    Riehl, p. 46.

  30. 30.

    “Es gilt vorab, den Bauernstand zu reinigen. Wir haben zwei Hauptarten von verdorbenen Bauern. Die eine bilden jene von uns hinreichend gezeichneten Entarteten, bei welchen sich der sittliche Ruin zu dem ökonomischen gesellt. Von ihnen kann die Gesellschaft nur auf chirurgischem Wege befreit werden, nämlich durch eine möglichst umfassende Amputation. Hier kann es sich nur darum handeln, wie die Auswanderung von ganzen derartigen verkommenen Gemeinden wie von Einzelnen möglichst rasch und kräftig befördert werde.” Riehl, p. 104. Cf. Rebel 1996 (with Rebel 2005) on the role of ‘amputation’ in the production of Austrian peasants.

  31. 31.

    “Der zurückgekommen, zerfahrene, mit seinem Loose, seiner Heimath zerfallene Mann aus höheren Gesellschaftsschichten findet zuletzt Rettung und Genesung nur noch darin,—daß er Bauer wird. Er besitzt vielleicht noch Mittel genug, um sich in Deutschland ein Ackergut zu erwerben, aber so recht eigentlich Bauer werden könnte er in Deutschland nicht, die Verhältnisse, in denen er aufgewachsen und welchen er entfliehen will, würden ihn hier auch hinter dem Pfluge verfolgen, er würde sich hier des neuen Berufes schämen. Aber jenseits des Oceans schämt er sich dessen nicht. So gestaltet sich hier das Colonistenleben—d. h. das Bauernleben—zu einer rechten Luft- und Wassercur, die den ganzen kranken Organismus gründlich ausfegt. Wer nirgends mehr seinen Frieden mehr finden konnte, der findet ihn im Urwald – als Bauer, und zwar nicht als faulenzer Oeconom, sondern als ein Bauer im Wortsinne, der Schwielen in den Händen hat und im Schweiße seines Angesichts sein saures Brod ißt. Es liegt für den Staatsmann ein deutungsschwerer Fingerzeig in dieser Thatsache, daß die abgestandenen Theile der Gesellschaft zuletzt in Bauernleben und Bauernsitte sich wieder erfrischen.” Riehl, p. 56.

  32. 32.

    See Zantop 1997; Dagenais and Greer 2000.

  33. 33.

    For colonial perspectives on medieval societies, see Bartlett and MacKay 1989; Bartlett 1994; Bourgne et al. 2008; Fernandez-Armesto and Muldoon 2008.

  34. 34.

    For an exemplary case study, see Ellenblum 2007, part II.

  35. 35.

    It should be noted in passing that in order to perform this Kunststück, Riehl had to revise the notion of history and to elaborate the image of the “living Archive,” anticipating some modern notions of “collective memory:” In premodern communities, memory and tradition were often ascribed to interacting groups, to whole communities whose conflict-ridden discourse was the process of tradition. Riehl, for his part, represents the peasantry not as an interacting group, but as a hypostatized social category, a repository of ascribed “memory.” Riehl’s ererbtes Volkstum (supra, n. 23) a hovering and onerous entity existing everywhere and nowhere, comes closest to some modern hypostatizations of national memory.

  36. 36.

    A fuller discussion in Algazi 1998; for a useful discussion, see Ricklin 2004.

  37. 37.

    Has [leges] ego vidi seriatim omnes collectas et expertus sum multas de illis, et maxime potiores, in vulgari usu ex antiqua introductione cum suis formis maxime in iudiciis ruralibus potius quam in oppidis et civitatibus propter forte supervenientia statuta municipalia haberi. Cusanus, de Concordantia catholica libri tres lib. III, cap. 25, par. 474 (p. 423). Schaeffer 1976: 2 notes that one should not have expected humanists “to see the Middle Ages in their entirety as an historic period, perhaps because the humanists of the sixteenth century as well as a number of generations still to come were too deeply immersed in surviving medieval forms of institutions, social structures and literary conventions, customs of life and habits of thought, to see the Middle Ages in our understanding of the word as definitively and irrevocably past.” This goes some way toward explaining why Cusanus’s middling period could not have been our “Middle Ages.”

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  1. Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Gadi Algazi

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Algazi, G. (2013). Middling Ages and Living Relics as Objects to Think with: Two Figures of the Historical Imagination. In: Humphreys, S., Wagner, R. (eds) Modernity's Classics. Transcultural Research – Heidelberg Studies on Asia and Europe in a Global Context. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33071-1_14

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