A somewhat light piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (occasionally they do deeper dives, but sometimes it's more coverage than analysis, as in this case, and that's fine) explores the tensions of Medieval studies through the complications of their annual Kalamazoo conference.  In the past few years the medievalists have been struggling with how they should respond to the rise of white nationalism and its occasional use of pseudo-historical tropes, symbols, and mythology from an imagined middle ages as a way of legitimating itself.

I have a couple thoughts on this.  First of all, it's one more reminder of the contingency of history.  Gettysburg was a town long before it became a battlefield, and the residents of the town really didn't want to become part of history in that way.  The same can be said of Stalingrad.  And the same can be said of Charlottesville, before it became #Charlottesville.  Now don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting any of these places were sheer "victims" of the violence that they witnessed (though to my mind that seems more likely to be the case, at least immediately, regarding Gettysburg and Stalingrad than Charlottesville).  I'm only suggesting that the way that multiple causal forces intersect is pretty contingent, perhaps (depending on your metaphysics) accidental, and that this is an interesting way to think about history.  That medievalism is wracked by these issues now, while, say, the fields of philosophy or political science seem not to be, is to some significant degree a matter of contingency.

Second, there's a way in which our specialization can enable and distort our apprehension of reality.  As Donald Rumsfeld would put it, you go to the culture war with the disciplinary army you have, not the disciplinary army you wish you had; or, as Samuel Johnson put it, in his Lives of the English Poets, discussing of John Milton, “[n]o man forgets his original trade: the rights of nations, and of kings, sink into questions of grammar, if grammarians discuss them.”  Medievalists are fighting in their own idiom about this because it is the idiom they know.

Then again, I actually think they're sort of right to engage in this critical self-study.  I am not sure that Medieval studies wholly falls into this category; after all, if I understand rightly, the field was created in some ways (in the nineteenth century) as a part of a larger movement towards nationalism.  Certain visions of race and gender politics came as part of it as well.  All of this is worth engaging.

But I also think that sometimes we want to make the discipline itself the battlefield, rather than make the discipline useful to the battlefield.  Academia is not exactly on the front lines here.  There is a difference between "symbolic violence" and actual violence.  Having witnessed both, I think that sometimes we can disarm our most powerful contributions by feeling ashamed they are not immediately of service in the fight, whatever the fight happens to be.

Every scholar, every human, must choose for themselves how they will inhabit their time--as scholars, as citizens, and as humans.  But I hope the medievalists will not forget to continue doing what I think is their most potent and powerful work, which for me is interrogating "periodization"--interrogating the way that we have organized history, and ourselves, up into different epochs.  The "medieval" is a product of a certain moment in historical self-understanding, emerging as a way of organizing the West's relationship to certain heritages which it wanted to affiliate with in different ways.  There are questions of identification and distance from classical antiquity, from Christianity, from Judaism, and from the idea of "Europe" all packed into the idea of the "medieval".  Among many others.  Medieval studies seems to me one of the most potent forms of "modernity critique" we have going--not as a device to nostalgize some mythological past in order to grouse about the present, as perhaps some of the early theorists of the medieval (up through Tolkein, say) seemed to indulge in, and as what stands I think behind some of the white nationalists these days; but as a vehicle for asking basic questions about where we are now, who we are, what values we have, what values we want to endorse, and who we aspire to become.

A period of self-critique in medievalism is possibly a good thing.  But I hope that the field would emerge from it with some greater awareness of how the work it has been doing can be of value going forward, whatever the changes it undertakes.