medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

The reason I raised the topic, if I may recall us to the starting point, was the implied assumption that if no explicit mention of the virgin birth of Christ prior to date X is known to modern scholarship, ergo belief in the virgin birth of Christ _in fact_ arose only many decades or centuries after the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.  The starting point was what I perceive to be abuse of the argument from silence so frequent as to be unnoticed by most academics.

In response, several list members have protested (quite civilly and mildly, it must be said) that I need not be concerned, that we all agree about how extensively scholars must employ speculation and assumptions in their work (the present interlocutor), that a reasonable, moderate use of such gap-filling can be distinguished from hard-core ideological interpretation (Wickstrom), or even that some hope remains for something of an Enlightenment objectivity, broadly conceived (Mundy, if I understand his point).

I will not prolong the discussion.  I would merely like to say (civilly, I hope), that the theory so neatly outlined in the post to which I am now responding is not in fact adhered to in the academy.  I am not at all troubled by instances where a scholar is aware of the three levels and distinguishes among them as he writes.  My point, which I seem to have failed to make clear enough, is that certain reigning assumptions (hegemonic assumptions) are so widespread in an academic world that is so conformist that they go undetected and thus cannot be acknowledged.  I tried to lay out what the reigning assumptions are today and how they differ from those of the Enlightenment and the pre-Enlightenment traditional critical method.

What I wanted to make us aware of is that we seem incapable of recognizing precisely academics' current biases, even when we claim to be doing so.  We are very good at pointing out and discrediting the biases and assumptions of the immediately preceding cultures (the Enlightenment, traditional Christianity/Judaism), but _really_ operative elements of the current worldview, precisely because they are currently operative, constitutive, and pervasive, escape the sight of those in the current mainstream.  They are visible to those at the margins, but the nature of hegemony is to discredit those at the margins and hence they need not really be listened to.  They are ideologues, after all, and we at the center are  non-ideologues, reasonable, moderate folks. (I write "we" here as I try to put myself in the place of those in the center of today's scholarly culture.  I personally, as I noted, adhere to a traditional Christian critical method.)

Finally, I was trying to point out the irony that the current hegemony, since the demise of the hegemony of the Enlightenment, is that of privileging (hence hegemonizing) the marginalized ones, privileging the grotesque, decentering.  Ironically, this pushes to the margins those who valorize the center (medieval, traditional, orthodox Christianity) against which today's "grotesques" or "marginalized groups" (medieval dissenters, heretics, pagans in medieval Christendom, homosexuals, women, etc. in medieval Christendom) are being celebrated.  In short, one cannot really valorize the grotesque or marginalized, one cannot decenter.  One cannot help having a hegemony, a center and a periphery or margin.  Although the postmodern revolt against Enlightenment hegemony claims to have truly decentered traditional phliosophy and religion and to have valorized the formerly marginalized and misunderstood, in fact it simply replaces one center with another.  When one begins celebrating what another culture pushed to the margins, one centers the formerly marginalized and marginalizes the formerly centered groups.

And no matter what occupies the center, no matter what the hegemonic is, precisely those who operate in this center (today celebrating the queer, the marginal, the dissenting, the heretical) have the most difficulty being self-critical, being aware of how their assumptions color their interpretation because they _are_ at the center, in the middle of what is widely accepted, what is current, what is centered and most valorized.

My claim was that the philosophical/metaphysical key to the postmodern hegemony is an it's-all-about-power assumption, quite different from Plato, or Christianity, or Enlightement Reason.  Without a shift to this philosophical assumption, the valorizing of the dissenting, queer, grotesque could not have been carried out.  Because this "it's-all-about-power" philosophy is now hegemonic in both "high" and "low" culture it is so much a part of the woodwork of our world that most of us do not realize how it affects our stage 3 interpretation.  For that reason, the neat theory outlined below seldom gets put into place.

I have presented this argument in several papers and it will, I hope, be published in the _Journal of the Historical Society_ before too long.  Whenever I present it, I get much the same response: it's not all as bad as you make it out to be, why are you so exercised about this.  Might I suggest that this could indicate the degree to which we are not aware that our current attempt to avoid hegemony by decentering and valorizing the grotesque and marginal is in fact hegemonic and prejudicial to the sort of clear three-stage work outlined below?  I am exercised about it because I do believe a real blind spot exists, precisely among those who are so proud of having finally realized how much "where you stand impacts how you interpret."  Precisely the postmodern claim to have unmasked the hidden prejudices and hegemonic assumptions of the Enlightenment seems to me to be a blind spot.  I think precisely _that_ claim needs to be unmasked.  Rather than having advanced in self-awareness over the Enlightenment or traditional Christian/Jewish interpretation, the post-Enlightenment decentering, it seems to me, represents a dangerous retreat into self-deception, namely, the self-deception that we have finally progressed farther into unmasking and decentering self-criticism than the Enlightement or the traditional Christian/Jewish folks did.

No one, of course, admits to being a postmodernist, when pressed.  So all who read this can comfort themselves with the thought that it does not apply to them.  My point was that the "it's all about power" assumption that grounds the decentering hegemonizing of the grotesque is present even more subtly in many accounts of elites, institutions, dissenters etc. written today by those who would deny that they are ideologues or postmodernists.   One might call it a sort of "commonsense postmodernism" along the lines of the Scottish Commonsense Enlightenment--less extreme or ideologically driven than Hume or Voltaire or Diderot but still drawing on the same basic assumptions.

Some, many perhaps, on the list may be saying, but there's no mainstream left anymore, there is no hegemony in the scholarly world--stop making such generalizations--a wide variety of methods, philosophies, indeologies are at work in the scholarly world and we are so much the better for it.  I don't think this in fact obtains, though we try to tell ourselves it does.  As long as people are hired and fired, put through tenure reviews, have books and articles peer-reviewed for publication, there will be a mainstream set of assumptions about what constitutes good, poor, outstanding, innovative scholarship and what does not.  There is a center, a hegemony.  There always has been and always will be.  My assertion is that it is no longer the Enlightenment that  drives that hegemony and that it also is not the pre-Enlightenment traditional Christian/Jewish framework.  For lack of a better word it is post-modern or post-enlightenment.  So far, I suppose most would agree with me.  What I am attempting to add, for the sake of self-criticism and self-awareness, is that the philosophic key to this post-whatever is a new view of Power as the key to reality.  To those who say, "but wasn't it always that way," I say, no, it was not.  That most of us find it impossible to believe that there _really_ was a time when human institutions and history and religion and philosophy were not reduced to Power. only undescores to me how widespread this hegemony of Power is today--we interpret medieval Christian claims that love, not naked Power, makes the world go round;  or ancient Greek claims that Justice, not naked power, makes the world go round; or the Enlightenment claims that Reason, not naked power, makes the world go round--we interpret all of these as voicing the delusions of well-intentioned folk who were, sadly, mistaken about Reality.

In short, although Brenda M.C.  acknowledges stage 2 below (that our interpretation takes place whatever scholarly tradition each of us is a part of),  Professors Wickstrom and Mundy sought to distinguish between really ideologically biased interpreters and a more centrist, commonsense (less ideologically driven) approach.  Thus, among members of this list, we have no real agreement.  We have not simply decided to let a thousand flowers bloom as long as we all acknowledge where we are coming from.  We all do distinguish between "good scholarship" and "extremist" or "ideological" or "polemical" scholarship.  To me that implies that we do think there's a slightly more "objective" and "unprejudiced" mainstream way of interpreting things.

I do not wish to belabor this topic and thus this will be my last intervention on the topic.  If I've failed to make myself clear up to now, I'm not likely to succeed with another try.  Undoubtedly _real_ differences in our worldviews contribute to some degree of talking past each other on this topic as on others.

Dennis Martin

>>> [log in to unmask] 06/02/01 02:46PM >>>
medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

I was impressed by Prof Martin's exposition but wondered (from my outsider
position) why it was necessary to say what he did to this audience..

I have always assumed that there are three layers to the exposition of any
research.

1. A description of the data you have collected whether it is from trenches
(archaeology), charters & chronicals (Med Hist &c), or the literary text
(Lit Crit.)

2. An interpretation of this in the light of whatever scholarly tradition
you are part of.

3. Speculation and imaginative reconstruction and your own original
contibution. "Filling the gaps".

Provided it is ABSOLUTELY CLEAR from the way you write which level you are
at, what is the problem ? We ALL write from within a tradition, but surely
that should be plain to both ourselves and to our readers. Nor does this
preclude appreciation of, and respect for, other traditions. (I think most
of us are fascinated and delighted to get access to Islamic accounts of the
Crusades.)

And yes, there are some absolutes. "This text contains these words." "This
trench contained these artifacts." Whether the text is a fake, contemporary
or not, and whether the trench has been "salted" is part of the second level
of interpretation.

And yes, we must look at the gaps and try to fill them in the light of the
known facts, always baring in mind that the next  person's published finds
may throw our own theories into disorder ... but that's research for you.

Vive le sport!

Brenda M. C.

.

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