The Past in the Past: Dinshaw’s Getting Medieval

In her post below, Mary Kate writes:

On the final page of the book, CD defines “getting medieval” as this: “using ideas of the past, creating relations with the past, touching in this way the past in our efforts to build selves and communities now and into the future” (206). This conception seems to get us into the thick of a problem of temporality – how does the unidirectional “arrow of time” stop being so unidirectional upon closer inspection? How, to borrow from CD in her reflection on the book, “Got Medieval” (published in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, No. 10), do we identify and examine the “copresence of different chronologies to explore the power of multiple temporalities in a single moment?”

This leads me into my next, brief question. In GM, the medieval past touches the present in various ways. However, as much as CD corrects the homogeneous premodern of Bhabha, Baudrillard, and others, as much as she demands that the so-called modern allow itself to be or realize that it is touched by an abjected, mobile past, her own medieval strikes me as homogeneous as well to the extent that it is not itself touched by its present pasts.

CD writes well about the Lollard assault on the ‘crimen Sodomorum’ of institutional religion, on its wealth, on its alimentary excess. I don’t believe, of course, that CD presents this material as if it sprang ex nihilo (or ex Wycliffo); after all, she cites and uses Penn R Szittya’s important The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature. At the same time, I don’t think there’s enough mobilization in GM of one of the most peculiar aspects of medieval textuality, namely, its habitual, even constitutive reuse of centuries-old writings, and of the mnemotechnics in which production was always a rearrangement of pasts. Antifraternal critique reuses moral approaches from the twelfth-century Parisian critique of bad living clerics, which itself redeployed work by Gregory the Great; no doubt we could keep pushing this further back, or expanding the lines outward to form something more rhizomatic than genealogical. I also imagine–although I haven’t done the legwork–that Lollard ecclesiastical critique, especially its antimendicant critique, derives at least in part from the work of the Spiritual Franciscans, and thus we would have seen critiques internal to the Friars turned against the Friars as a whole, and from there, turned against the whole of the Church.

GM is already a big book, and it’s certainly a great book. It seems ungracious to complain that it should have been bigger, more capacious, that CD should have loosened the 40-year boundary she set for her medieval analysis. We would have needed another 100 pages. I should, then, present this not as a critique but as a call to be inspired by GM to keep on pushing. Readers of ITM know that this work is already being done, especially with JJC and MKH’s attention to the polychronicity of ruins and stones, of the distant past of ruins and the very distant, unfathomable past of fossils inhabiting and confounding various medieval presents, whether they’re 8th or 10th or 12th century. Although this question might remind us too much of the postmodern inability to break with the past, we might also wonder in whose voices the Lollards speak when they think themselves using their own voices?