*Welcome to another edition of the #Nerdflow Newsletter!*
Good news. This newsletter is expanding to include interviews now! In addition to sharing original reflections and curated content related to religion, race, and history, I will also be interviewing leading thinkers and writers in these areas.
For the first installment of the #Nerdflow Q&A, I was happy to get a hold of Matthew Gabriele, professor of medieval studies and chair of the department of religion and culture at Virginia Tech, and David Perry, a journalist, medieval historian, and senior academic advisor in the history department at the University of Minnesota. Gabriele and Perry recently published The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe.
The co-authors push back against the “Dark Ages” trope and white supremacist mythologies that frame this time period. As they describe it,
The Bright Ages contain the beauty and light of stained glass in the high ceilings of the cathedral, the blood and sweat of the people who built them, the golden relics of the Church, the acts of charity and devotion by the people of deep faith, but also the wars fought over ideas of the sacred, the scorched flesh of the heretics burned in the name of intolerance and fear.
Instead of glibly dismissing the Middle Ages as backwards, or tapping into nationalist nostalgia, Gabriele and Perry insist that this period contains “the multitudes of possibility inherent in humanity.”
In the exchange below, we talk about medieval diversity, what shows like Game of Thrones get right or wrong about history, book bans, plagues, and more.
Camacho: You write that “white supremacists continue to reach back to medieval European history as a way to tell a story about whiteness, a sense of lost (but imagined) masculinity, and the need to shed blood.” Okay. It does seem that this period is full of pale-skinned people, patriarchy, and violence. Why should a progressive-minded person want to look back at this period?
Gabriele: That’s a tough one. But as we show in the book, both “medieval” and “Europe” are a bit more expansive than most people think. What I mean is that their world was filled with people who looked different from one another, who acted different, and who thought different. We tell, for example, of the abbot Hadrian in Canterbury who was “a man from the people of Africa” and shaped early medieval Britain for generations, of Hildegard of Bingen, an abbess who traveled in the highest circles of power, and of the translation studios of Toledo in Iberia composed of Muslims, Christians, and Jews working together.
The most important thing a progressive-minded person can take from a full accounting of the past is that it contains possible worlds — that for every choice of violence there was also a possibility of peace, and every instance of repression could very well have been otherwise.
Camacho: Who are the Anglo-Saxons, exactly? This term has always confused me.
Perry: This term has quite a history, used and mis-used across a few centuries now, and deeply tied up in the history of modern scientific racism. But, as Mary Rambaran-Olm and Erik Wade wrote recently for Smithsonian, it’s not a widely used medieval word, and certainly not as a shorthand for all the residents of that large island. For that, in the medieval manuscripts, we mostly see englisc.
As Rambaran-Olm and Wade write, “The field of medieval studies has increasingly begun to discard the use of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ in favor of more accurate, less racist terminology. More specific terms such as ‘Saxons,’ ‘Angles,’ or ‘Northumbrians’ allow for greater accuracy. More broadly, terms like ‘early medieval English’ and ‘insular Saxons’ are used in lieu of ‘Anglo-Saxon.’”
Camacho: When I was in middle school, I remember learning about Charles Martel, nicknamed “The Hammer,” who apparently saved Europe from Muslim invasion. At least, that’s the way it was framed for me. In your book, you don’t shy away from addressing interreligious or interethnic violence. But you also argue against the idea that this violence represented a clash of civilizations. Why?
Gabriele: Oh man, the myth of the Battle of Tours is one that’s haunted medieval studies for centuries — a small-ish skirmish that credulously was later framed by white historians as a mighty battle that saved “the West.” The idea of the “clash of civilizations” is a modern one that has its roots in European colonial ambitions in of the 18th and 19th centuries and continues to this day, designed to frame Europe as (a) under siege, and (b) superior to its foes. In the European Middle Ages, however, the relationship between Christianity and Islam is deeply complicated and varies widely across times and places. This of course isn’t to ignore or even minimize the very real moments of violence, such as the sack of Jerusalem in 1099 or the massacre that followed Hattin in 1187, but rather to say that it’s important to trouble the imaginary unbroken line of violence that seems to stretch from the 7th century to today.
Christians and Muslims, for example, likely shared the same places of worship in Jerusalem for many years after its initial conquest; the Christian crusaders often made alliances with different Islamic polities to wage wars against others, and Christian Iberian kings fielded armies composed almost entirely of North African Muslims to use against their enemies; and sources testify to Islamic traders moving freely to and from Christian cities even while Saladin and King Richard I were battling during the First Crusade. There are reasons that violence erupts when and where it does and by shining a bright light on these events we can realize that they were the result of different structures and individual decisions, not foreordained.
Camacho: Lord of the Rings. Game of Thrones. Robin Hood. Many people, including me, have gotten images of the Middle Ages from these movies and shows. What do they tend to get right or wrong about the history?
Perry: Fantasy shows, movies, books, and games are a portal into medieval European history and culture, and I think at their best they show the rich orality of the culture where storytelling is enormously important, where the line between the supernatural and the natural is thin in the imagination — which isn’t to say all medieval people thought there were ghosts in the attic, though surely some did. And many capture ideas about heroism that were also embodied in medieval sources.
But medieval fantasy distorts too in so many ways, first by focusing on a narrow way to imagine the past, as dark and grim, solely male dominated, white, martial, and wracked by constant violence — especially sexualized violence. Whereas, in fact, medieval people lived complicated lives, looked different from each other, experienced gender and faith and politics and everything else in a wildly diverse ways.
Camacho: When you describe the University of Paris banning the teaching of Aristotle and his commentaries in 1229, I can't help but think of the Republicans in the U.S. who are currently trying to impose bans in universities and public schools against books that address racism. Is there anything we can learn from that medieval Parisian episode?
Gabriele: Collective action. When the teaching of Aristotle and Averroes, an Islamic commentator on Aristotle, was banned in Paris, the students and faculty fought back, together. They collectively disbanded the university, founding other universities in cities that wanted them. The authorities in Paris were so horrified by the loss of prestige and revenue that they fully reversed themselves and granted the University of Paris almost full autonomy. But the critical thing is that students, teachers, and administrators worked together to stand for intellectual freedom.
Camacho: You highlight that conspiracy theories and scapegoating proliferated during the Black Death. How does what you know about the plague inform how you view today's pandemic?
Perry: It’s been a weird experience, because over the years we’ve had to work so hard to convince students that medieval people were often not just reacting from fear, but also trying to make sense of the Black Death within the framework of the world as they understood it; that both medieval science and medicine AND the violence against Jews or the flagellants are equally part of the medieval response to pandemic, and that we aren’t so different — although we do know more about germs!
I think living through the Covid pandemic in all its responses, failures, scapegoating, religious outbursts, violence, profiteering, heroic medicine, infrastructure failures, communal solidarity and communal collapse, etc., has made it more important to teach the history of pandemics, and perhaps easier to convince students to view the Black Death with complexity.
But also, as Monica Green pointed out to us, the second plague pandemic lasted for centuries. Because that’s what diseases do as they move through populations if left unchecked. This doesn’t fill us with optimism.
Camacho: If you could hang out with two figures from the Middle Ages, who would they be and why?
Perry: I remain obsessed with Enrico Dandolo, a Venetian doge who in his 90s, while blind, led the Venetian forces on the Fourth Crusade in 1204 that resulted in the conquest of Constantinople. It’s not that Enrico was a nice guy or the most brilliant or anything — I’d be delighted to sit with Maimonides in medieval Cairo if he found me worthy to hang out and listen quietly — but I have a number of questions for Enrico that I’d badly like answered.
Gabriele: I don’t really like a whole lot of the people we talk about! I guess if I had to choose though, it’d be Marie de France. I just absolutely adore her short and fabulous collection of stories, Lais, and she seems to have such a fierce intellect and biting humor. Plus, we really don’t know much about who she was, so having a drink and hearing her stories in person would be really kind of amazing.