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The Middle Ages Middle Ages THE MIDDLE AGES AFfER THE MIDDLE AGES IN THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD Edited by Marie-Fran�oise Alamichel and Derek Brewer D.S. BREWER The American Middle Ages: I Eighteenth-Century Saxonist Myth-Making I ) LAURA KENDRICK 'But America didn't have a Middle Ages! Why should an American, of all people, be a medievalist?' This question was posed to me by my French relatives, who assume that study of the past is not done out of any gratui­ tous curiosity. Why, indeed, does an American think it perfectly 'natural' to study the Middle Ages? Why are there thousands of medievalists teach­ ing on American campuses (often at least partially built in Gothic revival styles)?1 In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Europeans discov­ ered their national identities in their medieval histories, but how can Americans do the same? Not only is American history not supposed to 'start' until after the European Middle Ages were ending, but it is sup­ posed to begin in opposition to them. As the historical doxa goes, the 'New World' provided for its European settlers an escape from the 'Old World' still burdened by the remnants of its medieval past and feudal institutions. But what does it mean to 'have' ·a Middle Ages? Lynn White argued, in a 1965 essay, that 'a blind spot in the study of the history of the United States is failure to recognize our detailed and massive continuity with the European Middle Ages' even to the point that 'today the United States is closer to the Middle Ages than is Europe'. 2 Because many of the everyday tools and technologies of the American frontier, from log cabins to cov­ ered wagons, barbed wire and whisky were inventions of the Middle Ages, White considered that the Middle Ages 'lived on' in the West. Although my own field of investigation here is the American historical 1 In its peak year of enrolment, 1978, the Medieva l Academy of America, the largest pro fessiona l organisation for medievalists, counted 3,901 me mb ers, almost all resident in the US and Ca nada. See Luke We nger, 'The Medieval Acade my and Me dieval Studies in North America', Medieval Studies in North America: Past, Prese1ll, and Future, ed. Francis G. Ge ntry and Ch risto pher Kleinhenz (Kalama zoo, Mich.: Medieval Insti tute Pub lications, 1982), p. 25. 2 LynnWh ite, 'The Legacy of the Middle Ages in th e America n Wild We st', Sp eculum. 40 (1965), p. 191. 121 LAURA KENDR ICK imagination, and not the history of technology, I too have come to the paradoxical-seeming conclusion that America did have a Middle Ages, by which I mean not only that Americans developed their own peculiar understandings of the European Middle Ages, but that they imaginatively transplanted the Middle Ages to the American continent. To be sure, the American Middle Ages are a fabrication- just as are, to some extent, all stories of the past, all histories. That the American Middle Ages were invented rather than real is less important, in many respects, than that they were invented at all. Upon closer inspection, it turns out that some of the most important contributors to a myth of the American Middle Ages are those same Americans whom we remember for their calls for separation from Europe and the European past - men such as Thomas Jefferson, writer of the Declaration of Independence, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who, in 'The Poet' (1844) and 'The American Scholar' (1841) tried to declare the independence of American letters. Upon the foundations of pre-existing European inventions of the medieval past, many of which they borrowed, these same Americans and many others have constructed a myth of an American Middle Ages in which 'Anglo-Saxons' replayed the period from 300 to 1500 and, in so doing, 'rectified' the errors of European history. The myth of the American Middle Ages bears a certain resemblance to the myth of America as Eden and of the American of European ancestry as a new Adam, beginning history over again in a fresh 'American' Garden of Paradise. 3 The new beginning is imagined as a return to an idealised past, a time before 'corruption' set in. But, whereas the myth of the American as Adam is fully primitivist and turns the historical 'clock' back to Edenic zero, thereby erasing the presence of the original Indian inhabitants of the Americas, the myth of the American Middle Ages turns the historical 'clock' back only part-way, to reset it in the 'middle', in a period identified as a time of transition and struggle. As opposed to the myth of the American as Adam, the myth of the American as 'Saxon' could take account of conflict between the new inhabitants of America and the original ones, between European immigrants or their descendants and the Indians, between 'Saxons' and 'Americans' (for the latter name was not commonly used to identify anyone other than Indians until well into the nineteenth century). In the imagination of the myth-makers the globe was a kind of clock, with the ages in the civilisation of man marked around its girth, so that, by moving westward against the direction of the earth's rotation, one moved 'back in time' to a more primitive stage of human history.4 As Thomas 3 R. W. B. Lewis, in TheAmerican Adam (Chicago: Un iversityof Chicago Press, 1955) , discovered this myth prevalent in American literature of the period from 1820 to 1860. 4 Inthe sixteen th andseve nteenth cen turies some fme clocks were made inthe formof a 122 The American Middle Ages Jefferson put it in a letter to WilliamLudlow of 6 September 1824, a man travelling eastwards from the Rocky Mountains to the East Coast would see the equivalent of 'a survey, in time, of the progress of man from the infancy of creation to the present day': the savages of the Rocky Mountains . he would observe in the earliest stage of association living under no law but that of nature, subscribing and covering themselves with U1eflesh and skins of wild beasts. He wouid next find those on our frontiers in the pastoral state, raising domestic animals to supply the defects of hunting. Then succeed our own semi-barbarous citi­ zens, the pioneers of the advance of civilization, and so in his progress he would meet the gradual shades of improving man until he would reach his, as yet, most improved state in our seaport towns.5 In the so-called 'progress of civilisation westward', the settlements of the American frontier represented a kind of middle state, between contempo­ rary European civilisation to their east and a primitive savagery to their west. On this imaginary time-line the American frontier was imagined as a sort of revival of the early Middle Ages in Britain: just as the legendary Saxons Horsa and Hengist and their followers, beginning in the fifth century, had pushed the supposedly more primitive, 'painted' Picts and the original 'British' from Britain and established democratic institutions that would reach full flower under King Alfred, so the freedom-loving ancestors of these ancient Saxons, a remnant of the old race, migrated to America and drove out the more primitive, 'painted' Indians (the native 'Americans') in order to establish democratic institutions. The analogies between American Indians and the native inhabitants of Britain prior to the Saxon invasion had been drawn in the literal sense of the term as early as the late sixteenth century, when the Virginia pioneer cele stial globe encircled about its 'e quator' by a calibrated calendar ring ; such globe ­ clocks are often depicted in painting s of this period next to clocks with two-dimen sional round faces and ot her instrument s for measuring time. Even sund ials might take the form of a globe. For example, in an engraving from 17 20 , a pedesta lled sundial-globe ha s hours marked inRoman numerals about its circ umference. This method of spatialising time as the un idirec tional progre ss of a marker aro un d a circle or globe sugge st s that thepa st is a place left behind. Logically, then, to reverse the direction of movement aro und the circle or globe is to go back in time. The sp atial location of the Americas, farto the west of Europe, pro vided an opport un ity for eighteenth-centurypri mitivists to represent what was happen­ ing in the pre sent as if it were happening in thepa st, therebypo werfully conflating cultural with chronological primitivism. Photograp hs of early timepieces collected in muse um s and repre sented in paintings may be found in The Clockwork Universe: German Clocks and Automata, 1550-1650, ed. Oa us Maurice and Otto Mayr (New York: Neale Watson, 1980), fig s 113-16 ; and Alfred Chap ui s, De horologiis in arte (Lausann e: Scrip ter, 1954), plate s 81, 92, 94, 127 . On the distinction be tween cultural and chronological primitivisms, see Arth ur 0. Love joy and Ge orge Boas, Primitiv ism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (1935; New York: Octag on, 1965), pp. 1- 11. 5 TheWrit ings of ThomasJe fferson, ed. Andrew A. Lib scomb and Albe rt Ellery Bergh, 20 vol s (Washington, DC: Jeffe rson Memo rial Association, 1903 -7), xvi. p. 74. 123 LAURA KENDRICK John White supplemented pictures of naked and tatooed American Indians with pictures of similarly naked and tatooed early Europeans (but without any identifying labels). Illustrators who imitated his models interpreted his tattooed, naked Europeans as early Picts ('painted men') and Britons, and named them so.
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