Immediately after the official ending of the Middle Ages, Europe was ravaged by a pervasive medieval nostalgia. In Italy the great poets of the Renaissance, from Pulci to Boiardo and Ariosto, returned to the themes of the Knights saga. Teofilo Folengo wrote Baldus, a poem conceived in an incredible latin de cuisine; Torquato Tasso, the great poet of Italian Mannerism, celebrated the glories of the Crusaders. In Spain, Cervantes told the story of a man unable to reconcile the intrusion of reality with his love for medieval literature. Shakespeare borrowed and reshaped a lot from medieval narrative.
At the flowering of the English Renaissance John Dee or Robert Fludd rediscovered symbols and emblems of medieval Jewish mysticism. Even in the baroque period, when modern science seemed dominated by the new paradigms of Galileo or Newton, the Church of the Counter-Reformation worked silently to improve or to pollute the philosophy of the Schoolmen, while in France Mabillon rediscovered the treasuries of medieval manuscripts. As a semiotician I cannot forget that one of the most outstanding achievements in the theory of signs was due to an innovating follower of Aquinas, John of Saint Thomas or, as they call him now, Jean Poinsot.
During the Age of Reason, while the circle of the French Encyclopédie was seemingly fighting the final battle against the remnants of the Dark Ages, these Dark Ages started charming the aristocrats, with the Gothic novel and early Ossianic Romanticism. Geographically close, even though psychologically far from the castle of Otranto, Ludovico Antonio Muratori collected in his Rerum Italicarum Scriptores the ancient chronicles of medieval grandeur. Soon Chateaubriand was to celebrate the rise of Gothic cathedrals under the trees of the Celtic forest, while thanks to Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, and the restorations of Viollet-le-Duc, the whole nineteenth century would dream of its own Middle Ages, thus avenging the enlightened gesture of Napoleon, who cut the tympanum of Notre Dame to allow his imperial cortège to enter the cathedral.
Oddly enough one could see, from the Confessional of the Black Penitents, Fulton’s steamboat sailing triumphantly; and I do not exactly know whether the spinning jenny and the power loom were neo-Gothic machinery or whether the Nightmare Abbey of Gregory the Monk was a factory for the concoction of Gothic dreams. The Italian Risorgimento was a period of abundant medieval repêchage, not to mention Italian opera, full as it is of troubadours; and finally there was the German neomedieval vertigo of the castle of Ludwig of Bavaria and Wagner’s parsifalization of the universe.
What would Ruskin, Morris, and the pre-Raphaelites have said if they had been told that the rediscovery of the Middle Ages would be the work of the twentieth-century mass media? Classicism and Medievalism At this point we must bring up at least two questions. First, what distinguishes this permanent rediscovery of the Middle Ages from the equally permanent return to the classical heritage? Second, did the many Middle Ages (too many) always fit the same archetype? As for the first question, we can oppose the model of philological reconstruction to that of utilitarian bricolage.
In the case of the remains of classical antiquity we reconstruct them but, once we have rebuilt them, we don’t dwell in them, we only contemplate them as an ideal model and a masterpiece of faithful restoration. On the contrary, the Middle Ages have never been reconstructed from scratch: We have always mended or patched them up, as something in which we still live. We have cobbled up the bank as well as the cathedral, the state as well as the church. We no longer dwell in the Parthenon, but we still walk or pray in the naves of the cathedral. Even when we live with Aristotle or Plato, we deal with them in the same terms suggested by our medieval ancestors. When one scrapes away the medieval incrustations from Aristotle and renews him, this reread Aristotle will adorn the shelves of academic libraries but will still not connect with our everyday life.
Since the Middle Ages have always been messed up in order to meet the vital requirements of different periods, it was impossible for them to be always messed about in the same way. So I’ll try to outline at least ten types of Middle Ages, to warn readers that every time one speaks of a dream of the Middle Ages, one should first ask which Middle Ages one is dreaming of. Ten Little Middle Ages
1.The Middle Ages as a pretext. This is the Middle Ages of opera or of Torquato Tasso. There is no real interest in the historical background; the Middle Ages are taken as a sort of mythological stage on which to place contemporary characters. Under this heading we can include also the so-called cloak-and-dagger novels (or les romans de cape et d’épée). There is a difference between historical novels and cloak-and-dagger stuff. The former choose a particular historical period so as to gain a better understanding not only of that period but (through it) of our present time, seen as the end result of those remote historical events. The characters of the novel need not be “really historical” (that is, people who really existed); it is enough for them (albeit fictional) to be representative of their period. Lady Rowena and Pierre Bezukhov are inventions of novels, but they tell us something “true” about the English Middle Ages and about Russia at the time of Napoleon.
On the contrary in the cloak-and-dagger novel the fictional characters must move among “real” historical figures who will support their credibility. Think of Dumas and of the crucial narrative role played by such characters as Richelieu and Louis XIII. Notwithstanding the presence of “real” characters, the psychology of d’Artagnan has nothing to do with the psychology of his century, and he could have blustered through the same adventures during the French Revolution. Thus in historical novels fictional characters help one to understand the past (and the past is not taken as a pretext), while in cloak-and-dagger novels the past (taken as a pretext) helps one to enjoy the fictional characters.
- The Middle Ages as the site of an ironical revisitation, in order to speculate about our infancy, of course, but also about the illusion of our senility. Ariosto and Cervantes revisit the Middle Ages in the same way that Sergio Leone and the other masters of the “spaghetti Western” revisit nineteenth-century America, as heroic fantasy, something already fashioned by the early Hollywood studios. In the same sense, Rabelais was playing upon his fantastically revisited Sorbonne, but he no longer believed in the Paris he was telling of, as the characters in Monty Python movies do not believe in the grotesque period they inhabit.
3.The Middle Ages as a barbaric age, a land of elementary and outlaw feelings. These are the Middle Ages of Frazetta’s fantasies, but, at a different level of complexity and obsession, they are also the Middle Ages of early Bergman. The same elementary passions could exist equally on the Phoenician coasts or in the desert of Gilgamesh. These ages are Dark par excellence, and Wagner’s Ring itself belongs to this dramatic sunset of reason. With only a slight distortion, one is asked to celebrate, on this earth of virile, brute force, the glories of a new Aryanism. It is a shaggy medievalism, and the shaggier its heroes, the more profoundly ideological its superficial naïveté.
4.The Middle Ages of Romanticism, with their stormy castles and their ghosts. Germane to the eastern cruelty of Vathek, these Middle Ages return in some contemporary space-operas, where it is enough to put computers in the dungeon to transform it into a starship.
- The Middle Ages of the philosophia perennis or of neoThomism, which loom not only behind Maritain and the pastoral and dogmatic views of Pius XII or John Paul II but can also be perceived, as a transparent source of inspiration, behind many kinds of formal and logical thinking in contemporary secular philosophers. Recently, in my Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, I studied the medieval theory of definition as it was imposed by Porphyry’s Isagoge and I showed to what extent it was affected by certain logical quirks. My purpose was to demonstrate how these quirks continue to affect many contemporary theories of meaning that, frequently without acknowledging it, are still in debt to the Porphyrian line of thought. In this sense, the perennial vigor of the Middle Ages is not derived necessarily from religious assumptions, and there is a lot of hidden medievalism in some speculative and systematic approaches of our time, such as structuralism.
6.The Middle Ages of national identities, so powerful again during the last century, when the medieval model was taken as a political utopia, a celebration of past grandeur, to be opposed to the miseries of national enslavement and foreign domination.
7.The Middle Ages of Decadentism. Think, obviously, of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, think of Ruskin, but think also of Huysmans’ A rebours and of the ecstasies of Des Esseintes. The typical Italian version of this decadent Middle Ages is found in the neomedievalism of Giosuè Carducci and Gabriele D’Annunzio (though the former was not a fin-de-siècle decadent). At first an invention of intellectuals, it was then organically inserted into the project of nationalistic restoration and produced, in architecture and the visual arts, a lot of fakes, sometimes interesting and sometimes pathetic, in Italian cities.
8.The Middle Ages of philological reconstruction, which goes from Mabillon through Muratori up to the best of Gilson, to the rediscovery of the Acta Danicorum Philosophorum and to the Annales school.
