Middle Rages: Why the Battle for Medieval Studies Matters to America by Milo Yiannopoulos

Author:Milo Yiannopoulos
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Dangerous Books
Published: 2019-05-06T07:00:00+00:00

IV: Hue and Cry

A typical claim of the social justice tendency in Medieval Studies is that scholars should widen their focus out from Europe and into Eurasia and Africa. They say limiting your study of the Middle Ages to Europe is too “white-centric.” But almost everyone teaching the Middle Ages has taught courses on pilgrims, preachers, and travelers to Asia like William of Rubruck and Marco Polo.

Left-wing medievalists like to exclaim, “The Middle Ages weren’t only in Europe,” a fatuous claim which appears to mean, “Don’t forget that the rest of the world existed.” There’s no evidence anyone ever has forgotten—and besides, applying the term Middle Ages to contemporary China would be something like cultural imperialism, according to the progressive inquisitor’s manual.

Scholars of the Middle Ages are acutely aware that Europe was a backwater—just as the people living in Europe themselves were, which is why so much medieval history focuses on the experiences of Europeans in the Middle Ages stunned by the size and sophistication of Eastern cities. Constantinople was considered the center of civilization; Jerusalem was placed in the middle of every mappa mundi. Paradise was located in Asia. “It is farcical to suggest that people who study the Middle Ages don’t know this,” says Fulton Brown.

Insufficient attention is paid in medieval curricula to the “problem of whiteness” and its complicity in European slavery, the same critics claim. But the medieval slave trade stretched from Scandinavia to the furthest reaches of the Muslim world. Vikings began their raids not for food or precious metals, but to abduct people they could sell into servitude. Globally speaking, slavery isn’t a “white thing”—it wasn’t in the Middle Ages and it isn’t now. There isn’t a scholar in the field who doesn’t know about slavery in the Middle Ages, or a student who leaves college not learning about it.

As is so often the case with progressive academics, critics of medieval history aren’t telling anyone anything new—they’re just aggressively insisting on a change in emphasis without giving persuasive reasons for their demands. Many in the field suspect, and told me as I was researching this story, that Leftist critiques of the field seem to have less to do with rebalancing a Euro-centric understanding of the past than they do with giving white Christian Europe—and, by implication, modern Christian America—a bad name, just as Leftist academics have been doing for decades in other academic disciplines.

It’s true that there are relatively few people of color in Medieval Studies, if you don’t count the Green Knight. It’s less clear why that is: possibly, black academics just aren’t as interested in European history as they are African. Or perhaps Medieval Studies is failing to recruit black academics because its most prominent professors are Left-wing cultural critics anxious to distance themselves from the one dimension of their discipline that might actually appeal to African-Americans: Christianity. And maybe Asian scholars are drawn to subjects outside the humanities entirely.

But the relative whiteness of Medieval Studies doesn’t, in and of itself, prove any innate hostility to marginalized communities.

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