Bad Medievalism and the Modernity Problem

Humanists have long insisted on a chasm separating modernity and the Middle Ages. In Bad Medievalism and the Modernity Problem, Kathy Lavezzo demonstrates how the temporal divide scholars typically accept is a fiction that has shaped racial discourse over a longue durée. The hard line drawn between “then” and “now” is of a piece with the line separating whiteness from humans deemed irrevocably other. Thus, Lavezzo advocates a “bad”—that is, depressing and disturbing, even nauseating—historicism attuned to the interpenetration of race, whiteness, and periodicity in the “west.”

Teasing out the dialectical invocation of both periods by figures as diverse as W. E. B. Du Bois, Carolyn Bynum, Stuart Hall, Johan Huizinga, Paule Marshall, Karl Marx, Gloria Naylor, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Sylvia Wynter, Lavezzo demonstrates how the tension between and across categories of the “medieval” and the “modern” has mobilized intense emotional and political responses.

Inspired by Lavezzo’s discovery that Hall, the beloved founder of cultural studies, planned as a student at Oxford to become a medievalist but was dissuaded from that path by his teacher Tolkien, Bad Medievalism and the Modernity Problem unpacks the implications of that charged encounter. Central chapters contrast Tolkien’s white heritage medievalism with a speculative inquiry into the Piers Plowman dissertation that Hall never wrote.

Other chapters assess the white “feel” of periodization by scholars, including Jacob Burckhardt, Huizinga, Fredric Jameson, and Bynum, and draw on theorists, including Du Bois and Wynter, to chart the medieval roots of a racialized discourse of progress and primitivism. Bad Medievalism and the Modernity Problem culminates in new readings of Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Cafe and Paule Marshall’s The Fisher King, demonstrating their importance as productively pessimistic engagements with the racial legacies of both the medieval and the modern.