Richard Utz (Kalamazoo)

Negotiating Heritage: Observations on Semantic Concepts, Temporality, and the Centre of the Study of the Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals

1 Prolegomena

Since 2001, the Copenhagen Centre of the Study of the Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals, a project funded by the Danish National Research Foundation, has pushed the epistemological boundaries of the reception of medieval culture in postmedieval times. As conference participant and member of Advisory Board for the Centre's book series, Ritus et Arts: Traditions and Transformations, I have been able to accompany the Centre scholars on their path toward a theoretically informed and innovative approach to the negotiation of western civilization's medieval heritage. During this process, it appeared to me that Reinhart Kosellek's work on semantic concepts and temporality provided a helpful perspective to assess the Centre's research and scholarship. Since I view Negotiating Heritage: Memories of the Middle Ages, edited by Mette B. Bruun and Stephanie Glaser (2009), as paradigmatic of the work done at the Centre over the last eight years, I will concentrate my application of Kosellek's thought to this specific volume.

And while I am not external to the scholarship produced at the Centre, I hope my perspective will add to the emerging appreciation of its value and consequence for interdisciplinary and international medievalism.

2 Kosellek's Conceptual Historiography, in a Nutshell

In 1843, in a treatise reflecting on the "the movement of production" (Die Bewegung der Produktion), radical German democrat Wilhelm Schulz had the following to say about the relationship between historical events and linguistic activity:

More than 120 years after Schulz, Reinhart Kosellek, widely considered one of the most influential German intellectual historians of the post WWII era, said the following in an essay on the semantics of modern concepts of movement.

Both of these views attempt to describe and better define a foundational methodological predicament for scholarly work on the past, namely the fascinating dynamic between historical events and their linguistic realization. While historical events and experience can only be conveyed through language, neither events nor experiences are realized by their linguistic articulation. While most extralinguistic conditions for all occurrences remain dependent on language for their effectiveness, they are not fully assimilated by it. "The prelinguistic structure of action and the linguistic communication by means of which events to take place are intermingled, yet do not coincide." (Kosellek 2004: 222)

If most scholars are aware of this methodological impasse in their historical research, and if most post-enlightenment cultural historians acknowledge that an historical document or event warrants continuous rereading based on the difference between the actual historical events and their linguistic realization as well as the temporal distance between historical event, linguistic realization, and contemporary readers/investigator, there are those who would not view certain documents as profiting from linguistic re-present-ation (Ver-gegenwärt-igung), from rereadings that would take into account social, cultural, and – closely related – semantic change. More often than not, such contemporary refusals to view historical texts as organic documents are connected with conservative ideological and religious views. For example, the Foundation of American Christian Education (FACE) adamantly rejects requests to update its official linguistic reference works to an at least recent, if not current, incarnation of Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language, but has been reprinting and consulting the 1828 edition of Webster's reference book. When asked why the organization would prefer to consult a dictionary that does not include an entry on "airplane" and was published in the same year in which Henrik Ibsen, Hippolyte Taine, and Leo Tolstoy were born, its President, Carole Adams, responded that FACE viewed the 1828 edition of Webster's as a primary text of American history which "shows the biblical worldview and vocabulary of the founding generation as recorded by Noah Webster, father of American Christian education." (Shea 2009: 17)

Similarly, some judges on the current United States Supreme Court embrace the constitutional theory of so-called originalism. Of these justices, Antonin Scalia in particular has shown a marked habit of citing older reference works in an attempt to negate the temporal and cultural difference between the time at which the U.S. constitution originated and his own present.

These kinds of activist cultural negations of the essential non-contiguity between past and present are rare nowadays, at least among scholars. More common are linear historical accounts that would acknowledge historical difference on the one hand, but focus on the forward looking aspects of past events on the other hand. As examples of the latter tendency, William of Ockham and John Wyclif serve as forerunners of the Reformation, Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde prefigures the nineteenth-century realist novel, and the Florentine Camerata prepares the grounds for the opera.³ What distinguishes, in my view, the work done over the last eight years by the Centre for the Study of the Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals from these two other approaches to reading cultural history is its members' conscious negotiation of temporality and the semantics of temporality. In what follows, I would like to examine some of these negotiations, applying some of Reinhart Kosellek's tenets in the essay collection, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, a text Hayden White once characterized as ushering in "a new era in the conceptualization not only of what history means to Western culture but also what Western culture means for history." (White 1987: 1176)

At the beginning of Futures Past, Kosellek compares two distinct moments in the reception history of the famous Battle of Issus, in which Alexander the Great's Greek army defeated the Persians in 333 B.C. One, Albrecht Altdorfer's widely known historical painting, Alexanderschlacht, unites on a canvas of 1.5 square meters everything that was known, in the early sixteenth century, about the impressive military victory that ushered in Hellenism. Noting various kinds of anachronism employed by Altdorfer, Kosellek remarks:

If for Altdorfer temporal difference between the year 333 B.C. and his own historical moment was not apparent, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), who documented his impressions of the painting in the early nineteenth century, "was seized 'upon sighting this marvel,' " as he wrote, by a boundless 'astonishment.' Schlegel praised the work in long sparkling cascades of words, recognizing in it 'the greatest feat of the age of chivalry.'" (Kosellek 2004: 10) Although Schlegel conflates Antiquity and the Middle Ages in the term "chivalry,"

3 Negotiating Heritage: What Would Kosellek Say?

Kosellek's conclusion is that in the three centuries that separate the reactions to the Battle of Issus by Altdorfer and Schlegel, a period commonly referred to as early modernity (frühe Neuzeit), history underwent a process of temporalization (Verzeitlichung), one that finally accelerated toward the concept of historical process that informs modernity and the modern university. If Kosellek's assumption is correct, could it be said that the Cistercian bridging of the temporal gap between the eleventh-century Exordium Cistercii or the twelfth-century Exordium parvum on the one hand, and the seventeenth-century writings of Armand-Jean de Rancé, abbot of the Cistercian Abbey of La Trappe, was perhaps less astonishing a feat than modern readers might assume? Could it be said, perhaps, that the retrieving and revitalizing of a Cistercian 'golden age' through the "wilderness topos," as described by Mette Bruun in "The Wilderness as 'Lieu de Mémoire': Literary Deserts of Cîteaux and La Trappe" could have been realized somewhat more easily because the "wilderness" of a high medieval Cîteaux would still have corresponded to a quite similar notion of "wilderness" among seventeenth-century Cistercians at La Trappe? Was, to repeat my question in different terms, the Cistercians' work at a collective identity as "desert dwellers" so successful because they still were in temporal "harmony with the past?" (Bruun 2008, 42)

Martin Gosman's essay on "The Ceremonial in the Estates General of France" seems to confirm the longe durée of a medieval mentalité within which the national harmony between the absolutist French King and his Estates could be sustained by the Crown's clever utilization of the symbolic public union between the persona of the current King and the divine institution of kingship. (Gosman 2008). The temporal contiguity between medieval past and early modern present, avowed by the nation's legal, semantic, and symbolic heritage, was strong enough to keep the Estates delegates from seeing "that the Crown was merely exploiting that legacy to organize its own 'show.'" (Gosman 2008: 213) But what of post-Enlightenment contiguity when, according to Kosellek's claim, the process of temporalization or Verzeitlichung would have created even more complex conditions for various forms of ritual to bind together past and present? M. B. Pranger's essay on "Devotion and the Present: Memory and Oblivion" confronts two scenarios for modern theology. (Pranger 2008) On the one hand, Pranger speaks of Friedrich Schleiermacher's early nineteenth-century attempt to reconcile Enlightenment thought and Protestant Christianity by positing faith as an atemporal, timeless, and intuitive experience, a deeply felt harmony between critical reason and creation. Karl Barth's twentieth-century reaction to the challenges of accelerating temporalization, according to Pranger, was to "criticize and historicize the atemporality" of Schleiermacher's Romantic and medievalizing theology of experience (Erfahrungstheologie) and "restore a degree of historicity" and world-orientedness to religion. (Pranger 2008: 239)

What is it that motivates post-Enlightenment thinkers, writers, artists, and scholars to resort to either timelessness or processual historism in their various expressions? Or, in other words, what kind of temporal experience is facilitated by the emergence of modernity? Kosellek finds the answer to this question in the emergence of the concept and term neue Zeit (Neuzeit) since the second half of the eighteenth century. "Time," in his words,

In the final thirty years of the eighteenth and the first thirty years of the nineteenth century Grimm's Deutsches Wörterbuch records more than 100 neologisms, compounds which qualify Zeit/time in a positive historical fashion. In addition, Zeit was related to the following terms: "section," "regard," "view," "task," "expense," "predicament," "movement," "formation," "character," "duration," "development," "epoch," "event," "requirement," "fulfillment," "appearance," "abundance," "course," "feeling," and "spirit." (Kosellek 2004: 247)⁵ The Oxford English Dictionary records the first use of "movement" as indicative of "The way in which events or conditions are moving at a particular time or in a particular sphere; a tendency, a trend," for 1789 (with Thomas Jefferson); "formation" is increasingly employed as "The action or process of forming; a putting or coming into form; creation, production" after 1830; "duration" and "durational," meaning a "[l]asting, continuance in time; the continuance or length of time; the time during which a thing, action, or state continues," takes off in the early eighteenth century; "development," as a "gradual unfolding, a bringing into fuller view; a fuller disclosure or working out of the details of anything, as a plan, a scheme, the plot of a novel" can be shown as a term unknown before 1750; "epoch," meaning "[t]he beginning of a 'new era' or distinctive period in the history of mankind, a country, an individual, a science," is recorded as a seventeeth-century invention.⁶

These neologisms, which point toward a foundational experiential change in the qualifying and conceptualizing of time enter, according to Kosellek, into competition with the already existing sources providing insight into time's movement until the eighteenth century, for example the stars, nature, living conditions, calling, fate, or chance.

Extending Kosellek's observation, I would like to claim that the process of temporalization, as a linguistic weapon from the arsenal of historism, not only dissected the present with the aid of concepts of movement, but even trickled down into the general concepts used to describe the past. Thus, the discovery of the historical world and the emergence of historical relativism may have helped usher in just one more –ism which is now commonly used to speak about the reception of medieval culture in postmedieval times, Medievalism. The term "Medievalism" can be said to be a linguistic performance responding to particular pressures in and outside the academy as well as to the existence of competing terms and practices of "Medieval Philology," "Medieval History," and "Medieval Studies."

Academic scholars of the Middle Ages, keen on presenting their subject matter as demanding much more serious intellectual rigor and solid academic Sitzfleisch than the popular or dilettantish reception of medieval culture, recognized the polysemous quality of "medievalism" as chance for better defining their own social relevance and status as experts and critics. Consequently, the semantic narrowing of "medievalism," especially by English-speaking medievalists, into just another Victorian whim, can be viewed an essential part of the process of academizing and institutionalizing the reception of the Middle Ages.⁸ "Medieval Studies," the early twentieth-century interdisciplinary North American amalgamation of nineteenth-century European medieval philology and history, increasingly cordoned itself off as exclusive of any self-reflexive, subjective, empathic, or playfully non-scientific work on medieval culture.

The recognition of a future-oriented temporality and an encroaching rigid academic pastism is, perhaps, what informs John Ruskin, whom the Oxford English Dictionary records as the first documented user of the term, "medievalism," and who is quoted by Mette Bruun and Stephanie Glaser in one of the mottos to the third section of Negotiating Heritage, "Artistic Negotiations with the Medieval Heritage." In 1849, in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, Ruskin writes:

Modern history, which begins to exert exclusive ownership over the academic reception of the past, is too "cold" and "lifeless" to overcome the otherness that is now the Middle Ages. Only poetry and architecture (anthropomorphized in caps), whom the modern scientific disciplines increasingly treat as lifeless textual corpora and corpses to be dissected, categorized, and archived, can still bridge, from Ruskin's Victorian vantage point, what early modernity has increasingly set apart. Therefore, he argues for sustaining at least a sublimated form of enthusiastic direct contact with the past, one that preserves a flavor or touch of the past in which his (national) present might find its own origins. Reading and preserving past poetic or architectural texts is his and many of his contemporaries' acceptance of the Janus-faced quality of medievalism, its simultaneously back- and forward looking aspects.

The scientific character of philology, history, archaeology, paleography, etc., continually replaces existing knowledge about the Middle Ages with new, better, more comprehensive knowledge, while the everlastingness of poetic and architectural monuments appear to guarantee a more stable, unshifting appreciation of the "real" Middle Ages, mnemonic devices based on the less and less valued aspects of the direct connection of the eyewitness or the tactile.¹⁰ Such attempts at a comprehensive, whole, and holistic reception become rare around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, especially when reception moves away spatially from its direct geographical anchors.¹¹ As Jens Fleischer (Fleischer 2008) demonstrates in his essay on "Spolia as Architectural Memory", the Chicago Tribune Tower, built in the 1920s and thousands of miles removed from the remains of the "real" European Middle Ages, invokes the stately entrances of a Gothic cathedral while using, at the same time, the supremely modern technique of the collage, a visual strategy similar to cubism. Concepts of modern art create the mere aura of medieval history on a North American inner city façade that includes shattered pieces from the city hall at Arras and the cathedrals of Ypres and Notre Dame de Paris, and the building presents a fragmentary and willingly non-harmonic artistic sedimentation of the European Middle Ages. It implants the medieval as one of many elements of alterity in the formation of the New modern World.

4 Conclusion

In summary, what has the Centre for the Study of the Heritage of Medieval Rituals contributed to the reception study of medieval culture since its inception in 2001? It has joined historicity and experience, discussing the reception of cultural artefacts and texts and events as a progression through the horizons of expectation of a motley succession of readers.

For these reasons, Reinhart Kosellek speaks of the "contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous" (Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen), the "characterization of the moment of a specific experience as a point of contemporaneity in which all that occurs together by no means enters into this moment in a uniform fashion." (Kosellek 2004: xviii)

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Notes

¹ I am quoting Keith Tribe's English translation of Schulz's manifesto (Schulz 1974), from Tribe's translation of Futures Past (Koselek 2004). I would like to express my special gratitude to my friend, Rüdiger Hartmann, who recommended Kosellek's work to me many years ago at the University of Regensburg.

² On Scalia's 'philological' methods, see Kamar (Kamar 1999: 1305).

³ For the first two examples, see Oberman (Oberman 1966) and Kittredge (Kittredge 1970). For a critical discussion of the third example, see (Østrem 2008), another volume from the Centre's book series, Ritus et Artes.

⁴ I have extended Kosellek's example of the reception of the Battle of Alexander and his notion of temporality to the study of "medievalism" (Utz 2009).

⁵ Kosellek adds: "This register can be conveniently broken off with Zeitgeist, certainly the most widespread compound and the most often invoked."

⁶ For these terms, I accessed the electronic version of the Oxford English Dictionary available at Western Michigan University's Waldo Library on September 25, 2009. The OED's definitions are, of course, current ones, but are in their general nature descriptive of the historical uses of these terms in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

⁷ For an enlightening discussion of "pastism" and "presentism" in relation to medievalism see Rhuys (Rhuys 2004).

⁸ By 1908, as the public altercation between the former English Jesuit, George Tyrell, and Cardinal Mercier of Malines, Belgium, about the medieval or modern orientation of the Catholic Church reveals, "medievalism" had turned into an umbrella term for everything retrograde and unsophisticated see Tyrell (Tyrell 1908). As any web search will demonstrate, this negative semantic shading has remained prevalent, especially in the political discourse of countries which, like India, are caught in an ongoing national argument about their (allegedly medieval) heritage and their swiftly growing global economic importance. See, for example, K. M. Shrimali's review of R. S. Sharma's Early Medieval Indian Society. A Study in Feudalisation (Shrimali 2001).

⁹ While other cultural, linguistic, and national traditions may not know the English terminological division between "medievalism" and "medieval studies," the division between a popular/writerly/artistic and a scholarly reception of the Middle Ages exists in similar or even more pronounced form. The history of medievalist practices and terminological development in the German-speaking world, into which the term "medie[a]valism" entered as a loan translation, see Utz (Utz 1998); see Aurell (Aurell 2006) and Utz (Utz 2005) for terminological discussions in the Spanish- and French-speaking world.

¹⁰ For a recent overview of medievalism and the mnemonic power of 'place,' see Utz (Utz 2004).

¹¹ On the influence of geographical distance on forms of Australian medievalism, see D'Arcens (D'Arcens 2000a) and (D'Arcens 2000b).