Harvard Magazine on the latest stage in the “American conquest of the Middle Ages”:
The great literary scholar Ernst Robert Curtius reflected on this absence in his 1948 magnum opus, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. “What strikes me most is this: The American mind might go back to Puritanism or to William Penn, but it lacked that which preceded them; it lacked the Middle Ages,” Curtius wrote. “It was in the position of a man who has never known his mother.” Yet he saw this lack as an opportunity for American scholarship. “The American conquest of the Middle Ages,” he observed, “has something of that romantic glamor and of that deep sentimental urge which we might expect in a man who should set out to find his lost mother.” That “conquest” began, in his view, with the “cult of Dante” that sprang up among the New England poets of the nineteenth century, above all Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who translated the Divine Comedy.
DOML can be seen as the latest stage in the American conquest of the Middle Ages, offering the best introduction the general reader has ever had to the “mother” of Western Christian civilization.
December 27th, 2011 | 5:30 pm
Adam Kirsch brings good news indeed. The Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (DOML) sounds like a hopeful step in the process of re-discovering Medieval culture while de-sanctifying Renaissance and Enlightenment anti-medievalism.
Kirsch correctly identifies the American cultural grounding in classical Roman, Protestant, and Enlightenment models, and the absence of connection with medieval culture. But he misses the reason for it. America’s founding was, in its way, part of the historical reaction against the Catholic Church.
Anti-papism, as it was called, the oldest and still one of the most accepted American prejudices, was a critical part of the Enlightenment. Medieval culture was therefore rejected precisely because it was so devoutly Catholic.
DOML’s greatest challenge will presumably be the enormous oeuvre of Thomas Aquinas. But whatever can be done to broaden familiarity with his works will go far to reverse the image of the Middle Ages as intellectually benighted.
It is fascinating to survey the many side effects of this anti-Catholic, anti-Medieval prejudice. Because Thomas Aquinas embraced (some say “baptized”) Aristotle, the taint of medievalism has somehow been stretched to cover the great Greek philosopher who lived eight centuries before.
December 27th, 2011 | 10:47 pm
Um…but vast amounts of Aquinas have already been translated. Why do we need facing English and Latin? For that matter, a fair amount of Scotus has been done as well, even though it is in relatively obscure presses. Why not someone new, someone fresh like Nicolaus Bonetus or Francis of Meyronnes?
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