Thumb through the program for the 54th International Congress on Medieval Studies and you’ll spot the usual suspects: Beowulf, King Arthur, Sir Gawain, the Wife of Bath, along with a courtyard full of knights, dragons, saints, peasants, witches, wizards, and fools. The event itself features vendors hawking drinking vessels fashioned from bull’s horns and biscotti baked by Trappist monks. The Mead and Ale Tasting happy hour, which boasts a range of sickly sweet and bracingly bitter libations with names like Spiced Welsh Braggot and Raspberry Melomel, is very well-attended.
And then there are the sessions, more than 500 of them, including a roundtable on “The Expressive Qualities of Hair in the Middle Ages,” a gothic calligraphy workshop, and a presentation promising “Proof of the Existence of Giants in Medieval England.” To be clear, this is not a Renaissance faire or some kind of highbrow cosplay convention; there are no giant turkey legs available and the guys wearing hooded robes with rope belts are actual monks. It is the largest annual gathering of medievalists, and one of the few conferences where someone might break into conversational Old Norse or while away an afternoon discussing siegecraft during the Hundred Years’ War.
Lately, medievalists have been warring among themselves. Hanging over this spring’s conference were complaints from the group Medievalists of Color that several sessions on race proposed by its members and others were turned down by the meeting’s organizers. Among the rejected proposals were “How to Be a White Ally in Medieval Studies 101,” “Decentering Privilege,” and “Toxic Medievalisms: Misuses and Abuses of the Medieval in Contemporary Culture.” A letter from the Babel Working Group, a scholarly collective founded in 2004, argued that there “seems to be a bias against, or lack of interest in, sessions that are self-critical of medieval studies, or focused on the politics of the field in the present, especially relative to issues of decoloniality, globalization, and anti-racism.”
While squabbles over session approval are not uncommon at academic conferences, the conflict in medieval studies feels like a struggle for the future of the field, one that sometimes pits older scholars against a younger generation, and those with a traditional approach against those with a more activist bent. And it’s turned personal at times, even nasty and disturbing, with medievalists lobbing insults over Twitter, squaring off in blog posts, and calling for colleagues to be more or less excommunicated from the discipline.
The most controversial combatant skipped the recent gathering, held, as it is every year, at Western Michigan University, here in Kalamazoo, though the debate she kick-started is still going strong. In 2015 Rachel Fulton Brown, an associate professor of medieval history at the University of Chicago, published a post on her blog, Fencing Bear at Prayer, whose title alone — “Three Cheers for White Men” — seemed engineered to raise hackles. Dorothy Kim, then an assistant professor of English at Vassar College, responded in a post of her own, calling Brown’s 228-word, somewhat cheeky paean to the historical upside of white men, which included praising knights for embracing courtly love as an alternative to rape, an example of “white fragility+benevolent sexism.”
They’ve been trading jabs ever since, in dueling essays and on Facebook and podcasts. When Kim wrote a warning on the blog “In the Middle” to her colleagues in 2017 about the importance of “not upholding white supremacy in the classroom,” it seemed directed, at least in part, at Brown. Brown responded that colleagues like Kim who suggest that medievalism is rife with racism should learn “some f*cking medieval western European Christian history, including the history of our field.”
As if that weren’t enough, last fall Milo Yiannopoulos, a journalist-turned-troll-turned-pariah, published a 15,000-word dissection of the Brown v. Kim saga, in which he unsurprisingly sided with Brown, portraying Kim as a hysterical, slipshod scholar and Brown as a beacon of reasonableness and verity. Brown and Yiannopoulos share the view that claims about white nationalists, like the Tiki-torch marchers in Charlottesville, Va., drawing their inspiration from the Middle Ages have been overblown. The real threat, as they see it, is a “social justice incursion” into a field dedicated to examining the cultural building blocks of Western civilization. There’s enough of a mind-meld between the unlikely pair that some scholars suspect that Brown was essentially the co-author of Yiannopoulos’s thesis-length investigation/diatribe. In an email, Brown denied any ghostwriting: “Milo wrote it. He interviewed me. He is a talented journalist who knows his craft.”
Brown missed the meeting in order to give a keynote at a conference on academic freedom. She has a fanbase outside of the discipline now among those who think that left-wing activists have distorted the humanities. It’s a role she seems to revel in. “My understanding of what is at stake is that it’s our ability to test ourselves through honest debate,” she says, “You don’t get stronger if you don’t have to answer hard questions.” But some colleagues who might eagerly back that sentiment, and who praise Brown’s scholarship, have been dismayed by her recent trajectory. Along with befriending Yiannopoulos, she’s written positively about Vox Day, the author of books like SJWs Always Lie, and a manifesto for the alt-right. In January she posted a photo of herself grinning beneath a “Make America Great Again” cap.
How do we reach these people who are stuck in echo-chambers of pseudo-academic-ese?
Dorothy Kim didn’t attend this year either, though her virtual presence was keenly felt. During the conference, Sarah Luginbill, a graduate student in medieval European history at the University of Colorado at Boulder, tweeted that “individual attendees (who are all old white men) are disrupting inclusivity with snide, under-breath remarks AND constant talking during certain presentations.” Kim replied: “Am I surprised by the sneering white men, NOPE.” When Blake Gutt, an assistant professor of French at the University of Michigan, tweeted “I’ve just been looking through the Kalamazoo program and not feeling particularly inspired. The lack of panels on race is obvious. Not much trans stuff this year either,” Kim concurred: “mmmhmmmm.”
As for whether the field is addressing the problem she and others see, Kim, who is now an assistant professor of English at Brandeis University, thinks the situation is complicated. Via email, she wrote that while “more medievalists admit there is a white supremacy issue,” the powers-that-be in medieval studies “continue to platform medievalists who connect themselves with the far right.”
To be fair, there were panels on race, and on transgender-related issues as well. Jana Schulman, director of the Medieval Institute, which puts on the conference, notes that the Medievalists of Color’s proposed “Whiteness Workshop,” which has been held the last two years, was accepted but that the group decided not to put it on. “There are quite a few sessions on teaching the global Middle Ages, or race, whiteness, and other such things,” Schulman says. “When you have 550 sessions, and you have a lot of traditional and innovative proposals, you’re trying to find a happy medium.”
Cord Whitaker doesn’t buy that. Whitaker is an assistant professor of English at Wellesley College and the author of the forthcoming book Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking (University of Pennsylvania Press). Whitaker thinks defending the conference’s rejections by saying there are already plenty of sessions on race is “an insufficient answer.” Such topics, Whitaker says, should be “treated with great importance, perhaps more importance than some other elements of the field, because of how they’re being co-opted by nefarious forces that are white supremacist and white nationalist and others of that ilk.”
Seeta Chaganti agrees. Chaganti, a professor of English at the University of California at Davis, chose to boycott Kalamazoo this year, writing on the Medievalists of Color website that “the actions of this organization’s leadership not only silence marginalized voices but also enable racially-based harassment.” She argues there’s more at stake than merely who gets a certain speaking slot on Saturday afternoon. “We still carry around a lot of unconscious bias about who is authoritative and whom we feel comfortable citing and treating as an authority, and those things really need to be confronted and re-examined,” Chaganti says. “How we accept and reject conference proposals is connected to how we do hiring, is connected to whose books we publish.”
That unconscious bias is pervasive in Nahir Otaño-Gracia’s experience. Otaño-Gracia, an assistant professor of English at Beloit College, says she’s often been treated like an interloper in medieval studies. Fellow scholars have asked why Otaño-Gracia would want to study Old Norse literature considering that she’s from Puerto Rico — as if it’s a more logical area of study if you’re from, say, Ohio. She’s been mistaken for a waitress by an older male scholar while out to dinner at Kalamazoo, even though she was wearing her nametag displaying her academic affiliation. Otaño-Gracia attended this year but only showed up at sessions where she knew she would feel comfortable, and she chose to stay off campus rather than in the dorms where most medievalists stay. She doesn’t think the field does enough to protect and support underrepresented groups. “Frustration, exhaustion, sadness — I would say those are the emotions that I experience,” she says.
A few days before this year’s conference, The New York Times weighed in on the continuing uproar. A single quote from the article supplied an unofficial slogan of sorts for many at the meeting. Richard Utz, a literature professor at Georgia Tech, told the paper that most medievalists don’t set out to be political but are instead “monkish creatures who just want to live in their cells and write their manuscripts.”
That benign-sounding assessment prompted a hashtag (#notamonk), lots of eye-rolling, and was riffed on by multiple speakers. The quote was seen not only as slander aimed at those pushing for change but also an unfair knock on monks, who don’t necessarily fit the chanting-on-a-mountaintop stereotype. Jonathan Hsy, an associate professor of English at George Washington University, objected on Twitter to a “prominent white male medievalist, ‘speaking for’ the field as if it were ‘apolitical’” and for a “continued pattern of sidelining marginalized medievalists.”
Utz shakes his head at how his quote, which he intended to be lighthearted, was received. He’s well aware that monks can be activists, and he wasn’t trying to make the case that medievalists must remain cloistered with their illuminated manuscripts. In his book Medievalism: A Manifesto, Utz wrote that scholars have an ethical obligation to expose ideologies that operate “under the guise of seductively vague invocations of the medieval past.”
That said, Utz doesn’t think that the Medieval Institute set out to exclude anyone, and he’s bothered by some of the rhetoric from its critics. “The accusation of systemic racism makes it harder because even if you agree with everything that the person brings to you, you first have to overcome the fact that you are now branded nationally as somebody who is involved in systemic racism,” says Utz, who is a former member of the institute’s advisory board. “But maybe I’m too monkish to see the value of the public nature of that accusation.”
An argument in favor of more sessions on topics like race is that the ones the conference did hold were packed to capacity. A session titled “White Nationalism, Misogyny, and Modern Receptions of the Early Medieval North Atlantic,” attracted a standing-room-only crowd. Presenters discussed the fact that you’ll find enthusiastic posts about Arthurian legend and Beowulf on neo-Nazi websites, and noted how white supremacists like to imagine the distant past as an uncomplicated era of racial homogeneity, a skewed vision rooted in fantasy rather than history. “How do we academics reach these people who are stuck in these echo-chambers of pseudo-academic-ese?” one scholar asked. “How can we combat these perceptions that just snowball?”
It’s a question Maggie Williams has thought about a lot in the last few years. Williams, an associate professor of art history at William Paterson University, studies Irish high crosses, representations of which white supremacists like to paint on homemade shields or get tattooed on their biceps. “I’m Irish American by heritage and so I’ve long had the privilege of being able to ignore questions of race either in my scholarship or in academic scenarios, and I don’t see that privilege as existing anymore,” she says. “I elected to say publicly that these crosses are also used by white supremacists and neo-Nazis and fascists across the world. I just think we need to say that out loud.”
Daniel Franke is on a shortlist of medievalists who have actually confronted white nationalists in person. Franke, an assistant professor of history at the College of William & Mary, showed up at the Charlottesville rally in 2017 holding a sign that read “The Middle Ages Weren’t ‘White.’” Franke considers himself “conservative-ish” and has quarreled with Dorothy Kim and others who he thinks have gone after colleagues who may not embrace their methods, but don’t really oppose their goals. “Not all of us are going to use critical race theory in our classes, and that doesn’t mean that we are somehow thereby complicit,” he says.
As for how scholars should respond to white supremacists other than making placards, Franke argues that the best strategy is to stick with what they’ve been doing all along. “We’re probably going to get some students in our classes who are harboring thoughts along those lines, but we’re going to keep teaching the stuff that we know, which is the actual history,” Franke says. “Because it doesn’t provide much comfort for white-supremacist dreams of a pure medieval European homeland.”
A number of medievalists declined to comment for this article or measured their words with extreme care. “I’m nervous to talk on the record about any of this,” one said. Another worried about getting “roasted” on Twitter for offering an opinion. For some, there is a worry that pushing back against those who think there should be more emphasis on race, or trying to defend conference organizers against allegations of systemic racism, means that they’re somehow siding with white nationalists. Others see this as a mostly media-created controversy that has framed the field of medieval studies in an unfairly acrimonious light, and they don’t want to further add to that perception.
As for finding a way forward, Lisa Fagin Davis thinks medieval studies has to figure out how to “welcome more voices to the table.” Davis is executive director of the Medieval Academy of America, which sponsors sessions at Kalamazoo and holds its own annual conference. She says the attitude that scholars only care about their work and not how it applies to the modern world is an outdated notion that she’s trying to change. “It’s not necessarily that these are people who think diversity is bad. It’s that they think it’s not our business, that is not our mandate as an organization or as a field, that it’s somebody else’s mandate,” she says. “That is not the future of our field and it can’t be because we won’t survive.”
