World Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern Textual Culture by Louise D’Arcens (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: World Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern Textual Culture by Louise D’Arcens Hillary Cheramie Louise D’Arcens, World Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern Textual Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 201 pp. Louise D’Arcens’s thorough investigation of medievalism beyond European chronology provides a timely model for reframing how scholars can attentively engage the “Middle Ages.” Drawing from a rich and diverse archive, D’Arcens masterfully unpacks the capacity of the Middle Ages to conjure contradictions. By carefully illuminating these contradictions and holding them aloft, she creates a framework to analyze how medievalism can at once bolster and displace the legacies of nationalism, racism, and colonialism. World Medievalism is poised to query the many developments of the global turn in medieval studies over the last twenty years and forge a path toward ethically making a world capacious enough for spatial and temporal localizations that resist Euro-Anglo hierarchies. The world, D’Arcens argues, can transcend the globe’s teleology because it can encompass the “transhistorical experiential state” of medievalism (22). This phenomenological aspect can be constructed sensorily, as it is at a heritage tourism site, or imaginatively, as it is in the world of a novel. In each of her four case studies, D’Arcens analyzes the contradictions and tensions of the transhistorical experience of medievalism. The first half of the book examines the use of the Middle Ages in the Northern Hemisphere to in one instance attempt to maintain Eurocentric legacies, and in the other instance displace Eurocentric legacies with interculturalism. The book’s second half is concerned with medievalisms that have emerged from the Global South, specifically the Asia-Pacific region. These medievalisms illuminate the possibilities and pitfalls of the transtemporal straddling of premodernity. The first chapter focuses on how right-wing French nationalism uses medievalism in reaction to identity crises spurred on by threatening globalization. D’Arcens’s selection of novels is astute in that each demonstrates the different contradictions arising from French nationalist medievalism. The thread that binds them together is déclinisme, a sense that in a teleological societal progression France is worsening, which manifests on the Right as melancholy for lost imperialism. Jérôme Ferrari’s Sermon on the Fall of Rome (Le Sermon sur la chute de Rome, 2012) aligns post-Roman France and post-colonial Corsica and, D’Arcens argues, imagines that a neomedieval future will develop from this power vacuum. Michel Houellebecq’s Submission (Soumission, 2015) satirizes [End Page 221] concerns of a neomedieval future in his depiction of France on the eve of becoming an Islamic polity. D’Arcens shows how medievalism is invoked to “disorient” clichéd antagonism between Europe and Islam and ridicule the contradiction inherent to the Islamophobic Right’s traditionalism. The chapter closes with a novel that similarly struggles with “the contradictory role of the Middle Ages as both the origin and the fulfillment” of national identity (71). D’Arcens unravels the blind “dis-orientalism” at the core of Mathias Enard’s Compass (La Boussole, 2015) (60). Rather than merely apologize for orientalism, the novel grapples with the legacy of East-West relations, inflected by the Crusades, and how to proceed in those relations given the resultant uneven distribution of power and resources. Chapter 2 turns toward the reorientation of medievalism in Tariq Ali’s Islam Quintet and hones the “world” of World Medievalism here to “diasporic Arab-Islamicate fiction” (76). Ali’s novels create and populate historical worlds that refuse the hierarchies of Western chronology and cartography, offering an alternative to the exclusion of Arab knowledge and the misinterpretation and flattening of Islam. By drawing attention to Tariq Ali’s contemporary politics and activism, D’Arcens situates the Islam Quintet as a meditation on modern East-West relations. The Quintet reclaims time and geography for hope—for a Middle Ages that have not been foreclosed by Latin Christendom. The convivencia that runs throughout Ali’s novels offers hope for the future that is particularly welcome, D’Arcens highlights, following the first chapter on déclinisme and melancholy. Set in late fifteenth-century Muslim al-Andalus, Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree (1992) combats the notion of Islamic fanaticism by...