from Medieval Academy News

Reaching way out: Presenting the Middle Ages to Modern America
by Sharan E. Newman

The fascination with things medieval has never been so high as at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Films, books, Medieval Times Banquets, Society for Creative Anachronism jousts, Medieval and Renaissance Faires (sic), and any number of soi-disant documentaries on the period are abundant. At the last Kalamazoo meeting I met a group of nurses from Chicago who were attending just for fun because they wanted to know more about the Middle Ages. They had read about the conference and wanted to learn more.

The nurses were unusual in that they came to a place where scholars discussed the Middle Ages, for the popular interest in the medieval past is often accompanied by a distrust of serious academic studies. For example, during a recent documentary on William Wallace, the screenwriter of the film Braveheart was asked why he didn’t follow history more closely. He answered proudly, “I don't let facts interfere with the truth.” His “truth” came from eighteenth-century ballads and his own imagination, not the work of academic medievalists.

Part of this aversion to “the facts” may be a reluctance to have childhood myths shattered. King Arthur should be sleeping under the lake, waiting until he’s needed. The Templars must still exist, guarding the Holy Grail. And all the evil that we, as humans, are capable of has been safely buried in a distant century, locked away from the present by the intervening Renaissance and Enlightenment.

Most people learn about the Middle Ages from sources that don’t include the work of serious medievalists. At best, the sources are authored by historians who specialize in another area, at worst . . . well, there are a lot of “worsts”: romantic “recreators” wanting to return to an “Age of Chivalry,” film-makers who like simple plot lines, novelists with an itch to prove how much better we are now than people were in the “Dark Ages,” and too many others, many of whom were simply mistaught in their own school days. We’ve all seen the result of this “teaching” in our classrooms. It often takes most of a term to un-teach students’ firmly held beliefs about the Middle Ages, leaving little time to explore the historical search for reality.

Our society persists in dumping every negative belief or bizarre custom into the dark cauldron they imagine as “medieval.” As a result, evil that is done today can be regarded as some recidivist accident. Of course, modern people don’t persecute others for their beliefs. Women may still earn less money, but at least they’re not subject to the droit de seigneur. We’ve freed ourselves from the mind control of The Church, which, as everyone knows, kept Europe in a cultural death grip, encouraging superstition and witch-hunts and keeping the peasants from revolting.

I hear these statements almost every day, either in the media or from people I encounter in my work. How many times have you had to explain that there were no chastity belts, no matter what someone may have seen in a museum? Popular ignorance of the Middle Ages is matched only by popular curiosity. This is the paradox.

Can we do anything about this wide gap between what scholars learn and teach about the Middle Ages and what the average person believes? Scientists have long since given up trying to correct the gibberish used in science fiction movies and television. Perhaps we should retreat into the archives and be satisfied that we know the “facts,” even if no one else does. I know this is tempting.

However, I decided to take another tack in presenting my research to the world: I wrote it into fiction. This approach has its own drawbacks. The stories are made up. The main characters are also made up. This means that sometimes people think the novel’s historical characters, who play minor roles in the stories, are also fiction, despite the endnotes that accompany my novels. However, I would rather people thought I had made up John of Salisbury than that they never hear of him at all. There is room for debate on this, I admit, but it was a choice I made in order to present the period to as wide an audience as possible.

What I didn’t expect was how much more I would learn by studying the twelfth-century for a novel. When I began my first mystery, I assumed that I knew something about Paris in 1138. I’d been studying the period for years. By the end of the first page, I realized that I knew nothing about dress, food, architecture, or weapons. I wasn’t sure about how the philosophers, townsmen, nobles, and Jews interacted, or if they interacted at all. In the past eight years I’ve done more primary research preparing to write fiction that in the previous twenty. I’ve also read many of the excellent recent secondary sources, often by members of the Medieval Academy.

I don’t pretend that my books of fiction are a totally accurate representation of the period. I make mistakes. For instance, even though Bert Hall has explained it to me several times, I still can’t understand the parts of a crossbow. Chrysogonus Waddell informed me that I had a hymn for Pentecost sung at Christmas. I know there are other blunders, too. And, even with the most meticulous research, each book is still my interpretation of what I’ve read and how I imagine the period. But I do believe that my work is more accurate than is most fiction set during the Middle Ages and certainly more accurate than recent popular histories written by non-medievalists.

I’m not suggesting that everyone in the Academy give up tenure and write a novel. The most important thing scholars can do is to remain scholars and to train others to be able to do serious historical research and critical analysis of texts and artifacts. Keep the flame burning. Insist on language skills. Continue to teach and do research as much as possible. And also, please continue in the generous spirit that so many of you have shown, sharing your knowledge with others, like me, who have taken a different route to interpreting the Middle Ages.

With that in mind, it’s time to mention my latest project. Frustrated and outraged by so-called “documentaries” on aspects of the Middle Ages in which scholars I knew were interviewed, only to have their words twisted or ignored in favor of the popular myth, a director friend and I are submitting a proposal to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a multi-part film series on the Middle Ages. We are still in the planning stages, but I’ve already asked some of you about participating in this project. We may not get the funding we need but, if we do, I intend to prove that history presented on film can be accurate as well as entertaining. I shall probably need the help of everyone in the Academy to do it.

Two things I want to be clear on. I intend to have control of content and there will be honoraria. Comments will not be taken out of context. It’s a quixotic undertaking but, as with the novels, I want to reach as many people as I can, hoping that I can make people reevaluate their attitudes about the Middle Ages. Some might even come into classrooms with more open minds. You'll have to take it from there. It is my fervent hope that, together, we might be able to make a dent in popular mythology about the Middle Ages.

Editor’s note: Sharan E. Newman is the author of numerous mysteries set during the Middle Ages, including a series that features the twelfth-century novice nun, Catherine LeVendeur, as a crime-solving sleuth, and a trilogy based on Queen Guinevere. Newman’s latest book, To Wear the White Cloak, is scheduled for publication this October.