Boydell & Brewer

D. S. Brewer

Chapter Title: Conclusion: Medievalism as an Alternative Modernity

Book Title: Medievalist Enlightenment

Book Subtitle: From Charles Perrault to Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Book Author(s): Alicia C. Montoya
Published by: Boydell & Brewer, D. S. Brewer. (2013)
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7722/j.ctt284t40.11

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Conclusion: Medievalism as an Alternative
Modernity

I
n a provocative book about “the hidden agenda of modernity”, Stephen
Toulmin has argued that modernity entailed a major philosophical shift. This was
a shift from the oral to the written, from the particular to the universal, from the
local to the general, from the timely to the timeless, and from humanism to ration-
alism. The new modernity, whose rise Toulmin dates back to the major works of
Descartes in the 1630s and 1640s, was marked by the “pursuit of mathematical exacti-
tude and logical rigor, intellectual certainty and moral purity”. While earlier thinkers
had questioned the value of abstract theory for concrete human experience, the new
philosophy instead sought to describe the world by recourse to timeless, abstract uni-
versals. And while older traditions had taken into account the historical embededness
and circumstantial character of particular practices, valuing the transitory for itself,
the new worldview privileged structures that were perceived as unchanging, overrid-
ing historical context or situatedness. Modernity, in short, entailed the replacement of
an organicist paradigm by a newer, Cartesian paradigm of rationalist idealism, analytic
separation between fields, and between the observing subject and the world that was
the object of his observation.
Viewed against Toulmin’s account of the making of modernity, the literary medi-
evalism of the early Enlightenment may at first sight appear to be an expression of
the older paradigm. Indeed, medievalism too privileged orality, the particular and
local, the historically situated, and praxis over abstract theory. Medievalism, according
to this reading, offered another path to understanding, which rejected the analyti-
cal detachment first proposed by Descartes and imitated throughout the ensuing age
of Reason. Medievalism instead foregrounded organicist or contextualized under-
standing, performativity, affective engagement and notions of continuity, even of
simultaneity between past and present. This view of medievalism as an alternative to

  Toulmin, Cosmopolis, 30–42.

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Toulmin, Cosmopolis, x.

221

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222 Medievalist Enlightenment

Cartesian modernity was propagated in its own day. Throughout the eighteenth cen-
tury, prominent authors stressed the supposed opposition between medieval obscurity
and modern-day progress. To the most progressive philosophes, the medieval “Dark
Ages” provided a useful foil to the modern “Age of Light”. The medieval past played
an important role, most notably, in the defining Enlightenment debate about whether
history progressed in a linear, cumulative fashion towards a morally superior state
of civilization, or rather, degenerated or moved cyclically – as that ultimate critic
of modernity, Rousseau, polemically maintained. In the foundational rhetorics of
modernity, the medieval stood in for the superseded, the irrational, for the bodily
and the emotive, and for the female, while the modern stood for all those values the
Enlightenment philosophes held dear: historical progress, the rational, the universal,
the male.
But in fact, the picture is more complicated than either Toulmin’s account or the
philosophes’ own discourse suggest. Toulmin’s account, to begin with, exaggerates the
hegemony of a rationalist, disembodied epistemology in the making of modernity.
While rationalist idealism did play a foundational role in the new modernity, much
of Enlightenment thought, from Descartes himself – the author also of the Passions
de l’âme – onwards, sought to revalorize the passions that were central also to the
medievalist paradigm. Similarly, the sensationist, Lockean epistemology adopted
by the Encyclopédie contested the disembodiment essential to the Cartesian view.
Despite the rhetorics adopted by some Enlightenment authors, many of them contin-
ued to work within a modernized version of the earlier, organicist paradigm. There
is perhaps no better example of this basic ambivalence than the greatest of all “insid-
ers on the outside”, or “autocritics” of the Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Rousseau has indeed played a key role in this book, as a figure who both embodied the
Enlightenment’s most stridently anti-medieval rhetorics, and yet saw in the “first age
of mankind”, equated with the medieval, a powerful antidote for the ills of modern,
corrupted society.
The medievalism of the early Enlightenment could more productively be described,
then, not as an alternative to modernity, but as an alternative form of modernity. For
this medievalism was unthinkable without modernity itself, as its foremost representa-
tives well realized, even as they struggled with the intellectual impact of Cartesian
rationalism. One of the pivotal issues in the writings of another author central to this
book, Madame de Sévigné, was the value to be accorded to disembodied reasoning, as
she vigourously debated with her daughter the meaning of the Cartesian revolution.
Acording to Longino Farrell, the Aristotelian Sévigné expressed profound skepticism
regarding Descartes’s privileging of abstract reason. This was in conformity with her
“class bias eschewing the notion of work, application, patience, purpose … all that
smacked of pedantry and compromised the wit and spontaneity in which she and her
circle of friends prided themselves.” She was not alone in this, for – as Roy Porter has
argued, and as the present book has sought to demonstrate – the worldview of the

    ����������
Hulliung, The Autocritique of Enlightenment.
   �����������������
Longino Farrell, Performing Motherhood, 259.

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 Conclusion 223

aristocratic elites of the Enlightenment was essentially a psychosomatic rather than

a Cartesian one. This was an important point of intersection between medievalism
and aristocratic culture. For medieval chivalry, as the ultimate expression of nobility
(noblesse), expressed itself not through analytic reflection, but through lived experi-
ence, embodied codes and ways of being-in-the-world, to use Ricoeur’s expression.
The reference to the medieval thus had not only a historical dimension, but also an
aesthetic and a moral one.
As revealing as Sévigné’s resistance to Descartes was the manner in which she
expressed it. Drawing on a rich aristocratic tradition of embodied forms of under-
standing, she opposed Descartes’s ideas by contrasting her own supposedly natural,
negligent style, and her own supposedly unreflexive way of being-in-the-world –
epitomized by her living her life as a medievalist novel – to his abstract method. To
Descartes’s reliance on the “book of the world”, she opposed the truth-value of fic-
tion, a truth-value embraced by all those aristocratic amateurs who, by performing the
medieval through various literary salon games, made the past come alive again, in a
series of resurrectional rituals – opera, fairy tales, romances – that continue to speak
to readers today. As Longino Farrell notes, “the Descartes motif served as a vehicle for
the articulation of [Sévigné’s] repeated refusal of method, coherent enough to consti-
tute itself a system of valuation. She consistently, but always obliquely, opposed her
sociability, her affectivity, her imagination and spontaneity to his reclusiveness, his
intellectualness, his reason, and his cautious analyses.”
But as these exchanges also make clear, it was precisely through the confrontation
with Cartesian thought, as the herald of modernity, that authors gained a clearer view
of their own epistemological positioning in the world. Sévigné’s medievalism emerged
most self-consciously in the 1680s and 1690s, i.e. as the legacy of Cartesianism was
beginning to coalesce, and as modernity itself was becoming an inescapable real-
ity for aristocratic amateurs such as herself. What took place during the the early
Enlightenment rediscovery of the medieval, then, was not so much the forcible replace-
ment of one paradigm by another – as the academicians working at the Académie
des Inscriptions would have their readers believe – but rather, a unique confrontation
between two worldviews. Medievalism did not simply oppose two epistemologies – an
aristocratic, embodied one and a bourgeois, analytic one – but saw them engage in
active and often spirited dialogue. In a sense, these decades saw the medieval past,
represented by the aristocrats’ living, performative memory of their own glorious
family histories, meet the modern present, incarnated by the figure of the progressive,
philosophe-friendly scholar. Out of this encounter arose a new self-consciousness, as
aristocrats became aware of their own engagement with the past – at the very same
moment as, with the creation of the modern absolutist state, that past started to break
irretrievably away from them.
Early Enlightenment medievalism was, therefore, a fundamentally modern phe-
nomenon. It took the memory of the medieval, incarnated by longstanding aristocratic

   ����������������������������������
Porter, “‘Barely Touching’”, 47–9.
   �����������������
Longino Farrell, Performing Motherhood, 254.

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224 Medievalist Enlightenment

practices and beliefs, and reintegrated it in a new historical setting. Through its deci-
sive encounter with rationalist, Cartesian modernity, medievalism made possible a
new intellectual understanding of the past where, previously, there had been only the
richness of centuries-old aristocratic praxis. Modernity itself was not a monolithic
condition, but a model that allowed for multiple, even contradictory interpretations
of the world – justifying the increasing reference, in recent scholarship, to “multi-
ple” or “alternative modernities”. As Charles Taylor has written, European modernity
was characterized by the disintegration of a Christian, hegemonic worldview and its
replacement by a model in which different ways of understanding the world, including
a religious one, could coexist. Seen in this perspective, the coexistence of aristocratic,
literary medievalism and bourgeois, rationalistic modernism was not so much a con-
tradiction as an expression of modernity’s own defining pluralism. Such pluralism was
evident, among others, in early Enlightenment reconfigurations of medieval love, that
united apparently contradictory pagan eros and Christian agape in a single, heterog-
enous rather than synthetic model.
Medievalism, in conclusion, represented not a historical throwback or a nostalgic,
reactionary longing for an earlier time, but a distinct variety of modernity. This was
an alternative modernity that, rather than emphasizing its radical break with the past,
attempted to integrate elements of the past into a new, organicist view of history and
society. Finding meaning in the primitive language of mankind, equated with music,
it privileged pure expressivity above language and textuality. Starting with Chapelain,
this modernity rehabilitated the vieux romans that classicist doctrine had rejected as
morally corrupting, helping to shape novel notions of private reading as an activity
undertaken for personal pleasure, and reflecting a new, bourgeois interiority. By con-
testing aspects of the scholarship of the Académie des Inscriptions, it proposed an
ideal of emotional engagement with a past that refused to die, or a true “touch across
time”. And in positing that the bonds of affection between mothers and children,
between husband and wife could become the locus of a new communion and / or tran-
scendence, i.e. by sacralizing human erotics, it reintroduced religious meaning into
an increasingly secularizing world. In short, the literary medievalism of the decades
from the 1680s to the 1750s lay the bases for much of the Enlightenment’s modernity.
Understanding this medievalism is crucial not only to understanding the parameters
within which we have ourselves come to conceive of the medieval, but also to under-
standing the epistemological debates on which modernity itself was built.

   ��������
Taylor, A Secular Age, 20–1.

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