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Spatial Struggles: Medieval Studies between Nationalism and Globalization
Frits van Oostrom, University
of Utrecht
Und die einen sind
im Dunkeln, und die anderen stehen im Licht.
Doch man sieht nur die im Lichte; die im Dunkeln, sieht man nicht.
—Bertolt Brecht
Like any hermeneutical discipline, medieval studies are characterized by
a very close relation between object and subject and, therefore, by historical
representations that are influenced by the position of the modern scholar.
Every one of us knows cases from our own specialization in which the medievalist
work done by predecessors seems to say at least as much about their own
preoccupations at the time as it does about the Middle Ages. Even in those
cases where this is less conspicuous, the preferences, projections, and
blind spots of the scholar of medieval studies greatly determine the choice
of object, the perspective, and the interpretation and phrasing of insights.
Much current medievalist research gladly undertakes the deconstruction of
the anachronisms in nineteenth-century medieval studies, which itself had
started to liberate the Middle Ages from the contempt of humanists and the
Enlightenment. Like all historical disciplines, medieval studies is in a
process of being continuously scratched and varnished; and the more medieval
studies ages and grows, the more our work is written on palimpsest.
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