Master Narratives of the Middle Ages: Introduction

by Maura Nolan, University of California, Berkeley

For some years now, medieval literary studies has been characterized by an intense focus on the local and particular and a resistance to the global— a resistance that arose in part as a reaction to totalizing practices of literary criticism like Robertsonian exegetics and in part as an embrace of the historical over the formal, especially as it was embodied in New Criticism. Scholars have performed remarkable feats of historicist and textual localism, discovering that a gaze calibrated to the detail can paint a new picture filled with texts and contexts ignored or forgotten. At the same time, however, it must be recognized that the medieval period itself was an age of totalization, of explanatory models (like the three estates), taxonomies (the seven deadly sins), and founding myths and narratives (Troy, Rome). It is into this disjuncture between the localism of recent criticism and the totalizing character of medieval explanatory models of knowledge production that the essays collected in this special issue seek to insert themselves. Each contributor sets out to look anew at a "master narrative"—whether it is medieval or modern—and to evaluate its usefulness with a measure of objectivity, resisting the poststructuralist temptation to reject such narratives out of hand and finding in the longue durée (to use Rita Copeland's example) a mode of analysis both revealing and practically useful.