This chapter explores what historical significance Manicheism has for the work of Frantz Fanon. It explores the role that St. Augustine’s anti-Manicheism might play in Fanon’s thinking, and the ways in which members of the Front de Libération Nationale in the Algerian war were deeply conscious of the historical terrain of Manicheism. This chapter argues that the quasi-Hegelian absolute negative is Fanon’s most powerful rebuke to both conventional Hegelian dialectic itself, and to the colonial manicheism that Fanon urges the colonized to overcome.

This essay interprets Erwin Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism of 1951 by situating the book within the Marburgian tradition of neo-Kantian philosophy. To do so, Panofsky’s relation to Marburgian neo-Kantianism is first contextualized and explicated, specifically by way of his well-known relationship to Ernst Cassirer and his own programmatic statements about art historical method. With this foundation in place, Panofsky’s specific claims in Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism are positioned as an attempted art-historical translation of the Marburgian commitment to ground knowledge on underlying structures of knowledge. Panofsky’s effort in this regard is shown to relate to nomological traditions of scholarship, wherein covering laws are an express and essential aim of research. Interpreting Panofsky’s argument in this way helps clarify the book’s uneven reception in the humanities, wherein an ideographic approach focusing on historical specificity for its own sake is a more accepted norm.

Ernst Robert Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages remains a monumental achievement of postwar scholarship, whose vast scope – spanning a continent and more than a millennium – has kept it continuously relevant. However, its strangely atemporal view of literature, its treatment of medieval Latin as a medium (rather than a creative literature in its own right), and its peculiar structure have likewise been criticized since its publication. This essay argues that ELLMA’s virtues and faults are intertwined, and that both are inseparable from Curtius’s use of the psychoanalytic theories of C.G. Jung. Adapting Jung’s theories of archetypes and the stratified collective unconscious to literary study, Curtius reimagined medieval Latin as the collective unconscious of modern European literature. This boldly creative decision allowed him to achieve his goal: a reparative vision of a Europe forever unified through classical education.

The mid-twentieth century gave rise to a rich array of new approaches to the study of the Middle Ages by both professional medievalists and those more well-known from other pursuits, many of whom continue to exert their influence over politics, art, and history today. Attending to the work of a diverse and transnational group of intellectuals – Hannah Arendt, Erich Auerbach, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Erwin Panofsky, Simone Weil, among others – the essays in this volume shed light on these thinkers in relation to one another and on the persistence of their legacies in our own time. This interdisciplinary collection gives us a fuller and clearer sense of how these figures made some of their most enduring contributions with medieval culture in mind. Thinking of the Medieval is a timely reminder of just how vital the Middle Ages have been in shaping modern thought.

In The King’s Two Bodies, Ernest Kantorowicz explores the fusion of corporate office with the private person occupying this office, considering the historical and legal issues within this topic. Kantorowicz, however, was also to fuse his ongoing study of the past with his own office as professor in his refusal to sign the oath of loyalty requested by the University of California regents, 1949. Kantorowicz’s intellectual life as a medieval historian informed his decision not to sign the oath – in contrast to his Berkeley colleague, the Renaissance scholar, Leonardo Olschki. This example shows not only how one fashions one’s scholarly work, but how one is, perhaps on the deepest level, fashioned by the working out of one’s mental life. This chapter also considers how Kantorowicz incorporated pivotal concepts from his past, in this case, the notion of sovereignty from Carl Schmitt.

This essay argues that Simone Weil and her early editors fashioned her as a modern iteration of the medieval mystics, replicating a key feature of the archive of medieval women’s mystical writing: the construction of medieval women’s textual afterlives by male clerics. Though scholars have often observed parallels between Weil and the medieval mystics, the ways in which Weil and her editors effect this parallel have not been thoroughly explored. Weil and her editors constructed her as a Christian mystic – drawing both on contemporary discussions of the topic, and on the archive of medieval mysticism for points of comparison – in a distinctly modern sense of the term, as it was coming to be understood in twentieth-century France. Together, they transform her image much as the advisors and amanuenses of the medieval mystics did in transmitting their works into modernity.

In 1980, Paul Zumthor published Parler du moyen age, an elegant little book on the state of the discipline and the task of the medievalist, tracing a history of medieval studies from its pre-war romanticism and positivism up to Zumthor’s own view from the horizon of the late 1970s. Through this retrospective, Zumthor in part recounts the transformation of the field by medievalists like Auerbach, Curtius, and Spitzer, but also positions himself as a kind of bridge between that generation of medievalists whose most influential works came out in the years immediately following WWII and the work of medievalists today, with the rise of post-structuralism, for instance, breaking in between. One of the central concerns of the book is precisely this movement between eras, not only between postwar medievalism and its romantic heritage, but also between the present moment of a reader and the objects of the past being read. Such concerns with interpretation across historical distance have a long and crucial history in the field of hermeneutics, which reached its peak between the 1960s and 1980s. Following Zumthor’s lead, therefore, this chapter will look backwards, performing a genealogy of philosophical and literary hermeneutics that traces Zumthor’s engagement with this tradition – particularly his engagement with Hans Robert Jauss, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and his friend Roland Barthes – and attends to the place of the medieval in it.

The mid-twentieth century gave rise to a rich array of new approaches to the study of the Middle Ages by both professional medievalists and those more well-known from other pursuits, many of whom continue to exert their influence over politics, art, and history today. Attending to the work of a diverse and transnational group of intellectuals – Hannah Arendt, Erich Auerbach, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Erwin Panofsky, Simone Weil, among others – the essays in this volume shed light on these thinkers in relation to one another and on the persistence of their legacies in our own time. This interdisciplinary collection gives us a fuller and clearer sense of how these figures made some of their most enduring contributions with medieval culture in mind. Thinking of the Medieval is a timely reminder of just how vital the Middle Ages have been in shaping modern thought.

Known for her detective fiction, Dorothy L. Sayers – having received early training in medieval continental romance and languages –dedicated the final decade of her life to her true passion project: her Penguin translation of The Divine Comedy. Her Dante, read by millions, was a fellow master of story-telling: funny, self-deprecating, passionate. In her letters and lectures, she constructed vivid fantasies of Dante as a living man, centering particularly around her readings of a controversial erotic canzone. This chapter reads these fantasies not as transparent escapism from a troubled personal life but, in conjunction with her feminist essays and treatment of the complex sexual politics of Dante’s ‘Terrible Ode’, as a performance of self-authorization, mitigating the audacity of a detective novelist ‘doing’ Dante by modelling alternative relations with medieval authority. This chapter thus reveals a feminist function of fantasies of the Middle Ages in the modern scholarly imaginary.

This essay introduces the medievalism of African American sociologist and activist W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois’s medievalism, a device to promote the ends of racial justices, also becomes a critical and epistemic tool, a lens through which to view and analyze the present by using the European Middle Ages for comparison and as a metaphor. Examining fictional, sociological, and historical writings, the essay traces Du Bois’s deployments of the Middle Ages from the first decade of the twentieth century to just after the second World War. It considers Du Bois’s early short story “The Princess Steel”; Du Bois’s interwar medievalism through his 1928 novel Dark Princess; and finally his 1947 speech “Color and Democracy” after his book of the same name. The essay establishes that Du Bois employed a sophisticated medievalism strategically in order to assert African Americans’ equal access to and ownership of US and European history and culture.

The tendency in our political moment for fascists to appropriate medieval symbols and stories for their own ends was preceded by the same phenomenon in the middle of the twentieth century. Then, as now, thinkers of various kinds challenged the Nazi mischaracterization of the Middle Ages, with some thinkers going even further, finding in the medieval world potential solutions to problems that plague modernity. Hannah Arendt was one of those thinkers. Her engagement with the Middle Ages was profound, stemming from her dissertation on St Augustine, to her sustained discussion of both Augustine and John Duns Scotus in her final work, The Life of the Mind. Arendt’s appropriation of these thinkers was political in the early part of her career, in which Augustine provided her with a framework for a political community based on the shared experience of loving one’s neighbor, a vision she articulated in her dissertation, Love and Saint Augustine, but that also appeared at key moments as a potential solution to the problems discussed in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Later in her career, Arendt’s writings on medieval thinkers turned more phenomenological, as she explored those aspects of the human condition that underpinned her earlier political work. For Arendt, Augustine, and especially Duns Scotus, provided a robust understanding of free will, which is necessary for political activity and the creation of new forms of living together. Ultimately, Arendt beliefs, especially about race, make it impossible to uncritically adopt her positions in our own moment. And yet, her thoughts about the Middle Ages can still provide us important ways to think about our present crises.