20150524.0735

As I have noted, I still have a few more things to say in this webspace about my decreasingly recent trip to Kalamazoo, Michigan, for the 50th International Congress on Medieval Studies. Some of it will work towards untangling and unpacking comments made at the conference that I have found interesting. Today's bit, though, will concern one of the two plenary addresses given, that which I attended: Richard Utz's "The Notion of the Middle Ages: Our Middle Ages, Ourselves." I have written in another venue about the man's work, and I know him to be a luminary in the fields of study with which I associate most strongly, so the chance to hear him give a talk was most welcome.

It was also a rewarding experience. What I take from his argument is the idea that the kind of enthusiasm usually decried in formal scholarship as "amateurish" (typically through a pseudo-scientific motion towards an objectivity that even the sciences acknowledge is unattainable, as witness the observer effect) should instead be embraced. Indeed, those who display that enthusiasm, typically medievalists (as opposed to medieval scholars), should be embraced and their methods at least tested. There is, as I understood Utz to assert, value in recreating and reenacting events and likely hypotheticals, and many of the "amateurs" devote more resources to their "hobby" than scholars do to their scholarship. (How much of this is a result of externally imposed budget concerns, though, I am uncertain, and I do not recall Utz addressing the point.) After all, most who enter medieval scholarship--any scholarship, really--do so through an intense love of the subject matter, an affect frequently condemned by those scholars later as leading to blindness and/or sloppy work (and, indeed, such assertions do sometimes prove true; love for a thing should not blind the lover to the failings of that thing) but one that yet exerts a powerful influence.

The talk put me in mind, in part, of Mark Edmundson's "Against Readings," something about which I commented early in this blogroll and to which I seem to return from time to time (including in my teaching materials). There is peril in scholars disconnecting themselves from the love of topic that leads them into the work they do. There is peril in seeking to create distance between the worker and the work; alienation of labor is a thing much decried in its occurrences outside the academy, although it seems that the work the academy does moves in a similar direction. The thought occurs that it is that separation, done deliberately, that helps create or at least lends to the support of the idea of humanities scholarship as a thing not worth doing, as a dry and sucking thing that drains the life and love of the world from those who partake of it. What I take from Utz, and what I have long taken form Edmundson, is that there is a great need to embody the love of The Work that leads to doing The Work. If we as scholars of the humanities expect others to see that our work has value, we need to act as if it does, and we can only do that by embracing love for it, by being "amateurs" as well as professionals.