5 - Co-disciplinarity

Summary

THINKING CRITICALLY ABOUT medievalism invites us to reassess the boundaries of modern academic disciplines and explore manifold conceptual approaches to the past. On their most basic level, studies of medievalism require cognitive multitasking – a sort of channel-flipping orientation toward time. That is, scholars who study medievalism enact modes of inquiry that sustain at the very least two temporal mindsets at once. First, they attend to how works (literature, art, music) were understood and used in their own time. Second, they investigate how people in later periods (including the present) engage with or recreate such materials.

In order to investigate a diverse range of cultural productions that engage with some notions of the past, academic studies of medievalism span a number of established disciplines and modes of inquiry: literary criticism, art history, and cinema studies, to name just a few. In this essay, I would like to posit “co-disciplinarity” as a key feature of medievalism studies within the academy but also outside of it. By this term co-disciplinarity, I do not simply refer to more familiar “multidisciplinary” or “cross-disciplinary” models of scholarly teamwork in which two or more people trained in different disciplines join forces to examine a shared object with the benefit of their respective interpretive skill sets. In this model of interaction, for instance, a literary scholar and an art historian might examine Pre-Raphaelite paintings that incorporate allusions to medieval narratives. For the purposes of this discussion, co-disciplinarity entails a shared intellectual and creative zone. Co-disciplinarity is a feature of any institutional, non-academic, or virtual space that allows an individual or a group of people to test the very conventions of academic disciplines and to experiment across diverse modes of artistic production.

This consideration of co-disciplinarity takes medievalism's conspicuous concurrence of temporalities as its conceptual starting point. Pivoting from a recent turn in medievalism studies that breaks down conceptual distinctions between professional (i.e., academic) medievalist scholarship and so-called “amateur” modes of medievalism, I emphasize the sense of “queer time” that medievalism so often engenders. In this essay, I reflect on current developments in medievalism scholar ship, and also offer a kind of manifesto outlining unrealized possibilities.