The Idea of Origins in Medieval Historiography (Twentieth Century)

As the professional sub-discipline of medieval history came together in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, theories of progress were grafted onto the existing stock of narratives of medieval history. In the North American medieval community, a new outline for teaching and thinking about medieval history came into being. A major goal was to justify study of the European middle ages by claiming the period as the point of origins for modern phenomena, a tendency epitomized by Joseph R. Strayer's On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State. This mode of thinking about medieval history subsequently dominated much of the twentieth century. This paper will try to illuminate the origins of this origins-talk, assess its impact on the study of the European middle ages, and ask whether the model is still viable. This is a historiographical paper: major sources include the genealogies of prominent textbooks and other general medieval histories, along with disciplinary assessments published periodically in journals and reviews since the 1920s. The emergence of origins-talk in the early twentieth century was tightly linked to History's incorporation of theories of progress or development that are no longer in good odor. This paper argues that the growing exclusion of medieval European history from history departments—as measured by such things as diminishing contacts between medievalists and postmedievalists, progressively fewer medieval historical contributions to historical journals, and declining numbers of medieval faculty in some departments of history—is in part a product of medieval history's dependence on talk of origins. I will also explore briefly some of the theoretical moves in recent decades, inaugurated by Foucault, Habermas, and others, that have situated the origins of "modernity" in the more recent past and thereby further marginalized medieval European history.