Medieval Europe: The Original American Area Study

The framing of medieval Europe as a coherent area of study was an American invention of the twentieth century and, as this paper argues, a prototype for later area studies developed to advance American policy agendas. For modern Europeans, the medieval past was the contested terrain of proto-nation states, among whose bellicose successors the continent was destined to be divided. In the United States, by contrast, an earlier ideology of primeval “Anglo-Saxon” exceptionalism (which had influenced statesmen, intellectuals, and artists since the colonial era) had been transformed by the academic study of medieval Europe around the turn of the century, as well as by popular interest in the more diverse European homelands of many American immigrant communities. After World War I, the conceptualization of medieval Europe as a discrete geotemporal region was concretized by the devastation of national states and their cultural patrimony, the fragmentation of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, and the renegotiation of claims to self-determination and sovereignty adjudicated at the Paris Peace Conference—where the first professionally trained American historian of medieval Europe, Charles Homer Haskins, was the special intellectual advisor of Woodrow Wilson. After World War II, the establishment of American medieval studies as a holistic area of interdisciplinary inquiry was further strengthened by expanded access to higher education, including the foundation of programs and centers dedicated to medieval Europe. These developments not only challenged the traditional historiographies of Europeans, they had real impacts on former European colonies and American foreign policy during the Cold War because the historian Joseph Strayer, an advisor to Allen Dulles at the CIA, considered medieval European political institutions to be the best models for restructuring newly decolonized and/or emerging states in ways aligned with American political interests.