The Middle Ages Never Ended

Did you know that the 1990 Christmas classic Home Alone is actually a blood libel allegory? Think about it: a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Christian boy is robbed on Christmas by two stereotypically Jewish-presenting men. It doesn’t sound all that unlike the medieval antisemitic trope in which Jews were falsely accused of engaging in the ritual murder of Christian children. Am I reading too much into this? Maybe. I study medieval literature, so it’s sort of my job.

We often think of the Middle Ages (or popularly dubbed “Dark Ages”) as a time period of no significant intellectual output, an era that gets lost somewhere between classical antiquity and the Renaissance. Perhaps that is why we as medievalists choose to study it; we are drawn in by virtue of its obscurity.

Once one becomes properly acquainted with the joys (and horrors) of the medieval, they start to show up everywhere. In other words: Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. This brings me back to Home Alone, which was the last thing I expected to be discussing in my seminar on medieval identities. The concept of the blood libel (along with other antisemitic tropes) gained popularity around the Crusades as anti-Judaic sentiment was on the rise. When discussing, more broadly, medieval anxieties about the Eucharist, my professor posed a semi-rhetorical question: Did people actually believe in this stuff? 

It all comes down to the nature of truth, she said. Using the Holy Grail, a trope popularised by Arthurian legend, as an example, did medieval Christians actually believe that the cup from which Jesus supposedly drank at the Last Supper had divine powers? Of course, we can only speculate as to what medieval people would have thought when they read or heard some version of Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval. My professor’s answer to this question struck me. She explained that while they may not have believed in the literal truth of the Grail, they certainly believed in it in the abstract. So the short answer is yes.

These truths, which appear in medieval tropes such as the blood libel, the Eucharist, courtly love or the Holy Grail, do not simply disappear with time, nor do the motifs that reflect them. 

In the broadest of terms, a great deal of the literature conceived of in the Middle Ages was, like much of modern (especially popular) literature, organised around a set of tropes that gave a voice to the dominant beliefs, values and fears of the time. Depictions of courtly love allowed people to contemplate and reconcile anxieties around romantic love with church doctrine. The notion of the impending apocalypse served to express the deeply felt eschatological dread across many medieval religions. 

As in modern fiction, these tropes operated within a simultaneously entertaining and morally instructive context. What is literature if not a mirror for society? Medieval motifs appear in modern literature, of course, but they remain relevant beyond fictional contexts, perhaps more so than ever.

When I watch a modern politician publicly apologise for infidelity, I think of the medieval practice of confession. When I hear the term “fake news,” I am reminded of the near-mystical power of the written word in many medieval cultures and the perceived dangers of misinterpretation. When I think about the medical and moral policing of women’s bodies today, I can hardly tell the difference between that and the medieval treatment of the dually sacred and corrupt female body.

I have been, of course, trained to notice these things. Their ubiquitousness, however, grants them importance beyond the realm of literary scholars.

When asked why I study medieval literature, I often cite the following exam

ple: The ever-present existential crisis of climate change consistently reminds me of medieval apocalypse anxiety. It was commonly believed, particularly within medieval Christianity, that the end was nigh. This anxiety gave shape to the way people interacted with the world, especially in a moral sense. How might we contend with that same feeling? Will we ignore it, crumble under the weight of it or allow it to spur us into action?

Perhaps we ought to look to medieval literature for counsel. If we are living in the end times, then it may be equally true that we are living in our very own Middle Ages.

Illustration by Ramona Kirkham