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COPYRIGHT 2002 Adam Mickiewicz University Press
ABSTRACT
This paper presents a number of individuals from the last two centuries who, for varying reasons, have been attracted to both medieval studies and action for social change. Karl and Eleanor Marx, William Morris, and F.J. Furnivall are among the illustrious exemplars of this dual tradition, to which Margaret Schlauch, in whose honor this conference was convened, also belonged.
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I begin with two disclaimers. The first is that this is not a formal paper but rather a series of impressions and anecdotes about several people in this and the last century who were committed to medieval studies and to social change. This is because the paper originated as a talk in a panel on women medievalists at the International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo. I was asked to speak about my career and I chose instead to do a prosopographic piece, inserting myself into what could loosely be called a tradition, one to which Margaret Schlauch also belonged. Since the point of being a Marxist is precisely in community, context and history, this seems appropriate, and I am sure that Schlauch (with the modesty I have learned was characteristic of her) would have approved.
My second disclaimer is about the looseness of what I am calling a tradition, because I don not claim to have been directly influenced by any of the people I will mention, except for the first one, who was not a medievalist. I will bring out some points of contact among these individuals and between them and myself as a Marxist medievalist.
Karl Marx wrote about medieval economics, as he had to in order to document the development of mercantile capitalism during the high Middle Ages. These scattered items, collected by Eric Hobsbawm in Precapitalist economic formations, have been used by many cultural historians -- Ernst Fischer, Arnold Hauser, Norbert Elias, Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel, Jacques LeGoff, Perry Anderson among others -- and remain useful to materialist-minded medievalists. Marx well understood the radical intellectual and social innovations of the high medieval period (e.g., the Italian city-state) and admired high medieval culture. He paid special tribute to Dante, ending his preface to the first edition of Capital with a line from "the great Florentine" that might well have served as his own life motto: "Segui il tuo corso e lascia dir le genti". (2)
The beautiful and erudite Eleanor Marx, Karl's oldest daughter, had close friendships with two important figures in nineteenth-century medievalism who themselves were social activists. One was the artist and printer William Morris, with whom Eleanor, along with Friedrich Engels and others, founded the Socialist League in 1884. Morris's medievalism was a lifelong commitment, starting with his childhood reading of the novels of Sir Walter Scott, then reinforced at Oxford by John Ruskin's work, especially "The Nature of Gothic", and by fashionable Anglo-Catholicism (Meier 1978: 95; for other work on Morris's Marxism, see Grennan (1945 [1970]), Boos and Silver (1990), MacDonald (1999)). His early "Defense of Guinevere" (1858) picks up the art-nouveau medievalism of the period (also exhibited in Tennyson's Arthurian cycles, in some of Browning's dramatic monologues, and in the work of several painters) as well as its nascent feminism. His epic The Earthly Paradise is set against the backdrop of the Black Plague; h is "Dream of John Ball" commemorates the leader of the great and nearly successful 1381 rebellion; and his socialist utopia, News from nowhere, combines certain aspects of medieval life with Marxian notions of revolutionary struggle, full genuine socialism and the development of human personality. As a craftsman, Morris produced what has been called one of the most beautiful books ever made, the Kelmscott Chaucer (in 1894). Morris had little use for what he called "the maundering side of medievalism" -- the merely aesthetic attraction to medieval art, and the sentimental romanticization of the period evident in the work of various poets and painters. Instead, Morris constructed a "realistic" medievalism. For him, what tied Marxism and medievalism together was, in his own words, "hatred of modern civilization" -- a hatred generated in turn by "the desire to produce beautiful things ... the love and practice of art" (Briggs 1994: 36-37). In this sense, both his art and his politics were strategies of protest an d of reconstruction.
Eleanor Marx was never as close to William Morris as she was to F.J. Furnivall, the famous editor of medieval texts, founder of the Chaucer, Ballad,...
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