Preface

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199650484.002.0006

Front Matter

Preface

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https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199650484.002.0006

Pages

vi–xii

Published:

September 2013

Extract

All books have specific contexts, and this one is no exception. Its subject matter is the changing interpretation within Europe of the end of the Roman Empire and the early Middle Ages from the eighteenth century to the present and how individual interpretations influenced and were influenced by the circumstances in which they were written. The underlying question of the book, however, is a related but slightly different one: why is early medieval history, or indeed any pre-modern history, important? This question was raised in a very sharp way by the then education secretary, Charles Clarke, in May 2003 when he allegedly stated ‘I don’t mind there being some medievalists around for ornamental purposes but there is no reason for the state to pay for them.’¹ A similar vision seems to underlie the Coalition Government's views of the place of the Humanities in Higher Education since 2010.

Modern historians can claim that they have a function in policing the use and abuse of the immediate past, some of which impinges unquestionably on the present.² Certainly history can and sometimes has to be a fact-checking exercise: but facts, particularly those relating to the distant past are often not amenable to strict verification. Moreover, interpretation is frequently an issue that is not black and white, and uncertainty is even more likely to affect our reading of the Middle Ages than of the modern period. Nevertheless, the issue of use and abuse is as relevant to interpreting the sixth as the twentieth century.³ The Middle Ages are used and abused all the time.⁴ Part of a response to Charles Clarke must therefore be that Medieval History is often exploited improperly, and this should not be allowed to pass without comment. At first sight, however, the misuse of Medieval History is insignificant: it is most obvious in the tendency of journalists and politicians to describe as ‘medieval’ or ‘dark age’ an atrocity that could only have happened in the nineteenth, twentieth, or twenty-first century: that is, when the word ‘modern’ would be more accurate.⁵ It is easy to dismiss political rhetoric as nothing other than words. Yet rhetoric does matter, and the use of words like ‘medieval’ in modern discourse involves the exploitation of the past.

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