David Aers

Medievalists and Deconstruction: An Exemplum

During the postwar period the work of those specialising in medieval literature, normally employed in semi-autonomous departments of Middle English language and literature, habitually assumed a thoroughly complacent resistance to any theoretical and political self-reflection. The paradigms determining teaching and research remained invisible to practitioners who took pride in their scholarly objectivity. When major currents of modern philosophical, historical, cultural, psycho-analytical, political and theological inquiry entered adjacent domains of literary studies, professional medievalists remained confident that there was no need to engage with such currents. It was simply assumed that such engagement could not improve either self-knowledge or knowledge of the past. This mistaken belief continued to prevent medievalists from making their own paradigms topics for critical reflection, even though these paradigms carried absolutely decisive theoretical and political views. A mixture of naive positivism and varieties of distinctly modern political conservatism, these paradigms inevitably shaped the version of the past handed out to students as well as the version of medieval texts approved in the respectable professional journals. This history needs recalling but needs no further elaboration here since it has been told and documented by Lee Patterson in recent studies which are themselves outstanding models of critical historiography and which deserve to become major reference points for those working in medieval studies.1

Visionary Eschatology: Piers Plowman

In its later versions Piers Plowman is a long, complex poem of extraordinary formal, theological, and political complexity. It is one of the greatest Christian poems. Written in a period of unprecedented conflict in English polities, including the Church, it was passionately involved in exploring many of these conflicts while seeking to imagine projects of Reformation. The poem includes fascinating reflections on diverse eschatological traditions within the late medieval Church, including neo-Joachite ones. Subjecting both the contemporary Church and such eschatologies to sustained critique, the author evolves a profoundly Christocentric vision in the light of which triumphant narratives of the Church would emerge as among the opiates threatening the Church at the poems close.