Reflecting on the interplay of historical and social scientific concepts, Roland Betancourt discusses the extent to which current social and cultural trends influence the study of the past. Responding to critiques of current research being ‘presentist’, he argues for the value of historical research through its ability to enlighten understanding of both past and current societies.

In 1940, Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss, established the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, conveying it to Harvard University for the promotion of Byzantine and Medieval scholarship, replete with an extensive art collection, library, and gardens for the enrichment of scholars.

On the garden walls of Dumbarton Oaks, the dedicatory inscription from 1940 reads that the Blisses established Dumbarton Oaks so “that the continuity of scholarship in the Byzantine and Mediaeval Humanities may remain unbroken to clarify an everchanging present and to inform the future with wisdom.”

Across many of our great institutions of learning from the same period, similar declarations can be found, which speak to the expectation that scholarship should contribute to the betterment of society. These statements demand that scholarship not be removed or distant from vicissitudes or questions of its time, but motivated by the imperative to clarify and inform that present with the unique wisdom our scholarship can offer.

For Dumbarton Oaks, the Blisses’s expectations for the impact and power of Byzantine and Medieval Studies in the world are explicit. These expectations also overstep the bounds of how the Humanities are often regarded today, seen as some Quixotic or arcane project, whose lofty proclamations on impact are often relegated to grant proposals and broad justifications for the existence of our departments and disciplines, but are of little efficacy beyond that.

Despite these foundational remits, today we are confronted with widespread charges of “anachronism” and “presentism” by both far-right pundits and even academics, who bemoan (albeit at different places on the political spectrum) the so-called corruption of history with modern concerns often rooted on an intergenerational grumbling about “kids these days” and an alleged demise in rigour.

Often times these critiques forget that the notion of historical anachronism is a distinctly modern invention, one that can be variably traced to the Enlightenment, but that took hold over the course of the twentieth century. This has largely been a product of an exclusionary colonialist and classist project that sought to remove the scholar’s labours from the challenges and problems of our world – while still forging history in his own privileged image. These charges have also been disproportionately lodged against queer, trans, and BIPOC scholars, whose work has actively sought to rethink canonical decrees and to not presume a white, cishet subject as the default.

Within Medieval Studies, a vibrant and ongoing body of scholarship has been rethinking worn out expectations about gender identity, sexuality, and processes of racialization that past scholarship interpreted through its own puritanical and orthodox notions of medieval Christianity, blunting the great diversity and complexity that medieval art and texts evidence.

Today, the imperative — for the Byzantine and Medieval Humanities “to clarify an everchanging present and to inform the future with wisdom” — has made itself as necessary as ever with the spread of Christian nationalism and far-right religious politics that often use the medieval past as the backbone for their political imaginary. Beyond the Middle Ages, we also have witnessed an immense investment in the political manipulations of history, intended to censor much of the research on gender identity, sexuality, and race in history writ-large.

Simultaneously, there has been a dissemination in popular culture of critical terms from the Social Sciences and Humanities; terms like critical race theory and intersectionality. Through the widespread popularisation of these concepts, many are re-evaluating the ways in which they think about, present, and articulate their own identities today. This has led, for example, to a confrontation with the limits of our modern, western gender binary and it has largely normalised conversations on gender identity and pronoun usage that had been previously limited to those with affirming support networks and peers.

Not surprisingly, many lay and academic audiences are now interested in exploring the histories of these identities and their articulations across time. To think about transgender, genderqueer, or non-binary figures in the Middle Ages hardly seems like an anachronism to many today, especially to those who have come to articulate their identities later in life, having experienced these realities before they had a name or term accessible to capture it.

To engage in anachronism, conventionally speaking, is to use present practice to presume how something was done or how a subjectivity was construed in the past. However, to use modern critical terminologies and methodological frameworks to help articulate the complex nuance of the past is just the responsible craft of the historian. Just as a paleographer anachronistically assigns terms to describe the flares and characteristics of an ancient script in order to date, categorize, and trace the development of a handwriting style, a historian is expected to use cutting-edge methodologies to help articulate, parse out, and present arguments for how our premodern sources presented the past.

Today, in response to charges of anachronism, we see what we might refer to as a hyperchronicity, a myopic attachment to historical “facts” that flattens out the complexity of the historian’s craft and fetishizes alterity with that adage of “the past as a foreign country.” Hyperchronicity is a crude knee-jerk response, a new positivism. It is this hyperchronicity — not presentism or anachronism — that presents the greatest challenges to the Humanities today, denying so much of the work done by scholars to emancipate the histories of lives that have been purposely erased or cruelly forgotten.

For Medieval scholarship that seeks to ask questions about gender identity, sexuality, or race, our current moment has gifted us with robust and broad audiences, who often approach our scholarship not through an academic bibliography on queer theory or critical race theory, but through ideas about gender identity, sexuality, and race from academia that have now been popularised across social media.

Like the Blisses, committed to ensuring the unbroken continuity of the Humanistic study of Byzantium and the Middle Ages, it is this so-called anachronism that will make viable the study of these presumably arcane fields for new generations, who once felt marginalised and denied access into these spaces. If something like Byzantine Studies is to survive into the next generation, it will be thanks to scholarship that dares to clarify its vibrant contributions to our world.

While some like to bemoan the weakening of ancient language instruction or the revamping of canonical surveys, these complaints are in denial of the simple fact that what many of these scholars are doing is far harder: it still requires the same flawless language skills in a series of ancient and modern tongues (sometimes to understand a single text and its transmissions), it still requires the same expansive grasp of the historiography, methodologies, and current research in our particular fields and disciplines, and yet it also necessitates a nuanced understanding of methods and theories from across the Humanities and Social Sciences, each with their own intellectual histories, as well as an intimate grasp of the state of the conversation in these adjacent areas, the broader academy, and in the general public — which is critically invested in these debates and wants to engage with work that is as rich and complex as it is accessible and engaging. And, it still requires on-site and archival research that can be a deeply precarious practice for marginalized scholars and near-impossible to undertake when researching certain sensitive issues or topics.

In thinking about the present’s approach to the past, we should take to heart the imperative posed to us by institutions who once believed in the power of our scholarship to inform, disrupt, and repair; that our purpose is “to clarify an everchanging present and to inform the future with wisdom.” We must acknowledge that the dismissive uses of “anachronism” or “presentism” are a product of a Humanistic inquiry that has forgotten the human in its remit.

As if a warning beacon, left behind to spur on future generations, above the Dumbarton Oaks’s dedicatory words stands a foreboding Latin epigram: “Quod severis metes” — “what you sow, you reap.” As academics, we must hasten to this warning and ask what is the future we wish to reap from the histories we sow today.

Roland Betancourt is the author of Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender and Race in the Middle Ages, interested readers can read the review on the LSE Review of Books. 

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Image Credit: Image of Dumbarton Oaks Library reproduced with permission of the authors, feature image detail of Fragment of a Floor Mosaic with a Personification of Ktisis, via The Met (Public Domain).