Dr. Paula R. Curtis

de Pee notes that if we want to de-center the "global Middle Ages" it suggests that there is something attractive to us about keeping the global Middle Ages. Why is that? Should we be worried about it?

We've brought up the prestige and lineage of the term medieval, its justification of modern nation-states and ethnic identities. There's also the rootedness of the Middle Ages in European academic discourse.

For example, the Western academy is established in China and Japan as a way to legitimize these modern states and construct "acceptable" frameworks. It's very intimately connected with state-making and has repercussions across disciplines, both written and scientific pasts.

But there's also viable and valid ways of extending this idea in different contexts. Even though we say these definitions are arbitrary, they have to be, and they've gathered a myriad of associations that are recognizable & useful. We can make these cultural associations mobile.

There are other reasons to preserve these "Middle Ages" for places outside Europe/the Mediterranean. One of them is sources. All of us here are writing history from fragments. This raises very similar issues in how we think and do history, literature, religion, how we write.

These fragments are, to borrow Cameron Cross' words, our "grammar." He jokes that we can sit and listen to an hour of talking about a single source five times in a row and we think it's normal. Not everyone thinks so!

We are always translating, paraphrasing, categorizing, thinking in terms of the past and our own. From that perspective it's almost inevitable that the European Middle Ages provides some kind of reference point.

The way we write history involves narrative, literary tropes/forms, things that are part of a continuous and shifting dialectical tradition between our sources, a long lineage of people writing about history sharing in the literary tradition of early periods.

This is not true for many of us. We're writing about many traditions from different areas that don't share those narratives, and that's something for us to be aware of in our de-centering process. That we extend it but bring in new narrative forms, tropes, and images.

This desire to extend the Middle Ages rather than abandon them is therefore not only desirable but necessary. It will allow us to learn to see the Mediterranean as an exception, not a model. The Middle Ages is a part of our historiographical tradition.

So extending, transforming it, allows us to do something new at the same time. De-centering may prepare us for non-academic and non-Western tropes as the academy becomes more flexible and open to other areas and backgrounds.

de Pee says that part of his process in this is writing research in language that more readily links to that time and its people and opens up to the sources of his period- he avoids writing with analogies/metaphors like "taking a backseat," for example.

There's also a long history of bad politics behind much of the historiography that we grapple with. The de-centering of the Middle Ages is partly a duty to overcome these politics of race and nationalism that have informed so much of previous conceptualizations.

This world history- because we can't do it on our own, it has to be collaborative. And this is a new mode of writing that historians, especially, are not comfortable with yet. This is new practices, genres, and forms of writing.

de Pee suggests that digital mapping is such a good place to start with this collaboration that we need to do. Things that are shared, visible, and accessible to many people. You can easily, in this process, eliminate the national boundaries.

This may offer a new way to de-center this global medieval past.