The romance of miscegenation: Negotiating identities in La Fille du comte de Pontieu

Abstract

It would of course be ludicrous to fault modern critics for denying the "co-evalness" of the middle ages.1 After all, its very name defines this thousand-year chunk of Western history as that which we are not-the time before Modernity2 Yet this delineation of a Time Before bears an uncanny resemblance to the "othering" process that, since Said, it has become our second nature to recognize, analyze, and criticize. In fact, like "the Orient," the Middle Ages have long served as a repository of the abject and the exotic against which modernity is constructed. The coincidence is more than structural, for medievalism, like Orientalism and often linked to it, was one of the nineteenth century’s abiding obsessions.3 In recent popular usage, "medieval" is often used as shorthand for everything dark and perverse, as in the famous line from Quentin Tarantino’s.4 Nor does it fare better in academic discourse. Carolyn Dinshaw, for example, notes how Homi Bhabha’s notion of the radical hybridity of postmodern identities is bought "at the cost of the medieval."5 As capacious a thinker as Sylvia Wynter launches her deconstruction of modernity by pushing off from the static, essentializing view of. "Latin-Christian Europe" characterized by its "orthodox ChristianAristotelian physics" and its "clergy-controlled Scholastic order of knowledge."6.