Category: Medievalism blog

Donna Trembinski, St. Francis Xavier University 

Western-style universities were founded in the Middle Ages.  One doesn’t need to look very far to see evidence of this today. The pageantry of university gowns and ceremony, fraternities, common meals in refectories all stem from medieval antecedents. For the most part, such medieval-inspired nostalgia on today’s university are the generally frivolous trappings of an institution steeped in history, or, more accurately for Canada, an institution that wants to project the image it is permeated with history and custom. Not all medievalisms in university settings are so harmless, however. For instance, most universities in Canada police their own communities. They have codes of conduct that are expected to be followed and infractions of the codes are policed by internal security forces and internal justice systems. That modern universities in Canada have become essentially a law until themselves is somewhat surprising, until we remember that this too has its roots in the structure and operations of medieval universities. 

The oldest university in Europe is probably at Bologna, founded in the mid-eleventh century. Soon after, other centres of higher learning were founded; Oxford and Paris by the end of the twelfth century and many others in the decades after that. Before the advent of these centres of higher learning, monasteries, cathedrals and mosques were the centres of higher learning, and indeed, medieval universities retained many of the characteristics of learning that had developed in these religious institutions. Just as institutions of higher learning grew enormously in Islamicate lands in the period from the 10^th-14^th c, so too did medieval universities.  By 1400, there were  more than 40 universities in Europe. Almost all these universities still exist in some form or another today. 

Figure 1: A sixteenth century image of masters in robes at the University of Paris    

Source: Wikimedia Commons 

Medievalism in modern university settings has not yet merited a great deal of attention, but evidence of the medieval origins of the institution and nostalgia for that medieval past can be found all over university campuses. The black gowns and colourful “caps”  students wear for ceremonies? Those have their origins in the clerical robes most students wore in the Middle Ages (See Figure 1). Oral examinations or defenses? These too, have their origins in the disputationes of medieval universities, in which students and masters debated the important intellectual questions of the day.  Fraternities and houses? Those too, are explicitly medieval. Called nationes each house had its own distinct character. 

A less clear, but nonetheless apparent medieval lineage can be found for university codes of conduct and disciplinary tribunals; a university’s own “court” system tasked to mete out justice and penance when infractions occur. Students at medieval universities were clerics. This meant that they were maintained by church funds and were regarded as members of the church. As such, university students had the right to be tried in ecclesiastical courts rather than town courts when they committed crimes. Functionally this meant that many universities had their own courts with jurisdiction over students and other members of the university community.  

Figure 2: A medieval illumination showing students drinking and being sick.  

Source: The Times Higher Education 

This became a bone of contention between university students and towns people, especially as medieval university students had a reputation for participating in the more unsavory aspects of university life, drinking, carousing, fighting. Students frequently clashed with local landlords, pub owners, merchants and town officials. But when they were called to face the penalties of their crimes, town officials had no recourse but the university courts which were more favourable and lenient to students. Punishments in these courts generally consisted of doing penance and small fines, rather than the corporeal punishment that might have been meted out in town courts. Understandably, medieval townsfolk sometimes resented the privilege students had to be tried in university courts.  

Though some of the powers of university courts were stripped in the early modern and modern periods, to a large extent, universities still police themselves as they did in the Middle Ages. Most universities have codes of conduct by which students are expected to abide. These codes of conduct regulate all manner of infractions from sexual assault, to academic misconduct like plagiarism and cheating, to prohibited drug use on campus. Though many infractions regulated by student codes of conduct are criminal and, as such, governed by federal, provincial or local laws, policing, investigation, judging and sentencing still often occurs only within university processes and amongst university personnel, far removed from other legal bodies. This extensive power of protection is directly rooted in medieval models of university life and privilege and has, in some cases, at least appeared to allow universities to gloss over or ignore problematic behaviors by both professors and students.  

At first glace, university code of conducts and attendant processes may not appear to be medievalism as it is generally understood, a nostalgia for a sanitized and fundamentally false version of the Middle Ages. However, modern universities have fought to retain and even enhance their rights to police their own communities, believing the institutions to be a community of their own, both a part of, but also separate from, the usually urban community in which they exist. This comes, at least in part, from a modern agreement with the quite medieval notion that members of the university community are different and so deserve special and favoured treatment. This is nostalgia, even if it has not yet been interrogated as such. 

Shoufu Yin, University of British Columbia 

If one goes to the cinema, watches TV dramas, or plays video games, there is one thing that one will not miss: the salience of Chinese women warriors. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) has notably popularized the swordswomen of traditional China. The Disney films of Mulan (1998, 2020) are based on the well-known “Ballad of Mulan,” which attests to the Sino-Steppe geopolitics of roughly the sixth century CE, when Mulan joined the army in her father’s stead. While the award-winning film The Assassin (2015) takes inspiration from Tang (618–907) legends devoted to women knights-errant, the monster film The Great Wall (2015) invented a woman commander Lin Mae who was presented as living in the mid-eleventh century. Interestingly, although Turning Red (2022) is mainly about a 13-year-old Chinese-Canadian girl in Toronto named Mei, it actually stresses that a maternal ancestor of Mei acquired supernatural fighting power from her pact with red pandas during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). 

Figure 1. Mulan, A Well-Known Chinese Woman Warrior 

Source: Wikimedia Commons  

These are not isolated examples. In recent decades, popular culture representations of women warriors of imperial China, whether historical or fictional, have gained increasing popularity in global media. My general take is that these films and games provide new opportunities for teaching and writing histories. They invite and encourage us to ask new and interesting questions. The release of Total War: Three Kingdoms (2019), which includes the character of Zheng Jiang, a bandit queen from the second century CE, sparked a wave of curiosity among players and fans who began to question whether Zheng Jiang was a real historical figure. This online discussion served as a catalyst for further historical inquiries: What kind of error did the developers of Total War: Three Kingdoms (2019) make when reading the primary sources? Were there actually bandit queens in second-century China or early China (1800 BCE – 200 CE) in general? (Short answer: yes!)  

In some cases, popular culture representations even point to understudied areas in history. To give only one example, the series Pirates of the Caribbean (2003–2017) has effectively popularized the story of Zheng Yi Sao (1775–1844), a historical leader of pirates who remains relatively understudied in the field of Chinese and maritime history. During the spring semester of 2023, while teaching an introductory course on Chinese history (one from the lens of and with a particular focus on women), I found that my students were surprised to discover that Zheng Yi Sao was not a fictional character. In fact, they were particularly passionate about delving into the “real” history of this legendary female pirate.  

Now, it seems that the time is ripe to at least think about teaching the history of imperial China by focusing on women, including but not confined to those who had once challenged their ascribed gender roles and/or those who have been featured in the global film/game industry. Before that, however, we need a conceptual and analytic framework that will enable us to critically engage different representations of women warriors in China and beyond—ranging from the earliest records in history to the most recent films or video games. How do producers and consumers (whether in East Asia or North America) Orientalize and fetishizing the imperial past, women in war, and the related narratives? 

My purpose here is to test an idea that I call “the pseudo-recognition of women warriors.” As a first approximation, it refers to the problematic appropriation, imagination, or representation of women who played critical roles in warfare and other violent settings. In doing so, I want to draw a distinction from what Axel Honneth calls “misrecognition,” the situation where individuals fail to receive the respect crucial to subject formation, which leads others to fail to see that individual’s value in intersubjective, social, and political relationships.¹ When a regime, either imperial Chinese or global capitalistic, orchestrates “pseudo-recognition” of women, it gestures toward recognizing their achievements—epitomized in acts of promoting their ranks or featuring their valor. However, in doing so, the regime cunningly redescribes their achievements in ways that reproduce the ideological order, whether patriarchal, orientalist, or both. 

Elsewhere, I have identified multiple rhetorical strategies of pseudo-recognition that were particularly important in imperial China.² The most established one eulogizes female commanders by reducing them to obedient daughters or faithful wives, who temporarily transgress the gender boundary only to better fulfill more important responsibilities that the patriarchal order prescribes for them. Why did Mulan join the battlefield instead of staying in the inner quarters serving her husband (as the normative texts prescribe)? Well, because she needed to save her father from throwing his life away on the battlefield. The second very influential strategy is simply to say that female leaders in war were exceptional individuals who transcend the gender order prescribed to commoners. While this approach plays an important role in actual documents of imperial China, it characterizes the logic behind some of the recent movies as well. Mulan has a unique destiny, according to Disney. And Mei’s maternal ancestor was uniquely chosen by the Red Panda Goddess as the guardian of her village, and this explains why such a woman rose as military and political leader. Another form of pseudorecognition that characterizes both imperial Chinese and contemporary global cultural production is certainly the fetishization of the female body when representing fighting women. In the sixteenth century, commercial prints started to visualize female commanders in the Chinese tradition, and Saito Tamaki thoroughly examined the “beautiful fighting girl” as a complex sexual fantasy with a focus on Japanese anime and manga.³ 

In brief, as other contributors to this forum have wonderfully demonstrated, the way we look at the past—whether it be a nostalgic quest for one’s origins or an Orientalist imagination of the Other—shapes our visions of the future. Given the paramount importance of critically examining our perspectives on the past, together its influence on the present and future, my discussion boils down to a proposal: From the lens of pseudo-recognition, it will be possible to compare how women warriors were represented in imperial China and global media. The imperial Chinese court repeatedly produced frameworks to make sense of women’s success in military leadership without giving up patriarchal ideology, which prescribes that women are not suitable for war. It seems to me that some of these discursive or representational strategies are still visible in cinematic representations of Chinese women today. In addition, it is worth stressing that the global popular cultural industry has notably introduced new techniques of representing and producing pseudorecognition of Chinese and Asian women and culture in general. This phenomenon warrants further research and analysis, as it has significant implications for how these cultures are perceived and understood on a global scale.  

Footnotes:

[1]: See in particular Axel Honneth, “The Point of Recognition: A Rejoinder to the Rejoinder,” in N. Fraser/A. Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (New York: Verso, 2003), 237-67; see also Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (London: Verso, 2013), 29, 167.

[2]: Shoufu Yin, “Rewarding Female Commanders in Medieval China: Official Documents, Rhetorical Strategies, and Gender Order,” Journal of Chinese History 6.1 (2022): 23–42.

[3]: Saito Tamaki, Beautiful Fighting Girl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

Further Reading 

Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (London: Verso, 2013). 

Axel Honneth, “The Point of Recognition: A Rejoinder to the Rejoinder,” in N. Fraser/A. Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (New York: Verso, 2003), 237-67. 

Saito Tamaki, Beautiful Fighting Girl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 

Shoufu Yin, “Rewarding Female Commanders in Medieval China: Official Documents, Rhetorical Strategies, and Gender Order,” Journal of Chinese History 6.1 (2022): 23–42. 

Robert Zecker, St. Francis Xavier University

“Why can’t those people come here legally and work hard, become Americans, like we did? At least they could learn the language!” Too many wall-builders and anti-immigrant foot soldiers in the United States’ xenophobic army have sanctified the myth their ancestors arrived with worthy notions of liberty, self-sacrifice and almost innate American patriotism. Current nativists, however, rely on a nostalgic vision of the past in which virtuous ancestors effortlessly passed through Ellis Island. This nostalgia relies on a selective fashioning of the southeast European immigrant, a shtetl of the mind that wilfully forgets some of the less palatable aspects of an earlier era’s newcomers, and the moral panic an “invasion” of Slavs, Italians, and Jews triggered in old stock Americans. In part, the “invasion” of Southeast Europeans around 1890 caused old stock Americans to create genealogical societies that looked back to Plymouth Rock and a time America was free of the “gross little aliens” polluting the land. Sadly, today descendants of these earlier pariahs all too often stigmatize current newcomers, suggesting a continuity in American nativism, even if today it is Asians, Muslims, and Latino/as who raise restrictionists’ ire.

Figure 1: Fostering Idea of Original Americans

“Mayflower Descendants Hold Quiet Celebration This Year.” Americans with colonial forebears did everything they could to distinguish themselves from Southeast European newcomers. Philadelphia Inquirer, February 22, 1908, 2. Source: https://www.genealogybank.com/newsletter-archives/202202/mayflower-descendants-who%E2%80%99s-who-part-9

At the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth centuries, to old stock immigration restrictionists, the migrants reverently valorized today posed nothing less than an existential crisis for the nation. Henry Cabot Lodge asserted the Slovak was a bad investment for the United States, equating his indolence and supposed love of drink to the canard of Chinese addiction to opium. By 1882 Chinese migrants were infamously excluded by Congress from migrating to the U.S.; Lodge and other politicians hoped the same would soon be said of Slavs.

Tropes of pollution, disease, menace, and invasion were deployed by cartoonists, journalists, and politicians to characterize southeast European newcomers. Sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross asserted “a Pole could live in dirt that would kill a white man” (among many other dime-store assessments of Slavic and Italian unsuitability for the republic.) Cartoons published in Puck, a popular satirical political magazine, depicted a terrified Uncle Sam cowering at the base of the Statue of Liberty as rats with knives in their mouths labeled “Italian” swarmed into New York Harbor. Another cartoon showed a bewildered Uncle Sam, “a stranger in his own land,” surrounded in New York by signs in Yiddish, Italian, and other incomprehensible foreign tongues. Progressive Era photos or magazine exposés of immigrant neighborhoods characterized New York’s Little Italy or the primarily Jewish Lower East Side as at best sites of exotica, but more often seats of squalor, danger, and dysfunctionality.

Figure 2: At Ellis Island

Physical examination of female immigrants at Ellis Island, New York City, 1911. Inspectors scrupulously guarded the country’s gates against “unfit” newcomers. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C., https://www.loc.gov/item/95506353/

Such anxiety was not entirely unfounded. Ethnic nostalgia exhibits much amnesia in forgetting immigrant street gangs (Brooklyn’s Murder Inc. or the Sicilian camorra, not always as cinematic as Goodfellas or The Godfather would have us believe.) Allen Street on the Lower East Side was circa 1900 the center of New York prostitution, a fact sensationalized in Munsey’s Magazine exposés of alleged Jewish control of the “white slave trade.” Disease, crime, and juvenile-delinquency indices in immigrant enclaves such as Brownsville, Brooklyn – now remembered with fondness as home to egg creams, labor lyceums and second-generation strivers all bound for City College and glory – were alarmingly among the highest in the city. Dysfunction and boot-strapper achievement were close neighbours in immigrant quarters. Only maladjustment, though, was seen by a nativist like Lodge, while nostalgic descendants of ghetto dwellers have developed amnesia about the deviant while celebrating immigrant achievers. One person’s nostalgia was, for 1900 nativists, another man’s angst.

Figure 3: Little Italy in New York

Italian neighborhood with street market, Mulberry Street, New York, circa 1900. This photograph, published by the Detroit Publishing Co., likely evoked images of menace among nativists alert to the Italian “invasion” of “their” country. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C., https://www.loc.gov/item/2016817801/

To progressive journalist Frank Julian Warne, the “sclavic” (sic) immigrant was an invader of coal-mining regions of Pennsylvania, driving down the wage rate of established miners. Ironically, by 1904, many of those miners were Irish American, whose labor militancy and Catholicism in an earlier era had raised alarm bells, too. The fear that a secretive society of Irish Catholic Molly Maguires was terrorizing eastern Pennsylvania led to a militant pushback culminating in the 1877 execution of six Irish American “Molly Maguires” in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. By the early twentieth century, though, it was Slavic migrants who were often characterized as inherently violent, prone to drink and a menace to respectable, white America, which by that point tentatively included Irish Catholics. Yesterday’s outsider was admitted as a grudging insider when new “wretched refuse” arrived at Ellis Island and infiltrated the mine and mill towns of America.

Figure 4: Staking a Claim to Thanksgiving

By 1944, Polish Americans could claim Thanksgiving as part of their heritage as loyal Americans. This advertisement from the International Workers Order’s Front Line Fighters Fund urged readers to send a Thanksgiving “care package” to soldiers overseas. “The pilgrims, our ancestors, came from the old world to America in pursuit of freedom and a better life,” the ad asserted in Polish. A few decades earlier, nativists would have bristled at Poles claiming the pilgrims as “our” ancestors. Wayne State University, Walter Reuther Library, Don Binkowski Papers, Box 5, Folder 5-29, Głos Ludowy, November 25, 1944, 6, “Radość Dnia Dziękczynienia Należy do Naszych Dielnych Bojowników” (“The Joy of Thanksgiving Belongs to Our Brave Warriors.”)

Fear of worrisome migrants swarming into industrial America spurred the birth of colonial genealogy societies seeking to reclaim a purer, nobler heritage. Old stock Americans founded the Society of Mayflower Descendants in 1897, the Colonial Dames of America in 1890, and the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1890. Nostalgia for a time when the country unequivocally belonged to White Anglo-Saxon Protestants and homages to one’s pioneering ancestors were often juxtaposed to anxiety about southeast European “hordes” muddying the American gene pool. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also saw a rise in the performance of historical pageants venerating colonial nation builders, a respite from the anxieties of an urbanizing, polyglot country. Today’s descendants of Slavic or Italian migrants often express patriotism and love of America’s traditions. In the age their ancestors arrived, however, that colonial heritage was often wielded by WASPs to reclaim America from the grasp of Slavic, Italian, “gross little alien” hands. Colonial lineage was resurrected and celebrated, at least in part, out of an anxious nostalgia for an America old stock residents feared was slipping from their hands. More than a hundred years later Slavic or Italian Americans often join in similar cries to “make America great again.”

Everybody is yearning to breathe free in their fabricated America; nostalgic invocations of a pure past when the country was free of the huddled masses polluting the body politic resonated in 1900 no less than 2023. Slovak, Jewish, Italian, or Polish Americans who invoke hard-working, model minority ancestors might do well to remember at one point their forebears were the “mongrel” and the “underman” who would invariably cause America to “sink to early decay unless immigration is rigorously restricted.” Henry Cabot Lodge, Madison Grant, and other immigration restrictionists wanted to build a wall to keep out the “beaten men of beaten races.” They wanted the great-grandpa of many of today’s restrictionists on the other side of that wall.