While the Catholic Studies Consortium (catholicstudiesconsortium.com) dates the emergence of the field to 1993, the English Catholic historian Christopher Dawson (1889 – 1970) was the first professor of "Roman Catholic Studies," at Harvard, taking the position in 1958. Dawson’s work—particularly The Crisis of Western Education (1961)—was cited as an influence by early founders of Catholic Studies programs. As described by the Consortium, Catholic Studies programs are united by a methodological approach which seeks “to integrate the Intellectual, Spiritual, Moral, and Cultural Traditions of the Church with all disciplines and cultures through dialogue.” Catholic Studies program seek to integrate different disciplines by highlighting “the ways in which the rich traditions of the Church intersect and enoble [sic] all other professions and fields of knowledge.”
While this is close to Dawson’s own vision, Dawson’s suggested disciple of “Christian Studies” was to provide students with “a unifying vision of the spiritual sources from which western civilization flowed” (76). In the past, he laments, theology or philosophy provided an overarching vision of the true, good, and beautiful, but secular and utilitarian impulses in the academy have unraveled that approach, which was grounded on the presupposition that theology was the “queen of the sciences.” Dawson instead seeks to introduce contemporary students to an integrating vision knowledge by studying the many fields of Christian cultural production in hopes of glimpsing the single, living vision instantiated in each. He elaborates: “no one denies the existence of a Christian literature, a Christian philosophy and a Christian institutional order, but at present these are never studied as parts of an organic whole... The fact that the average educated person is not only ignorant of Christian theology, he is no less ignorant of Christian philosophy, Christian history, and Christian literature, and in short of Christian culture in general” (Dawson, 86-87). “Christian Studies” would look to the cultural production of the past as a way of backing into the unified vision of the whole from which these products emerged. If the Neoplatonist could assert that the purpose of the Many was to disclose the One, the scholar of Christian Studies could assert that the purpose of studying the art, literature, liturgy, thought, and life of Christian epochs was to glimpse the living faith which shaped these many fields.
Immediately it becomes clear that Medieval Studies is not, then, Catholic Studies. Calls for Papers at the annual Medieval Congress at Western Michigan occasionally invite proposals from “many disciplines,” but most medievalists are firmly rooted the specific disciplines of history, intellectual history, English, musicology, etc. Few medievalists relish the thought of articulating “the” animating idea across authors and objects of study, and even before the renewed consciousness surrounding issues of equality and inclusion following the death of George Floyd almost all would have insisted that the object of Medieval Studies is not restricted to Christian Europe (e.g., Keene, Toward a Global Middle Ages, 2022). In the wake of George Floyd, the imperative to correct the systemic Eurocentricism of Medieval Studies has only intensified (e.g., Heng, Teaching the Global Middle Ages, 2022). Medieval Studies is both too disciplinary and too global to be reduced to the project of “Catholic Studies.”
Elsewhere, I have suggested that anthropology has played the role of Jungian shadow to Medieval Studies. While the study of the (largely European) Middle Ages has martialed immense historical, philological, philosophical, theological, and theoretical work, sometimes implicitly justified as by the attempt to understand the history of “our” Western subjectivity, the methods of anthropology have been deployed to understand the “other” whose texts and histories were unavailable to Western academics and whose beliefs were a priori dismissed as implausible. The explicitly racial dimension of this division, and the way in which it was deployed to justify the logic of Western imperialism over that “other” prior to the First World War, has been well documented (David Chidester, Empire of Religion: Imperialism & Comparative, 2022). A fruitful way to undo this binary, while simultaneously furthering the project of globalizing the Middle Ages while coming to fresh insights about medieval Europe, is to deploy the methods and conclusions of anthropology on the Latin West—which, perhaps surprisingly, is very seldom done.
Once we analyze medieval Christian Europe through the lens of anthropological theory derived from the study of Africa or the Pacific Islands, we disrupt the presupposition that the Middle Ages are pre-Modern in the sense that they achieve their full-flowering with the arrival of Modernity. We can see familiar practices emerge from an unfamiliar logic which is not merely pre-Modern, but un-Modern. The Eastern Triduum makes far more sense through the lens of a West African gateway ritual, intended to renew the cosmic order at a moment of seasonal liminality, than it does as a didactic (or superstitious, because insufficiently didactic) commemoration. The drive for synthetic integration of knowledge across disciplines has something in common with the West African elaboration of cosmograms which the Modern mastery of facts or mathematical formulae lacks.
While Medieval Studies, then, cannot be reduced to Catholic Studies, I want to suggest that it can provide resources to expand the Catholic imagination by stepping back from disembodied rationalities of Modern to glimpse non-Modern logics of how the human person has functioned religiously, ritualistically, and educationally. By providing a fuller glimpse of the possibilities of the human, Medieval Studies can be muse, if not handmaid, for contemporary Catholic thought.
In this paper, by way of example, I draw together some insights from the anthropology of ritual drawn from Zuesse’s Ritual Cosmos (1979) and applied to the Anglo-Saxon monastic life of Bede the Venerable. I then suggest how this decidedly non-Modern view of ritual provides resources for the contemporary Catholic to “step back” from disembodied suspicions of fasting or other canonical taboos to see their function in the service of a ritually-structured world. This “apo-Modernist” project is not properly Medieval Studies, but draws on the fruits of Medieval Studies to expand the contemporary Catholic imagination.
If Catholic Studies is the quest to integrate diverse fields by uncovering the Christian worldview which inspire a variety of cultural products, then Medieval Studies cannot be reduced to Catholic Studies. The contemporary emphasis on the global Middle Ages only emphasizes this point. Nonetheless, if we approach the Middle Ages with tools developed to study other “non-Modern” societies, we can uncover aspects decidedly “non-Modern” aspects of the Middle Ages. Not only does this uncovering disrupt the idea that the Middle Ages readily flowed into Modernity, but it provides Catholics with resources to expand our imaginations in an un-Modern, or apo-Modernist, direction. In this paper, I pay special attention to the promise of this approach to the understanding of ritual today, allowing Catholics to appreciate aspects of the liturgy and of liturgical practice which we may not realize were operative or which might strike contemporary practitioners as superstitious or meaningless.