Muse, not Handmaid: Medieval Studies and the Expansion of the 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.