The Medieval Other in The Washington Post

Although it's no longer hot off the presses, I thought I'd quickly bring up this article from Wednesday's Washington Post; it irritated me when I read it, but I only today thought of this blog as a good place to vent about it. The article provides a small but telling example of some of the prevalent assumptions and representations surrounding the era we're studying. (It also bears some remote resemblance to our discussion in yesterday's class about government, absolutist lineages and associational forms.)

The point at issue is an emergent influence-peddling scandal in the House of Lords. Apparently, the members allegedly involved cannot be suspended or expelled from the house, just publicly "named and shamed" (a job perk of which I'll bet Rod Blagojevich is now envious). The author of the article, in describing this, explains that "rules in the Lords, a chamber that dates to the 14th century, are still far out of step with modern Britain."

I may be over-reading (although isn't over-reading things a professional responsibility for a graduate student?), but note that, in this formulation, it is the Lords, and the Lords alone, that dates back to the 14th century. The things wrong with the house are presented as entirely explicable in terms of its medieval origin and legacy. Note, also, that the House of Commons, the fully representative and democratic chamber that runs most everything these days, is implicitly left off the hook. We hear nothing about the Commons dating to the 14th century, even though its origins are every bit as medieval (our author was a member). The Lords are medieval, hidebound, and anachronistic; the Commons are progressive and modern, free from the taint of medieval antecedents or a medieval history.

In other words, intentionally or no, this article misrepresents parliamentary history in such a way as to oppose the Middle Ages and modernity and pass off contemporary flaws in the system as medieval vestiges, without acknowledging that the system itself is, in some sense, a medieval vestige: a medieval institution providing the framework of modern government. It's easy to come up with alternate ways of stating the same basic point that avoid this problematic amputation of the medieval past: "rules in the Lords have changed little since both houses of Parliament were established in the 14th century." Instead, this article sweeps the medieval history informing all British government under the rug and essentializes as medieval only the undesirable or unlawful or disadvantageous aspects of modern society. I'm not saying that the rules in question here are not medieval holdovers in need of reform, just that, by identifying these rules alone as medieval in origin, this article demonstrates some of the deep-set ways in which modernity dissociates itself from and defines itself against its medieval past. This storm in a teacup (to use an appropraitely British expression) points us toward some of the fundamental theoretical and historiographical issues that will bear on our study of Chaucer and the period in which he wrote.