Legitimacy of the Middle Ages

This collection of essays argues that any valid theory of the modern should - indeed must - reckon with the medieval. Offering a much needed correction to theorists such as Hans Blumenberg who, in his "Legitimacy of the Modern Age", describes the 'modern age', including the present, as a complete departure from the Middle Ages, these essays forcefully show that thinkers from Theodor Adorno to Slavoj eiuek have repeatedly drawn from medieval source materials to theorize modernity. In "The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages", modernists and medievalists, as well as scholars specializing in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century comparative literature, offer a new history of theory and philosophy, with essays on 'secularization' and periodization, Karl Marx's (medieval) theory of commodity fetishism, Martin Heidegger's scholasticism, and Adorno's nominalist aesthetics. Where one essay illustrates the workings of medieval mysticism in the work of Freud's most famous patient, Daniel Paul Schreber, author of "Memoirs of My Nervous Illness" (1903), another looks at Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire, a theoretical synthesis whose conscientious medievalism was the subject of much polemic in the post-9/11 era, in which premodernity itself was perceived as a threat to western values. The collection concludes with an afterword by Fredric Jameson, a theorist of postmodernism who has engaged with the medieval throughout his career.