Medievalists in the Mirror: Looking Back to the World of 1925 and Its Legacy

In 1925, the Medieval Academy was hastily incorporated to launch a journal whose title, Speculum, mirrored a distinctively American medievalism. Rooted in an ideology of “Anglo-Saxon” exceptionalism dating back to the colonial era, this engagement with the medieval past was both strengthened and complicated by the emergence of the United States as a global power. By 1920, the devastation of European cultural patrimony and intellectual networks opened new avenues for American intervention, exemplified by the direct involvement of Charles Homer Haskins (a future president of the Academy) in the negotiation of national self-determination after the Great War. This article surveys the conditions shaping the first generations of American academics who catalyzed the invention of a new field, medieval studies. It then offers a revisionist history of the Academy’s establishment based on its own archives, which reveal how the work of constructing this field was largely accomplished by members of the academic precariat or faculty at new public universities, whose grassroots campaign and collective initiatives were later obscured by the few self-proclaimed founders who came to control the institutional narrative. It concludes by reflecting on the priorities and prejudices that would limit the scope of medieval studies in the following decades.