Lauren Mancia, Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY
Any historian would be thrilled to hear that Icon Books has begun to develop graphic guides for history. These guides are a bit in the spirit of the old Writers and Readers Documentary Comic Book series from the 1970s and 80s, a collection whose titles were welcome, reliable gateways to larger theoretical and historical worlds for those not yet ready to plunge into Marx’s unabridged Das Kapital. Might The Middle Ages: A Graphic History play a similar role? As a history professor at a public university serving mostly first-generation college students, and as a teacher of general audiences at venues around New York City, I hoped it would. We need it!
Why do we need it? Students are often loathe to do the reading. Professors are desperate to find a visual image, or chart, or joke to draw them in, in class and out. (Classically effective jokes in the medieval history classroom include James A. Brundage’s sexual decision-making flowchart.) I had high hopes for this volume, since Eleanor Janega’s own ‘Gone Medieval’ podcast is a lovely option for medieval history students and general audiences who would rather listen to a playful retelling of history than read it in traditional textbook format. My expectations were occasionally rewarded by The Middle Ages: A Graphic History. It does provide some good images for PowerPoints that I can use in my college classes, like the one on the left (figure 1), which is good for helping to understand how medieval people saw their world (50) or the one on the right (figure 2), good for explaining how the medieval university’s curriculum was structured (90).
It is also true, in the classroom and in public history, that distant periods go down easier with a little humor, or more down-to-earth storytelling. The most recent, stunning example of this is the Saturday Night Live skit on George Washington’s Dreams for America, which uses the new republic’s insistence on regulating weights and measures to highlight the absurdity of its neglect of equality and freedom for all its inhabitants. The classic medieval example is Monty Python and the Holy Grail’s critique of how government and “feudalism” might have been understood by medieval people; the hippest medieval example might be the fantastic videos made by Greedy Peasant. The Middle Ages: A Graphic Guide does scratch the humor itch every so often, as when it argues that most cities had brothels because theologians saw them as a civic good (117, figure 3), or characterizing historians’ writing before the birth of women’s history in the 1960s (114, figure 4).
My own favorite moment is when Janega and Emmanuel create a series of false endings for their history (figure 5), making the point that periodization is not some ‘reality’ of the past when an era had ended, but is rather an interpretation imposed on history by historians (168).
At its core, however, The Middle Ages: A Graphic History is more problematic than useful for the classroom. First, its narrative of 1000 years of medieval history is antiquated and stale. Yes, it updates the age-old retelling by adding a few pages on the relative irrelevance of Britannia in this period (50-51), on Mongol invasions (106-109, 128-129), and on sex work (117-118). But it leaves out the Magna Carta, the invention of the codex, and the beginnings of European racial ideologies while spending an inordinate amount of time on the Hundred Years War (136-40, 149-151, or 5% of the book).
The book’s most egregious fault is its assumption that readers will know the Middle Ages well enough to understand unexplained drawings and the book’s snarky tone without additional commentary. Several images employ medieval iconography without explanation (e.g., Jews are always shown with conical hats), which could feed into modern stereotypes when placed in the wrong hands. Other images, like the array of closing images of (a) Guantanamo prisoners, (b) George W. Bush, and (c) Donald Trump next to a medieval king declaring “Deus vult” scarily leave open to interpretation how “the Middle Ages are still very much a part of our world” (174). Perhaps because they are based in the U.K., the book’s authors and publisher are not as sensitive as this American reviewer to how certain audiences might misinterpret such unexplained juxtapositions or misuse them in unintended ways. But I know that my New York City students would need a lot of supplemental information to understand that page. Similarly, The Middle Ages: A Graphic History often assumes a flippant, broad, overly modern attitude toward the medieval mindset that risks over-simplifying the period, especially for the general or student reader. The adjective “weird” is used regularly with no further explanation (33, 101, 110). Early monks are described as sitting “in desert caves…tr[ying] not to wank” (31). Frederick II just “did what he wanted” (106). Rich people in the Middle Ages didn’t “car[e] what the Church had to say” (110). Pope Gregory VII’s Dictatus Papae was merely a “scheme” implemented by a schemer (65, figure 6).
Once more, such glib comments border on dangerous when delivered into the wrong hands, as when the Rhineland Massacres are introduced: “There was no need to hold off on shedding blood until they reached the Holy Land when there were perfectly good non-Christian communities to slaughter in Europe” (84). Again, this might be rooted in differences between the U.K. and the U.S. in humor or in classroom atmosphere, but I don’t think this kind of jokiness would go over well in my diverse classroom or with my non-specialist friends.
My final issue is this: an author who uses an innovative form to express their ideas often does so to immerse readers in the meaning of the work. Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar imitates its characters’ unending, unanswered life quests by inviting readers to “hop” around different chapters, reading them out of order. E.E. Cummings experimented with spelling, grammar, syntax and the physical shapes of his poetry on the page to better convey his themes. In the scholarly space, Saidiya Hartman has invented a new form of narration for Black history, using critical fabulation to fill in archival silences.
Graphic novels can take advantage of their form too. Great examples include Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers and Saints (one volume of which is told from the point of view of a Boxer and the other from the point of view of a Christian) or Hatem Aly’s marginal illuminations throughout Adam Gidwitz’s The Inquisitor’s Tale (which both support and undermine Gidwitz’s text in the style of a medieval manuscript’s marginalia). In the case of The Middle Ages: A Graphic History, I think my biggest disappointment is with Icon Books, which claims to be an “independent publisher of thought-provoking non-fiction,” whose Graphic Guides promise to unfurl “complex, theoretical topics.” Thought-provoking” and “complex” do indeed characterize non-fiction graphic novels being published by other presses. The French series La Revue Dessinée de La Découverte, for example, is doing excellent work (like the medieval title Chevaliers, Moines, et Paysans: De Cluny à la première Croisade).
And yet the majority of images in The Middle Ages: A Graphic History’s are merely graphic-novel versions of what already appears in medieval history textbooks: dynastic family trees. (17, 54); a social-political “feudal pyramid”(60, 99), despite long-established research dismantling the construct of “feudalism” as a medieval idea; maps of the Hundred Years War (138). There is so much potential for a graphic history of the Middle Ages. What if the style of the illustrations changed over the course of the book to reflect new styles in medieval manuscript painting over the course of 1000 years (instead of all being in a roughly 13th– through 14th-century medieval style, as they are in The Middle Ages: A Graphic History)? What if the voices of Part 6, on “Medieval Others” (women, sex workers, homosexuals, Jews, heretics, lepers), were characters challenging the linear historical narrative that runs through the text by retelling it from their different perspectives?
Social media, technology, ChatGPT, waning attention spans, and the effects of COVID all are real things that we have to contend with as history professors. Graphic histories can be a way for us to meet students and general audiences where they need us. But choosing graphic histories doesn’t mean that we have to pander to the lowest common denominator of humor, or resort to visual ideas as old as our parents’ college medieval textbooks. We can produce more innovative narratives, expanding the minds of general and student audiences by telling thoughtful, subtle, and complex histories in new forms with refreshed tones. The Middle Ages: A Graphic History has gotten us up and running. I look forward to the next attempt at this worthy task.
Eleanor Janega and Neil Max Emmanuel, The Middle Ages: A Graphic History (London: Icon, 2021)