Content area
Full text
This article investigates what, if anything, we can learn from exploring the almost-but-not-quite-colonial aspects of the Middle Ages. More specifically, it examines the interplay of colonialist rhetoric and medieval historiographical conventions in one historian’s account of the second bubonic plague pandemic, now commonly known as the Black Death. This pandemic first spread across Europe in 1347–1353, and eventually resulted in the deaths of at least fifty million people globally, with different regions across the world losing anywhere from thirty to sixty percent of their population.3 Local and regional outbreaks recurred roughly once every decade until c. 1500, with further outbreaks persisting through the early modern period.4 I analyze the English chronicler Thomas Walsingham’s (c. 1340—c. 1420) reaction to one such outbreak, which occurred on the Anglo-Scottish Border in 1379.5 Walsingham’s historical position makes him a particularly useful object of study for scholars working in our modern, postcolonial-yet-still-colonialist world. As I will discuss in greater detail below, Walsingham wrote his account of this outbreak during a contraction of English colonial ambitions in Scotland. Nevertheless, he used classical tropes about civilization and barbarity to provide readers with a pro-English interpretation of this outbreak. His work therefore underscores how colonialist rhetoric allows colonialist ideologies to quietly endure, even after the political systems that once encouraged them no longer exist.
Walsingham’s chronicle of the Black Death also provides an unexpectedly fruitful opportunity for studying how colonialist ideologies make demands on the historians who hold them. Walsingham clung tightly to the idea that civilizations progress from primitive barbarity to sophisticated enlightenment, because it justified his view of the Scots as inherently, even irredeemably, inferior to the English. Yet this colonial outlook had a fraught relationship with his historical narrative. Sometimes it comported with the history he wished to tell. At other times, it saddled his history with a pre-scripted framework of historical progression that contradicted both the historical events he described and the common historiographical conventions of his day. Yet whether colonialism helped or hindered his history did not seem to matter much to Walsingham, since he consistently embraced colonialist views, even when they clashed with medieval historiographical logic. Of course, Walsingham is hardly the only historian—medieval or otherwise—to have sacrificed historiographical principles on the altar of...