American-Medieval Histories: Temporal Fictions and the Co-Creation of Intellectual and Institutional Identities, 1870 to 1970

Recent historical scholarship has shown how deeply American political and educational institutions, social projects, fictional narratives, and racial hierarchies are rooted in conceptions of the European Middle Ages; and, in turn, how Americans played crucial roles in determining the study of medieval Europe as both an academic discipline and object of popular fascination. This session takes stock of these entangled historiographies and considers the implications of their mutual constitution. How can a better understanding the co-creation and development of these usable pasts to inform how we study them now, and to enable a critique of the many medievalist and American mythologies still build upon them? The three papers in the sessions fit together chronologically addressing shared intellectual ideas overtime. The session will be of interest to scholars of US intellectual history, the history of race in the US, and historians of medieval history, the history of epistemology, and intellectual institutions.