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Home > News & Events > CLA Today Archive > Summer 2003 : La plus ça change

La plus ça change…Learning from medieval history

by Mary Shafer

For students in Ruth Mazo Karras's class in medieval women's history, contradiction rules. “‘Things haven't changed much,’ they say; or else, ‘You’ve come a long way, baby,’” laughs Karras.

“I hope they see that both of these things can be true,” adds Karras. “People think there's a master historical narrative out there. But up close, the master narrative falls apart. When you look closely, history is complex. My students sometimes get frustrated because they say I introduce confusion. They want answers. But in history, you can't always see the answers.”

It seems that Karras has always been interested in the questions. And with a professor for a father, she was a natural for an academic career. But medieval studies?

“I don't remember when I wasn't interested,” she says of the field, remembering that she always loved to read about what she now calls “the most fascinating period in history”—the years from about 500 to 1500.

As for her interest in gender, that emerged a bit later as an explicit focus of her work. It was after she finished her Ph.D. that she began exploring how gender and sexuality played out in the medieval world that had become her intellectual home away from home.

Karras, named a CLA Scholar of the College this year, came to the University of Minnesota in 2000 as a full professor. She was one of a handful of scholars (selected from 1,300 applicants) to emerge from the history department's “megasearch” for the nation's best historians.

Previously on the faculty of Temple University in Philadelphia, Karras knew in a nanosecond that she and the U, with its thriving women's history program, would be a good fit.

“I felt as if I’d died and gone to heaven,” she says of her interview for the position. “It was a very good fit intellectually, and though it was a tough decision personally, it was not at all tough professionally.”

If medieval European history sounds far removed from modern concerns, a class—or even a conversation—with Karras will quickly change that impression. From her you will learn about some fascinating and often surprising similarities, as well as differences, between contemporary views and institutions and those of medieval times.

“Many of our state laws about marriage and family actually go back to medieval times,” says Karras. “Medieval European families had a similar structure [to ours]. At the same time, it's useful to learn that many things we think of as ‘natural’ may not necessarily be that way. Take marriage, for instance. Although the Church tried to say it was a merging of two souls, in practice, marriage was a way of ensuring the legitimacy of children. Marriage was a vehicle for passing on your inheritance.”

A version of this pragmatic view of marriage as an economic and procreative partnership survives today as a legal concept, Karras says, but for most European and American couples, it is but a subtext in romantic narratives of marital love.

The comparative historical perspective sheds light on political issues as well, says Karras. “It may not be relevant to what Congress is voting on this week, but certainly a historical perspective is important to the issues people care about.”

Taking the long view of interactions over the centuries among Christians, Muslims, and Jews, for instance, can help clear “a path toward greater understanding of the critical issues facing us in the Middle East,” says Karras.

Similarly, looking at gender over time casts in a whole new light questions about whether sexual orientation is innate or chosen. “A close look at history may suggest to us that it is neither,” says Karras, much of whose recent work has centered on gender and sexuality.

“Our system for classifying sexual orientation didn't exist in other periods,” she says. “People in medieval Europe didn't define other people as ‘gay’ or ‘straight’ depending on the gender of their erotic object. Rather, they classified them as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ depending on whether they played an ‘active’ or ‘passive’ role in sex, regardless of who their partner was.”

With her knack for undoing certitude and introducing complexity and confusion, Karras is quick to explain that what we learn, or what we “know,” we take in through the prism of our own experience. There is, in Karras's view, no singular history or true historical record.

“People who say ‘Just tell it as it was’ don't understand that the questions you ask are dictated by current history,” Karras says. “It's the present that changes, not the past. The big ‘linguistic turn’ of the social sciences in the 1980s and ’90s—the idea we can know the past, or indeed the present, only through language as embodied in texts—helped us understand that you can't know another person's experience; you can know only his or her words. That's a problem for the historian. Are we learning the ‘real’ past or [someone's] version of the past?”

It's the changing perspectives, though, that keep her field vital, Karras says.

“I was worried that medieval history was marginalizing itself because we weren't trying to make ourselves relevant. The attitude that ‘If people don't understand my work, too bad’ won't get you very far. In the last 20 years or so, the interest in new directions and new twists on older works has been exciting, as medieval historians look at issues like gender, intercultural contact, the natural and the built environment, and other questions of concern in the modern period as well.”

With one foot planted firmly in each of three millennia, Karras finds nothing more gratifying than digging around in archives.

“I think of it as needing to get my fix,” she laughs. “In an archive, you handle a parchment that is centuries old and you feel such a connection to the people who created the parchment a thousand years ago. It's pretty amazing.

“Medieval history may sound arcane, but it helps you understand both that things change and that deep and lasting structures are very important and very persistent.”