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    The Returnof the Middle AgesRAVELS IN HYPERREALW

    pop culture. In a drugstore recently I picked up, at random, aseries of comic books offering the following s m o ~ b o r d :onanthe King, The Savage &ord of Conan tbe Bavbwkm, Carn$ot 3000,7Be Sword and theA m thew last two displaying a complex inter-twining of Dark Ages and laser beams), The Ekktra Saga, C y mtbe Crystal Wam'or, ior,EI.P.lcsfM e h , . . .

    I could go on. But there is no special reason h r a2nazememat the avalanche of pseudo-medieval pulp in paperbacks, *between Nazi nostalgia and occultism. A country able to produce paris are full of interesting examples of medieval novels or ro-Banetics can do a lot in terms ofw a b d - w e a r sollcery and H* -s O n he other hand, Italians have never scored mmrhbleGrail h p p d It would be s d onder if the next porn hit s mMarilyn Chambers as La Prinwsse Lointaiue (if Americans havesucceeded in tramforming R o s d s Chanteclair into the Fmm-tiks,why not imagine the Princess of Tripoli offking the keys ofher chastity belt tn a bearded Burt Reynolds?). Not to mmtionsuch postmodern neosledieval Manhattan new castles as the Cld-corp Center md T m p Tower, curious instances of a newh-dalism, with their courts open to peasants and mercham andwell-protected high-level apartmentsreserved for the lords.

    American cultivated masochism has abundantly agonized aboutsuch wonders as the Hearst Castle and the exterior of he Clois-ters (the interior being mole philologically inspired). But this isbeside the point

    The chroniclesof theNewMiddleAges also tell of t h ~ ~ ~ a a d s posia that have recently been devoteof readers discoveiing Barbara Tuchman. The director of hMetropolitan Museum has decided to exhibit as "real" fakes d commes, even though they are more accustomed this kind ofthe forgeries that his public previously admired as the real thing, revival, are also debating the same question, and we should ay oand the crowds queueing at the museum, a fkw years ago, for the provide some anmet.exhibition ofmedieval Irish art are a clear symptom of new taste. ~hu se ar e at present witnessing, both in Europe and Amer-

    America, having come to grips with 1776, is devouring the iw, a period of enewed interest in the Middle Agcr, a a&Real Past. Canned philology perhaps, but philology al l the same. ous oscillation h e n antastic neomedievaiim and responsibleThe Americans want and really like resp&le historical recon- @ol~gical d n a t i o n . Undoubdy what counts is dxe secondstruction (perhaps because only aftes a text has been ripmusly aspect of the phenomenon, and one must wonder why Americansrecomtructd can it be irresponsibly deconstructed). L i b m a q are more or less experiencing the same obsession as

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    TRAVELS INHYPERREALIR

    and why both are devouring th e reconstructions of Duby, Le RoyLadurie, and Le Goff as if they were a new form of narrative.W ho could have suspected, a decade ago, that people were readyto swallow the registers of a medieval parish in Poitou as if theywere th e chronicle of an Agatha Christie vicarage?W e are dreaming th e Middle Ages, some say. But in fact bothAmericans and Europeans are inheritors of the Western legacy,and all the problems of the Western world emerged in the MiddleAges:Modern languages, merchant cities, capitalistic economy (alongwith banks, checks, and prime rate) are inventions of medieval so-ciety. In the Middle Ages we witness the rise of modem armies,of th e modem concept of the national state, as well as th e idea ofa supernaturalfederation (under th e banner of a German Emperorelected by a Diet that functioned like an electoral convention); thestruggle between the poor and th e rich, the concept of heresy orideological deviation, wen ou r contemporary notion of love as adevastating unhappy happiness, I could add the conflict betweenchurch and state, trade unions (albeit in a corporative mode), thetechnological transformation of labor. At the beginning of thepresent millennium came th e widespread introduction of wind-mills, there was the invention of horseshoes, of th e shoulder har-ness for horses and oxen, of stirrups, and the modern type ofrudder hinged to the stem below th e surface of the water (withoutwhich invention the discovery of America would no t have beenpossible). T h e compass came into use, and there was the final ac-ceptance of Arab mathematics, hence the rise of modem ways ofcomputing and double-entry bookkeeping. At th e end of the era,if we agree that th e era stops conventionally in 1492, came gun-powder and the Gutenberg galaxy.W e are still living under th e banner of medieval technology.For instance, eyeglasses were a medieval invention, as importantas th e mechanical loom or th e steam engine. At that time, an in-tellectual who became farsighted at the age of forty (bear in mindthe difficulty of reading unreadable manuscripts by torchlight in

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    dark moms beneath shadowy vaults) was unable to produw ac-tively after the age of fifty. With th e introduction of eyeglassesintellectual productivity increased enormously and th e followingcenturies could better exploit these human resources.f one of the aforementioned ideas and realities was born inclassical antiquity. From ancient Greece and Rome we acquired a

    : certain idea of tragedy (but ou r theater is based on a medieval' moden and an ideal of beauty, as well as ou r basic philosophical' conceits. Bu t from th e ~ i d d i e ges we learned how to use them.T h e Middle Ages are th e root of all ou r contemporary "hot"problems, and ir is no t surprising that we go back to that periodevery time we ask ourselves about ou r origin. All th e questionsdebated during th e sessions of the CommonMarket originate fromthe situation of medieval Europe.Thus looking at the Middle Ages means looking at ou r in-I

    ; fancy, in th e same way that a doctor, to understand ou r present' state of health, asks us about ou r childhood, o r in the same waythat the psychoanalyst, to understand ou r present neuroses, makesa careful investigation of the primal scene.Our retum to th e Middle Ages is a quest for ou r roots and,since we want to come back to th e real roots, we are looking for"reliable Middle Ages," no t for romance and fantasy, though fre-quently this wish is misunderstood and, moved by a vague irn-pulse, we indulge in a sort of escapism 1 a Tolkien.

    But is dreaming of th e Middle Ages really a typical contem-porary or postmodern temptation? If i t is true- and it is-that theMiddle Ages turned us into Western animals, i t is equally true thatpeople started dreaming of the Middle Ages from th e very begin-ning of th e modem era.A Continuous ReturnModern ages have revisited the Middle Ages from the momentwhen, according to historical handbooks, they came to an end.

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    TRAVELS IN HYPERREALITY The Return of the M~ddle ges

    T he modem era begins with some astounding achievements of the grandeur. Soon Chateaubriand was to celebrate the risehuman spirit: the discovery of America, the liberation of Granada of Gothic cathedrals under the trees of the Celtic forest, while( ~ t hhe consequent destruction of the Arab scientificlegzq hanks to Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, and the restorations of Viol-would have anticipated the Renaissance and the rise of modern let-le-Duc, the whole nineteenth century would dream of its ownscience), and the beginning of the second Diaspora with the exile Middle &a, hus avenging the enlightened gesture of Napoleon,of the J e m from (pogroms were invented earlier, by the who cut the tympanum of Notre Dame to allow his imperial tor-Crusaders; Western civilization has a complex pedigree). t&ge o enter the cathedral.Immediately after the official ending of the Middle Ages, Eu- Oddly enough one could see, from the Confessional of therope was ravaged by a pervasive medieval nostalgia. In I W ~ Y he Black Penitents, Fulton's steamboat sailing triumphantly; and I dogreat Poets of the Renaissance, from Pulci to Boiardo and Ariosto, not exactly know whether the spinning jenny and the p m e r loom~e tumedo the them= of the Knights saga. Teofilo Folengo -te were neo-Gothic machinery o r whether the Nightmare Abbey ofGregory the Monk was a factory for the concoction of GothicB a k , a poem conceived in an incredible btin de -ne; TorquatoTasso, the great poet of Italian Mannerism, celebrated the glories dreams. T he Italian Risorgimento was a period of abundant me-of the Crusaders. In Spain, Cervantes told the story of a man un- dieVal reptcbage, no t to mention Italian opera, full as it is of trou-able t~ reconcile the intrusion of reality with his love for medievd badom; and finally there was the German neomedieval vertigo ofliterature. Shakespeare borrowed and reshaped a lo t from medie- he castle of Ludwig of Bavaria and Wagner's parsifalization ofval narrative. the universe.What would Ruskin, Morris, and the pre-Raphaelites haveAt the flowering of the English Renaissance John Dee orRobert Fludd rediscovered symbols and emblems of medieval Jew- said if they had been told that the rediscovery of the Middle Agesish mysticism. Even in the baroque period, when modem science would be the work of the twentieth-century mass n~edia?seemed dominated by the new paradigms of Galilee or Newton,the Church of the Counter-Reformation worked silently to im- r Classicism and MedievalismProve or to pollute the philosophy of the Schoolmen, while inFrance Mabillon rediscovered the treasuries of medieval manu- ~t this point we must bring up at least two questions. First, whatscripts. AF a semiotidan I cannot forget that one of the most out- distinguishes this permanent rediscovery of the Middle Ages fromstanding achievements in the theory of s i p wls due to an inno- ' the permanent return to the classical heritage? Second, didvating follower of Aquinas, John of Saint Thomas or , as they call . h e many Middle Ages (too many) always fit the same achetype?him now, Jean Poinsot. During the Age of Reason, while the circle 2 h r the first question, we can oppose the model of philo-of the French Engchpe'dd was seemingly fighting the final b a d e logical reconstruction to that of utilitarian bricolage.against the remnants of the Dark Ages, these Dark Ages started In he case of the remains of classical antiquity we ~~COnsuuc tcharming the aristocrats, with the Gothic novel and early Ossianic them but, once we have rebuilt them, we don't dwell in them, weRomanticism. Geographically close, even though p~cholo@cal lY onlycontemplate them as an ideal model and a masterpiece offar from the Castle of O a n t o , Ludovico Antonio Muratori col- faithful restoration. O n the contrary, the Middle Ages have neverlected in his Rmnn Italcaaum S m p t w ~he ancient chronicles of been reconstructed from scratch: W e have always mended or66 67

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    TRAVELS IN HYPERREALIN

    patched them up, as something in which we still live. W e havecobbled up the bank as well as the cathedral, the state as well asthe church. W e no longer dwell in the Parthenon, bu t we stillwalk or pray in the naves of the cathedral. Even when we live withAristotle o r Plato, we deal with them in the same terms suggestedby our medieval ancestors. When one scrapes away the medievalincrustations from Aristotle and renews him, this reread Aristotlewill adorn the shelves of academic libraries bu t will still not con-nect with ou r everyday life.

    Since the Middle Ages have always been messed up in orderto meet the vital reguirements of different periods, it was impos-sible for them to be always messed about in the same way. So PI1try to outline at least ten types of Middle Ages, to warn readersthat every time on e speaks of a dream of the Middle Ages, oneshould first ask which Middle Ages on e is dreaming of.T e n Little Middle Ages

    1. T h e Middle Ages as a pretext. This is the Middle Ages ofopera o r of Torquato Tasso. The r e is no real interest in the his-torical background; the Middle Ages are taken as a sort of myth-ological stage on which to place contemporary characters. Underthis heading we can include also th e so-called cloak-and-daggernovels (o r les romans de cape et d'ipe'e). The r e is a difference be-tween historical novels and cloak-and-dagger stuff. T h e formerchoose a particular historical period so as to gain a better under-standing no t only of that period bu t (through it) of ou r presenttime, seen as the end result of those remote historical events. Th echaracters of the novel need no t be "really historical" (that is,people who really existed); it is enough for them (albeit fictional)to be representative of their period. Lady Rowena and Pierre Be-zukhov are inventions of novels, bu t they tell us something "true"about the English Middle Ages and about Russia at th e time ofNapoleon. O n the contrary in the cloak-and-dagger novel th e fic-

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    The Return of the Middle Ages

    tional characters must move among "real" historical figures wh owill support their credibility. Think of Dumas and of the crucialnarrative role played by such characters as Richelieu and LouisXIII. Notwithstanding the presence of "real" characters, th e psy-chology of d'Artagnan has nothing to do with th e psychology ofhis century, and he could have blustered through th e same adven-tures during th e French Revolution. Thus in historical novels fic-tional characters help on e to understand th e past (and th e past isnot taken as a pretext), while in cloak-and-dagger novels the past(taken as a pretext) helps on e to enjoy the fictional characters.

    2. T h e Middle Ages as the site of an ironical revisitation, inorder to speculate about our infancy, of course, but also about theillusion of ou r senility. Ariosto an d Cervantes revisit the MiddleAges in th e same way that Sergio Leone and th e other masters ofthe "spaghem Western" revisit nineteenth-century America, asheroic fantasy, something already fashioned by the early Holly-wood studios. I n the same sense, Rabelais was playing upon hisfantastically revisited Sorbonne, bu t he no longer believed in theParis he was telling of, as th e characters in Monty Python moviesdo no t believe in th e grotesque period they inhabit.

    3 . T h e Middle Ages as a barbaric age, a land of elementaryand outlaw feelings. These are th e Middle Ages of Frazetta's fan-tasies, but, at a different level of complexity an d obsession, theyare also the Middle Ages of early Bergman. T h e same elementarypassions could exist equally on the Phoenician coasts o r in thedesert of Gilgamesh. These ages are Dark pa r excellence, andWagner's Ring itself belongs to this dramatic sunset of reason.With only a slight distortion, on e is asked to celebrate, on thisearth of virile, brute force, the glories of a new Aryanism. I t is ashaggy medievalism, and th e shaggier its heroes, th e more pro-foundly ideological its superficial naivett.4. Th e Middle Ages of Romantich, with their stormy castlesand their ghosts. Germane to th e eastern cruelty of Votbek, rheseMiddle Ages return in some contemporary space-operas, where it

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    TRAVELS IN HYPERREALITY

    the decisive demonstration of Casaubon) that it was written at the 'time of Moses or of Pythagoras and, in any case, before Plato.Now the argument runs as follows: Since the C o q w Hermeticum~0nta insdeas that "later" circulated within the Platonic milieu,this proves that it was written before Plato. As for the modusS-ponens, it works (?)as follows:

    If p then q, bu t k then w,and can be exemplified by the following argument: "If a= b, thenb= a." But the C ~ t p w ermeticum says that sinrt infert'us sic q t r -ius; therefore, the Holy Grail is none other than th e Lapis Pbilo-sophonrm. I know that all this is no t real Middle Ages and that ourold doctors debating their q w s t i m s qd i b e t a l e s at the Faculty ofArts were more rigorous than Henry Corbin or Gilbert Durand;but the thinking of the Tradition usually proceeds under the ban-ner of a permanent Arthurian Land, continually revisited for en-joying intemporal ecstasies. In any case, there is on e sense in which we dream of the Middle

    10. Last, very last, bu t no t least, the expectation oftbe MiElen- Ages so that ou r era can be defined as a new Middle Ages. 1 wrotenium. These Middle Ages which have haunted every sect fired by an essay on this subjectmore than ten years ago, and though someenthusiasm still accompany us and will continue to do so, until aspects of ou r time to which I referred then have partly changed,midnight of the Day After. Source of many insanities, they remain I believe that it is worth reprinting here some a f th e reflections Ihowever as a permanent warning. Sometimes i t is no t so medievalto think that perhaps the end is coming and the Antichrist, in First of all, when we say that ou r age is neomedieval, we haveplainclothes, is knocking at the door. to establish to which notion of the Middle Ages we are referring.

    TO begin with, we must realize that the term defines two, quiteWhich One? distinct, historical periods: one that runs from the fall of the Ro-man empire in the West to the year 1000, a period of crisis, de-So, before rejoicing or grieving over a return of the Middle Ages, cadence, violent adjustments of peoples and clashes of cultures,we have the moral and cultural duty of spelling ou t what kind of rnd another that m e n d s from the year 1000 to what in ou rMiddle Ages we are talking about. T o say openly which of the schooldays was called Humanism, and it is no accident that manyabove ten types we are referring to means to say who we are and foreign historians consider tiis already a period of full bloom; theywhat we dream of, if we are simply practicing a more or less hon- even talk of three Renaissances, the Carolingian, another in theest form of divertissement, if we are wondering about ou r basic eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the third one, the Renaissanceproblems or if we are supporting, perhaps without realizing it,some new reactionary plot.

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    TRAVELS INHYPERREALITY The Rsturnofh &idb &W

    Assuming that the Middle Aps can be synthesized in a b d salpatim ~t d v e d new racial c~~~~ponents,t ~ e bof abstract niodel, to which bf the two does our own era corn- -ted nuny h a 4s ivisions, reduced h e d i s r e n ~e-s~ond?h~hm&t ofstrict -ha, item by item, would . .twmid- nondbns, pamcians and plebeians; it re-be hgenuo~s, ot least becausew. i4 n m mormowly spde d- , tained its &-on ofwealth but has watered down the d i ~UP where what happens in five of our yeam can sometimes moqdpl rnla, nor a d d it do othenise- It has witnessedmmap~nd what h a p p d t b a n fivecenturies, Secondly, tbc p h m m of rapid acculturations,has raised to goV-entmm of world q d d o wvw the whole plan- nor- of r am that m hundred yeam earlier~dave been COn-~ A F M z a t i ~ l ~ ~nd culturesand various ph- ofddop - t && inferior, has relaxed the dogmas of m y 1x1live m e , nd in ordin2~pfhnhology we are led to t about s m e period the government can worship the~~ @*the "medid atndition" of the pcoplc of ~ e @aev. at thesoldiefs can worshipMithra, and the slaves,J-M*New YO& a floorithngBabylm~ o the parallel, if4& ~ seemsm a t lethal to the F m smust be esmblished between certain mamen@ and simtim of t r e p d v e tolerance ailowsmV-p h e t q adkcation andv&aw mommrs of a hirmrid p m

    that stretchesh he fifth to the thirteenthbe sure, comparing a pmh e h i sm i dr i o d ~ f l l l m o s t a r h d ~ a t s ~ & ~ i t l s l p k lit d d e insipid if~~ k s,B~~to fhmulate a "hypo&ds of the A &&' (S if.=setting out m fibricate a Wd l e Agcs Pnd W= *eingredientsare required tomakeone&at is& c h t and ee$Cjbj.W h a t i s " ~ M~ rmk e $oodMddleAga?~ i r s t o f ~ ~ l , aBrurpea= that in breaking down, ag m t iomw pmp.rb.rhas unified the world in inngurge, -, ideologies, r&gionq;Irz, and h o l ~ g y ,nd then at a certainpoint, t h d o tsunmmab l e complexity, ollapses. It collapses because the "bar- Middle Ages hdp ,llldendbarbs'' are pressing at its borders; these barbarians are nor net- amat is happening in our OW day. At dK O O ~ P ~f t~P t *essarily d t k t e d , but they are bringing new amom, views and w t y nsue, differentc iv i l i za t io~~ slo*of theworld. These barbarians may burst inwith violence, b a U S e he mge of a -w man s outlined. It am a after-

    w t t to seize a wealth that has bem denied&a,r theg w& but h e basic elements are already t h e , b a b n adm-m ~ yteal inm the sodal and adturd body of& pq rnatic Boethiw,who popularizes Pyth%~mnd r-dsspreadingnew faithsd ep puspekes of lifk.At theb e e g fisde, * on rputiry from memory the krrond be p a utof its fill, the Romvl empire is not undermined by the aharn inye* a oosway of culture, and, p r e t e d q to be theethic; it has already undermind i d y syncmi* m ~ ~ - ~of ~q e is actually setdng up the firstS* Cater ofA ~ ~ d r i ~- a d he -td a& ofWthra or h r ~ ,*B magis scad ahi4ADUSopa and images of ent-day historiography thatwe we74 75

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    TRAVELS I N HYPERREALITY The Returnof theMlddleA g e

    masterpiece of comfwt &d sakty has long since come toa d boarding a jet t.hmugb the various dtctronic check-and searches to amid hijacking restores pifectly the an-me of aclventwous insecurity, presumably destined to

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    narrate and explain ev er yh ng , the nations of the earth, the artsand craftr, the days of the year, the seasons of sowing and reaping,the mysteries of the faith, the episodes of sacred and profane his-tory, and the lives of the saints (great models of behavior, as su-p e r s ~ ~ ~nd pop singers are today, an ilite without political power,but with great charismatic power).Alongside this massive popkar-culture enterprise there pro-ceeds the work of composition and collage tha t learned cu lture iscarrying out on th e flotsam of past culture. Tak e one of the m agicboxes of Cornell or Arman, a collage of Ernst, a useless machineof Munari o r Tinguely, and you will find yourself in a landscapethat has nothing to d o with Raphael or Canova but has a lot to dowith medieval aesthetic taste. In poetry there are centos and rid-dles, the kennings of the Irish, acrostics, verbal compounds ofmultiple quotations that recall Pound and Sanguineti, the lunaticetymological games of V@ of Bigorre and Isidore of Seville, whoimmediately suggest Joyce (as Joyce knew), the poetry treatisesand their tem ponl exercises of composition, which read like a scriptTor Godard, and espeaally the taste for collecting and listing. Whichthen became concrete in the treasure-rooms of princes or cathe-drals, where they presewed indiscriminately a thorn fiom the crossof Jesus, an egg found inside another egg, a unicorn's horn, St.Joseph's engagement ring, the skull of S t John at the age of twelve[sic].

    And over al l reigned a total lack of distinction between aes-thetic objects and mechanical objects (a robot in the form of acock, artistically engraved, was given by Harun a1Rashid to Char-lemagne, a kinetic jewel if ever there was one); and there was nodifference between the o bject of "creation" and the object of N-riosity, or between the work of the artisan and that of the artist,between the "multiple" and the unique piece, and, least of all,between the curious trouvaille (the ar t nouveau lamp and a whale'stooth) and th e work of art. AU was ruled by a taste for gaudy colorand a notion of light as a physical element of pleasure. It is of no

    The Return of the MiddleAgesE

    f importance that, in the past, goldeh vases were encrusted with to-i pazo set to reflect the rays of the sun coming through the stainedI glass of a church, and now there is the multimedia orgy of anyElectric Circus, with strobe lights and water effects.

    Huizinga said that to understand medieval aesthetic taste yout have to think of the sort of indiscriminate reaction an astonishedbourgeois feels when viewing a curious and precious object. Hui-zinga was thinking in terms of post-Romantic aesthetic sensibiliy,today we would find this sort of reaction is the same as that of ayoung person seeing a poster of a dinosaur or motorcycle or amagic transistorized box in which luminous beams rotate, a crossbetween a technological model and a science-fiction promise, withsome elements of barbarian jewelry.An ar t no t systematic bu t additive and compositive, ours and

    : that of the Middle Ages: Today as then the sophisticated elitistexperiment coexists with the great enterprise of populariiadan (therelationship between illuminated manuscript and cathedral is ther same as that between MOMA and Hollywood), with interchangesand borrowings, reciprocal and continuous; and the evident By-

    zantinism, he mad taste for collecting,lists,assemblage, amassingof disparate things is du e m he need m dismantle and reconsiderthe flotsam of a previous world, harmonious perhaps, bu t by nowobsolete.Nothing more closely resembles a monastery (lost in thecountryside, walled, flanked by alien, barbarian hordes, inhabitedby monks who have nothing to do with the world and devotethemselves to their private researches) than an American univer-sity campus. Sometimes the prince summons one of those monksand makes him a royal counselor, sends him as envoy to Cathay;and he moves from he cloister to secular life with indifference,becoming a man of power and trying to rule the world with thesame aseptic perfection with which he collected his Greek texts.Whether his name is Gerbert de Aurillac or McNamara, Bernardof Clairvaux or Kissinger, he can be a man of peace or a man of

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    TRAVELS I N HYPERREALITY H he Return of theMiddleAges

    war (like Eisenhower, who wins some battles and then retires to amonastery, becoming presid mcess is characterized by plaques and massacres, intolerancethe service of the empire when eah. ~ b ~ d ~a p that the Middle Ages offer a completely jollymatic hero).But it is doub$ul that these monastic cepters will have the pmspea As h e Chinese said, to curse someone: "May You live inan interesting period."

    preservation: I t lost essential manuscripts and saved others thatwere quite negligible; it scratched away marvelous poems to writeriddles or prayers in their place, it f i i f i e d sacred texts, interps:lating other passages and, in d o i i so, wrote "its own" boob. heMiddle Ages invented c o r n m d society without possessing my rprecise infoirmation on the Greekplis, it reached China thinl&gsto find men with one foot or with their mouths in their bellies, i t .may have arrived in America before Columbus, using the a smn- .omy of Ptolemy and the geography of Eratosthenes.Our own Middle Ages, it has been said, will be an age of"permanent transition" for which new methods of adjustmentwillhave to be employed. T he problem will no t so much be. that ofpreserving the past scientifithe exploitation of disorder, entering into the logic of conflictual-ity. There will be born-it is already corning into existence-a .culture of constant readjustment, fed on utopia. This is how me-dieval man invented the university, with the same carefree attitudethat the vagabond clerks today assume in destroying it, and per-haps transforming i t T he AGddle Ages preserved in its way theheritage of the past but no t through hibernation, rather through aconstant retranslation and reuse; it was an immensed f bri-colage, balanced among nostalgia, hope, and despair.