Petrarch and Post-colonialism

Article by Robyn Parker. Edited by Liam Geoghegan. Additional Research by Ellie Veryard.

 ‘There are deserts and wastelands, not just of geography, but of times as well.‘ 

Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620) 

As an undergraduate I studied History and Politics. The two were completely different; so far removed I often struggled to connect my study of both of them. I spent most of my degree begrudging the compulsory political analysis modules every year. They were highly conceptual, to the point of abstraction at points. But looking at how I view History now, I have to admit that a fair bit of my approach comes from my Politics background. I approach History conceptually. I don’t look necessarily at what happened, but the concepts surrounding a certain event and conceptual evolution over a period of time. Yet one of the stumbling blocks I’ve found is figuring out to what extent can modern theories and concepts be applied to the Middle Ages. How useful really are theories based in modern rationalities, and modern mindsets to a period that is often characterised as completely different and set apart from our own world? How much should we manipulate and change these theories to suit a different period in time? And are we simply imposing modern conceptualisations on a foreign landscape? 

A case in point is Petrarch, a fourteenth-century Italian poet, charged with creating the term the “dark ages” to describe the period between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance. Recent historians have attempted to apply the modern theory of postcolonialism to Petrarch to describe his relationship to time and history. Postcolonialism as a theory deals with the effects of colonisation on cultures and society. (And I use postcolonialism deliberately to separate it from post colonialism which denotes a period in time; the period after colonisation). From a modernist perspective, this theory primarily deals with geographical colonisation, looking at the effects of colonisation on countries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A central facet of the theory is the concept of “othering”. This is taken to mean that when the colonisers came to a country, they affected the colonised by creating a sense of “other” in their subjects. The colonisers, in effect, completely separated themselves from the (black) “natives” who they often characterised as having completely opposite mentalities to the (white) coloniser. Thus the colonisers saw themselves as progressive, intelligent, and educated. The natives, in their eyes, were backwards, uneducated and barbaric. Postcolonialism helps explore these power relationships and the effects that colonisers had on the colonised. So, clearly this theory has its roots in a very specific modern time period, as it was created out of a phenomenon that occurred within modernity. But recently the theory has begun to be applied to Petrarch in the fourteenth century, and it is currently the subject of much debate in medieval studies. Applying postcolonial theory to Petrarch means not seeing how Petrarch colonised geography as the nineteenth century imperialists did, but how Petrarch colonised time. Petrarch stands between what has traditionally been thought of as the end of the Middle Ages and the start of the Renaissance (or the beginning of modernity). At this point in time, Petrarch has a unique perspective on the Middle Ages, because he stands in the middle between two periods. He calls the Middle Ages the dark ages, a time of debasement and squalor which he lives in unhappily. Petrarch explicitly compares this to the Roman Empire which he sees as a period of light, and he sincerely believes that one day Rome will rise from the ashes and be bathed in radiance once again. By characterising a period of time in this way, it can be said that Petrarch essentially “othered” a period in time. He gave, as the colonisers of the nineteenth and twentieth century would do to the natives over six hundred years later, the Middle Ages a completely different quality of time, compared to Roman glory and his hope for the future. It is telling that Petrarch uses many of the traditional antitheses that will later be used by colonialists; light and dark, new and old, good and evil, freedom and servitude and so on. Thus Petrarch can be seen as basically “colonising” the Middle Ages. 

At first glance, then, it appears that postcolonial theory has had a positive effect on medieval historiography as it has enlightened us to the power structures between colonisers (Petrarch) and the colonised (the Middle Ages). Postcolonial theory helps us to explain why we see the Middle Ages as we do; as the “dark ages”, as an era of brutality and barbarism, and why the Renaissance is seen as a period of learning, progression and light in comparison. But is this really an apt theory to apply to the Middle Ages? I believe that by applying such modern theories we are guilty of what we accuse Petrarch of; colonisation of time. Postcolonial theory allows us to accuse Petrarch of othering time, which detracts us from realising that we other time, specifically by the employment of postcolonialism. We have already accepted seeing medieval contemporaries as barbaric and unlearned, because we accept implicitly Petrarch’s characterisation of the Middle Ages as such through accepting the application of postcolonialism onto Petrarch. 

So applying the modern theory of postcolonialism to the Middle Ages can help illuminate power relations. But blandly applying theories, with little thought to their consequences or implications is a dangerous sport. We must recognise not only whether we can genuinely apply modern theories to the medieval, but what effect these theories will have on our perception of the medieval. In the case of Petrarch, postcolonialism leaves the people of the Middle Ages in a temporal wasteland, they are forever unlearned, forever barbaric and forever in the dark. 

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