Mapping History: The Topoi of Periodization

That history is cut up into periods, that we recast names, dates, and ideologies from the supposed vantage point of “now” is, as Marshall Brown quotes David Perkins in “Periods and Resistances,” a “necessary fiction.” Even so, Brown argues for the continuation of the practice of periodizing, but challenges our assumptions about why we do and should periodize—just what are we getting at in our efforts? He makes his case as he asserts that “without categories—such as periods—there can be no thought and no transcendence beyond mere fact toward understanding. Periods trouble our quiet so as to bring history to life.” The purpose of periodizing is not to insist on a single, right understanding of the past, but to attempt a formulation of the past which allows present engagement with it in an effort to understand not only the period in question better, but our own present as well. Periodization is, as Brown states, about understanding a place in history, demarcating art, science, music, literature, and cultures in time and space so that, through the unavoidably discursive process of understanding one thing in terms of another, the past and the present can be elucidated.

As a medievalist with a special interest in the interrelationships between literature and music and literature and medieval maps, the dynamic relationships between the topoi of history and fields are significant to me. Our perception of a period is shaped by the boundaries, the borders we ascribe to it and by what lies on the other side of each of those borders. Much like a medieval mappamundi (for instance, the Anglo-Saxon map, c. 1050 included above), the topos of history can be understood as similarly parceled out and yet connected, likewise projecting backward and forward in space and time. Medieval maps function as a participative philosophy of the process of time in space, mapping religious and secular space and time, from a divine creation at the beginning of time in the east (here Eden situated on the island of Laperbana), through to an anticipated apocalypse, a literal end of the earth in time and space, perched on the edge of the Spanish peninsula of Finisterre in the extreme west (notably here depicted with the Pillars of Hercules marking the edge of knowability and mortality just past the Spanish peninsula). A medieval viewer of these maps, even in their most schematic forms, understood their place in space, history, and theology at a glance—situated in relation to the pull of the past, the momentum toward the future, and the expanse of the world around them.

From our readings these past few weeks it is clear that the movement of history, theory, culture, or periods, puts the geography of thought, knowledge, and (hoped for) understanding into a dynamic relationship with us, as situated viewers. With that, scholars have two basic choices: to give up on any attempt to periodize (a move which Brown argues against), or to accept an understanding of history as a malleable thing, which will necessarily change as our own perceptions of our present change, as we imagine and reimagine our future and engage with the past differently, even as we engage with different pieces of the past, from the Medieval to the Baroque, for instance—if we, indeed, move to “recognize that every period is also a terrain, in more or less proximate relationship to other terrains.” Though Brown presents this geographic image of periods as a way of speaking to the shifting definitions of the periods from one field of knowledge to another, from English to science, for instance, this image is likewise useful in viewing periods within a single field. As medieval mapmakers participated in their own perception of present, past, and place in their mappamundi, periodizing enables a scholar to critically engage a moment (however big or small) of the past, leaping over the expanse of space and time which may lie between, and find within that dynamic examination a new understanding.