A New Yorker article on abortion in the U.S. written prior to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision but anticipating its overthrow of Roe vs. Wade, quotes a gynecologist named Franz Theard as saying “I cannot believe that people who were born after ’73 are going back to the Middle Ages” (June 20, 2022, p. 21). Even before I read that, I had expected someone, somewhere, to make a medievalizing reference to describe a post-Roe America, given how often the European Middle Ages are used today to represent the “bad old days.” What surprised me was the actual medieval reference in Justice Alito’s opinion in Dobbs. In claiming that English common law treated abortion after “quickening” as a crime, he quotes “Henry de Bracton’s 13th-century treatise” as stating that if someone has “struck a pregnant woman, or given her poison, whereby he has caused abortion, if the foetus be formed and animated, and particularly if it be animated, he commits homicide” (p. 17). This reference to the Middle Ages
Medieval Studies blew up online this past weekend when a Rachel Fulton Brown, an Associate Professor in the History Department at the University of Chicago (my graduate institution, although I did not study with her), published a few pieces on her blog aimed at Dorothy Kim (an Assistant Professor at Vassar College, who I know from the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship) for her insistence that medieval studies as a field needs to grapple with the way its materials have been and are currently being used by white supremacists to support their ideology and that those of us who teach medieval materials need to signal our rejection of white supremacist beliefs to our students. While the first post begins (and the second continues) an attack on Kim, the bulk of it is given over to an argument about the Virgin Mary that is framed around a famous window from Chartres Cathedral, known as Notre Dame de la Belle Verriere (our lady of the beautiful window). According to Fulton Brown, th