Are the Middle Ages really ‘dark ages’? What new discoveries can old sources reveal to us? What can previous eras teach us, including about ourselves? Prof. Emilia Jamroziak, who took over the Named Chair of Honour of Professor Maria Janion in the 2024/2025 academic year, spoke to us about the Middle Ages, research into this period and its perception in the context of scientific knowledge.

Karolina Żuk-Wieczorkiewicz: You deal with a period that is quite distant in time. What made you interested in it? What are the biggest challenges associated with researching it?

Prof. Emilia Jamroziak: In a sense, it was the difficulties that made me interested in the Middle Ages, or more precisely, the fragmentary nature of what has survived and how much we do not know. Therefore, for a researcher of the Middle Ages, the way we ask research questions is fundamental, because we cannot answer many things directly. In documents and the material we study, what interests us is often not directly visible or easily discernible. Therefore, we must formulate questions that will enable us to find this information indirectly, because it is there, but it is not directly accessible.

How is this important for someone researching this period?

The fragmentary nature of our knowledge, the fact that so little has survived, means (and I find this very appealing) that my role as a researcher is greater. I am not overwhelmed by a ‘cacophony of information’; my work is almost like detective work. It is not so much about reconstructing what happened, but rather about recreating certain elements of that world, culture or the way reality was perceived at the time. The fragmentary nature of the preserved materials also means that research on the Middle Ages has been very interdisciplinary for many decades, in fact since the mid-20th century. This era cannot be studied by just one narrow discipline. Cooperation and drawing on the research of art historians, archaeologists, linguists and literary scholars means that I am in contact with various research workshops. All this means that our audience, the people with whom we are in scientific dialogue, is wide. This, in turn, translates into a diversity of research perspectives.

So, paradoxically, thanks to the fragmentary nature of the preserved traces and the need for cooperation between many disciplines, our knowledge of the Middle Ages is more complete?

Yes. It also makes it more interesting because different fields are interested in different aspects. For example, work on a text from the perspective of literary or linguistic research brings different tools than the work of a historian. This is very valuable and interesting.

You mentioned that it is necessary to ask the right questions. I understand that the different way of thinking of people from the era under study can also be a challenge. How does a medieval person differ from a modern person?

This is largely what my classes with students are about. For people in the Middle Ages, the world was different; above all, there were more worlds. The world was perceived as a space in which there were different types of beings that could have a positive or negative impact on human life – and which could be exploited in some way. People were convinced that there were different types of demons, angels, saints (who were believed to be very active) and that there were ways (prayer, various magical or paramagical activities, different types of objects) through which one could come into contact with these forces. The spirits of the dead also played a very important role, completely different from that in popular culture since the 19th century. They were not a source of entertainment, but an important channel of communication and connection with the dead, in a fundamentally different way than is understood today.

It seems that people in the Middle Ages were definitely less lonely than today.

Definitely. Life in a group was also more important, as can be seen in completely different concepts of privacy (or private space) than those that developed in Europe since modern times. The way people lived – how they organised spaces, e.g. for sleeping or physiological activities – was completely different in the Middle Ages. This is also an example of an aspect of medieval life that is indirectly visible in historical materials. Information about it is often incidental, present in sources concerning completely different issues.

So where do we get this information?

An innovative line of research from the end of the last century (late 20th and early 21st centuries) is very interesting. A strong research group associated with this line of research is still active in Finland. It examines the records of hearings and interviews conducted during canonisation processes in the late Middle Ages with people who claimed to have experienced a miracle. These are often extensive texts. People talking about these miracles had to provide quite a lot of information about the circumstances of the miraculous event. People from various social strata were interrogated, not only from the upper classes. Importantly, these people often described typical, everyday situations. The protocols contain, for example, stories from family life, examples of how people dealt with danger, what relationships existed within the family or in the group, and value hierarchies. Traditionally, historians have studied hagiographic sources and those related to canonisation processes in the context of the cult of saints, but the same texts can be important sources for the history of lived experience, the history of medicine or the history of emotions in a social context.

- And were completely different aspects discovered in the process?

Exactly. Often, many decades later, historians become interested in these sources again and approach them with completely different, new questions – because there are layers of information that were not previously considered relevant. Now they are – because we have different questions.

It seems that there is a trend in research concerning old court documents.

That's a very good example. In the past, these texts were studied in terms of the history of law or the history of specific places, especially cities. However, it turns out that they also contain a wealth of other information, for example on social relations, the history of mentalities or many areas of medieval medical history – or the history of disability. The research uses various types of legal documents, but also the aforementioned documents related to canonisation processes or miracles. It is precisely in these texts that information about people who today we would describe as disabled appears quite often.

Sometimes you hear – for example, in colloquial or public language – that something is ‘like in the Middle Ages’. What distortions do contemporary messages (including pop culture) convey in relation to scientific knowledge?

This is a very interesting problem. ‘Middle Ages’ is often used as a ‘bad word’, as a pejorative term. This is an example of medievalism, i.e. the presence of the Middle Ages in later cultures. These cultures used the Middle Ages in various ways as a building block for different things: for example, to create national myths, for entertainment purposes, but also as a space in which various negative elements could be placed. The treatment of the Middle Ages as a ‘repository of ignorance and superstition’ largely stems from the culture of the Enlightenment. In many parts of Europe, this pejorative connotation was strongly associated with Protestant culture well into the 20th century. This era was viewed negatively by rationalism and the triumphalism of the modern age, present, for example, in the 19th and 20th centuries: the belief that ‘we live in a golden age, at the peak of progress, things will only get better, we have steam engines, the atom and SUVs’. Meanwhile, we now know that we are not in such a wonderful situation and that things are unlikely to get better, only worse. I think we are at a point where it will become increasingly difficult to use the Middle Ages as a pejorative term, because its use is associated with a deeply linear view of the past: ‘There used to be darkness, but things are getting better, we have the Enlightenment, now everything is great, and in 10-20 years it will be even more wonderful.’ And this vision is crumbling before our eyes.

On the other hand, you can encounter the narrative that “things used to be better”.

This is also a false belief. It was not some golden age before evil modernity destroyed everything. Time is probably not as linear as we think. At least cultural and social time is more spiral than linear.

Are you saying that history repeats itself?

Yes. But it does not repeat itself in such a way that the same thing happens again, only certain elements and patterns repeat themselves. We ourselves also find elements of what we are experiencing now in our past experiences. In this sense, by analogy, we are able to tame, explain and understand what is happening now. And this is also an important role of history.

Do we see similarities between contemporary events and processes, sources or sequences of events from the past?

Or to social behaviour. On the one hand, this is something that can give us hope, but on the other hand, it fills us with fear, for example, all the contemporary discussions about what stage we are at before the war. These are always analogies to the situation before World War II. In turn, what people imagined before World War II (we know this from a huge amount of material on people's experiences during World War II, including oral accounts) was based on the perspective of World War I. What actually affected them later turned out to be new and shocking. So, although these analogies are useful, we never live in the past again. This can also be applied to some positive beliefs about the Middle Ages, such as that ‘it was so ecological back then’ or that ‘there was greater equality and community spirit’. Yes, there was community spirit, but it was not the same as we understand it today, and we would rather not return to it.

I think that while a certain kind of living with the past is culturally important (it is important in every community, regardless of time and place), it is something different from scientific research.

So we are dealing with different perspectives?

Yes. In fact, we can talk about three perspectives: the popular and cultural understanding of the past, scientific research on the past, and a third element: scientific research on the understanding of the past now. That is why we should study history, why universities should have history departments, and why museums should exist. The past is one of the fundamental elements of who we are, how we explain the world to ourselves, how we exist. Even if we think that we are always moving forward, that what we do is always rational and has nothing to do with the past, this past is within us as social and cultural beings.

- What did the Middle Ages give us?

A lot! It gave us the fact that we live in states, that Christianity has become widespread in much of Europe, but also that both Islam and Judaism are part of European culture. The Middle Ages also gave us the fact that we live in cities. Many villages also have their origins in the Middle Ages, because a place does not have to be a city like Gdańsk to derive from this era. We literally live in the same spaces where people lived in the Middle Ages.

A large part of our popular mythology comes from the Middle Ages: our ideas about kings and queens, the practice of city coats of arms or the town hall as the central building of the city, place names. Of course, many elements were inherited from antiquity and filtered through the Middle Ages. Contemporary European languages also became written languages in different parts of Europe and at different times during the Middle Ages.

I am also thinking about the seeds of European integration.

Of course! European integration – but also the mythology of integration. One of the most important awards promoting European unity is the Charlemagne Prize, awarded since 1950 by the city of Aachen, where the emperor's most important residence was located. In conscious references to integration, we refer not only to what happened after World War II (e.g. that we no longer wanted war in Europe...). Older references to the Middle Ages are also present. For example, the Hanseatic League: Gdańsk, in its history, is a wonderful example of the presence of the Middle Ages and of the fact that the Middle Ages are not only the history of individual places (e.g. ‘my little village’, which has existed since the 12th century), but also the history of a network of connections in Europe linking cities from Riga to London.

These networks of connections are clearly visible in your research on Cistercian monasteries. On the one hand, we see the international aspect – a network of connections across national borders – and on the other, we can see the challenges of adapting the monks' activities to local cultures. I am fascinated by how they achieved this: being a European community while functioning locally.

That is a good summary. This is largely something that (I believe) is very important for us in Europe. Too often we encounter polarisation, that we can either be this great European community or this very local, national community, snarling at everyone else, as if they were mutually exclusive. We are both.

Finally, to sum up, I would like to refer to your activities at Maria Janion's Named Chair of Honour and the numerous events you organise. How do you perceive the students' interest?

It is very high: students come, they are active, they join in discussions, they are not afraid to ask questions, they sign up for workshops. This is a very positive experience for me. Young people understand that studies are not only about passing courses, but are a stage during which they acquire various skills that translate into many other areas, such as social skills and reducing fear of something new and interesting. I also hope that the podcast competition I am organising will have a big response. I think that podcasts are currently a very important means of communication (not only of knowledge) and it is worth learning how to create them.

What are your hopes for your work at Maria Janion’s Named Chair?

I hope that what I leave behind in Gdańsk as a result of my work will be further developed by various people, not only in this place and in this form, but also by students who will continue on this path. Even if it is just one sentence they heard from me or other lecturers, or a skill they learned, I hope that it will stay with them, perhaps point them towards new opportunities or open doors for them.

I think that what the University of Gdańsk has organised, these three Named Chairs of Honour, is a great idea. It is a very effective way of establishing networks of understanding, contact and knowledge at a relatively low cost. It is opening up to the world by inviting guests and, at the same time, showing what Gdańsk has to offer. The people I invite come from different academic centres, have different experiences and represent different nationalities, and they are all delighted with Gdańsk. They emphasise how beautiful and interesting the city is, and how fascinating it is for historians. So it is worth showing what good things are happening here, that it is worth coming to Gdańsk and cooperating with the University of Gdańsk.

Thank you very much for talking to us!