WHILE THE METAPHOR of resonance can be applied beyond sound, this essay limits itself to discussing the idea of the resonance of medieval music and ritual in modern music and ritual practices. Depending on one's understanding of the notions of music and ritual (and the Middle Ages), it must first be acknowledged that modern practices directly access neither medieval music nor medieval rituals; at most they can sometimes be found to resonate. Any attempt to reconstruct a medieval ritual practice or musical performance encounters fundamental obstacles that make the reconstruction as much a creative as a scholarly effort. Even the most reliable and detailed sources (musical scores, liturgical manuscripts, narrative sources, or combinations of such documents) provide only vague notions of tempo, timing, sound, or of movements and gestures in the performative event constituted by the ritual or musical performance. Therefore, musicians and musicologists do not assume or expect authenticity of modern performances of medieval or other so-called “early” music (this may include music up to the time of Mozart, Beethoven, and the early Romantics). Today, in the so-called early music revival, the term “historically informed performance practice” characterizes modern attempts to implement current knowledge about earlier practices of music in contemporary performances.

The problems concerning medieval ritual are of a similar order. Not only is it difficult to get close to details about how specific rituals were actually carried out (for similar reasons as medieval musical performances), but as with “music,” it is not clear how to define or delimit the notion of the “ritual.” Nevertheless, the problems become less daunting when one leaves behind abstract discussions and focuses on specific and well-defined areas. Looking at medieval music connected to medieval liturgical practices like the mass or the Divine Office provides a framework for discussing the impact of such rituals and their music on modern composers and even on modern liturgical practices. Furthermore, the chant of medieval liturgical ceremonies has traditionally been understood as the beginning of Western music history in academic musicology.

In this article I shall deal with resonances of medieval chant and hymns in three areas of music performance: 1) within modern Protestant Lutheran mass liturgy; 2) among composers of so-called avant-garde music; and 3) within modern performance practice of medieval liturgical music. I shall do this by way of three short case studies.

The term ‘welfare’ is of Nordic origin. The Old English wel faran, meaning getting along and/or doing well, comes from Old Norse velferd, which in modern English means welfare (Hoad, 1996). This linguistic connection should certainly not be exaggerated, but the Nordic welfare states definitely enjoy a special position in international political and scholarly discourses. The Nordic or Scandinavian welfare state is a wellestablished model, and there would seem to be widespread agreement that the Nordic welfare state is something special. The question we pose here is: does this Nordic welfare state also come with a distinct social policy language?

In this chapter, we address this question by studying aspects of social policy language in Denmark and Sweden. The two countries have their separate histories, distinct national contexts and political cultures – and these national features naturally influence the terminology. Even so, there are shared characteristics. As North Germanic languages, Danish and Swedish are closely related. The Nordic setting is also characterised by a high level of transnational economic, political and cultural exchange, which also influences the development of social policy and social policy language (Petersen, 2011). Intra-Nordic diffusion and emulation, however, are not a self-contained system. On the contrary, the social policy languages of the open economies of Northern Europe have been influenced continuously by outside debates and reforms. In the following analysis, we use ‘Nordic’ and ‘Scandinavian’ interchangeably, but strictly speaking Denmark, Norway and Sweden are the Scandinavian countries, whereas ‘Nordic countries’ also include Finland and Iceland.

Answers to the workers’ question

The ‘social question’, or the ‘workers’ question’ (Danish: Arbejdersporgsmaalet, Swedish: arbetarfragan) as it was also labelled, concerned ‘the conditions of the labouring classes in primarily economic, social and political respects’, as articulated in 1896 by the Swedish Liberal politician and writer Ernst Beckman in a major new dictionary (Beckman, 1896: 317). This question, formulated in various ways with growing anxiety from the 1870s onwards, concerned the social and economic position of a growing class of wage earners. Beckman argued that the complexity of the social question called for a variety of responses. He pointed out three pathways: ‘individual self-help, help-to-self-help from society and help from the state’.

The purpose of this essay is to respond to recent attempts to define the notion of neomedievalism as distinct from (more traditional) medievalism. In the following I shall try to raise questions concerning categories of medievalism and concerning the general historiography of the Middle Ages.

To begin with, I shall reconsider the well-known definition (or characterization) of medievalism given by Leslie Workman, focusing in particular on a specific formulation to which several authors in the discussions published in volumes of Studies in Medievalism during the last few years have referred. In its briefest form, Workman’s definition states that “Medievalism is the continuing process of creating the Middle Ages.” A brief discussion of this idea is also found in Workman’s essay “The Future of Medievalism”:

Since Workman considers scholarly studies and “uses” of the Middle Ages (the latter including artistry as well as social reform) to be “two sides of the same coin,” his understanding clearly emphasizes the intimate connection between historical scholarship and “creative” (artistic) approaches to the Middle Ages. And, as cited by Carol L. Robinson and Pamela Clements and emphasized by Elizabeth Emery, the statement makes it clear that his notion of the Middle Ages refers to something that changes with the investigating (and interpretative) eye and that a certain circularity is therefore involved in the process. Scholars as well as artists aiming to recreate the Middle Ages give rise to a process that in itself is deemed to constitute the Middle Ages and medievalism. This would seem to establish (or refer to) a hermeneutical circle of the traditional kind in which a pre-understanding and some intellectual (or artistic) process leads to a renewed understanding, a new version, as it were, of (a part of) the Middle Ages. In Workman’s account, there is seemingly no well-defined object for these intellectual or artistic attempts, for as he points out in this context, “The Middle Ages quite simply has no objective correlative.”

In this paper I would like to address a question that is absolutely central to the definition of “medievalism”: namely, should this term be used for everything that derives from the Middle Ages, or should it be reserved for post-medieval interest in the revival of phenomena belonging to the period or notion of the Middle Ages? The importance of this question has been underscored by its great relevance to many of the conferences and publications sponsored by Studies in Medievalism over the years. Moreover, I am convinced that in limiting the possibility of conclusively theorizing about or mapping medievalism, the ambiguity addressed by this question has significantly hampered scholarly interest in the field. I therefore believe we must tackle this question directly and stake our position(s) in relationship to it.

Of course, I have no illusion that I can give anything near a definitive answer to it, but I would like to contribute to the debate on it by taking up Leslie Workman's classic position that medievalism is the continued construction of the Middle Ages. In one of his editorial introductions, which also observes that the term “The Middle Ages” was a Renaissance humanist creation that has “been elaborated and reinforced from different perspectives from the sixteenth century to the present,” Workman wrote: “[…] medieval historiography, the study of the successive recreation of the Middle Ages by different generations, is the Middle Ages. And this of course is medievalism.”