Leeds Live Blog I

by J J Cohen

The good news: I have arrived safely in Leeds. The bad news: I deliver my keynote tomorrow, so readers who have enjoyed my prolonged agonizing over the talk here at ITM, on Facebook and on Twitter must now face the fact that all good things come to an end.

I ran into a fellow American medievalist at Bodlington Hall who bragged that British Airways had offered her a $99 upgrade to Club World, where she was given her own sleeping cube. I was not offered such an upgrade by the airline, but by way of recompense they did give me an aisle seat next to a woman who gyrated her hips in her sleep in a way that perpetually crossed into the personal space of the college professor to her right. The passenger by the window meanwhile rang for the flight attendant every thirty minutes to request apple juice. Oddly enough he never peed, but to make up for it the hip gyrating personal space violating passenger awoke shortly after each juice delivery to head for the lavatory.

The hotel room that I have been given in Weetwood Hall is, in two words, quite nice. The bed is huge, the room is huge, and there is a tea kettle, a French press coffee maker, and more biscuits than even a glutton like me can devour. On Saturday afternoon I took the local bus into Leeds proper and walked around the arcades and Cornmarket. It was too late in the day for the art museum, but watching the people of the city on their Saturday errands was pleasure enough. I ate dinner, had some pretty good beer, and returned to my room to call home and head off to slumberland early.

Jet lag usually manifests as a mixture of homesickness and insomnia for me, so before I climbed into bed I popped the Ambien that my kind wife had given me from her stash. I know some people sleepwalk or bake cakes while under that drug’s influence, but not me: at some point late in the night I turned on my computer and made edits to my Leeds lecture. I lost consciousness holding down the return button and added about twenty pages of spaces to the speech. I then turned off the computer without saving anything. The next day I remembered EXACTLY what edits I had made (the holding of the return button, the changing of “chewed out” to “scolded,” some shortening of paragraphs). In a coffee shop later in the day I made the actual changes and saved them. Despite the sleep-editing I did wake up refreshed, and even took a run around Headingley, a village that it would be difficult for a medievalist not like: "In Viking times, Headingley was the centre of the wapentake of Skyrack, or "Shire Oak". Or so Wikipedia tells me. Two pubs are named after this oak, and I ran by both this morning: I will return and report if anyone with a horned hat lurks inside.

Tomorrow at 9 AM my “Between Christian and Jew” finally gets delivered. I’ve been living with the project so long that it will feel good to release some form of the project into the world. Wish me luck. Wish the audience luck as well.

Eileen just phoned that she has arrived, and that I should buy a pitcher of vodka and meet her at a nearby pub. That’s where I’m headed, but I will substitute tap water for her vodka because I really don’t think she can tell the difference.

If I can, I will try to blog some more of the conference as it unfolds.

Read More...

Summary only...

Personals for the Fictionally Forlorn Redux: Sou'wester (Spring 2009)

by EILEEN JOY

I was in the crowd of virgins in the temple at Aulis when your father plunged his dagger into your heart. My therapist tells me I have a thing for sacrificial victims, but I can’t help myself. Is this so wrong?

Some readers may recall a short story I wrote expressly for In The Middle just this past winter, "Personals for the Fictionally Forlorn." The story has been revised and expanded [to include entries for Edmund from King Lear and Anna Karenina] and is now published in old-fashioned print in the Spring 2009 issue of the literary journal Sou'wester. The fiction editor, Valerie Vogrin, is extending a free copy of the issue, which she will happily mail by the antique method of postal conveyance, to any readers of In The Middle or members of the BABEL Working Group who might be interested. Any and all requests can be sent to her at: vvogrin@siue.edu.

Read More...

Summary only...

Leedsward Bound

by J J Cohen

Four of your intrepid ITM Bloggers are on their way to the IMC at Leeds (clicking that link brings you to an overview interview with Axel E. W. Müller).

At Leeds this year: Eileen Joy, Mary Kate Hurley, moi, and Tiny Himself (he doesn't know it, but he isn't traveling first class: I am stowing him with my toiletries).

Hope to see some readers there.

Read More...

Summary only...

The Inevitable Result of Being a Medievalist's Child

by J J Cohen

Your offspring will one day surprise you by having purchased a miniature Neolithic chambered tomb for our spiny tailed lizard, Spike.

Peer closely at the picture at left and you can see Spike dozing contentedly in his new domicile.

OK, enough procrastination: I need to pack for Leeds.

Read More...

Summary only...

Congratulations to our winning poster

by J J Cohen

John Chapman's design won, by popular acclaim. Thank you to everyone who participated!

All were thoughtful and inspiring entries ... and thank all who submitted for their labor, creativity and time.

Read More...

Summary only...

CFP: Theorizing the Borders: Scotland and the Shaping of Identity in Medieval Britain

by J J Cohen

I met Katherine Terrell a few years back when she invited me to give a paper at Hamilton College. She contributed a terrific essay to Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages, on "Subversive Histories: Strategies of Identity in Scottish Historiography." Now she and Mark Bruce are assembling their own collection, on Scotland and Britain. Interested? Email Katherine and let her know: kterrell@hamilton.edu The collection looks like it will be a very important one.
-----------------------
One of the most fascinating current conversations in medieval studies concerns the application of post-colonial theory and border studies to the literature and culture of medieval Britain. Since the 2000 publication of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s The Postcolonial Middle Ages, several studies have addressed the creation and manifestation of bordered identities in medieval texts. However, while these studies have tended to couch the question of liminal identities in terms of England’s relationship with neighboring others such as the Irish and Welsh, internal others such as England’s (present or past) Jewish population, and more distant others like Muslims of the Middle East, there have been few studies of England’s nearest and arguably most contentious other: Scotland. Texts that originate in the Anglo-Scottish marches, as well as texts that actively seek to negotiate Anglo-Scottish cultural and political relations, offer some of the most fruitful occasions for the exploration of medieval borders, nationalism, and identity formation.

However, despite the recent growth in medieval Scottish studies, the last book devoted to a general exploration of cross-border literary influences was Gregory Kratzman’s Anglo-Scottish Literary Relations 1430-1550 (Cambridge University Press, 1980); Rhiannon Purdie and Nicloa Royan’s collection on The Scots and Medieval Arthurian Legend (Boydell Press, 2005) only begins to fill the gap. Anglo-Scottish relations have received more comprehensive attention from historians: for example in the work of Robin Frame and of Rees Davies, and in Andy King and Michael Penman’s recent collection, England and Scotland in the Fourteenth Century: New Perspectives (Boydell Press, 2007). Yet scholarship on cross-border literary relations, as well as work that addresses the interrelations between the literature and history of the two nations, remains scattered and underrepresented.

The proposed anthology, Theorizing the Borders: Scotland and the Shaping of Identity in Medieval Britain, will explore the roles that Scotland and England play in one another’s imaginations, addressing such questions as: How do subjects on both sides of the border define themselves in relation to one another? In what ways do they influence each other’s sense of historical, cultural, and national identity? What stories do they tell about one another, and to what ends? When do texts produced on the Anglo-Scottish border reify or critique mainstream notions of Scottish and English identities? How does the shifting political balance—as well as the shifting border—between the two kingdoms complicate notions of Scottishness and Englishness? When do hybrid categories come into being? We envision this as an interdisciplinary collection, bringing together literary scholars and historians working on both Scotland and England, with the goal of advancing scholarship on medieval Anglo-Scottish relations and the formation of identity.

Read More...

Summary only...

Hidden Treasures at the Met Museum

by Irina Dumitrescu

Tucked into a fold of the cavernous Metropolitan Museum of Art, a three-room exhibition of medieval manuscript drawings entitled “Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages” is on display until August 23, 2009. Despite the exhibition’s flowery review in the New York Times, these faded books draw few visitors in comparison with the epic Francis Bacon retrospective on the same floor of the Met. Still, medievalists will find unexpected, and unexpectedly breathtaking, treasures among them.

The collection is a particular treat for the Anglo-Saxonist. Saint Dunstan’s Classbook is on display, opened to the well-known image of the tiny monk Dunstan bowing to a brobdignagian Christ. Byrhtferth’s computus diagram fills an entire page of Oxford, Saint Johns’ College MS 17. A tenth or eleventh-century English copy of Prudentius’ Psychomachia is illustrated by eighty-nine stately images. The Arenberg Gospels, the Sherborne Pontifical, and the Bury Saint Edmonds Psalter offer examples of the dynamic and finely-detailed line drawing we know from the Utrecht Psalter. (Looking at these images I realised what the strange grace of slouching angels in undulating robes reminded me of – the “broken doll” look of a Vogue editorial model!) As if that weren’t enough, the Harley Psalter is also here in New York, unbelievably fine and brilliantly coloured. I had only ever seen enlarged black-and-white reproductions of Harley Psalter images, and thought them rough and unimpressive. Seeing the Harley in person, I realised that the exquisite lines of its drawings simply do not survive magnification, and that much of the dynamic quality of the figures results from their vivid, almost playful, colouring. Ironically but perhaps unsurprisingly, the occasional reproductions and magnifications of manuscripts on the exhibit walls were never as vibrant as the real thing.

I fell in love with other pieces as well. A ninth or tenth-century copy of the First Book of Maccabees from St. Gall features energetic battle scenes, with orange, yellow, blue, and green shields popping like bright Easter eggs from the manuscript page. A long scroll of Peter of Poitiers’ The Compendium of History through the Genealogy of Christ demonstrates that medieval artists would have appreciated flow charts and Power Point. The Sawley Map lets us imagine a world in which Europe is not at the top. And a twelfth-century English copy of Terence begins with an author portrait of the playwright and a drawing of thirteen theatrical masks waiting for use in a cupboard. While Terence looks expressionless at the reader, the masks practice a ghoulish variety of grimaces.

It is probably a mistake to follow up an exhibition on the glorious but quiet achievements of early medieval art with a Francis Bacon retrospective. Bacon’s paintings, overwhelming in both size and traumatic force, have a tendency to push anything else out of my consciousness. (And as they do so, they prove Mary Carruthers’ point about violent imagery and memory much better than any medieval manuscript could.) Still, looking at the ways in which Bacon painted people and people-parts in cages, seeing how one version of Bacon’s Pope Innocent is trapped in interlocking cages and bars, I understood some of the strange, subtle power of medieval images. Among the diagrams in the “Pen and Parchment” exhibition are a German consanguinity chart, entirely contained within the body of Adam, and a diagram by Opicinus de Canistris in which the universal church is drawn within one man’s body. These diagrams are curious to the modern eye, but they offer us a radically optimistic vision of a universe in which lines and boxes create order within the human, rather than fencing him in. In Three Studies for a Crucifixion, Francis Bacon opens up the human body and forces us to examine its grotesquely confused innards. In his diagram of the church, Opicinus places the crucifixion within a whole and unblemished body; he acknowledges human suffering, but shows us a way to find the meaning beyond it.

[thank you, Irina, for this fantastic guest post -- JJC]

Read More...

Summary only...

Postcard from London, via Reykjavik

by Mary Kate Hurley

[Iceland -- the best layover ever]

One of the myriad things I'm doing this summer is researching Aelfric's Saints Lives in London at the British Library. Yes: I am actually consulting manuscripts, which is a new and exciting research prospect for me. I've been extremely lucky in terms of funding the trip: the Medieval Academy of America generously awarded me the E.K. Rand Dissertation Grant, one of several dissertation grants which they award each year.

Of course, I'll have a lot to say about the actual process of consulting the manuscripts (and I hope to blog a bit about Leeds, which I'll be attending next week, as well). But for now I have a quick question that I'd like to put to all you Norse specialists out there.

On my way over to London, I had a 10-hour layover in Reykjavik. Just enough time to trek all over the city (I was there mostly for the landscape -- museums and manuscripts are always interesting, but I was more intrigued by the land than the stuff from those who've lived on it), and then to head back for a short stay at the unofficial waiting area for Keflavik Airport travelers.

What caught my attention, however, was on the bus rides to and from Keflavik, where I found myself intrigued by these bizarre rock formations:



Now, I've tried googling them, and although I've found a few references, finding something specific about the structures is a bit difficult. So: anything strike you, dear readers? Some half-remembered fragment of a story from graduate school days past (long past or recently past...)? These seem like a lovely addition to the many other stones we've discussed here at ITM.

cross posted to OENY

Read More...

Summary only...

York 1190 Poster Contest

by J J Cohen

As announced previously, we are running a poster contest for the conference York 1190: Jews and Others in the Wake of Massacre. The conference will be held at the University of York in March 2010.

Please take a moment, follow this link, and choose which poster you prefer (some are in multiple versions: choose the version you like best). They all have much to commend, but you can vote for only one. Fell free to leave your reasons for your choice in the comments to this post.

Voting is completely anonymous and the poll closes Wednesday July 8 at 5 PM Eastern Time. Thank you to everyone who submitted a poster!

Read More...

Summary only...

Queer Movie Medievalisms

by J J Cohen

Out (so to speak) this month. I blurbed this a while back so I got to read the galleys: it's a solid collection of essays that accomplishes innovative work. You'll also notice many ITM favorite writers here as well.

From the Ashgate website, where you can download the introduction and ToC:

How is history even possible, since it involves recapturing a past already lost? It is through this urge to understand, feel and experience, that films based on medieval history are made. They attempt to re-create the past, but can only do so through a queer re-visioning that inevitably replicates modernity. In these mediations between past and present, history becomes misty, and so, too, do constructions of gender and sexuality leading to the impossibility of heterosexuality, or of any sexuality, predicated upon cinematic medievalism. Queer Movie Medievalisms is the first book of its kind to grapple with the ways in which mediations between past and present, as registered on the silver screen, queerly undercut assumptions about sexuality throughout time. It will be of great interest to scholars of Gender and Sexuality, Cultural and Media Studies, Film Studies and Medieval History.

Contents:
Introduction: queer history, cinematic medievalism, and the impossibility of sexuality, Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh; The law of the daughter: queer family politics in Bertrand Tavernier's La Passion Béatrice, Lisa Manter; Queering the Lionheart: Richard I in The Lion in Winter on stage and screen, R. Barton Palmer; 'He's not a ardent suitor, is he, brother?': Richard the Lionheart's ambiguous sexuality in Cecil B. DeMille's The Crusades (1935), Lorraine Kochanske Stock; 'In the company of orcs': Peter Jackson's queer Tolkein, Jane Chance; The Eastern Western: camp as a response to cultural failure in The Conqueror, Anna Klosowska; 'In my own idiom': social critique, campy gender, and queer performance in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Susan Aronstein; Performance, camp, and queering history in Luc Besson's Jeanne d'Arc, Susan Hayward; Sean Connery's star persona and the queer Middle Ages, Tison Pugh; Will Rogers' pink spot: A Connecticut Yankee (1931), Kathleen Coyne Kelly; Danny Kaye and the 'fairy tale' of queerness in The Court Jester, Martha Bayless; Mourning and sexual difference in Hans-Jürgen Syberbergs's Parsifal, Michelle Bolduc; Superficial medievalism and the queer futures of film, Cary Howie; Afterword, Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger; Index.

About the Editors:
Kathleen Coyne Kelly is Professor of English at Northeastern University, USA; Tison Pugh is Associate Professor of English at the University of Central Florida, USA

Reviews:
'Through readings of films familiar and obscure, foreign and domestic, recent and classic, Queer Movie Medievalisms challenges us to think deeply about how heterosexuality works and how it inevitably fails, about how a film offers not just multiple points of audience identification but multiple cohabitating times. A superb collection of essays, with an especially provocative afterword by Glenn Burger and Steve Kruger. I commend Tison Pugh and Kathleen Coyne Kelly for producing so valuable and timely a volume.'
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, George Washington University, USA

'Queer Movie Medievalisms stands alone in the intense and far-ranging (pink) spotlight it deploys to examine cinematic encounters with the so-called "Dark Ages." Combining impeccable scholarship and enthusiastic engagement, the essays in this volume consider how "the medieval" becomes a destabilizing queer space for a range of American and European stars and films.'
Alex Doty, Indiana University, USA

Read More...

Summary only...

postmedieval: cover design

by EILEEN JOY

EDIT Thursday, 7/2: I have replaced image at left with the "real" final cover, and this is a much higher-resolution image than the previous one [so click on it and check it out!]. Again: thanks so much to everyone who helped with this.

[FIRST: please don't miss Jeffrey's post on the new book in Ashgate's Queer Interventions series, Jewish/Christian/Queer]

Thanks to everyone who helped us with the cover designs for postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, we are now edging closer to the design for volume 1 [issue nos. 1-3]; the overall template will stay the same but different images will be dropped in for the separate volumes [possibly for each issue--haven't quite decided that yet]. But in any case, click on the image on the right to see the fullest possible resolution of the image. We want to give special notes of gratitude to Karl Steel and Anne Clark Bartlett [suggested making the cathedral or sky pink], Anna Klosowska [suggested the punk, bleeding, unevenly-edged manual typewriter font], Christina Fitzgerald [warned us against designs that screamed clove cigarette-smoking graphic design students who are too cool for themselves], Michael O'Rourke [suggested, via Reza Negarestani, a pink that comes "after red," and via Kristen Alvanson, simply urged deep, rich pinks upon us with these words of Alvanson: "Pink magnolias, NYPL, NYBG, cherry blossoms in DC more pink...a fleshed out nipple, a bleeding heart, little girls' pink velvet ribbons, pink spaces, pink lights, my entryway and upstairs foyer bright pink glaze, a pink cashmere sweater set, Christos' pink, pink blush, or the lack of need for blush cotton candy Pink poodles or pink cats pink cover... Read More of Laches the most perfect shade of pink lipstick pink cd holders pink pearl necklace pink pearl earrings pink camisole pink highlighter pink Christmas lights and pink flowers- peonies, tulips, Christmas Cactus in bloom in my room, pinkish lilac, pink hydrangea, pink rose of sharons, rare pink poppies, carpet roses, spinning in pink flowers...begonia, spider flowers, cosmos, sweet peas, toadflax, moonwort, petunias, phlox!, butterfly flower, sun moss, wax pink, lilies, caprifloiaceae, pink wisteria, malvaceae, oyster plant in pink, foxglove, caryophyllaceae, heather, theaceae, magnolias, chinese crab apple flash by my eyes, Pink torrent"], Martee Edwards Davis [not a medievalist but a friend from elementary and junior high school who has experience in graphic design; suggested we put our thematic question on the cover and to also go for an edgier pink/red], and finally, Liza Blake [suggested that the pink used to color in cathedral or sky be a lighter shade of border color]. And if I missed anyone: my apologies!

One thing left to do will be to smudge out the tiny bit of another building that you can see poking out behind the modern Selfridges building in Birmingham. I will note here, because I didn't before, that the location of this photograph is of great symbolic importance in relation to the journal's vision and mission. The reason is that, first, Birmingham, as I'm sure everyone already knows, is where cultural studies was first founded as an academic discipline in 1964 when Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall, and others helped to found and direct the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. Second, the skyline of downtown Birmingham, from many angles, includes striking contrasts between the past and the present, the gothic and the sleekly modern, the feudal and the industrial. Third, because the Selfridges building was designed by Future Systems, who described the exterior design scheme this way:

The skin is made up of thousands of aluminium discs, creating a fine, lustrous grain like the scales of a snake or the sequins of a Paco Rabanne dress. In sunlight it shimmers, reflecting minute changes in weather conditions and taking on the colours, light and shapes of people and things passing by - an animate and breathing form.

Id est: the human and the machine and the animal combined. And finally, because the cathedral spire you see in this photo belongs to St Martins, a church in downtown Birmingham that has a rich, multi-layered architectural history, we could not think of a more appropriate architectural "site" for a journal that wants to emphasize inter- and post- and "middle" temporalities. Here is how the photographer, who goes by "richardr" on flickr. com, describes the church's building history:

St Martin’s is the ancient parish church of Birmingham and historically it is the Mother Church of Birmingham. It is generally considered that a church was built on this site in the mid 12th century. In the 13th century a large sandstone church was built which was only about fifty feet shorter than the present building. It had a central nave and two aisles with three altars at the East end and a tower. The spire was built a few years later. By 1690 the stonework was crumbling and the whole church was consequently encased in red brick, with the exception of the spire. Various attempts were made to restore the church but the most successful was 1873-75 under the direction of J. A. Chatwin, who had been one of Pugin’s assistants in the building of the Houses of Parliament. His plan was to retain the recently restored tower and spire and build onto them a new church, with north and south transepts, in the Gothic tradition. The interior is faced with red sandstone from Codsall Quarry, the exterior of the building being of Derbyshire and Grimshall stone.

In 1950, during Canon Bryan Green’s rectorship, in order to rectify bomb damage sustained in World War II, a significant restoration scheme was implemented under the supervision of Philip B. Chatwin, son of the architect who built the 19th century church. The chapel of the ancient Guild of the Holy Cross was restored. The building has some outstanding features including a unique stained glass window by William Morris designed by Edward Burne-Jones in 1877, their first in Birmingham, and a magnificent hammer-beam roof weighing 93 tons, which is believed to be modelled on the medieval Westminster Hall.

And one last thing: when everyone gets "back to school" in August, please tell your university or college library that you simply can't live--indeed, will throw yourself down on the ground and cry and scream--if they don't purchase a subscription to postmedieval. More information on how to make that happen can be found here. [I might also point out that a special discount will be offered to all members of the BABEL Working Group, so if you haven't gotten around to joining BABEL, why not do so now by sending an email to me at ejoy@siue.edu?]

Read More...

Summary only...

Jewish/Christian/Queer

by J J Cohen

The amazing Queer Interventions series at Ashgate (ed. Noreen Giffney and Michael O'Rourke) has just published a collection of essays entitled Jewish/Christian/Queer: Crossroads and Identities. Edited by Frederick Roden, the volume

investigates three forms of queerness; the rhetorical, theological and the discursive dissonance at the meeting points between Christianity and Judaism; the crossroads of the religious and the homosexual; and the intersections of these two forms of queerness, namely where the religiously queer of Jewish and Christian speech intersects with the sexually queer of religiously identified homosexual discourse.

If you follow the link above, you may browse the table of contents and download Roden's excellent introduction. MOR was kind enough to send me a copy of the "Series's Editors Preface." "Cross-Identifications" is short but quite rich, with observations like this, about openness and neighboring:

What Jewish/Christian/Queer shows us is that the deconstruction of seemingly mutually exclusive identities need not necessarily be a violent operation. Rather, it can make generous and generative space for a kind of openness, to others, to alterity, to racial, gendered, sexual and religious difference. If the Jew, the Christian, and the queer can be shown to neighbour each other, as each of the essays which follows demonstrates, then we can begin to foster ways in which it is possible, in the current politico-historical conjuncture, to love one’s neighbour. The very ethical stakes of the encounter the title of this collection stages hinge upon nothing less.

Cross-identification can foster a "non-assimilating openness to alterity." But the move is not without risks: "Such critical and identificatory porosity is a huge risk, of course, because it gives up on what seem like hard-won identities in favour of impure, mongrel, hybridised identity positions." Following Jean-Luc Nancy, O'Rourke and Giffney call this process dis-enclosing: an "opening up, a blossoming."

I want to quote the ending paragraph of the Preface because it captures eloquently how neighboring might be thought in terms larger than those of mere spatial adjacency. In my current research I have been exploring how the region between Christian and Jew can become in the Middle Ages a space (however volatile, however fragile) of interchange and mutual transformation, a place where heteropraxis undermines orthodoxy. O'Rourke and Giffney write of the necessity of such spaces for neighboring today:

For both Judaism and Christianity the commandment in Leviticus 19:18 to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ is canonical and an ethico-moral imperative. Alain Badiou has reworked the question of the neighbour in terms of what he calls ‘neighbourhood’. As Kenneth Reinhard explains it ‘rather than a definition based on topological nearness or shared points of identification, Badiou describes neighbouring in terms of “openness”. A neighbourhood is an open area in a world: a place, subset, or element where there is no boundary, no difference, between the inside of the thing and the thing itself’. For Badiou we choose, we decide, for the sake of universality, to construct a common open area, a ‘new place of universality’. This forcing open, this love, is ‘the decision to create a new open set, to knot two interiorities into a new logic of world, a new neighbourhood’. Roden’s knotting of the Jew, the Christian, and the queer creates an even more expansive open set and for Reinhard ‘an unlimited number of open sets can be united without being closed or totalized. Hence, the neighbourhood opens on infinity, endlessly linking new elements in new subsets according to new decisions and fidelities’. Jewish/Christian/Queer’s refusal to solidify identities, to promiscuously mix disciplines, theories, positions, is a subjective act in the Badiouian sense, a decision to create a new logic of world, one which has never been so urgent as today.

Read More...

Summary only...

Short piece on Zotero

by J J Cohen

Scott McLemee has an overview of this useful tool for organizing and annotating what you browse on the web. A personal endorsement: the free program has been indispensable to me in sorting and tagging various bits of digital information for both my prehistory and Christian-Jew projects.

Read More...

Summary only...

Short piece on GW MEMSI

by J J Cohen

Follow this link and you can read a brief article on GW's Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute.

If you squint at the picture of yours truly, you can glimpse in the background the piece of modern-looking art that my then four year old daughter created using a discarded carton and some paint.

Read More...

Summary only...

Is Mark to Maria as Tristan is to Isolde?

[illustration: troubadour casket]
by J J Cohen

According to Margaret Soltan at University Diaries, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and his paramour in Argentina reveal in the missives they sent each other

nothing more nor less than true thunderbolt from the sky love. English professors tend to be people who love language, and who seek in language, more than in other places, the real. The Sanford/Maria letters have in them the grain of that sought-after actuality. Every word, every phrase, comes from the deep heart's core.

According to Cristina Nehring in the New Republic,

We inhabit a strange society, indeed, when love (albeit misallocated love, excessive love) seems to elicit, of all crimes, the most vocal and violent repugnance. As soldiers and economies continue to fall around the globe, citizens at home rise to denounce ... a love relationship gone awry. A love affair that is, in many ways, a dozen times nobler than its Washington counterparts, more altruistic than the carnal flings that get pardoned every week, and greater-souled than the flirtations (with power) of many of its sneering, small-minded critics.

A secret adulterous love finds reason to be praised? A love socially forbidden, that has the power to render its adherents ridiculous to the public eye? Its practitioners do not denounce the relationship as tawdry and demeaning, a lapse or a sin, but speak of how it ennobles and transforms? Call it (with Gaston Paris) amour courtois. Or use a more medieval term: fin'amor, hohe Minne, cortez amors. But I think we have a whole lot of courtly loving going on. Behold a Mark Sanford email, sent to his beloved Maria:

Dearest,

You are glorious and I hope you really understand that. You do not need a therapist to help you figure your place in the world. You are special and unique and fabulous in a whole host of ways that are worth a much longer conversation. To be continued ...

Here's what Bernart de Ventadorn might have said, had this medieval troubadour composed Sanford's emails on his behalf:

Alas, I thought I knew so much about love,
and really I know so little,
for I cannot keep myself from loving her
from whom I shall have no favor.
She has stolen from me my heart, myself,
herself, and all the world.
When she took herself from me,
she left me nothing but desire and a longing heart.
Never have I been in control of myself
or even belonged to myself
from the hour that she let me gaze into her eyes -
that mirror that pleases me so greatly.*

So Sanford is married. Marriage is no real excuse for not loving. So he is a hypocrite, condemning others for his own secret practice. A new love puts to flight an old one. So he may have used state funds to finance some of his jaunts. Love is always a stranger in the home of avarice. So his emails are filled with anxiety. A man in love is always apprehensive. So jealousy is a frequent topic in the correspondence. Real jealousy always increases the feeling of love. So Mark told everyone he was hiking in the mountains. Every act of a lover ends in the thought of his beloved. So he didn't tell anyone he was in South America. Love can deny nothing to love. So he broke up with Maria and then returned to her. A lover can never have enough of the solaces of his beloved. So things seem to be falling apart now. When made public love rarely endures.

Governor Mark Sanford, latter-day Lancelot. And could there be a better name for a princesse lointaine than Maria?

*of course it would have been written in Occitan, a language Google translator might have some trouble with.

Read More...

Summary only...

Anglo-Saxon Apartheid, redux

by J J Cohen

About a million years ago (July of 2006 to be exact: so far back in the past that Stephanie Trigg's blog was new), Eileen Joy was a mere guest blogger at ITM, holding down the fort while I departed to Bermuda. One of her early posts carried the nonsensational nontabloidesque title of Anglo-Saxons Were Apartheid Racists!

Men whose genetic makeup is most similar to the residents of Frisia were apparently able to pass their genes to the men of contemporary England, while preventing indigenous British males from doing the same -- or so molecular archeology tells us. Since I posted recently about the fourth culture and humanities/science collaboration, I will also direct you to this interesting summation of the work that has been done in using genetics to come to a better understanding of British and English prehistory. The article bears the weirdly erroneous title of "Who Killed the Men of England?": really the piece is about how the British were made to vanish by those who became the men of England.

Read More...

Summary only...

"York 1190: Jews and Others in the Wake of Massacre": Poster Contest

[read Karl on murderous hobbits first]
by J J Cohen

Would you like to win (1) a copy of Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Archipelago, Island, England AND (2) a really cool Tiny Shriner T-shirt? Well, you can ... and at the same time assist a good cause: publicity for an important upcoming conference at Centre for Medieval Studies in York entitled "York 1190: Jews and Others in the Wake of Massacre."

The rules are simple.
(1) design a possible poster with suitable image for the conference
(2) email it to me (jjcohen[at]gwu[dot]edu)

We'll post the contenders here at ITM and conduct a poll for a winner. It's a good cause, you get to flex your creativity ... what could be better? Possible posters should be sent to me as .doc or image file by Friday July 3, 2009.

A summary of the conference appears below.
------------------

York 1190:

Jews and Others in the Wake of Massacre

Monday 22 – Wednesday 24 March 2010

Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York, King’s Manor, UK

The mass suicide and murder of the men, women and children of the Jewish community in York on 16 March 1190 is one of the most scarring events in the history of Anglo-Judaism, and an aspect of York’s past which is widely remembered around the world.

The York massacre was in fact but one of a series of attacks on local communities of Jews across England in 1189-90. These were violent expressions of wider new constructs of the nature of Christian and Jewish communities and they were also the targeted outcries of local townspeople, whose emerging urban polities were enmeshed within swiftly developing structures of royal government. This conference will therefore use the events of 1189-90 as a lens through which to reassess the rapid changes which were reconstructing communities and their relationship to royal and ecclesiastical government both locally and in national and European contexts. It will take advantage of the substantial amount of new work which has been done on twelfth-century England, notably on government and local power, ethnic identity, relationships with Europe, the development of distinct regional identities and new intellectual and religious models of community and pastoral care. The conference will bring together senior and junior scholars from a range of different disciplines and sub-fields to reinterpret the events of 1190 in the light of that new work. Our aim is to consider the massacre as central to the narrative of English history around 1200 as well as that of Jewish history.

Read More...

Summary only...

Murderous Hobbits

by KARL STEEL

From Salon via, I'm embarrassed to say, Gawker, I learn that Iranian State TV will be broadcasting the whole of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy to give people a good excuse to stay in and to let the authorities move on. The authorities may have their politics, but the people may just have their lives, their day-to-day business.

Will it work? Our anonymous witness writes:

Gandalf the Gray returns to the Fellowship as Gandalf the White. He casts a blinding white light, and his face is hidden behind a halo. "Imam zaman e?!" someone in the room asks. Is it the Mahdi, the last imam and, according to Shia Islam, the savior of mankind?

Who picked this film? I start to suspect that there is a subversive soul manning the controls at Seda va Sima, AKA the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting. It is way too easy to play with the film, to draw comparisons to what is happening in real life. There are the overt Mousavi themes: the unwanted quest and the risking of life in pursuit of an unanticipated destiny. Then there is the sly nod to Ahmadinejad. Iranian films are dubbed (forget the wretched dubbing into English in the U.S.; in Iran dubbing is a craft) and there are plenty of references to "kootoole," little person, the Farsi word used in the movie for hobbit and dwarf. "Kootoole," of course, was, is, the term used in many of the chants out on the street against President Ahmadinejad. He is the "little person." ("And whose side are you on?" Pippin asks the ancient, forest-dwelling giant named Treebeard. Those watching might think the answer is Mousavi, since Treebeard is decked out in green.)....

Gandalf's white steed strides into the frame. It is instantly transformed by local viewers into Rostam's mythical horse, Rakhsh. Rostam, the great dragon-slaying champion of Ferdowsi's poetic epic "Shahnameh," which recounts the whole history of Iran.

In this case, Ahmadinejad and his allies seem to be of the "fear no art" school, expecting that art will purge emotions, clear the head, and ennervate and exhaust the protest movement. But art, being in excess of what is strictly needed, being a thing of wants, and hence desires, never stays put. It travels, and causes us to travel from the commonplace, giving us new ideals while also calling our attention to the gap between our individuals lives and these ideals. And then it calls upon us to repair this gap, to remake this world to match the dreams art brings us. This is the revolutionary potential of self-aestheticization.

In A Whistling Woman, the fourth book of A. S. Byatt's Frederica quartet, student protesters singing Ent songs burn books and shatter museum cases, aiming to destroy the holistic pretensions of new university while promoting their own hippie, neomedieval, esoteric brand of universalism.

Who knows what worlds the Ent Songs of Tehran might bring? From here (although in Twitter I'm in Tehran), I can only wish them the best, although, like our anonymous correspondent, I can end only by wondering about the role of the 'little people' in this new epic. Let it be rewritten, since how can we make sense of a Lord of the Rings in which the kootoole shoot and beat all who refuse to recognize them as the heroic centerpiece of the story?

A leftover here:

I've been reading Zizek's Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, which inspired my line about the "gap between our individuals lives and these ideals." In the course of calling for "the rise of universality out of the particular lifeworld" (152), Zizek also writes this, against vulgar historicist readings of art:

Historicist commonplaces [ed: what I call "context"] can blur out contact with art. In order properly to grasp Parsifal, one needs to abstract from such historical trivia, decontextualize the work, tear it out of the context in which it was originally embedded. There is more truth in Parsifal's formal structure, which allows for different historical contextualizations, than its original context. (153)

Read More...

Summary only...

The Tiny Shriner is Your Facebook Friend

by J J Cohen

Or at least your frenemy.

If you haven't friended (or frenemied him) yet, you may do so here. Don't forget that he is also on Twitter, and the Tiny Shriner Adoration Society is now 42 poobahs strong. Via BABEL, he also hawks merchandise.

Read More...

Summary only...

Troll Post

by J J Cohen

Rather than stoke whatever fire is behind the "trolls and vampires" contretemps between two bloggers whose work I like, I took down the post -- which wasn't exactly of primary importance to ITM's ambit anyway.

Read More...

Summary only...