Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Why the Two Holes?

by Karl Steel

Yesterday my Comp Lit course finished up Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Among other things, I stressed the unresolved hybridities of the "Chapel" in Fitt IV: its combination of natural and architecture features, the hole in the hill as a sanctified hermit hole (I reminded them of the cave at the end of Hartmann von Aue's Gregorius) and as otherworldly entrance, Hautdesert as the "desert" of the wild Welsh wilderness and as the "desert" as the place of the saints, the green sash on Gawain himself as binding him to the natural world of the Green Knight (and Morgan) and to the culture of textiles and clothing, &c &c. You know the drill.

And then I opened it to questions, and a student, always a careful reader, asked [not an exact quote]: "Why two holes? Do otherworldly entrances normally have two entrances, or an entrance and an exit?" The line she meant is SGGK IV.2180:

Hit [the chapel mound] hade a hole on þe ende and on ayþer syde,
(It had a hole at one end, and there was one at the other)

My response? "The otherworldly entrances I know have only the one hole, so I don't know.....I'll ask an expert." By expert I mean you. Any suggestions?

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Kids 'n' codices

by J J Cohen

An advantage of having the Folger Shakespeare Library occupy the same city as your university, and of having your former departmental colleague as director of that library, is that you can then put together something like GW's Undergraduate Research Seminar at the Folger. This course grants a select group of students reader's privileges for a year, enabling them direct access to early modern archival materials.

If you'd like to learn more about this program (of which I am very proud), follow this link. You can even watch a streaming video in which I say some very ITM-y words about past and future to a vaguely Renaissance soundtrack.

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I don't think the MIT Center for Future Storytelling would like medieval romance

by J J Cohen

Seems more twentieth century nostalgic than future directed to me.

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Erotic Animals II: Adam in Paradise

by Karl Steel

Please enjoy and comment on the continuing journey of Jeffrey's Mandeville paper below, but, if you like, also enjoy what follows as a kind of hors d'oeuvre.

One of our very first posts, and (unsurprisingly?) an all-time (and I trust disappointing) hit among the pages that draw people (?) into ITM, was Jeffrey's "Erotic Animals" entry for the Encycopedia of Sex and Gender. Consider this post its descendant (and not, exactly, a descendant of my several posts on necrobestiality).

I stress a pedigree with the staid genre of the Encyclopedia to underscore a claim not to be (self-consciously) outré in my critical interests. I deny this for a lot of obvious reasons. It's usual to "push the boundaries" by studying "outsiders" (e.g.), but of course this critical practice:

1) cements the various outsiders--Jews, Lepers, Sodomites, Freemasons, Nazis, Furries, Sciopods, &c.--into a structural position as outsider and thus marks the critical interest as a subset of tourism of the bizarre (the analog might be the white American salaryman who cuts loose on a Caribbean vacation, before returning home into a sublated version of his salaried existence);

2) upholds the "cultural center" as a site without systemic antagonism, as a place that cannot be dissolved without an infestation from the outside.

It's been said many times before, but, well, to quote from a comment I wrote on a student's paper:

My own tendency in doing queer theory has been to argue for the queerness at the heart of what has otherwise been thought normal, to refuse to exclude the purportedly 'straight' from the queer, to disengage queer theory from its exclusive focus on samesex desires/acts, and ALSO to argue, as my friend Eileen Joy does, that all sex is hetero, in the sense that there is never an erotics of the same, of the homo (maybe), because we are never same to ourselves or to the social roles into which we've been thrust by our gender &c. This is not to say, however, that there's nothing politically efficacious in a focus on gays but I think there's also much work that can done in overturning straight confidence in its own straightness.

With that hypertrophied introduction, or apologia, I want to share with you a nugget from a great article I discovered yesterday, Eric Lawee's "The Reception of Rashi's Commentary on the Torah In Spain: The Case of Adam's Mating with the Animals," Jewish Quarterly Review 97.1 (2007): 33-66.

Genesis 2:19-23 runs:

19 And the Lord God having formed out of the ground all the beasts of the earth, and all the fowls of the air, brought them to Adam to see what he would call them: for whatsoever Adam called any living creature the same is its name. 20 And Adam called all the beasts by their names, and all the fowls of the air, and all the cattle of the field: but for Adam there was not found a helper like himself.

21 Then the Lord God cast a deep sleep upon Adam: and when he was fast asleep, he took one of his ribs, and filled up flesh for it. 22 And the Lord God built the rib which he took from Adam into a woman: and brought her to Adam. 23 And Adam said: This now is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man.

We've several problems here, perhaps chiefly the opening clause of 2:23, zot ha-pa'am, "this now": does this mean that God had provided a previous unsatisfactory Eve? That Adam was disatisfied in some way with what had happened before and thus that there was dissension in Eden from the very beginning?

Following earlier commentators, and to solve these problems, Rashi wrote "this time'—it teaches that Adam mated with (she-ba' adam) every [species of] domesticated animal (behemah) and wild animal (ḥayah) but his appetite was not assuaged (lo' nitkarerah da'ato) by them" (qtd Lawee 50). Unsurprisingly (?), this was a controversial interpretation. Lawee tracks several Iberian commentaries on Rashi's Commentary on the Torah that mysticize, deny, or strenuously ignore Rashi's reading; 13th- and 14th-century Jewish converts like Nicholas Donin used this interpretation against their former coreligionists. So it is recorded that in the Talmud disputation of 1240 in Paris, one of the Jews "concessit quod adam coiit cum omnibus bestiis et hoc in paradiso" (confessed that Adam had sex with all the beasts in paradise), and no doubt this confession helped justify St. Louis's Talmud-burning.

The question at this stage is: what can I do with this? Note that the interpretation disgusted both Christian and Jewish exegetes. One semi-sympathetic response suggested that bestiality was an important step in Adam's emotional and mental paideia. While this is at once sympathetic AND patronizing to Adam, it's hardly sympathetic to the animals. From Lawee, n.84:

Commenting on Gn 8.19, an anonymous Rabbanite Byzantine writer who may predate Rashi prolonged the period of human-animal sexual interaction until after the flood: "they [the animals] left the ark 'in their families'—indicating that until then humans mated with beasts." See Nicholas de Lange, Greek Jewish Texts from the Cairo Genizah (Tübingen, 1996), 86. This same writer also posited an element of coercion in the primordial human-animal relationship ("humans mated with beasts and made the beasts mate with them"), thereby raising moral issues (like lack of consent on the part of the animals) that figure in modern discussions of bestiality's moral status.

We have disgust, a dissatisfied Adam, and yet another abjection of animals on the path to adulthood. This doesn't give us much to work with. But it still might be possible to play with this strange sex, to discover in it, prior to the interruption by the arrival of Eve, an almost effaced site of lost possibilities (cf. what I do with Gowther). This obviously connects with Jeffrey's "Inventing with Animals in the Middle Ages," where he suggests that the yena might be understood as "an invitation to explore a spacious corporeality beyond the specious boundaries of the human, to invent through alliances with possible bodies a monstrous kind of becoming that carries history within but which is not reducible to historical allegory" (55). We might even see in Adam's bestiality a possibility for an anti-narcissistic relation to the other, a desire that does not seek satisfaction in "bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh."

Likely having exhausted your patience, I can only ask what might you do with Genesis 2:19-23? What (else) can we do with it that desubliminates the 'normal' or puts it in motion? What else can we do that is not drawn to Adam's bestiality only because of its sauciness?

UPDATE Thanks very much for the link from Michael Pitkowsky's blog for directing me to Gil Student's excellent summary of the various exegetical responses to Rashi's bestiality comment.

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Bodies in Motion 3: Or Any Other Beauty We Share with Stone

[image: naked cave-dwellers of Tracota guard their traconite; Cynocephali worship an ox. BL Harley MS 3954 f.40v Three other images from this MS are on the BL website, including some blemmyae and Hippocrates' daughter]
by J J Cohen

Behold Part III of my Mandeville series, the final installation. The essay is well on its way to solidification as a chapter of The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature, but will no doubt mutate into other things as well. Part one is here, part two here, part four here.

The Book of John Mandeville records how a traveler once journeyed the earth’s roundness, only to turn back at that point where his relentless forward motion had almost conveyed him to the place of his departure. This story, overheard by Mandeville in his youth, exerts a peculiar grip upon his imagination: the narrator describes the tale as one “Y have y-thought man tymes.” A “worthy man of oure countré” decides to leave England -- and not for pilgrimage, not for redemption, but for no other reason than “to se the worlde” (67). Having passed through India and the five thousand isles that lie beyond its shores, he arrives at an island where “he herde his owen speech” in the words of men driving cattle. The traveler takes the language to be a marvel rather than a marker of return. Mandeville, however, insists that the man had come so far in his journey that he had arrived “into his owen marches” –England’s borders, the edge of that known world abandoned so long ago. Finding no transportation forward, the traveler “turned agayn as he com, and so he hadde a gret travayl.” After having finally arrived home and (apparently) too restless to long remain, the man sails to Norway. Storm-driven to an island in the North Sea, he encounters an eerily familiar scene:

And when he was ther, hym thoughte that hit was the yle the which he hadde y-be on byfore, where he hurde speke his owen speche as the men drof beestys. And that myght ryght wel be. (67)

A man circles the world to meet a place intimate and strange at once, to meet in a way his own past, his own self, but from an unanticipated perspective.

According to Mandeville, any traveler can potentially arrive home again by remaining ever in motion. But “the erthe is gret” and “ther beth so many wayes”: Mandeville never states that anyone has successfully circled the earth to arrive at his departure, to attain home via an endlessly curving route. Yet if the man who almost circled the world has any regrets about not completing the compass, he never voices them. The traveler who so inspired Mandeville as a young man is never witnessed returning to the England of his birth. He is glimpsed only upon the road or the sea, never since his initial departure within “oure countré.” What would happen if this traveler really had circumambulated the globe? Would he then have settled into sedentary life? Or must he turn back before he arrives because, having so filled his life with motion, the stillness of a homeland – the stasis of an English identity -- no longer proves able to satisfy? Mandeville, Defective: always open to the future, never to arrive comfortably at home.

Mandeville’s boyhood imagination is captured by a traveler who nearly circles the world but abandons the journey at the borders of home. He does not fully recognize the familiar, perhaps because he himself has become in his wandering strange. Maybe that is why the traveler’s story is so alluring to Mandeville: the man must never return, the voyage must never be completed, for the only way to keep a body in motion is to prevent its coming home. Mandeville, of course, does return: he writes his Book while resident in the England from which he had been long absent. Yet in the Defective version, that return is not wholly satisfying: no sooner is the book completed than Mandeville is in transit to Rome. He totes his volume to the Pope, who gives the narrative his papal seal of approval. As the narrative comes to a close, Mandeville is traveling again … this time (according to the Book’s narrative fiction) in his memory, his mind, his armchair. Rather like medieval readers of the Book, rather like us, his “partyners” (95).

I wonder, though, since I’m now including medieval readers among the bodies the book puts into motion: would his fellow pilgrims have recognized the limits of their companion’s tolerance? Would they have realized the brake that Mandeville’s Englishness places upon his restless trajectory? Would they have realized that Mandeville’s failure was perhaps, like the English Traveler who set out before him, to have almost circled the world, but to have returned before he could arrive home by a route that would have changed his perspective, that would have queered his orientation, that would have made him see what remains stubbornly in place when a voyager who wants to “se the world” carries with him and transports back the failings of his home?

Mandeville is sometimes confined by the compass of his own Englishness, by the limits of his own devotional circuit, as if these were (following Bale) lapidary narratives, marble tombs. Yet the Book is also geological, in the rocky triple meaning of that word: sedimentary (an accretion of histories and texts into new forms), igneous (hardened after long movement into settled contours), metamorphic (ever changing, open to the future, circling the world to meet and no longer recognize oneself). Each text of the Book can be seen as a crystallization, a hardening, a gem created from an ever-fluid narrative that does not ever cease to be a body in motion, ready for metamorphoses to come.

Geological Mandeville
In the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, if we look just off to the side of the vacant compass that Joseph of Arimathea drew, we will find ourselves confronted not only with the stone of an ancient tomb, but with a scattering of other rocks: the “rooch” of Calvary, its whiteness forever stained by the dripping of divine blood (38); four rocks near the pillar at which Jesus was scourged, continually dropping water in an endless act of terrestrial mourning; the “roche” under which the Jews hid the cross for Saint Helena to exhume. Such stones commemorate the past by standing in for it: the relics they hid were long ago removed, the death for which they shed their endless tears vanquished by a bodily return to life. Yet these lithic monuments might activate in a careful reader a wider chain of associations – for the Book offers a story told through stones.

Sir John Mandeville is widely known for his geographical obsessions, but these unfold beside, along with, and through passions best described as geological. To give some highlights: [in Tyre one can see the stone on which Jesus sat to preach (32).] Not far from Jerusalem is the Fosse Ynone (Ditch of Memnon), where an eternal supply of undulating gravel can change suddenly into glass (32). This oceanic expanse of rock may be a gulf of the Gravel Sea. The Sultan built his great city “upon a rooch,” and nearby are stones left for Saint Katherine by angels (33). Not far from Damascus a voyager can see the ground from which Adam was fashioned, and the rock-hewn cave inside which he dwelt with Eve once expelled from Paradise (35). The Dead Sea casts forth chunks of asphalt, big as horses (45). By its shores spreads the barren plain upon which a fasting Jesus was tempted to transform stones into bread. In the river Jordan, the Children of Israel left enormous stones “in the myddel of the water” when through a miracle they passed over its bed dryshod (46). On the rock outside of Nazareth where some Jews attempted to hurl Jesus to his death can still be viewed his footprints, burned into the stone when he vanished from his would-be assassins (49). The Saracen Paradise features homes wrought of precious stones (54). Diamonds have a gender, as well as a sexuality: male and female come together to create even more of the glistening rocks (62):

They groweth togodres, the maule and the femaule. And they beth noryshed with the dew of hevene, and they engendreth comunely and bryngeth forth other smale dyamaundes, that multeplieth and groweth all yeres.

Engendering “comunely” renders diamonds, with their lithic promiscuity, rather like the soon to be encountered Lamorians, who keep all women “in commune” (65). Mandeville avers that he knows from experience feeding your diamonds with May dew makes them increase in size. Diamonds of either sex can overcome poison, prevent strife, banish evil dreams. They can also heal lunatics … and Englishmen, we are told, are “lunar,” rendering them – like Mandeville -- incessant travelers (62).

Some of the world’s heaving seas obscure magnetic stones (“roch of the adamaund” 62) in their depths, pulling to oblivion any ship manufactured with metal nails. A sea without bottom has reeds that float its surface; in their roots are tangled “many precious stones of vertu” that protect their bearers from bodily harm (69). The beastly men of Tracota covet a stone called “traconyghte,” not because it possesses any innate virtue but simply because it comes in 40 attractive colors (70). Cyconcephali carry foot-long rubies around their necks as a sign of kingly office (70). The Great Khan prefers his accouterments of daily living to be fashioned from jewels. Rubies and garnets worked into grapevine designs seem his household favorite. Even the steps to his throne and the chair itself are hewn from gems and bordered in gold (73). The Khan also possesses a radiant carbuncle that serves effectively as a palace nightlight (77).

For no reason other than a seemingly innate animus, Alexander the Great attempts to enclose the Jews “of the kynde of Gog Magog” (82) in far-off hills. When human labor proves insufficient to the task, Alexander seeks God’s assistance, and is rewarded by divine imprisonment of these people: “God herd his prayer and enclosed the hilles togedre so that the Jewes dwelleth ther as they were y-loke in a castel.” The gates that confine the homicidal race are wrought of “great stones wel y-dight with sement.” A barrier that will not be overcome until the time of Antichrist, these rocks keep the Jews removed from the stream of time, just as their ancient Hebrew locks them in a perpetual premodern (83). Submarinal “roches of adamaundes” not far from the lands of Prester John, meanwhile, freeze matter in place. Like underwater magnets they bind to themselves ships with iron fittings. Mandeville tells us he once went to see the expanse, and in a rare moment of poetry he describes a forest fashioned of naval masts: “Y say as hit had y-be a gret ile of trees growing as stockes. And oure shipmen sayde that thilke trees were of shippes mastes that sayled on see, and so abode the shippes ther thorgh vertu of the adamaund” (84).
Prester John’s domain is home to the Gravel Sea, where rocks and sand “ebbeth and floweth with gret wawes as the see doth. And it resteth never” (84). This billowing sea of stone sports fish “of good savour and good to ete.” Prester John, like the Great Khan whose daughter he weds, prefers housewares, eating utensils, and furniture made of gleaming gems, for jewels and precious metals betoken “his nobley and his might” (85). The Vale Perilous is strewn with gems, gold and silver to lure covetous men to their deaths. In the middle of this terrible place is a rock on which is engraved the “visage and the heed of the devel boylich, right hydous and dredful to se” (86). His eyes stare, colors swirl, fire erupts from mouth and nostrils. An island exists in which women have “stones in her eyen”; when enraged they can slay men with their vision (87). On an island so distant that few stars shine and the moon is viewed only its last quarter dwell ants (“pismeres”) as large as hounds. They gather the abundant gold into great heaps. Local men use clever tricks to rob the insects of their hoards (91). East of the land of Prester John are only “great roches,” their stony lifelessness the mark of impassable wilderness. Paradise is hidden behind immobile rocks (92).

In his meditation on stone as a radiantly beautiful material and a durable spur to philosophy, John Sallis writes of stone’s “peculiar temporality”:

Stone is ancient, not only in the sense that it withstands the wear of time better than other natural things, but also in the sense that its antiquity is of the order of the always already. Stone comes from a past that has always been present, a past inassimilable to the order of time in which things come and go in the human world; and that nonbelonging of stone is precisely what qualifies to mark and hence memorialize such comings and goings, such births and deaths. As if stone were a sensible image of timelessness, the ideal material out on which to inscribe marks capable of visibly memorializing into an indefinite future one who is dead and gone.

Such everlasting stones are certainly part of the landscape of the Book: they mark tombs and discoveries and great events. Stone is the perfect material to use to think about that which cannot be transported or transmuted. Thus in the wilderness outside Bethany Mandeville relates the biblical story of the temptation of Jesus by the “devel of Helle” (45). The fiend commands the fasting savior “Dic ut lapides isti panes fiat,” or “Say that these stones ben maked bred” (45). Only divine power can perform such transubstantiation. For a human to contemplate such volatility in lapidary substance would be extreme folly.

Yet the transmutation of rock through words is precisely what the Mandeville-author accomplishes. In the Book, stone is a strangely mobile, even itinerant material. Though rocks never do become bread, we watch as they billow into waves, as they offer us the miracle of fish from a gravel sea, as they exude rays of light and virtue. Rocks pull metals towards their embrace. They mate licentiously and engender baby gems. The stones that mark the Mandevillian landscape are of two kinds: those that affix history to place, and those that act like bodies in motion. The former anchor the narrative, the latter unmoor the Book, alluring and mobile rocks that are indistinguishable from flows of water or lava. Anchoring stone – the igneous accretions left behind by molten flow – include inert wealth, lonely ruins, rock-hewn gates that bar Paradise or seclude Jews, empty tombs. These are historical residua, depositories of ancient stories, unmoved markers of vanished time. Metamorphic or nomadic stones serve not as suture points but as spurs to constant motion: the endless pull of “adamaund,” the restless roil of the Gravelly Sea, living practice that unfolds within inhabited space (the Sultan reconfigures a church, diamonds mate and reproduce and are traded by the wayfarers they ward).

Undulating, magnetic, lovemaking stones: despite the lapidary effects of religious and national identities, within the Book of John Mandeville even the most static of bodies are spurred into motion.

Seismic Mandeville
What I have been calling for convenience the Book of John Mandeville is in reality not a singular thing but a diffuse and volatile concatenation. There is no “The Book of John Mandeville,” only a proliferation of Books of Mandeville, few of which have a historically identifiable author, redactor, or translator, all of which vary in major or minor ways from their apparent siblings, parents, cousins, queer friends, assorted hangers-on. Developing a vocabulary adequate to capturing the Books has proven a difficult critical task (as my foray into kinship metaphors just proved; other critics turn to chemistry or biology for their taxonomic metaphors). The text refuses to settle down into some well-delimited identity. Is it a reinvented itinerarium, a spur to pilgrimage, a Crusading substitute, an armchair travel guide, a romance, a heretical tract, a paean to orthodoxy, a proto-novel, an imaginative delectation of the exotic and the monstrous, a compilation, an encyclopedia? Yes. And because it is all these things at once it breaks generic boundaries and can’t be sorted neatly for library filing. No wonder Greenblatt called the Book a “hymn to mobility.” Though a bricolage of materials drawn from a dizzying array of texts (mainly French and Latin), the Book of John Mandeville seems almost sui generis: nothing quite like it exists.

Iain Macleod Higgins, the critic who has studied the dynamic and dispersed existence of the Mandeville manuscripts most closely, describes the Book as a “multi-text”:

The Book can be regarded not as a single, invariant work, but as a multinodal network, a kind of rhizome, whose French ‘radical’ gave rise to a discontinuous series of related offshoots in several languages, each of which can vary considerably from the others while being The Book itself to certain readers … Clearly, The Book is more than several books at once, both in its origins and generically; it is textually multiple as well (“Jerusalem in The Book of John Mandeville,” 32-33)

Critical consensus holds that the Book was first composed in French (and likely continental French), though no original exists. No text inhabits the center of the compass away from which speed two continental and one Anglo-French versions, away from which scatter a plethora of English variants with Egypt gaps or in rhyme or in close sympathy with French forebears, away from which are propelled at farther and farther removes German, Latin, Irish, Italian, Danish and Spanish redactions. At the center of this Big Bang that sent Mandevilles careening through Latin Christendom is only … the Postulated Archetype, an ur-Book that we assume must have been in existence at some point. When the Postulated Archetype abandoned its sepulcher in Palestine to retreat to that heaven where perfect texts reside, it left no earthly trace of its having been here, only the lingering textual ripples that suggest its inherent volatility, and perhaps indicate that it never intended to be transfixed like a glossed and reverenced Bible.

The Book of John Mandeville is therefore more of an event than a object: it moves through the world, leaving behind various versions of itself that bear witness to the form it took in a certain place under some influential and typically indeterminable conditions. It would be mistake to look at any one of these precipitates as if it were the Book itself rather than a record of the Book’s passing, just as a lava flow cannot be reconstituted from one of the igneous rocks into which it hardened and then abandoned in its onward rush.

The Books of John Mandeville are best seen as a performance of their own narrative structure, as a textual flow that crosses linguistic and national boundaries in a directionless quest to remain in motion, to circle the world by pressing forward and yet never to return home. This flow might leave in its wake certain crystallizations (manuscript attestations that we read today, but cannot assemble into some singular entity). Like Mandeville’s diamonds these crystals will always copulate with others and form strange new progeny. The Books of Mandeville amount to a body ever in motion, because structurally defective, open, reaching forward not to assimilate but to embrace, to touch and to change. In their proliferation, dispersal, and constant mutation, the Books of John Mandeville display an irreducible surplus not diminishable into the small contours of historical context or local determination. That thing in the Books of Mandeville which renders them ever restless over time, that surplus that can take a body outside of itself and scatter it across a suddenly more capacious world: that exorbitance in Mandeville so tied to an ardor for the lithic, that thing is art, restless and nomadic art.

Unleashed by Books that wander the world to vanish into varying forms is an art in no more human, no more ours alone, than are marble tombs containing manna or missing bodies or monsters, diamonds that yearn for copulation and increase, the heave of Gravel seas, or any other beauty we share with stone.

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Mongrel Solidarities: The Year My Parents Went on Vacation

[don't miss the job post]
by J J Cohen

This morning Eileen and I were making email film recommendations to each other, and I thought I'd share my note to her because the movie has so much to say to some of the thinking about community we do at ITM.

Last night Wendy, Alex and I watched the amazing Brazilian film O Ano em Que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias / The Year My Parents Went on Vacation. The moral of the story is that although the world we live in can be perilous, even inimical, affinity groups burgeon in unexpected places. These groups are mongrel, mutable, and transitory ... but they are also sustaining, especially for those who feel themselves in exile from some dominating culture. And who among us (the film asks) is not in exile?

The film also spoke eloquently to me in thinking about Uncle Paul, since (among other things) the narrative tracks shifting ethnic identities, especially Jewish ones. The bare plot revolves a young boy named Mauro being dropped at the door of his grandfather's apartment (his parents are fleeing political persecution, though they tell Mauro only that they are going on vacation). After sitting by the appointed door for hours, Mauro learns that the man he awaits died earlier that day. Unable to contact the vanished parents, uncertain how to proceed with this unwanted visitor, a neighbor named Shlomo takes the boy in, then consults his rabbi on what next to do. The rabbi declares that the Moses story is being reenacted, with Shlomo as the Pharaoh's daughter: he must care for the child. Shlomo protests that Mauro is a goy (his mother is not Jewish, and when the kid pees into a houseplant Shlomo sees he is not circumcised). Yet the rabbi is unyielding: the identity of the boy matters not at all; the command to care for the lost trumps all else. Shlomo starts calling Mauro Moshele ("little Moses") and with the help of not only the local Jewish community but nearly all of the racially mixed São Paulo neighborhood of Bom Retiro gives him a sense of belonging and of being loved.

Horrible things happen in this film. Violence limns its edges. People disappear. Mauro's mother does eventually return, however, and the boy she transports away from this haven is different from the one she left behind a year previously: full of the knowledge of how lethal the world can be, but full also of its ability to nurture, protect and change those who inhabit it, even in the face of what is darkest.

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Job Opening in Medieval History: Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

by EILEEN JOY

I want to alert all of our readers who may be medieval historians in search of a job that Southern Illinois University Edwardsville is currently searching for a medieval historian [this person would be replacing my friend Michael Moore, an historian of the Carolingian period, who recently left SIUE to take a position at the University of Iowa]. I can tell you that SIUE, more than any institution with which I have been associated, really puts its money where its mouth is when it comes to support for faculty research and teaching. Although the current economic climate is horrendous [for example, a friend informed me last week that her university in South Carolina has rescinded all travel funding and sabbaticals that were already pre-approved, frozen all job hires, and is also asking faculty to take on additional courses], at SIUE we are holding steady, partly thanks to progressive state funding and a Graduate School that is superior in terms of its external funding rates. As a result, travel funding is generous and there are close to ten annually recurring internal grant programs, and I can tell you that I have benefited enormously from those [two summer research fellowships and reassigned time practically every single year I've been here--in fact, I am not teaching at all next semester thanks to one of these grants]. In addition, SIUE puts a lot of support behind cross-disciplinary, team-taught courses and is continually devising new ways, with financial support, to encourage faculty to innovate new courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The History department has a very vibrant intellectual atmosphere and clearly values premodern studies [the chair of the search committee for this position is an art historian of ancient Assyria]--in fact, for several years now, their two-semester theory seminar for their M.A. students has been taught by a three-person team of an historian of intellectual French history [who studied with Derrida at Irvine], the early modernist [who works on material culture of the Italian Renaissance], and my friend Michael, before he left. I reflect that I am beginning to sound a little bit like an SIUE public relations machine, so I will simply append the job ad here:

H-Net Job Posting: Medieval History

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In memoriam: Paul Farber, 1912-2008

by J J Cohen

I've posted about Uncle Paul here at ITM in the past. He died yesterday in the assisted living facility where he'd been receiving hospice care for some time. I'd walked up to visit him earlier in the day, and realized quickly that although his body was lingering, he was already gone. Still I sat by his bed and held his hand. I told him how much everyone in my family loves him, and how grateful we have been to have him a part of our lives. He died at the age of 96, one day after his birthday.

Paul Pesach Farber outlived every member of his immediate family. His mother perished in a concentration camp. His siblings immigrated to the United States from Vienna (mainly through resources Paul sent their way), but they did not live long lives. His wife died in his arms a decade ago. His daughter succumbed to cancer when she turned forty. At age twelve his only grandson drowned while away at summer camp. Despite the tragedy that permeated his life, despite the moments of despair to which he was fully capable of giving voice, Paul was relentless in his humor, his affirmativeness, his joie de vivre. I remember once when a friend asked him to accompany her to an aerobics class, he raised an eyebrow and said "Why would I pay someone to yell at me?"

I met Paul for the first time when he was in his seventies. He didn't like me very much, and called me a snob. As time went on, though, we grew close. Even twenty years ago he could ascend Sugarloaf Mountain in Vermont far more quickly than I could -- and believe me I tried. Paul was a complicated person, and could at times be unpredictable, even mean. But he adored his great-niece, adored Alex and Katherine ... and he and I always had a bond that I find impossible to put into words.

I miss Paul, and I know it was an honor to have had so much time with him.

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History Has Many Skins: Enduring Preoccupations

by EILEEN JOY

When we were having lunch at the Circle Bistro in D.C. this past week, just before the "Touching the Past" symposium at George Washington University, and in between some silly discussions having to do with the 1976 movie Logan's Run, valium, and turning into oranges [thanks Julian Yates!], the conversation turned to whether or not we believed that there are certain things [certain subjects, certain objects, certain frames of mind, landscapes, places, weather, etc.] that have always preoccupied each one of us and continue to do so, such that, even if we peer into our childhood, long before we were medievalists, or into our earlier non-medievalist careers [for Karl, his stint in a punk band, for Jeffrey, his flirtation with biology, for me, my life as a gardener and fiction writer and general ne'er-do-well hedonist--oh, and that applies to Karl, too, circa 1980s and, for me anyway, into the mid-1990s], we might notice, with a sudden surprise, that we were *always* thinking about history, or we were always obsessed with animals [Karl], or with time [all of us], or with injustice [me], or with bodies [Jeffrey], etc. It is my own firm belief [although Karl demurred a bit] that there really are certain dispositions and orientations [desires, leanings] and habits of mind that we possess very early on, and almost unawares, these dispositions and preoccupations creep into everything we do, they won't let go of us, but we don't always readily admit this [or maybe don't always see it]. Are we formed so early on in our orientations to the world that, as Sara Ahmed has argued in Queer Phenomenology, some things appear in view to us, while other things, although present, remain out of view to us?

For me, I can only say that, yes, I really think this is so. Unlike a lot of other people, I came to medieval studies very, very late, only finishing my Ph.D. just before I turned 40, and after quite a few stints as anything but a medievalist: bookkeeper, garden designer, fiction writer, travel accountant, filmmaker, business entrepreneur/capitalist whore, photographer's assistant, interior designer's assistant, payroll manager, secretary/receptionist, etc. But throughout all of this I was, for the most part, surrounded by artists [chiefly writers, painters, sculptors, filmmakers, musicians] and I was always, in one way or another, working on my own art [my fiction], and when I reflected on that at the Circle Bistro last Friday, it occurred to me, with something almost like a shock [because I had not really thought about it before], that pretty much all of my stories [and my one novella] are absolutely all about history [about the past and its hold on the present], and also about resurrections of the various dead [and isn't this why I also love the paintings of Stanley Spencer?], and of course, they are all, in some fashion, love stories--albeit, rather queer love stories, not meaning they are about same-sex relationships, but rather that they are about queer couplings of all sorts: between Pablo Neruda and Marie Curie, who I paired up in one story, "I Have Kept My Heart Yellow," between Emma Bovary and a baker of blackbird pies, in "A Sweet, Crunchy Tart," between Edmund from Lewis's Narnia and a dharmic colony of ants, in "About the Author," between Lot and his daughters, in "Lot's Wife," between a male stripper and a Volvo that could fly, in "Volvo in the Sky" [these are just my published stories]. But speaking of the more conventional denotation of "queer," at least in our current critical parlance, I was always turning certain historical figures into lesbians: Marie Curie, Emma Bovary, etc. This, embarrassingly, has to be admitted.

It seems to me that we have to have created what might be called a "petit"-body of work, not with any particular forethought, just following our creative whims, and then some time passes, and we look back on what always seemed pell mell, and a certain beautiful order emerges--something strange and yet so familiar because it was what we always wanted, or were trying to say, all along. We love certain things so much, have such affection and loyalty to them that, even when we don't notice their presence, they are always emerging within us and flowing into our work. We have dispositions, in other words, and we should embrace them, maybe even give them more room to really, as it were, ravish us. Because I would like to think that the things I love in this world could not only be taken, but could take me in return. And wouldn't this also be an/other way of thinking about history and about writing history? We could have histories of dispositions, habits, preoccupations, orientations, or we could write our own medieval devotional manuals.

And so I'm also wondering: what is your disposition? Can you look at the work you've done in medieval studies, for example [your theses and dissertations, your essays and articles and books, your courses, etc.] and then, while also considering your former selves, your child self, do you see that you have certain subjects and objects and landscapes that preoccupy you, concern you, obsess you, inhabit you? And what are they? I would love to know.

And although Jeffrey asked me to share here on ITM one of my short stories, I'm not sure I feel entirely comfortable with that [they can be found, in any case, here and there in various journals and books such as Black Warrior Review and The Sun and Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction], but I will share here just the beginning of one story, published in 1992, "A Sweet, Crunchy Tart," told from the point of the view of the blackbird pie maker who lives on the imaginary island of Merula, and which got me thinking about all of this to begin with [and I will admit here, as I did to Jeffrey, that the first lines of this story came to me one afternoon [in their entirety] in 1991, in the midst of a hellishly hot summer when I was living in Virginia in a house without air conditioning and I would spend almost every single day lying in one of those antique, claw-footed tubs, where it was cool, and staring out the window, and just waiting, I guess, for anything to happen]:

History has many skins, layer upon layer of fragile papyrus, a thick apocrypha of facts and fictions, strands of white hair, cups full of brown teeth and jewelry gone green with rust. If our skin becomes dust and dust persists through all of our calamities, then I'm as eternal as air, sitting on the prow of the ship that sails to Byzantium, a twinkle in my eye. My bones might rot on the hull of the earth, but I hope there is a part of me that will settle on the wing of a gull and I will survive, yes, I will survive in spite of everything. It is love, the star in my palm, that will get me through, shake me out of time, make me like the seed shaken out of the poppy, small and hard, tasteless, eternal.

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Radical Acts of Anachronistic, Contemporaneous Combustion: Notes Toward an Historical Poethics

Figure 1. Stanley Spencer, Love Letters (1950)

by EILEEN JOY

[Be sure to note below the call for submissions from Cary Howie for the special issue of L'Esprit Créateur on "sanctity"]

Let's gather firewood. We'll light a fire on the mountain.
--Pablo Neruda, from "Love Sonnet LXXVIII"

As promised, I am going to share here my talk from the GWU Symposium on "Touching the Past," and I want to thank everyone who was there for such a stimulating set of conversations just after the papers were presented and beyond, well into the evening. I also want to thank the other presenters--Peggy McCracken, Julian Yates, and Carolyn Dinshaw--for their beautiful and thought-provoking papers. I found it almost frightening how much our four papers collectively paced and fretted around certain subjects: the inter-penetration of bodies and times, the pastoral (English landscapes, especially), affective/ghostly presences, the animal and animality, queer loves/affections, anachronistic "after"-lives, and resurrections. I never really got to the "poethics" part of my presentation (not enough time to if I didn't want to shirk my attention to the images of the paintings of Stanley Spencer, and I didn't), and so I have included it here in the more full version of my paper. My conclusion draws upon some of Joan Retallack's ideas in her book The Poethical Wager, but also upon the various manifestos written by the members of Oulipo, a literary collective formed in Paris in 1960 (and still going); members have included such figures as Italo Calvino and Raymond Queneau, and I'm wondering if any of our poet-medievalists are familiar with their work (I am thankful to the wonderful R.D. Morgan for giving me as a gift their "primer of potential literature"). If you want to understand the title of this post, you will find it in the paper itself (in which I have also included the images of Spencer's paintings):

The Faded Silvery Imprints of the Bare Feet of Angels: Notes Toward an Historical Poethics

NOTE: And it goes without saying, I hope, that any constructive questions that might be lobbed my way would be considered most useful by me since this forms part of the Introduction to a book that I am trying to complete this coming semester, when I will be on a leave from teaching (and that also means "hint hint Dan and Mary Kate: can you re-articulate here some of the questions and elaborations you had for me in DC?).

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CFP: Sanctity

by J J Cohen

Posted on behalf of favorite ITM love object Cary Howie.

Call for Submissions
L'Esprit Créateur
Special Issue: Sanctity

From Eulalie to Derrida, sanctity performs a series of crucial and complicated functions for French literature and philosophy. This special issue will address the figure of the saint as it gets deployed in contexts sacred and profane, and as it embodies ongoing concerns with materiality and transcendence, exclusion and belonging. The "communion of saints" should be understood, in this way, as widely as possible: as a name for the kinds of sharing or belonging that sanctity at once names and enables; as the ensemble of gestures, liturgical and otherwise, through which these kinds of sharing take place; as the barest thinking of material togetherness. Radically heterogeneous and radically constitutive of communities, in this world and beyond this world, saints condense especially powerful wishes and anxieties about where we’re going—and who "we" are, in the first place and the last.

Deadline for submissions: 1 July 2009. Maximum length: 6000 words. Please address all inquiries to Cary Howie, csh34@cornell.edu.

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At the Holy Sepulchre

by J J Cohen

Re: this, there is also this. Brawling over ownership of the church? Even Mandeville realized the religious rivalries unfolding within the architecture that encloses the tomb of Jesus ... but he offered a vision of fairly pacific coexistence, not kung-fu monks.

Of course, he was imagining the space rather than inhabiting it ... and didn't seem all that concerned that a Muslim sultan would be its caretaker.

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Of Haptic Pasts and Lampshade Fezes

by J J Cohen

Given that the single objective of the recent Touching the Past symposium at GW was to convince Carolyn Dinshaw that a small, burgundy colored lampshade was in fact a fez, and then to photograph said medievalist with said "fez" atop her head, I can without hesitation declare that Touching the Past was a resounding success.

Some highlights:

• More than fifty people participated, filling the room.
  
• Though most of our audience was local (GW, AU and UMD were especially well represented), a hefty contingent came from out of town and spent the night -- gratifying, considering that this hadn't been conceptualized as a "destination" gathering.
  
• Among those arriving from semi-distant parts was a van full of undergraduates from Richard Stockton College in New Jersey. They were a cool, friendly bunch. I also got to meet Ken Tompkins. I wish I'd had more time with him, but could say only a fast hello while dashing between cookie plates and audience herding.
• In fact I wish I had had more time with many people. The problem with running an event like this is the, well, running. I spent so much time on the move that I wasn't able to hear most of the Q&A (I am told it was quite lively, and would love it if someone present would post about the conversation here at ITM). I also didn't get to chat and/or catch up with several people I would have liked to converse with. If I snubbed you, I apologize.
  
• I was so proud of my GW students, former and current. They are the best ... and most of them stayed with the group right up to the end of festivities at 2 AM.
• Among those who came: the polymath Michael Wenthe, the affable Theresa Coletti, the charming Gail Gibson, the ardent Anna Klosowska, the mocking Liza Blake, the Heaney-hating Dan Remein, the splendid Myra Seaman, the elegant Madhavi Menon (the only person in the world who can eat more sweets than me) ...
• Peggy McCracken, Julian Yates, Carolyn Dinshaw, and Eileen Joy have so much in common that they probably formed a secret club together as kids. Hearing how well the four presentations fit together confirmed this suspicion of mine. Many attendees of the symposium asked me if the papers had been shared beforehand among the presenters. They had not. It's just that we had four people interested in the past, touch, pastoral, the early twentieth century, images, bodies.
  
• Possessing more than bare-bones funding for the institute means that we were able to invite as many graduate students as faculty to dinner with us. Twenty-eight of us devoured a vegetarian thali at Nirvana, the kind owners of which even selected two decent Indian wines to accompany the meal. GW MEMSI is trying to foster a community that also lives and breathes outside of the conventional space and formalized interchanges. No better spur to continued connversation exists than good company over good food and good drink.
• Maybe that is why we stayed out until 2 AM at the Orientalist splendor of the Venetian Room (where Anna Klosowska gave us languishing lessons on the opulent divans), and then in the patio of a nearby college dive bar.
• All the ITMers made the pilgrimage to my office to see the Tiny Shriner in his native habitat (a window ledge where he currently stands with a gazelle and a miniature boomerang). If you squint at the picture, above, taken by Karl, you can see the ghostly presence of two ITM commentators and favorite people, who were in attendance at the conference.
• Eileen's paper on the English painter Stanley Spencer condensed all her obsessions into a moving meditation on time, mortality, and letters. Karl gave perfect introductions to Julian and Carolyn, finding resonant fragments of their work. Mary Kate was her usual insightful self in the conversations that followed ... conversations that were errant and energizing.
  
• If you are reading this and you attended the Touching the Past symposium, THANK YOU. I cannot imagine a better inaugural event for the GW Medieval and Early Modern Institute. The convivial philosophizing that took place over that afternoon that stretched into the wee hours of the morning remind me -- again, and again -- of how fortunate I feel to be a part of the field right now.

Although perhaps it goes without saying, still I must say: the symposium would not have been possible without my wonderful GW colleagues Holly Dugan, Jonathan Hsy, Marcy Norton, Jehangir Malegam. Lowell Duckert undertook much of the labor that made the event possible, and Mike Smith and Beth Lattin pitched in at key moments to save the day.

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Today is the day

by J J Cohen

I feel touched already.

Secretly we're all hoping the new president-elect will stop in and finger the Tiny Shriner for his cabinet (Secretary of Education and Festive Fezwear, anyone?)

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How to See All 4 ITM Bloggers in the Same Room at the Same Time

[click on the image to make it readable]

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