tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post113778334634436206..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: Draft of Introduction, Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval BritainCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger16125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-52323713893996934352007-03-06T19:04:00.000-05:002007-03-06T19:04:00.000-05:00Hi, this is a very important question, so do you t...Hi, this is a very important question, so do you think that post-colonial theory (especially using the term hybridity?) can be justifiably applied to a text like 'Bewoulf'???Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1138361649792869792006-01-27T06:34:00.000-05:002006-01-27T06:34:00.000-05:00In fact I don't know the story from the Gesta that...In fact I don't know the story from the Gesta that you quote, Karl -- it's great! <BR/><BR/>Later today I hope to post the draft of the encyclopedia entry I'm working on, entitled "Animals, sexual symbolism of." It has words like zoophilia, bestiality, fellatio (it treats the Physiologus entry you mention), penis and vagina in it. That means a lot of people who are led to it via Google are going to be sorely disappointed.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1138329374682622302006-01-26T21:36:00.000-05:002006-01-26T21:36:00.000-05:00One more, quick! While I should be doing something...One more, quick! While I should be doing something else!<BR/><BR/>This is what I was trying to remember this afternoon: from Richard Grant's <I>Early Xians and Animals</I>, speaking of one entry in the Physiologus tradition, on the viper:<BR/><BR/>“The Physiologus said of the viper that the male has the face of a man, the female, the face of a woman. To the navel they have a human form, but they have the tail of a crocodile. The female has no vagina, just the eye of a needle; the male expels his sperm in her mouth. If she swallows it she cuts off his testicles and he dies immediately. As the offspring grow they eat the mother’s stomach and come out; thus they are patricides and matricides” (56, nt 4, 94)Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1138313870046242482006-01-26T17:17:00.000-05:002006-01-26T17:17:00.000-05:00You're right of course, Karl.Harh! That 'of course...<I>You're right of course, Karl.</I><BR/><BR/>Harh! That 'of course' means you've never spent any time in my household, where my hobby is being wrong.<BR/><BR/>I'll let your various theses sit, assuming I've reached the end of my prodding for now (point is, Wm...oh! I mean Thomas of Monmouth (!) ... chose the Jews, among othe reasons, because they evidenced the characteristically 'Norman' traits that the Normans by and large had ceased to evidence?). <BR/><BR/>Again, it'd be a darn shame if some more medievalists didn't leap into the conversation: don't see why that can't happen, with blogs being the new listservs.<BR/><BR/>But, erotic animals? Great! That probably deserves its own blog post, if you're willing to post the tentative quasi-ephemera that constitutes most of the blogosphere, if you're willing to somehow avoid any googling of 'bestiality' that might hit your blog or cause it to be caught up by the White House's latest prying into privacy.<BR/><BR/>In anticipation of such a possible blog post, here's what comes to mind for me immediately: a) Boswell's queer hyenas and jackals in Christianity and Social Tolerance; b) all the other 'unnatural' animals; c) but most of all, a story that you probably already know, from Sidney J. H. Herrtage, The Early English Versions of the Gesta Romanorum, Eets E.S. 33 (London: N. Trübner & Co., 1879).328-29, which is an odd version of the Androcles and the lion story where the emperor seeks out the lion, finds a cave, no lion there, but there's a lady bear, so of course he stays with her for a while, "and after that he had eten, thei layen bothe to-gedre. and the Emperour knew her flesshly, and she brought fortþ a sone, like the Emperour."Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1138306684027018722006-01-26T15:18:00.000-05:002006-01-26T15:18:00.000-05:00You're right of course, Karl. I was thinking today...You're right of course, Karl. I was thinking today, as I worked on a piece about erotic animals, that even if by the mid 12th C much of the anti-Jewish theology and folklore wasn't in circulation yet (miracles of the virgin are later, I think), even a text like the <EM>Physiologus </EM>makes it clear that Jews are to be theologized. Thus its owls and hyenas are Jewish.<BR/><BR/>But at least in the case of Norwich, I'd argue that the Jews' Frenchness is just as -- or even more -- important than their religious difference. At a time when the Normans who had devastated, reconfigured, radically remade the city had suddenly vanished into its English population, the Jews with their francophone ways became the focus for discontents having as much to do with the Conquest as it did with their tortured relation to Christian self-identity. At least that's my thesis.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1138244501793178752006-01-25T22:01:00.000-05:002006-01-25T22:01:00.000-05:00JJC,Thanks for the kind comments. All I have to do...JJC,<BR/><BR/>Thanks for the kind comments. All I have to do now is finish the dissertation and set to rights the detritus of projects that it’s left in its wake so far. No small task, but I hope not impossible.<BR/><BR/>Thanks for pointing me to the Howe essay, which gets at some of my thoughts, and the forthcoming Lavezzo, which I think I’m going to like a lot.<BR/><BR/>Here’s some more thoughts on Wm of Norwich: Granted, he’s no sophisticate. That doesn’t mean that he’s not caught up in Christianity’s problematic and constitutive relationship to both Judaism and actual Jews. It just means that he’s probably not going to be self-conscious about what he’s doing (as, say, Richard of Devizes was, or the author of the mind-numbingly weird Adam of Bristol legend). <BR/><BR/>With all the various groups he could have chosen to demonize, he chose Jews. I think it’s fair to say that he chose Jews for a reason, and not simply because they were vulnerable. Jews played (were made to play) a key role for Christianity since its inception, but especially so in the twelfth century, what with the way Mariolatry (also virtually an Insular invention) invoked anti-Semitism so often to gives it stories punch. Now, I might have just gone off the rails here, as I was thinking of the Englishman John of Garland’s Stella Maris, which is about 50 year after Wm of M (haven’t looked at R. W. Southern’s “The English Origins of the Miracles of the Virgin," Medieval and Renaissance Studies 4 (1958): 176-216, but I ought to). Nevertheless! I’m convinced that regardless of Wm’s lack of sophistication, he had to be caught up with the significance of Jews for Christians in some way not incidental to his larger products; medieval Christians couldn’t help but turn Jews into theology, or do some sort of self-reflective weird cultural work with them: not sure how it would play out in the actual criticism of this Norwich thing, though….<BR/><BR/>Now, it may be JJC that I’m being unfair here, tilting at strawmen. I don’t mind being set aright at all!<BR/><BR/>Back! To! Work!Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1138215347703426952006-01-25T13:55:00.000-05:002006-01-25T13:55:00.000-05:00Great medievalist minds think alike, even when the...Great medievalist minds think alike, even when they are not all quite as grouchy as each other. On Bede's strategy of self-peripheralization, see Nicholas Howe's excellent "Rome: Capital of Anglo-Saxon England," <EM>JMEMS</EM>34 (2004). But wait, there's more. A few weeks ago I was asked to blurb Kathy Lavezzo's forthcoming <EM>Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community, 1000-1534</EM> (Cornell University Press). I read the book as uncorrected proofs -- and loved it. I'll paste my little encomium below. I mean every word of it:<BR/><BR/><EM>In this ambitious new book Kathy Lavezzo explores what she calls the "exaltation of the English world margin," the strange embrace of the English of their own peripheral status. Analyzing half a millennia's worth of texts and maps, Lavezzo argues that a nascent kingdom found both self-empowerment and a justification for imperialism in its residence at the edge of the earth. Works by Ælfric, Giraldus Cambrensis, Ranulf Higden, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Wolsey and John Skelton are read alongside contemporary maps in a breathtakingly interdisciplinary tour of the British Middle Ages. </EM>Angels on the Edge of the World <EM>is the necessary starting point for future discussions of the early English nation. As lucid as it is compelling, it deserves to be read by every medievalist interested in rethinking the period from a postcolonial point of view.</EM><BR/><BR/>What you say about the Jews and Christian self-identity is very well put. You've done astounding things with mapping such complicated dances of romance and abjection in your work on animals. Norwich, though, doesn't seem much like Paris, Canterbury, Oxford, Champagne when it comes to transforming Jews into theology. Thomas of Monmouth wasn't all that abstract a thinker, nor a very subtle philosopher.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1138207806773304862006-01-25T11:50:00.000-05:002006-01-25T11:50:00.000-05:00Oh, I can change my moniker at any point. Maybe….n...Oh, I can change my moniker at any point. Maybe….now. There’s a tedious story behind it, and it has its uses in distinguishing online friends from fiends (friends say Karl, fiends make bad jokes about how appropriate my handle is), but <A HREF="" REL="nofollow"><BR/>http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/a_stupid_proposal/<BR/>>this post</A> [[aargh: html is working weird here. No time to fix!]] by Bérubé is beginning to sink in, vis-à-vis a changed moniker.<BR/><BR/>I buy your distinguishing between Bede’s heterogeneous island versus the 12th century’s compartmentalization of the various peoples with civilization in the middle, however muddled that middle is with its mixture of Anglo-Saxons and Normans (do I have that right?). But here’s what struck me this morning about centers and margins, although it may be relevant to your project only accidentally: the opening to Bede’s HEGA situates Britain in relation to the much larger, much more important countries to its south. I know he’s cribbing ultimately from Strabo (right?), which partially accounts for the form this cartographical opening takes. Nevertheless, I’ve always found it odd that Bede begins by making (recognizing) the subject of his work so peripheral: I wonder where the center(s) is/are in this history.<BR/><BR/>Similar thing with 12th-century historiography, as England/Britain still isn’t the center, at least in geographical and medical discourses. The geographical center is either Rome or Jerusalem, whereas the medical-geographical center is, as William of Malmesbury has Urban II observe (drawing ultimately on Aristotle’s Politics?), seems to run along the longitude to which Southern France belongs. People to the North (e.g., the English) and South (e.g., the Holy Land) of this line are extreme in various ways. Again, where’s the center?<BR/><BR/>Here’s the (a?) thing with the Jews: I can see why you’re limiting yourself primarily to twelfth-century historiography/ethnology/urban planning. But I’m thinking in terms of Christian self-perception, to which the Jew is absolutely essential, to serve both as the raw material that Christians expropriate and transform into Christianity* and as the wretched failures whose very abjection demonstrates the truth and triumph of Christianity.** Not that this balance could be easily maintained. Some 12th-century thinkers, like Peter the Venerable, couldn’t tolerate the presence of Jews among Christians, whereas others, like Bernard of Clairvaux, wanted the intermixture to continue for just the reasons I set out above. Was this highly fraught use of Jews operative in mid-twelfth century England? Insofar as it was a Christian country, yes, but at this point, it seems to me that these discourses were probably most active in Paris, Champagne, Cluny, and along the Rhine. So you may not need to consider this stuff…<BR/><BR/>Who else can we get to join this party?<BR/><BR/><BR/>* Via the theft/appropriation of the Jewish scriptures, first of all, but in the twelfth century, too, rabbis were essential to the revitalization of exegesis, as Andrew of St. Victor, Peter Comestor, and others spent a lot of time talking to rabbis and using their insights.<BR/><BR/>** JKW says you’ve seen some of my animal stuff: you can see the relation here.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1138189655236003232006-01-25T06:47:00.000-05:002006-01-25T06:47:00.000-05:00Thanks, Karl. Those are thoughtful points. I'm sor...Thanks, Karl. Those are thoughtful points. I'm sorry about your epithet; it doesn't seem to fit. I hope someday you are allowed to change it.<BR/><BR/>I try hard in the book not to make a radical distinction between abjected groups at the margins and those at the center, mainly because I'm trying to map how England <EM>centers </EM>itself vis a vis Britain. Bede, I think, is good at illustrating the commingled state of the insular peoples, if only implicitly. It's up to his 12th C disciples to peripheralize the Irish, Welsh and Picts more permanently by changing a shared archipelago into a segregated island. Retroactively, the 12th C historians profoundly changed the past.<BR/><BR/>As to the Jews, I try to keep my claims small. I was looking specifically at what happened in Norwich, when a historical people was being transformed into a fantastical one. I didn't find the Big Fantasies about Jews such as you might see in <EM>Mandeville's Travels </EM>to be of much relevance (in provincial England, in the mid 12th C, there just wasn't all that much available yet) -- but that fact will obviously not hold true for long. By the time of the pogroms that closed the century, it's starting to be much more about vaster mythologies.<BR/><BR/>As to Geoffrey of Monmouth ... I think in a way he's right: it was always difficult to draw the lines among peoples. What's confounding about him is that he declares the elemental separateness of the insular races and then sabotages those separations at every turn. What a perverse little man. And we have to live in the aftermath of his art.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1138163637518666242006-01-24T23:33:00.000-05:002006-01-24T23:33:00.000-05:00Hate to break up this reverie by getting all serio...Hate to break up this reverie by getting all serious-like, but a couple of things come to mind while reading this intro, things that you, JJC, probably deal with at some point in this book:<BR/><BR/>* The radical distinction that must be made between abjected groups imagined only to inhabit the peripheries (the Scots of Owl and Night, the Welsh and Irish) and those imagined to be a ubiquitous, even necessary, pollutant within the borders of what should make sense, i.e., the Jews;<BR/><BR/>* Jews like those in the Wm of Norwich stories and the others thought to inhabit every major Christian urban center (but not so many that they couldn't come together in a murderous convention every year) versus the Jews behind the Alexandrine Gate (The Red Jews) who were like the Scots and Welsh in being beast-like but were so much worse because they were an Apocaplyptic people who would one day overrun the metropole;<BR/><BR/>* Geoffrey's whining that things have gotten so bad that you can't tell the difference anymore between Anglo-Saxons and Britons.<BR/><BR/>Now I'll step aside to make way for more silliness.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1137983489752471752006-01-22T21:31:00.000-05:002006-01-22T21:31:00.000-05:00Hmmm. Interesting discussion. The only difficulty ...Hmmm. Interesting discussion. The only difficulty I forsee is if you should make it a musical, it will be extremely difficult to find a word that rhymes with "hybridity."<BR/><BR/>If I may suggest a few titles for a show based on your works:<BR/><BR/>Musical:<BR/>-- Les Monsterables;<BR/>-- The Phantom of the Opus;<BR/>-- Man of La Monstrosity;<BR/><BR/>Dramatic Movie:<BR/>-- An American Beowolf in London<BR/>-- Midnight in the Garden of the Good and Medieval;<BR/> ...Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1137879997896095302006-01-21T16:46:00.000-05:002006-01-21T16:46:00.000-05:00I have often thought that, should I one day realiz...I have often thought that, should I one day realize my dream of transforming one of my scholarly works into an off-off-Broadway musical, then -- should everyone who has ever bought one of my books buy a ticket -- I could fill a very small theatre for one night.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1137866994396922832006-01-21T13:09:00.000-05:002006-01-21T13:09:00.000-05:00There's a one-armed man in this part of the Upper ...There's a one-armed man in this part of the Upper West Side who lost his other arm when he threw himself in front of a Subway train some years ago. Now that he's safely back on his meds he gives himself over to community theatre, but the only role that he's taken in the past few years--and I shit you not--is that of Grendel. So if you ever want to remake your book as an off-Broadway show I can hook you up with a Grendel, no problem.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1137852769880303722006-01-21T09:12:00.000-05:002006-01-21T09:12:00.000-05:00What I really love about the blogosphere is how it...What I really love about the blogosphere is how it offers the possibility of serious, high-level discourse about matetrs of great import.<BR/><BR/>My *next* book will be a pop-up. Look for the Grendel that loses its arm, with real ripping action.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1137815297109851032006-01-20T22:48:00.000-05:002006-01-20T22:48:00.000-05:00Um, I was led to believe that this was a pop-up bo...Um, I was led to believe that this was a pop-up book, or at least a book with pictures. I want my money back.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1137795281975368572006-01-20T17:14:00.000-05:002006-01-20T17:14:00.000-05:00I disagree.I disagree.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com