Held in his lap Deliciously: Medieval Hermits, Distracted by Cats

by KARL STEEL

Obviously, if you like what we do, join our community. And please, if you haven't done so yet, read this guest post by Shamma Boyarin, which will give you a good sense of what we've been up to recently. This post here is comparatively, and perhaps even absolutely, frivolous.

Apparently it’s International Cat Day, and, for several days, unwitting I have been researching medieval cats and the envious hermits who love them. What good fortune!

You probably know that the Ancrene Wisse (early 13^th century) allows anchoresses one cat: “Ye, mine leove sustren, bute yef neod ow drive ant ower meistre hit reade, ne schulen habbe na beast bute cat ane” [VIII 76-77; My dear sisters, unless need drives you and your director advises it, you must not have any animal except a single cat, 201, trans. slightly modified]. Fewer of you might know how the passage continues: anticipating the damage that cows [“kues”] might cause, it warns the anchoress of the trouble that comes when her neighbors have anything to complain of [“Ladlich thing is hit, wat Crist, hwen me maketh i tune man of ancre ahte” (It is a hateful thing, Christ knows, when men can make in town anything of about an anchor; 201, trans. slightly modified)]. And especially if any anchoresses must have animals, it advises “loki thet…hire thoht ne beo na-wiht th'ron i-festnet” (see that…their thought is in no way fastened on it).

Have a cat, but beware of being too attached to it. To put this another way, even then, cats were liable to draw our love. For these reason, the eleventh-century Liber confortatorius by Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, written in England to Eve, a woman recluse, insists that “No cat, no chicken, no little animal, no irrational creature, should live with you: fleeting time should not be wasted” (Book III, Otter trans., 80). For this reason, in the fifteenth century we encounter the unfortunate Margaret, a nun tormented in purgatory, who “had a lytel hound and a lytel catte folwynge hyr, al of fyr brennynge” [61; had a little dog and a little cat following her, both of them aflame], and who would not relieved from them until the “drosse of syn” (78) is fully burned away.

In the twelfth century, in his manual for rulers, Gerald of Wales includes a feline temptor of this sort in an aside about Gregory the Great. It’s written that a certain hermit had heard of the sanctity of Pope Gregory and went to see him in Rome, where he witnessed a grand procession of cardinals, clerics, and especially Gregory himself, bedecked with his imperial regalia. He returned to his place [locum suum], and wondered at night whether this glory suited humility, and then, as he slept, he heard a voice reciting this verse [hunc versum modulantem audivit]: 'Pluris habes catum quam praesul pontificatum’ [You esteem the cat more highly than the pope does the papacy]. For, as Gerald explains, this good man had a cat, which he was accustomed to play with [ludendo] after he finished his work and prayers. (Thanks Trevor Russell Smith for help here).

The earliest surviving version of this story may be in Gerald; Robert Bartlett, who alerted me to it, does not list anything earlier (Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?, 199), nor have I been able to find anything earlier on my own. Despite what some claim, the cat story is not in John the Deacon’s early life (PL 75:103-6, pdf), nor in this early life from Whitby. But it does appear in Vincent of Beauvais’ Speculum historiale, sadly denuded of Gerald’s catum/pontificatum pun: "Angelus Domini ad quendam eremitam, qui unum cattum pro relevando taedio secum habebat, de eodem Gregorio testeretur dicens: Majorem delectationem habes in hoc catto, quam Gregorius in omni imperio Romano" (XX.19, p. 867; an angel of the lord came to a certain hermit, who had a cat to relieve the tedium of living alone, and said to him about Gregory, you have more delight in this cat that Gregory does in all the power of Rome).

And from there, it strolls into the Golden Legend of Jacobus da Varagine (more commonly, Voragine), whose more than 1000 surviving Latin manuscripts attest to a universal readership in medieval Latin Christendom. I can cite, for example, the translations by Jean de Vignay, themselves quite popular: “tu aimes miex cele chate que tu aplanies tous les jours que il ne fait les richesces (BnF fr. 241, 76v; you love this cat that you caress every day better than he loves his riches). Judging from the examples in Godefroy’s Old French dictionary, which have to do mainly with horses, the verb for caressing, aplaner, may have been used particularly for animals, and therefore might be translated as “pet”; it certainly, and charmingly, was related, then and now to flattening, leveling, or smoothing out (the modern French aplanir).

Jean de Vignay wasn’t the only French translator; Jean Belet, for example, writes “En ces tans fu uns hermitains hons de grant vertu qui avoit laissie toutes choses por dieu et n'avoit nule chose fors que une chatte, laquelle il aplaignoit souvent et aussi com sa copaigne en ses genouz la norissoit” [Bnf fr. 20330 47v; In those times there was a hermit of great virtue has had left all things for god and had no possession except for a cat, which he caressed often, and like his companion, he fed her [while she sat] on his knees; thanks Jeanette Patterson for paleographical assistance!]. We also find the story in a thirteenth-century French verse translation of Life of Gregory, where the smugly pious hermit is more proud (“orguillous e fier”) than Gregory, because of his delight in his cat:

Tu ton chat eimes e nourris,
Bailles e beises e polis
(You love [presuming that eimes is from aimer] and feed your cat / and play with him and kiss him and “polish” him).

And of course we find it in English too, and once on a window in Canterbury Cathedral. While Gregory is missing from the saints collected in John Mirk’s Festial, and while the South English Legendary (in both EETS editions) focuses, narcissistically, on Gregory’s famously inspired evangelization of Britain (“not Angels, but Anglicans!”), it does appear in the 1430s in the Gilte Legende (taken mostly from Jean de Vignay): “How durst thou make comparison betwene the richesse of Gregori and thi pouertee, sethe thou louest more thi catte that thou handelest and strokest eueri day thanne he dothe all the richesse that he hathe, for he dispisethe hem and yeuith hem frely to eueri man” (Vol. 1, 203). And from thence, but also via Jean de Vignay, we have Caxton’s translation, which may be the most delightful of all: "And in that time there was a hermit, an holy man, which had left and forsaken all the goods of the world for God's sake, and had retained nothing but a cat, with which he played oft, and held in his lap deliciously" (Vol III, 66-67).

And that would be that for the cat, were it not for one more story of this sort, still more brief, in a Life of Saint Basil. Again, this story does not appear in the early life, attributed to Amphilochius (PL 73); nor have I yet found it anywhere earlier than the Golden Legend: it’s not in Aelfric, for example. Again, a seemingly proud prelate; again, a smugly humble hermit and his cat; and then one more detail, its tail: “Tu amplius delicaris in palpando caudam gatte tue que delectetur Basilius in apparatu suo valent” [Einsiedeln Stiftsbibliothek Codex 629(258), 41v; You delight in stroking your cat’s tail more than Basil does in his vestments: dating to 1288, this is the second-oldest copy of the Golden Legend, made during Jacobus’s lifetime, and delightful to me, because of what strikes me as an Italianate gatte for catte, hinting at a casual, vernacular affection for this animal].

Again, we have this in French (BnF 241 48r, tu te delictes plus en aplamant la queue de ton chat que Basille ne fait en son appareil), and in English, losing the tail, here from the Gilte Legende:

Another hermyte seigh another tyme Seint Basile go well besain [“be seen,” that is, “on display”] in abyte of a bisshop and despised hym in his thought, seyeng: ‘Lo what delyte he hathe to go in suche bobaunce.’ And a vois ansuered hym and saide: ‘Thou delitest the more in strokyng of thi catte thanne Basile in al hys araye (Vol 1, 117) (Caxton here).

The thirteenth-century Franciscan Chronicler Salimbene di Adam would not have approved. In Coulton’s translation:

I have seen in mine own Order certain Lectors of excellent learning and great sanctity who had yet some foul blemish, which caused others to judge lightly of them. For they love to play with a cat or a whelp or with some small fowl, but not as the Blessed Francis was wont to play with a pheasant and a cicada, rejoicing the while in the Lord (90)

Sic in ordine meo, qui est ordo beati Francisci et fratrum Minorum, vidi aliquos lectores optime litteratos et magne sanctitatis, et tamen aliquam merditatem habent, per quam leves persone iudicantur ab aliis: libenter enim ludunt cum murilego vel cum catulo vel cum avicula aliqua, sed non sicut beatus Franciscus cum fasiano et cicada ludebat et delectabatur in Domino. (146)

As much as I like pheasants and cicadas, I’m charmed by how cats insist on getting into our business, on demanding our attention, on substituting for God, on puffing us up with pride for them, how they draw ascetics astray from their celestial thoughts down to this warm and fuzzy and tailed earth. Delicious.

Corrections are welcome!

Medieval Cat Bibliography

Aerts, Erik. "La relation entre l’homme et le chat dans les anciens Pays-Bas au moyen âge et à l’époque moderne I. Le chat utile, diabolique et imaginaire."  Vlaams Diergeneeskundig Tijdschrift 84 (2015): 212-222.

Aerts, Erik. "La relation entre l’homme et le chat dans les anciens Pays-Bas au moyen âge et à l’époque moderne II. Le chat domestique et le chat tourmenté," Vlaams Diergeneeskundig Tijdschrift 84 (2015): 271-80.

Gray, Douglas. “Notes on Some Medieval, Mystical, Magical, and Moral Cats.” In Langland, the Mystics, and the Medieval English Religious Tradition: Essays in Honour of S. S. Hussey, edited by Helen Phillips, 185–202. Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1990.

Jones, Malcoln H. “Cats and Cat-Skinning in Late Medieval Art and Life.” In Fauna and Flora in the Middle Ages, edited by Sieglinde Hartmann, 97-112. New York: Peter Lang, 2007.

Lipton, Sara, “Jews, Heretics, and the Sign of the Cat in the Bible moralisée,” Word and Image 8 (1992): 362–77.

Poole, Kristopher. "The Contextual Cat: Human–Animal Relations and Social Meaning in Anglo-Saxon England." Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 22.3 (2015): 857-882. [thanks Matt E. Spears!]

Thomas, Richard, “Perceptions Versus Reality: Changing Attitudes towards Pets in Medieval and Post-Medieval England.” In Just Skin and Bones? New Perspectives on Human-Animal Relations in the Historical Past, edited by Aleksander Pluskowski, 95-104. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2005.

Walker-Meikle, Kathleen. Medieval Cats. London: British Library, 2011.

And another short blog post on medieval cats, from 2013, here.

OYSTERPOMORPHISM

by KARL STEEL

L. M. Boyd’s column, Sept 2 1988

What follows will be an excerpt from the book I'm working on.

I've been writing about oysters for years now, but have published on them just once, in Steve Mentz's Oceanic New York. I made some catastrophic errors in that essay -- the Marquess of Cavendish to whom Descartes wrote about oysters is not, of course, Margaret Cavendish, and only my understandable, irrepressible desire for the perfect intellectual slash fiction made it so -- but the volume, as a whole, is otherwise absolutely worth reading.

I'm now, here in the second half of my sabbatical, creaking my way to a submittable version of Book2, and am naturally enough, I started the final writing at the end. Here's a section from the ending bit of Chapter 4, on Oysters, with just enough about Gelli's La Circe to draw you in. The whole of the chapter's end is here; along with a bit on minimal animals; on oysters and agency; and, of course, the Anglo-Saxon oyster riddle.

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In 1549, another talking oyster appears, in Giovanni Battista Gelli’s La Circe, his adaptation of Plutarch’s fourth-century Gryllus, or “Grunter.” Plutarch’s work features Ulysses and one of his men, since transformed by the sorceress Circe into a pig, debating the respective advantages of humanity and porcinity. The pig wins. Plutarch’s work survives in just one, fragmentary manuscript, while Gelli’s work, lucky enough to have been produced near the dawn of the print era, was quickly translated from Italian into Latin and the major European languages, and perhaps even twice adapted for the stage.[1] It also surpasses Plutarch in its dedication to the conceit, for in Gelli, not just the one, but ten animals out-argue Ulysses, until at last he convinces an elephant, and only the elephant, to let itself once more become human. As the elephant had once been a philosopher, its final decision may mean that none but it is sufficiently ratiocinative to recognize the value of reclaiming its human privilege; furthermore, this conclusion, with the elephant presumably ranking as the most august of this beastly collective – which includes an oyster, mole, snake, hare, goat, doe, lion, horse, dog, and cow – may at least hint that the whole work follows a neo-Platonic trajectory, in which all-too-practical animality gradually ascends towards abstractive humanity. Alternately, if we recall that Gelli himself, despite his growing fame among Florentine philosophers, refused to abandon his own trade as a cobbler,[2] the conclusion may be read as a satire: the elephant’s susceptibility to the allures of logos may suggest that only a philosopher, and – given the doe’s earlier complaints about the wretched condition of human women – only a male philosopher at that, would be foolish enough to give up on a happier, animal existence. All the other animals outmaneuver the famously clever Ulysses, because the human world has no allurements for them.[3] Laurie Shannon rightly insists, then, that the text is not concerned with the animal possession of reason, nor even of the superiority of reason to irrationality, but rather with “whether a good life entails duly cherishing what is necessary or striving to attain what is not.”[4] The elephant may furnish the work’s final answer to this question, but it perhaps is not the conclusive one.

The first and presumably the lowest-ranking of Ulysses’s refusnik animals is, of course, an oyster, a former fishmonger that prefers its easy, littoral life to market drudgery and maritime dangers. The oyster argues that Nature has made them “better and more noble than”[5] humans. After all, she has given oysters their own home, which conveniently doubles as their clothing, and has so made them that food comes to them without any struggle. The oyster takes this practical approach not because of its unfamiliarity with maieutics: having eavesdropped on philosophers back when it sold fish in Athens, the oyster observes that if the end is nobler than the means, then—itself answering the implicit question—Ulysses must surely admit that the earth is nobler than humans since the earth “at last devours you all.”[6] But the offhanded contempt with which it deploys this Socratic paradox suggests both that it recognizes that philosophy is a mere game—notably, it doesn’t extend this argument to its own material existence—and that it thinks the only argument really worth making is a simple description of the comforts of its own oystery life. Against all this, Ulysses can argue only that humans can do things, but has no answer to the oyster’s insistence that humans have to do things. For the oyster, as Shannon observes, “need and pleasure are not opposing modes of being”:[7] felicitous in being what it is, the oyster need not strive for satisfaction, nor for anything else, because it itself is exactly enough and needs nothing but to be.

Then the oyster declares the conversation over (“"I will shut up my little house and take my repose without a single thought"[8]) and the frustrated Ulysses seeks out his next opponent, an equally wily mole. However, just praising the oyster for its victory, or Gelli for his skills as a parodist, would miss the key element of this exchange, which is Gelli’s having the oyster argue as an oyster. It is not that the oyster is just happy, nor just that the “originary perfection” of the oyster lacks the lack that drives humans to mostly noble, sometimes pathetic, attempts to make themselves a better world,[9] nor just that oysters can be defined entirely by their immanent being, and so need not wander uncertain like humans, lost in their own definitional openness.[10] Of course, the contentment of Gelli’s animals in their animal condition is evidence enough of his participation in the long tradition that held all beasts to be innocently happy. But before that argument arrives, Gelli first has the oyster speak from its own particular place, which means showing that whatever its happiness, it is subject to the inescapable vulnerability of anything that exists. For the oyster first agrees to speak only on the condition that Ulysses keep watch during the debate, so that "those confounded crabs shall not throw a stone between my two shells...[to] make a meal of me.”[11] This tidbit of natural history is virtually proverbial in early modern oyster writing. Here, for example, is a Nicholas Breton’s “Dream of an Oister and a Crab”:

Upon the shore neare to the Sea, an Oister gaping wide, Lay looking for a little food to come in with the Tide: But hard by lay a crauling Crab, who watcht his time before, And threw a stone betweene the shels, that they could shut no more. The Oister cride, Ho neighbours, theeues: but ere the neighbours came, The Crab had murtherd the poore fish, and fed upon the same. When wondering that such craft did live with creatures in the deepe, With troubling of my braines withall, I wakt out of my sleepe.[12]

The crafty crab, or sometimes a crafty crow, always succeed against the oyster, as if the oyster’s shell is just an invitation to imagine any shelter’s ultimate inadequacy. Similarly, though the oyster of the Anglo-Saxon riddle talks, it does so mainly to protest about being plucked from the nurturing sea. In all these, as even with Lewis Carroll’s poem, the speaking oyster is less evidence of an (imitative) rational power than of their inescapable vulnerability. What all these works first or even mainly give voice to, then, is a normally unheard or unvoicable request not to be injured. If this is a recognition of the oyster’s “agency,” it is a recognition of an agency that speaks mainly to say that it is far less agential than it would prefer to be, that it is as much thwarted as enabled by its life.

This is probably the most sensible way to represent a talking oyster. Of course, no one who pays them any attention can deny that oysters do do things: they are prodigious cleaners of filthy water, and if New York City, for example, had still had its oyster beds, Hurricane Sandy wouldn’t have hit quite as hard. Nor are oysters entirely helpless: they have shells, and their shells give them some definition and protection, even if crabs always manage to find some way in. But the main point of the speaking, plaintive oyster may be the recognition of what has to exist, first of all, if there is to be any agency at all: agency requires an existence distinct in time and space from other things – no action is possible otherwise, because action needs to act on some other thing and from somewhere – and therefore the agent must have a location and some particular when, which means that its agency is always accompanied by its limits, its inabilities, its termination. It all goes further than this, however, because the oyster’s only intention, if it can even be called that, is that of their sensus solus itself, which establishes the relation towards the self, combined with a helpless inability to choose to do anything about it. That is, the oyster makes it clear that to be at all, even if all that the thing does is be, means being constrained by and vulnerable to nonexistence. For a living thing, this means, especially, that death awaits, whether it knows it or not.

This unwitting helplessness is on the other side even of what Derrida’s The Animal that Therefore I am called the “non-pouvoir au cœur du pouvoir” [“nonpower at the heart of power”].[13] Derrida arrived at this phrase after observing that, for Jeremy Bentham, the question of animal rights did not depend on whether they could use language or reason, but whether they could suffer. Derrida’s favored animal to think with in this essay was a cat; and cats demonstrably can suffer, so long as we are willing to admit that their cries are not simply the sound of clockwork breaking. However, oysters are not only mute, but also unaware, without any movement or sense of other things, without any ability, short of poetry, to make their distress known. To make vitality synonymous with agency and awareness is to forget this nonpower. It is also a mistake that threatens to grant protections only to those things that can do things, or react to things, or even to experience things, while forgetting that things also need protection because of what they cannot do, and may especially need protection against threats they themselves cannot recognize or even be aware that they are experiencing. For depending on which modern scientific studies of oysters and pain are embraced, the oyster may even lack the sensus solus prescientific natural history granted them. They may have nothing but their lives. If the social problem of pain is not knowing if others are really suffering,[14] then this problem is a subjective one, more like numbness than the problem of other minds. It is a problem that requires that the question of “what it is like to be,” for example, an octopus, tick, or oyster,[15] be answered not only with species specific phenomenology, but also with accounts of sensory incapacities, whether innate or temporary. In summarizing Jakob von Uexküll’s famous experiments on the environment [umwelt] of ticks, Agamben declares that if the tick’s sensory capacities are oriented exclusively to an awareness of mammalian blood, “the tick is this relationship,” living “only in it and for it.”[16] But surely it is a mistake to declare that the tick’s existence can be exhausted by what it believes itself to know (or, more accurately, what we can infer about what we believe it to know). Agamben’s declaration is too experiential. The tick’s unwittingness also has to matter: a complete phenomenological account of the tick means attending to all it does not experience. This is not a problem exclusive to invertebrates, of course. Cows too may be said to have this same impediment, particularly in slaughterhouses designed by Temple Grandin. By thinking like a cow, Temple Grandin “remove[s] the things that make [cows] stop moving forward: in a good facility cows walk toward slaughter as if toward a milking parlor.”[17] They advance fearlessly, not because they have become stoics, but because they don’t know what’s ahead. Surely this is a strange kind of “humane” slaughter: to remove only the fear and not the killing; to increase the ignorance, and call that a job well done. Surely there’s more worth protecting than just scared cows, and more than just the cow that has a moment to experience the pain of its own death. As one might expect, these insights can be taken even further. If death is inassimilable to the experience of the thing that dies—whether we call this experience “consciousness” or “sensus solus” or some term graced with even less grandeur—then the ultimate threat itself is always on the other side of our knowledge.[18] We can never get away from it, as we already know, but neither can we ever really know it. In sum, if we want to go further than suffering in looking for a paradoxical noncapacity that lies at the “heart of power,” we might seek it here, in the unexperiencable, uncognizable end, what we might call a non-awareness at the heart of existence.

[and so on!]

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[1] One early translation, absolutely faithful in its treatment of the oyster episode, is Denis Sauvage, trans., La Circe de M. Giovan-Baptista Gello [sic] (Lyon: Guillaume Rouillé, 1550). The two dramatic adaptations may be based on Gelli, or more directly on Plutarch, via “Que les bestes brutes usent de la raison,” in Les Oeuvres morales et meslees, trans. Jacques Amyot, vol. 1, 2 vols. (Paris: Michel de Vascosan, 1572), 270–74, which first made this text generally available in Western Europe (note, however, that the final entry in Machiavelli’s eight-part satire of 1517, “L’asino” [The Donkey], is also an adaptation of “Gryllus”). The two French plays each omit the oyster: from 1661, Antoine-Jacob Montfleury, “Les Bestes raisonnables,” in Les Contemporains de Molière, ed. Victor Fournel, vol. 1, 3 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1863), 223–38, which features one scene in which a man, once a lion, shouts in rage (“Qui diable m'a rendu ma première figure!”) when returned for a while to its human form, and then in effect answers Wittgenstein’s observation (“If a lion could speak &c”) by railing at Ulysses about human cruelty and treachery. The next, from 1718, is Marc-Antoine Legrand and Louis Fuzelier, “Les Animaux raisonnables,” in Le Théâtre de La Foire, ed. Alain René Le Sage and Carolet d’Orneval, vol. 3, 10 vols. (Paris: Etienne Ganeau, 1721), 1–35. Though lacking a talking oyster, this play does have a singing dolphin, which claims to be happy to meet Ulysses once more after vainly searching for him among “deux cens Huîtres” (200 oysters). The lion of Jean de la Fontaine's fable 'Les Compagnons d'Ulysse' is one of several animals, none oysters, that refuses to become human again (here I am a king, it says; were I a human, I would once more be but a simple soldier). For guidance in finding this material, Ibid., 35–36., which is preceded by a detailed paraphrase of the Gelli; Derek Connon, “Animal Instincts: Homer, Plutarch, and La Fontaine Go to the Fair,” in French Seventeenth-Century Literature: Influences and Transformations: Essays in Honour of Christopher J. Gossip, ed. Jane Southwood and Bernard Bourque (Berne: Peter Lang, 2009), 75–90 (which traces the route from Plutarch to the French adaptations); and Marc Escola and Sophie Rabau, “Bibliothèque de Circé,” text, Fabula, Atelier littéraire, (April 18, 2010) (particularly good on nineteenth- and twentieth-century reimaginings of Circe).

[2] Judith Yarnall, Transformations of Circe: The History of an Enchantress (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 110–11.

[3] For the deceit and storytelling of Circe and the animals, see especially the reading of Plutarch in Marina Warner, Monsters of Our Own Making: The Peculiar Pleasures of Fear (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 272–83.

[4] Laurie Shannon, The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 162.

[5] Giovanni Battista Gelli, The Circe, trans. Thomas Brown and Robert Adams (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963), 13.

[6] Ibid., 19.

[7] Shannon, The Accommodated Animal, 160.

[8] Gelli, Circe, 19–20.

[9] Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (Fordham University Press, 2008), 122, summarizing Lacan.

[10] Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 30, on Carl Linnaeus’ classification of humans as “manlike,” “constitutively nonhuman,” an “ironic” anthropological “machine” the preserves the fundamental human capacity to recreate itself as anything.

[11] Gelli, Circe, 12.

[12] From his 1622 Strange Newes out of Divers Countries, in Nicholas Breton, The Works in Verse and Prose of Nicholas Breton: Prose, ed. Alexander Balloch Grosart, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1879), 11.

[13] Jacques Derrida, “L’Animal que donc je suis (à suivre),” in L’Animal autobiographique: Autour de Jacques Derrida, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (Paris: Galilée, 1999), 278. Derrida, Animal That Therefore, 28.

[14] Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

[15] Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” The Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974): 435–50.

[16] Agamben, The Open, 47. For Agamben’s source, Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, with a Theory of Meaning, trans. Joseph D. O’Neil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 50–52.

[17] This is the summary of Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson, Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior (New York: Scribner, 2005) from Erica Fudge, “Milking Other Men’s Beasts,” History and Theory 52 (2013): 19. Fudge’s essay, which attends to humans and disability, as well as the history of the size and treatment of livestock, is an exceptionally good phenomenological/social-historical engagement with animals.

[18] Cary Wolfe, “Exposures,” in Stanley Cavell et al., Philosophy & Animal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 21, “For Derrida…we never have an idea of what death is for us—indeed, death is precisely that which can never be for us—and if we did, then the ethical relation to the other would be immediately foreclosed.”

Deviant Bodies and Animalized Humans

by KARL STEEL

Here's a post from my own website that I shared only through the In the Middle Facebook interface, thinking that it wouldn't draw much attention, and should therefore be left off ITM, which has, of late, found an increasingly larger audience. A mistake!

these are 'good numbers' for our blog

For our readers who don't use Facebook (and good for you!), I'm now offering my post here as well. This is the latest version of my work earlier this year on muteness and Cuthbert and animal gesture.

Nearly two years ago, I announced:

For several years I've wanted to write an essay on the way that 'mute beasts' communicate through gesture in a host of medieval texts (famous examples include the ravens in Bede's Life of Cuthbert and the lion in Yvain), with some consideration of the way that some monks complained that the use of monastic sign language reduced them to animality. So, a chapter on disability and animals, in terms of muteness, interspecies communication, sign language, and signs, maybe with a strong gesture towards the use of CS Peirce in HOW FORESTS THINK, would be a lot of fun to write.

And now it's basically done. I've submitted it to the medieval disability anthology, and then revised it a bit and submitted it again, and then revised it a lot more, because I'm sharing it at the University of Pennsylvania Medieval-Renaissance seminar this September 7. For the interested, here's the first part opening of my paper, my first real attempt to do disability studies.

Saxon Mirror, Mscr.Dresd.M.32 6r

For several medieval writers, differences in mental capability are partly an effect of particular kinds of bodies or environments.[1] For example, an eighth-century medical treatise by Qusta ibn Luqa (in Latin, Costa ben Luca), translated into Latin in the twelfth century, and listed as a Parisian university text in the thirteenth, holds that women, those too close to the sun, like “Ethiopians,” and also those too far from it all have souls that are “imperfectiores et debiliores” [more imperfect and weaker] than those of people whose internal heat and cold are in "perfectione aequalitatis" [perfect equilibrium].[2] Shape and size could matter as well as internal or external ecologies: Aristotle’s On the Parts of Animals held that since birds, fish, quadrupeds, and children were all “dwarflike,” their intelligence was inferior to that of upright humans. Michael Scot’s early thirteenth-century translation follows its ninth-century Christian Arabic source by omitting this specific comparison, but repeats logic, drawn from elsewhere in Aristotle’s treatise, that holds that “animalia sunt minoris intellectus quam homo” [animals are less intelligent than man], because they have more flesh in the front part of their bodies than humans do.[3] The thirteenth-century natural history of Thomas of Cantimpré begins its chapter on “The Monstrous Humans of the East” by proposing that although satyrs and onocentaurs lacked rational souls, they nonetheless could exhibit behaviors that seemed rational to the degree that that their bodies resembled those of humans.[4] And the discussion of the human worldly superiority in Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon observes that well-proportioned limbs signify (“denotatur”) a good mind, and then adds that “inde sentatiavit Plato quod qualis animalis effigiem gestat homo, talis animalis sequitur mores et affectus,” rendered by one translator as “wherefore Plato 3afe sentence that man folowethe the maneres and affectes of that beste, of whome he hath similitude.”[5]

The possession of speech was a key concern. A thought experiment, repeated through the Middle Ages from Gregory of Nyssa (fourth century) to William of Saint Thierry (twelfth) to Thomas Aquinas (thirteenth), held that if humans had no hands, they would be quadrupeds, and therefore be forced to grasp food with their mouths, and as a result would lose the flexibility of lips and tongue that allowed for the production of rational speech.[6] A handless body, being unable to express its rationality, would be functionally irrational. Like an animal or stone, it would be mute. This word, mutum (to choose a declension at random), appears 469 times in the Patrilogia Latine, and accompanies the word “animal” 43 times: not more often than it accompanies surdum [deaf; 160 times], but often enough to attest to a widespread association of nonhumans and muteness across scholarly cultures. This association is not because animals were thought silent, but because what sound they made was understood as mere noise. Habakkuk 2:18 is just one of several scriptural mockeries of those who believe that the "simulacra muta" [mute idols] they themselves created possess divine power.[7] Augustine’s commentary on Psalms 144:10 applies the same adjective to stones and nonhumans alike when it insists that no one should "think that the mute stone or mute animal [mutus lapis aut mutum animal] has reason wherewith to comprehend God.”[8] The condition of muteness thus traversed those of human impairment, animal inability, and material inertness. It slid from irrationality into inanimacy, from a life whose noise could not be understood to one that has no life, no voice, and no agency.

Law reinforced this division. The Justinian code ruled that humans who were permanently “mutus et surdus” (mute and deaf) could not legally draw up contracts, as they had no more capacity for judgment than young children, the insane, and even the chronically ill.[9] This legal voicelessness could also be applied to humans whose bodies were marked as deviant. The thirteenth-century Saxon Mirror (which survives in more than 400 manuscripts) begins its discussion of inheritance law by likening kinship to a human body, so that, for example, “the children of legitimate brothers are located at the level where the arm connects to the shoulders,” with more distant relations located further out on this imagined body; it concludes this discussion by decreeing that property cannot “devolve upon the feebleminded, dwarfs, and cripples.” With one stroke, it cuts such people off from the legal, genealogical body and subjects them to legal conditions elsewhere applied to people unable to express their rationality in socially normative ways.[10] To be sure, Henry de Bracton’s thirteenth-century compendium of English laws nuanced the Justinian code by allowing the entirely deaf to validate contracts by means of “signs and a nod.”[11] But even this modification still preserved the fundamental notion, namely, that certain impairments reduced people to a functional status of stones or nonhuman animals, without legally recognizable agency of their own.

In effect, since the Latin word “animal” could simply mean a “living” or “ensouled” thing,[12] common medieval references to “irrational animals” could functionally encompass several groups: nonhuman animals, humans with mental or intellectual impairment, and, less often, humans with deviant bodies. The phrase “mute animal” could similarly encompass both nonhumans and some humans. Although no widespread medieval law collapsed the distinction between these groups, rhetorical comparisons between nonhumans and impaired humans were frequent. They appear in work by, for example, Augustine (“they differ little from the beasts of the field”), Henry of Ghent (without “intellect…they remain only an animal”), Aquinas (“so long as man has not the use of reason, he differs not from an irrational animal”), and Henry de Bracton, who declares that the insane “are not far removed from brute beasts which lack reason.”[13] Proverbs did similar work: in Middle English, one could be “deaf as an adder,” “mad as a goose” and blind “as a bear,” “as Bayard,” a common horse’s name, or “as a beetle,” a word that denoted either an insect or a hammer.[14] This logic at least implicitly asserted that nonhuman animals were impaired by their own natural capacities, while impaired humans were not quite human.

A humanist disability rights perspective would at least hesitate before these comparisons, because they disable impaired humans by reducing them to a condition of being animals or even objects.[15] It might argue that deviations from the normative human body should be understood only as deviations within the range of human possibility, not as animal degradation. Without denying the fact that humans can suffer deprivations to which humans are uniquely vulnerable (for example, an awareness of legal exclusion), and therefore without declaring, for example, that “humans and animals are really the same,” my work in critical animal studies and posthumanism encourages me to linger with these comparisons instead of simply decrying them. Of course I am not the first to argue in this way. Sunuara Taylor begins an essay about her own impairment, animal metaphors, and animal rights by listing animal insults used against her impairment and those of others; but she admits that when she walks, she really does “resemble a monkey,” in particular, a chimpanzee. These comparisons need not “be negative.”[16] Rather, Taylor argues that they offer an opportunity to rethink embodiment, dependence, and autonomy so that nonhumans might be included in what might be called a vegan community of impairment. With this work, we can recognize that the paired accusations of impairment against nonhumans and certain humans alike call not for a reassertion of precritical humanism and its hierarchies of significant vulnerability, but rather for a reevaluation of the social and ethical functions of impairment, disability, and agency. Mel Y. Chen’s Animacies carries out this work thoroughly. In case studies ranging from lead paint and burst oil wells, to furniture, to the insidious feline genius of Fu Manchu, to semi-domesticated chimpanzees and other nonhuman animals, Chen tracks how certain groups and forms of life—particularly impaired people, racialized immigrants, and the sexually heterodox—are culturally invested with varying degrees of liveliness, agency, responsibility, and animalization. Chen prefers not to shift excluded people up the “animacy hierarchies” of “Western ontologies,”[17] however politically advantageous this reaffirmation would seem to be such groups. Rather, as with other feminist reevalations of materialism, agency, vulnerability, and autonomy, Chen prefers to “reside in this…negative zone”[18] to jostle aside the centrality of claims to agency and animacy in arguments for rights, justice, and care.[19]

Taylor and Chen’s work happily stymy one possible, straightforward argument about animalized metaphors of disability and the social animalization of impaired humans. This would be the assertion that nonhumans, being variously suited to each of their particular environments, are not in fact impaired, and that any supposedly natural animal impairment should be understood instead as representing multiple sensory and bodily norms, rendered “abnormal” and disabled only as an effect of environments and cultures built for other norms. Such a reading would effectively “deanimalize” animals by both freeing them of their negative cultural associations; it would invest them with the agency that uncritical humanism assumes them to lack; and it would simultaneously perform an analogous function for impaired people. Against these critical mistakes, I can also offer Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s “misfit” model of disability, which, by emphasizing material conditions fitted for certain bodies and capacities, deemphasizes the supposed personal bodily inadequacies of the disabled subject, so that “vulnerability is in the fit, not in the body.” Garland-Thomson argues that “fitting” requires a “generic body” in a “generic world,”[20] while I would push this point perhaps past the point of utility by arguing that any no fit can ever be perfect, because there is no perfectly generic world and certainly no perfectly adequate fit. The ineradicable vulnerability and ongoing unbalanced homeostasis of any entity means that no body, even those that belong to the community of “uniform, standard, majority bodies,”[21] can ever be perfectly fitted to its environment.

The remainder of this chapter will concentrate on an encounter that foregrounds and preserves such misfit moments. This is the meeting of Saint Cuthbert and the penitent ravens, which I offer as an experiment in the utility of considering disability studies, critical animal studies, and ecocriticism together, for both historical cultural studies and perhaps even more present-minded cultural studies. The encounter is notable for the gestural communication used by these “mute” beasts to effect a community; for the fact that the birds are not made to talk, although birds, particularly corvids, were a paradigmatic talking animal; and finally for where it takes place (the island of Farne, rendered hospitable to both saint and birds by continuous effort). This encounter does not affirm any bodily or environmental norms. It instead emphasizes the work communication and community require in an environment perilously inhabited by vulnerable bodies that can never be quite at home in it.

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[1] Like all cultural studies that unsettle categories that “go without saying,” terminology is a central issue in disability studies. For useful recent surveys of terminological debates from a medievalist perspective, see Joshua R. Eyler, “Introduction: Breaking Boundaries, Building Bridges,” Joshua R. Eyler, ed., Disability in the Middle Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2010), 1–11, and Richard Godden and Jonathan Hsy, “Analytical Survey: Encountering Disability in the Middle Ages,” New Medieval Literatures 15 (2013): 313–39. My chapter uses the social model of disability, in which “impairment” indicates the subjective experience or condition of discomfort, incapacity, illness, and so on, while disablement/disability occurs because of physical or social expectations and architectures that reduce or deny cultural participation to people with impairments (stairs rather than ramps are the classic example). This division between impairment and disability is analogous to the sex/gender division and vulnerable to the same critiques.

[2] Carl Sigmund Barach, ed., Excerpta e libro Afredi Anglici De motu cordis item Costa-ben-Lucae De differentia animae et spiritus liber translatus a Johanne Hispalensi (Innsbruck: Wagner’schen University Press, 1878), 138-39. Barach’s edition, which has the nonsensical “solari” living far from the sun, requires supplementing with other copies of the work; Cologny, Fondation Martin Bodmer 10, 245r, for example, reads "ut sclavi et mauri" [like Slavs and Moors], which respectively stand for those "longe distare a sole uel uicinare" [a long ways or close to the sun].

[3] Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals, trans. James J. Lennox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 686^b23-9; the Greek is “νανῶδες.” Michael Scot, De animalibus: Michael Scot’s Arabic-Latin translation. Part Two, Books XI-XIV: Parts of Animals, ed. Aafke M. I. van Oppenraaij (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 187–88. Michael Scot’s source may be drawing on discussions of body mass in Aristotle Parts of Animals 689^a25.

[4] Thomas of Cantimpré, Liber de Natura Rerum: Editio Princeps Secundum Codices Manuscriptos, ed. Helmut Boese (Berlin: W. De Gruyter, 1973), 97.

[5] Ranulf Higden and John Trevisa, Polychronicon, ed. Joseph Rawson Lumby, 9 vols. (London: Longman & Co., 1865), Vol 2, 180-81, anonymous English translation from British Library, Harley 2261. Trevisa himself says nothing about nonhuman animals, but instead says only “þerfore Plato 3af his doom, and seide suche ordenaunce, disposicioun, and schap as a man haþ in his kyndeliche membres and lymes, suche kyndeliche maneres þey foloweþ in dedes.” For several medieval assertions of the independence of body and mind, see chapter four in Irina Metzler, Fools and Idiots: Intellectual Disability in the Middle Ages (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016).

[6] For sources, and a longer discussion, see my How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011), 47–50.

[7] Scriptural translations are the Latin vulgate and, for the English, the Douay Rheims.

[8] Enarrationes in Psalmos, in Jacques Paul Migne, ed., Patrilogiae Cursus Completus: Series Latina, 217 vols. (Paris, 1844) (hereafter PL), 37:1877. For a book-length discussion of the animacy of stones, see Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

[9] Paul Krueger, ed., Justinian’s Institutes, trans. Peter Birks and Grant McLoed (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), II.12.13. Also see Alan Watson, trans., The Digest of Justinian (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 5.1.12.2, 166.

[10] Eike von Repgow, The Saxon Mirror: A ‘Sachsenspiegel’ of the Fourteenth Century, trans. Maria Dobozy (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 69-70. For more on legal history, see Christian Laes, “Silent Witnesses: Deaf-Mutes in Graeco-Roman Antiquity,” Classical World 104.4 (2011): 451–73; Irina Metzler, “Reflections on Disability in Medieval Legal Texts:  Exclusion – Protection – Compensation,” in Disability and Medieval Law: History, Literature, Society, ed. Cory James Rushton (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 19–53; and Wendy J. Turner, Care and Custody of the Mentally Ill, Incompetent, and Disabled in Medieval England (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013).

[11] Henry de Bracton, On the Laws and Customs of England, ed. George E Woodbine, trans. Samuel E Thorne, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), Vol. II.286. For evidence of the persistence of this law, see Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, in Four Books, 12th ed., vol. 4 (London: A. Strahan and W. Woodfall, 1793), Vol. I, 304, "A man is not an idiot, if he hath any glimmering of reason, so that he can tell his parents, his age, or the like common matters. But a man who is born deaf, dumb, and blind, is looked upon by the law as in the same state with an idiot; he being supposed incapable of any understanding, as wanting all those senses which furnish the human mind with ideas."

[12] For an example of the word’s range of meanings, see Alan of Lille, Distinctiones dictionum theologicalium, PL 210:701A–B.

[13] I draw all these examples from Metzler, Fools and Idiots, 108, 114, 120, and 154.

[14] Middle English Dictionary online (hereafter MED; accessed 8 August 2016), s.v. “bitil” and “betel.”

[15] For an admirable example of this kind of work, see Licia Carlson, The Faces of Intellectual Disability: Philosophical Reflections (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 160-61.

[16] Sunaura Taylor, “Beasts of Burden: Disability Studies and Animal Rights,” Qui Parle 19.2 (2011): 192 and 196 [191–222]; see also Sue Walsh, “The Recuperated Materiality of Disability and Animal Studies,” in Rethinking Disability Theory and Practice: Challenging Essentialism, ed. Karín Lesnik-Oberstein (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 20–36.

[17] Mel Y Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). The first phrase (sometimes under the form “animate hierarchies”) appears 33 times in Chen’s book; although the latter phrase is from page 127, references to “Western” thought abound in her book. Medieval studies help challenge sedimented, homogenized notions of what constitutes “Western” thought.

[18] Ibid., 17; for one sample of feminist approaches to these issues, see Bronwyn Davies, “The Concept of Agency: A Feminist Poststructuralist Analysis,” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 30 (1991): 42–53.

[19] For further work in this line, see Eunjung Kim, who, in writing about the artist Marina Abramović, asks “in what way can an embodiment of immobility and speechlessness challenge ableism, which is firmly grounded on the criterion to control one’s body to determine whether one qualifies as human?”; "Unbecoming Human: An Ethics of Objects," GLQ 21.2-3(2015): 230.

[20] “Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept,” Hypatia 26.3 (2011): 600 and 594.

[21] “Misfits,” 595. For homeostasis and systems theory, see the first several chapters of Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

"The Brutal Middle Ages" and other smug modern errors

Still from Marketa Lazarová.

by KARL STEEL

There's a big blog post about to spring up here tomorrow, so I'm squeezing in to beat the crowds. Once you read that, obviously, those of you lucky enough to be at Leeds must go to this excellent feminist medieval event, which is happening next Wednesday.

What follows is the opening of my 9,000-word (! yes! that was our limit: mine is exactly that) chapter on Animals and Violence for the Routledge Handbook for Animal-Human History (ed. Hilda Kean and Philip Howell), which I'm delivering a month late, because although I write about animals, I too am human. Roughly speaking.

The whole thing is called "Animals and Violence: Medieval Brutality, Margery Kempe’s Vegetarianism, and the Smugness of Modern Humanism." You've perhaps already seen earlier drafts of later sections here, here, and here. If so, great!

And now to read my co-presenters' papers for the "(Dis)abling the Human/Animal Body" session for the New Chaucer Society...

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Few readers of this chapter will be surprised to learn that examples of medieval cruelty to animals are easy to come by. William FitzStephen’s thirteenth-century portrait of London lauds the city for its entertainments, which include wrestling, target-shooting, and riverboat jousting, and also spectacular fights to the death between bulls or boars and dogs. The fourteenth-century Middle English poem Cleanness adapts Jesus' parable of the rich man's feast, so that, like a good English magnate, he proclaims the completion of preparations with a hearty ‘my bulls and my boars are baited and slain’ [my boles and my bores arn bayted and slayn]. And one early sixteenth-century English recipe meant for a convalescent begins notoriously: ‘Take a red Cock that is not too olde, and beate him to death, and when he is dead, fley him and quarter him in small peeces, and bruse the bones everye one of them.’[i]

I start here because this ‘medieval brutality’ is what would be generally expected in a chapter on the medieval and animals. ‘Medieval Brutality,’ a cliché in the general culture—as with this, from the New York Times: ‘experts in radicalization said that understanding the process by which people fell for the medieval brutality of a religious ideology is vital to combating it’—distinguishes the medieval from the modern as filthier, crueler, and more ‘ferocious’ (from the Latin ferox, wild animal, as ‘brutal’ comes from the Latin brutus, ‘beast’).[ii] In this self-regard of modernity, the medieval is more animal than the present. Recall the mudcaked peasants of Monty Python’s Holy Grail, the feral pagan temptress of Marketa Lazarová, one of František Vláčil’s medieval existential tragedies, or the damp, fleshy, fecal crowds in the streets and noble courts of Alexei German’s unendurable ‘medieval’ science fiction film, Hard to be a God.[iii] The assumptions hold that the past is cruel, the present civilized; the past superstitious, the present rational; and by extension, the past animal, and the present human. According to these assumptions, medieval people were more ‘in touch’ with animals, in part because they were more like animals than those of us presumed to belong fully to the present.

My study of violence and animals focuses on the Middle Ages because of this period's strange relationship to the paired conceptions of modernity and humanity. The idea of modernity often operates by looking to the Middle Ages either as its origin—where languages, religions, cuisines, and customs arose organically—or as what it had to leave behind in order to form itself as modern, by abandoning faith, aristocracy, and the ferocious violence of medieval peoples.[iv] As Kathleen Davis argues, a supersessionary model, itself borrowed from the Middle Ages, drives these assumptions. The model was itself a central feature of medieval Christian anti-Semitism. Since the earliest Christian scriptures, Christians portrayed Jews as outmoded, hidebound in irrational laws, and parochial, superseded by a (Christian) present that is forward looking, free, creative, rational, and cosmopolitan. Davis observes that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial administrators developed the concept of the ‘medieval’ to divide European modernity from colonies they preferred to think of as still trapped in the past.[v] The same assumptions of modernity persist into the present in a ‘developmental narrative,’ as Geraldine Heng writes, ‘whose trajectory positions’ the West as modern ‘and the rest of the world as always catching up.’[vi] It is an obvious irony that to the degree that the middle ages is thought of as superstitious, irrational, excessively traditional, and ahistorical—possessing only a homogeneous unchanging ‘pastness’ until the modern arrives—it becomes modernity’s ‘Jewish’ past, this while modern movements dedicated to closing borders to preserve their supposed Western freedom claim as their irrevocable heritage what they believe to be the medieval origins of their languages, nations, and especially faiths.

Left behind, yet necessary as a foundation, launching pad, or authentic core, the medieval is the animal in relation to the human of the modern. Whether this animalized medieval is actually in the past or in present-day regions, cultures, or activities disdained as ‘medieval,’ the Middle Ages is understood to be bound in a way of life like that of a mere animal: driven by instinctual appetites, beholden to the uncomprehending superstition of religious fundamentalism, and tyrannized by a rule founded only on direct, violent domination, the so-called ‘law of the jungle.’ If the animal is fundamentally ‘brutal,’ so the medieval is fundamentally animal. Both are what must be denied for the human to emerge, or both the true core concealed beneath a veneer of reason and temporary, merely decorative consumer culture.

For all these reasons, a critical reassessment of medieval attitudes towards violence against animals counteracts two interlocked delusions simultaneously, that of ‘modernity’ and ‘humanity.’ One way to resist these splits and the various paternalistic violences they justify is accurate representation, which demonstrates the heterogeneity, contradictions, and intellectual mobility of both sides of a presumed divide: Jewish exegesis was never stolidly literal, Christians could practice ritual every bit hieratic as what they accused the Jews of, and both engaged in an ongoing development of their own faith, often through exegetical exchanges, not always hostile, with each other.

So too does the notion of ‘medieval animalistic violence’ fail.
[and so on!!]

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[i] W. Fitzstephen, Norman London, F. Stenton (trans.), New York: Italica Press, 1990, p. 58; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Pearl; Cleanness; Patience, A.C. Cawley and J. J. Anderson (ed.), London: Dent, 1991, l. 55; A. W., A Book of Cookrye, London: Edward Allde, 1587, image 13, Early English Books Online, Cambridge University Library.

[ii] K. Bennhold, ‘Same Anger, Different Ideologies: Radical Muslim and Neo-Nazi’, The New York Times, 5 March 2015 [accessed 30 June 2016].

[iii] T. Gilliam and T. Jones, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, EMI Films, 1975; F. Vláčil, Marketa Lazarová, Ústřední půjčovna filmů, 1967; A. German, Hard to be a God [Trudno byt’ bogom], Kino Lorber, 2013.

[iv] For a well-known example of this tendency, see S. Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, New York: W.W. Norton, 2011.

[v] K. Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008; I am also drawing on her as yet unpublished work ‘Convolutions of Time: Why an “Early Modern” Period?’, presented at Common Eras: Law, Literature, and the Rhetorics of Commonality in Medieval and Renaissance England, Freie Universität Berlin, 19 May 2016.

[vi] G. Heng, ‘The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages 1: Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages’, Literature Compass, 8.5, 2011, p. 264.

Margery Kempe's Vegetarianism: Part II

by KARL STEEL

Part I is here; Part II is here; and now, finally, in as good a state as I can get it now, Part III.

Last week, one of our medieval colleagues gently expressed some incredulity when I said I was trying to produce something publishable on Kempe after spending only a few days "mastering" (hahah) the secondary criticism. She's right! The only way I'm getting away with this, probably, is that I'm writing for a non-medieval audience. I aim to be as good an ambassador as I can be; I aim to get Kempe still more readers than she already has (though Anthony Bale's already doing quite well on this front); I hope to do her a little justice.

Writing on Kempe and flesh is a decades-long project by now (thanks Karma Lochrie!), and writing on women and/as the "body" is at least as long. What I'm bringing to this conversation, if anything, is an interest in posthumanisms, new materialisms, and critical animal theory. And of course I owe a debt to Lisa Kiser's fantastic article on Kempe and animals. In a longer version of this project (perhaps as part of the introduction my always developing second book?), I can see engaging with, say, Leo Bersani ('is the rectum a grave?') and Mel Y Chen: maybe for this Fall's "Problems in Posthumanism" seminar!

Flourish of horns.

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Add MS 37049 28r - "rede flesche"

Karma Lochrie argues that the "primary human conflict" for medieval Christianity was not body against soul, but "the life of the flesh against the life of the spirit" (19). The body was neutral and passive. It did nothing on its own. Flesh, not body, was the true enemy of our better self. Flesh was "heaving" "pervious" (4), and "heterogeneous -- neither body nor soul, but carnal and spiritual at the same time" (39), for it was both materiality and materiality's own disturbingly autonomous disorder. It was both desirable in itself and desire incarnated. Flesh tended towards things it should not. It drew us after it. And flesh was a woman: as Augustine explained, "your flesh is like your wife ... it lusts against you like your wife" (caro tanquam coniux est...Concupiscit adversus te, tanquam coniux tua; on Psalm 140,  PL 37: 1825; see Lochrie 19-20; also important for me: Suzannah Biernoff, eg, 34; also, minus the attention to gender, Ben Woodard)

Kempe's Book tends to use "body" to represent whole things: her body as a whole, or her husband's, or Christ’s, either hanging on the cross or in the form of the Eucharist. The body, neatly bordered, coherently designates an individual. "Flesh," the other hand, is material and willful, desirable and disgusting, human or animal, and whether dead or alive, always irrepressibly lively. Flesh is sex (as in "fleschly knowyng" [Chapter 9] or "fleschly comownyng" [Chapter 3]). It is the thing that draws us away from spirit ("fleschly affeccyon" [Chapter 28 and others]). Flesh is sometimes the edible body of Christ, sometimes the aspect of self that operates without our willing it. When Kempe awaits an Archbishop’s interrogation, she "stod stylle, tremelyng and whakyng ful sor in hir flesch wythowtyn ony erdly comfort" [Chapter 13], standing still and trembling at the same time, as if she were commingled with another, unquiet self. Flesh is human and animal flesh both, and also meat, because Middle English vocabulary, like Latin, did not distinguish between "meat" and "flesh" (the Middle English "mete" simply meant "food" in general). Kempe’s flesh therefore recalled the body all in its lustiness, its exposure, its vulnerability, its edibility, its irrational motivations, and its sublime Eucharistic incarnation, recreated every time Catholic priests performed a Mass.

She is a woman, a mother, separated from her husband, and an older person (in her 50s) and widow by the time she has the book last last written down (for discussion, especially on the Book's ambiguous dating of Kempe's widowhood, Tara Williams): her culture would have made her into a figure of flesh in its its danger, its filth, its concupiscence, its edibility, all that a masculinized order sought to render governable by abjecting it from itself (so that "your flesh...lusts against you, like your wife"). Widows were considered to be sexually knowing; older women were commonly portrayed as repulsive (SGGK; Wife of Bath's Tale; Niebrzydowski's work for nuance). Her contemporaries prefer that she either hew to these roles or be silent. Failing that, they prefer her to be a hypocrite, so she confirms the truth of what they really know her to be. They accuse her of pushing aside a red herring at one meal in favor of a tastier, more expensive pike [Chapter 9]; by calling her both a Lollard heretic [Chapters 13, 46, 52, 53 etc] and a Jew [Chapter 52], they accuse her of not sharing correctly in their enjoyment, particularly of Christ's Eucharistic flesh (still useful); they want to believe her chastity a fraud, that she and her husband regularly sneak off to "woodys, grovys, er [or] valeys usyn the lust of her bodiis" [Chapter 76]. They insist that she eat meat, stop weeping, and keep her conversation about holiness to herself [Chapter 27]. She carries on, inhabiting and inhabited by flesh in all its characteristics simultaneously, on terms that both enact prejudicial certainties and deny them, because she is living as woman, as wife, as animal, as food, as desire, as a particularly sublated desire at that, and as the body of Christ.

Additional 37049 33r

A short poem included in a fifteenth-century Middle English Carthusian devotional anthology helps illustrate the operations of this densely tangled node of signification. It imagines a falconer that entices a restless bird to return by showing it a hunk of "rede flesche" (Additional 37049 28r): so too, explains the poem, does Christ draw us back, so that we can join him on the "cros of penaunce" through "discrete poneyschyng of thi body." Jessica Brantley dryly remarks that "the poem sets up a number of complex equivalences" (132): Christ is falconer, but also meat, while the reader is a falcon who becomes both "meat and crucified savior" through penance, which for a Carthusian means the lifelong penance of vegetarianism, which preserves pleasure by penitentially subjugating it. All the Carthusian poem lacks is an explicit reference to gender. Elsewhere, the same Carthusian compilation imagines a once beautiful women beset in the grave by vermin, gradually made to come to terms with her putrefaction and edibility (me; Elizabeth Robertson). The debate's first page features an illustration of a cloaked man kneeling before a crucifix, decorated with nearly naked Christ figure whose white flesh bleeds redly from its every surface (33r). Flesh, especially suffering flesh, runs though this compilation in all its forms: edible, suffering, disdained, repulsive, feminized, and the stuff of redemption.

Similarly dense identifications operate in Kempe’s fasting and identification with suffering. When Christ first orders Kempe to eat no flesh but that of his own body, he promises too that “you shall be eaten and gnawed at by the people of the world as much as any rat gnaws on the stockfish” (“Thow schalt ben etyn and knawyn of the pepul of the world as any raton knawyth the stokfysch” [Chapter 5]). Kempe twice compares herself to being meat chopped up for stew: “If it were your will Lord, I would for your love and for the magnifying of your name be chopped as small as meat for the pot” [Yyf it wer thy wille, Lord, I wolde for thi lofe and for magnyfying of thi name ben hewyn as smal as flesch to the potte" (Chapter 57, line 3358; see also Chapter 84, 4861)]. She goes without (animal) meat; she eats the (divine) meat of the Eucharist; she imagines herself as meat. The most insistently public form her piety takes, her writhing and wailing, even make her animal-like, as it cuts her off from the articulate voice that was among the definitive features of rational humankind: when she first receives her white garment, she emits her strongest wails yet, so that people “said that she howled as if she were a dog” [seyd that sche howlyd as it had ben a dogge” (Chapter 44, 2477).

When she sees animal suffering, she too suffers:

If she saw a man who had a wound or a beast of whatever sort, or if a man beat a child before her or smote a horse or another beast with a whip, if she might see it or hear it, she thought that she saw our Lord be beat or wounded in the same way that she saw the man or beast beat or wounded, whether in the field or in the town, whether alone by herself or among the people.

[yf sche sey a man had a wownde er a best wheþyr it wer, er ʒyf a man bett a childe be-for hir er smet an hors er an-oþer best wyth a whippe, ʒyf sche myth sen it er heryn it, hir thowt sche saw owyr Lord be betyn er wowndyd lyk as sche saw in þe man er in þe best, as wel in the feld as in þe town, & be hir-selfe [a]lone as wel as a-mong þe pepyl. (Chapter 28, line 1586 ff)]

In a superb study, Lisa Kiser enumerates several other comparisons between Christ’s and animal suffering in late medieval English religious writing; she points out how Kempe's comparison differs from the norm by beginning with animals and then moving to Christ. From this, Kiser proposes that in Kempe's weeping, we even witness a rare, even precocious instance of both "emotional fervor and moral disapproval" over the suffering of animals (for a brief treatment, also sympathetic, Katherine Wills Perto's Kinship and Killing). 

Kempe's compassion is not, however, for animals so much as it is for injuries in general, whether animals or human. More importantly, Kempe has no interest in preventing this suffering; rather, she passionately seeks out suffering, joins with it, and renders it,  whatever its form, an occasion for entanglement with the suffering of Christ. A typical scene from the Book has Kempe see Christ’s “precious tender body, rent and torn with scourges all over, more full of holes that "evyr was duffehows of holys" (Chapter 28, line 1618), whereupon she collapses and shouts wyth lowde voys, wondyrfully turnyng and wrestyng hir body on every syde, spredyng hir armys abrode as yyf sche schulde a deyd" (Chapter 28, line 1621), or as if she were herself hung on the cross.

This is empathic identification with suffering, but without any desire to end it. All the affective elements that we might think necessary for the development of animal rights, and even critical animal philosophy, are present, yet all they do is exacerbate the need to have suffering animals. I stress this, again, to argue against the notion that attention to or awareness of or even unease over animal suffering will be enough to activate a resistance to violence against animals. This is not to accuse Kempe of not being "good enough" from a modern animal rights perspective: that would be absurd. It is rather to keep open the chance to observe the real strangeness of Kempe's animal identifications and "carnivorous" vegetarianism. 

However much her religious ecstasies may normalized by contextualizing them with analogues in other late medieval mystics or contemplatives, her Book, at least, wants us always to know how much her identifications disturbed her contemporaries. Kempe performs this identification in and through her flesh, in public. Though she does rationally dispute with professional clergy to defend herself from charges of heresy, she expresses herself most characteristically through ecstatic weeping and howling, like a dog. More accurately, none of this is her performance or expression so much as it is a performance, an expression, generated impersonally or through a mobile melding of persons through and in the flesh in all its qualities as desiring, vulnerable, edible, disdained, and profanely sacred. This performance is not wholly agential, not wholly human, often not linguistic, but through all this indelibly gendered.

If we return to Derrida's praise of the "nonpower at the heart of power," we can see both how she lives out this quality, and how she does Derrida one better. Derrida is a philosopher, and a male philosopher at that, granted through that professional status a certain bodily abstraction. Though his famous essay puts his own body on stage, briefly, to speak of his embarrassment over his embarrassment of stepping out of his shower to find his cat looking at his penis, Derrida is himself largely absent from it, except in the expected form of philosophical language. Though his attention to the "nonpower at the heart of power" aims to break down language's pretensions to autocratic, rational agency to enter into its subrational passivity and helplessness, he still does this through the medium of language, his language in particular. 

Kempe's "physical piety," her insistent fleshiness vividly expresses this "nonpower," without having to preserve any pretensions to autocratic ratonality. To put this bluntly: she lives what Derrida only talks about. She enacts what Derrida only thinks about. And by distinctly living out this "nonpower" through her own body, Kempe renders any generalized statement about suffering or "nonpower" impossible. Kempe is not operating with the homogeneous categories of "human" and "animal" that Derrida's text preserves, despite its efforts. I join with Myra Seaman in stressing that "Kempe's state is supposedly beyond human, yet it remains utterly human as well: embodied, and intensely physical" (258), which is to say, that it is also animal and divine and woman and mother and widow, and that the medium that makes all this possible is the flesh.