Informal Events at IMC Leeds 2017: Public Medievalism and Disability Mentorship

by JONATHAN HSY

Are you heading to the International Medieval Congress in Leeds tomorrow? Note these INFORMAL EVENTS not listed on the official program: on Monday, an informal discussion on public medievalism and countering the alt-right; on Wednesday, an informal mentorship gathering for medievalists with disabilities (and allies).

Full information below! [Click image to enlarge; equivalent text also provided in this blog post.]

#PublicMedievalism event at #IMC2017; original tweet here

#PublicMedievalism: Developing Methods to Counter the Alt-Right

An informal discussion for delegates at #imc2017

Wilson Room, Emmanuel Centre, 13:00-14:00, 03/07/2017

For enquiries please contact Shihong Lin (on twitter @shlin28) and James Harland (on twitter @djmharland)

The rapid growth of social media usage and the emergence of social media subcultures such as #medievaltwitter have led to historical scholarship arguably never being more open, vibrant, or accessible. Alongside this development, however, has been an alarming growth of appropriation of the past by resurgent far-right and white supremacist movements to promote their goals, as charted by authors such as Dorothy Kim at In the Medieval Middle and The Public Medievalist’s special series, Race and Racism in the Middle Ages.

The battle for the past is fought across the twittersphere. Alongside a regular output of memes promoting distorted, far-right interpretations of a purely white, Christian past, events such as #femfog and Rebecca Rideal’s withdrawal from the Chalke Valley History Festival have also attracted backlash online, and most medievalists with a presence on twitter will have experienced the reception and misinterpretation of their output—either by open members of the alt-right or members of a wider public informed by nationalistic and racialist ideas.

We invite delegates, especially those who make frequent use of Twitter, to an open, informal discussion on the development of methods to effectively counter this trend, while ensuring that our twitter output remains no less lively, engaging, and publicly accessible.

Informal disability mentorship event #disIMC at #IMC2017; original tweet here

Medievalists with Disabilities

An informal gathering for disabled students, ECRs, academics, researchers and allies. All welcome!

12:45-14:15 on Wednesday 5th July, St George Room, University House

Accessible via lift from either Refectory Foyer or via University House

Bring your lunch and come and meet other medievalists with disabilities, or support your disabled colleagues. This gathering is completely informal, and we hope it will be the start of a supportive community.

[event hashtag for twitter is] #disIMC

If you have any queries, especially about accessibility requirements, please contact Alicia Spencer-Hall by email via aspencerhall [at] gmail [dot] com or on twitter @aspencerhall or contact Alex Lee by email via alexralee12 [at] gmail [dot] com or on twitter @AlexRALee.

If you're not attending IMC in Leeds this year, you can follow the official hashtag on twitter #IMC2017. The hashtags for these two informal events are #PublicMedievalism and #disIMC respectively.

P.S. Online PDF and mobile-accessible version of the official #IMC2017 programme is available through this link on the Congress website.

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.

---

[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).

Animals, Gesture, and Communication Despite it All

by KARL STEEL

It's the week before Kalamazoo, so of course I've just drafted my New Chaucer Society Paper.

Yeah. So, as I'm in Berlin, I'll simply wave fondly at Kalamazoo from a distance, and as I have more stuff to write during what remains of this chunk of my sabbatical -- one thing being a chapter on medieval animals and disability -- I need to get my stuff coherent, and fast! Last week was muteness (and thank you, hugely, everyone who helped me out on twitter and so on with ideas!); this week, it's gesture, which is as new to me as muteness was last week. And next week, well, I'll simply watch what trouble you all get into at the Big Show. And wish all the mentors and mentees a charming, helpful encounter!

And OH MY GOODNESS: as I was writing this, Jonathan Hsy was posting a BABEL events at Kzoo 2016 post. READ THAT. Use it. Mark your calendars. Do that. First.

For those of you who are grading, godspeed; for those of you who are writing your Kalamazoo papers, likewise; for those of you making long-distance moves for a new academic job, congratulations and good luck; and for those of you whom the market ignored, or disdained, for those of you not yet sure what you can do this Fall, all my best for you, and for a better future for the public good of education, one freed from the ugly strictures of Spreadsheet Rationality (read Eileen Joy here, and vote YES for a CUNY Strike Authorization, if you can, and if you haven't done so yet).

British Library Yates Thompson MS 26 44r (detail)

Read on if you like! Or just finish your grading.

Like Modern English, Middle English abounds in metaphors that troped impairment as animality: "blind as a beetle," "deaf as an adder," "mad as a goose." Mainstream medieval philosophy and Christian doctrine regularly glossed the paradigmatic quadrupedal animal body as a material form of irrationality, and likewise held that animals were "mute" not because animals were silent, but because the sound they made was understood as unwritable, as senseless, as mere noise.

Within a disability rights perspective, it certainly not unjustifiable to decry these comparisons, because they reduce impaired humans to a condition of animal degradation. Without - and I hope this understood - denying the importance of human rights, my scholarly habits of critical animal studies encourage me to linger with the animal comparison, to explore what might be done with it. My training means that I can't simply say that humans are better than animals, but neither do I want just to say that animals, of whatever sort, are all subjects of a life, and deserve to have their unique perspectives respected. What I'm doing in this paper is a bit more delicate, and, as befits someone who is new to disability studies, more tentative: I'm proposing that the metaphor of "natural" animal impairment offers up as model of multiple sensory and bodily norms, helping to dislodge the idealized, able-bodied human at least implicitly at the center of so many medieval narratives of human impairment.

In medieval narrative, at least if there's a saint involved, a person who is "blind as a beetle" will leave sighted. I offer the sample of the Patrologia Latina, where the nouns surdus and mutus often travel together, and likewise often travel with stories of miraculous healing. Augustine's Enchiridion promises that the bodies of the holy will be resurrected "sine ullo vitio, sine ulla deformitate," without any fault, without any deformity. However advantageous this may be for the impaired person, in this life or the next, the at least implicit message of these healing stories is that the impairment is an inconvenience, both for the impaired person and the saint. Healing someone's muteness allows the saint and the formally mute person to talk in the language the saint knows best; it allows the saint to replace an inconveniently impaired person with one whose body works the way the saint presumes it should. With this autonomy granted, the healed person goes one way, and the saint goes another. Normalcy has been restored.

This strong medieval narrative tendency towards the miraculous normalization of impairment is simply not as common in stories of saintly encounters with animals, no matter how miraculous. To be sure, these stories of mastery, taming, protection, elimination, and especially communication often require that a saint make himself understood to animals, and sometimes involve the reverse. Nonetheless, a saint who encounters an animal that is as "blind as a bat," because it is a bat, is probably not going to make that blind bat see.

One implication of this observation becomes more obvious if we concentrate on stories where that supposed impairment could have been overcome. These are stories about saints and birds, and, especially for my talk, in the story of Cuthbert's encounter with the penitential ravens.

I am interested in birds because they're an outlier in medieval negative glossings of animality. They're bipedal, for one, and so cannot be so easily classed as beasts confined to merely terrestrial appetites. The high-flying eagle, was commonly honored with tropological admiration for its supposed ability to look directly into the sun. And birds were the animals most typically imagined to have voiced language too. No hero that I know of gains the ability to understand the language of pigs or even dogs; but in the Volsung saga, Siegfried eavesdrops on birds, while the Middle English “Bird of Four Feathers,” or, still closer to home, the Parliament of Fowles, the House of Fame, and the Squire’s and Manciple’s Tales also all furnish ready examples. As birds have a peculiar capacity to erase the supposed impairment of being animal, a saintly encounter with a bird is one where it is very easy to imagine the bird ceasing, at least for a while, to be a "mute beast." 

Knowing that helps us recognize what makes the story of Cuthbert and the penitential ravens so special. The story goes like this: when the saint sees these birds tearing thatch from the roof of his guest house on the island of Farne, he waves them away, and verbally rebukes them. They flee, and then one or more ravens returns, and by way of apology, gives the saint a lump of pig’s lard. Written versions of the story first appear in a late seventh-century anonymous life, written not long after Cuthbert's death; Bede retells it several times in verse and prose; Aelfric gives it a compressed form, and then it appears in two late medieval, Middle English versions, one a couplet attached to choir stall paintings at Carlisle Cathedral, and the other at length in the Cuthbert compilation now known as Egerton 3309.

Of course, penitential fowl are a hagiographical motif of especial popularity with British saints. Saints Columbanus, Illtud, Wereburga, Guthlac, and, on the continent, Amelburga all have their problems with birds, often voracious geese, and often extract an apology from them. But barring the Cuthbert story, all these penitential birds are always only imitating something or someone else. Jonas of Bobbio’s life of Saint Columban has its bird "oblitus ferocitatis,” “forgetful of its wild nature,” splitting the bird’s miraculous behavior from its basic wildness. Illtud’s geese "withdraw…of their own free will..like tame animals," quasi domestica quadrupedia, a strange comparison. The posture of the geese of Amalburga - "submissive wings" with "heads laid on the ground" - is only a "simulacro" of reasonable human behavior. Wereburga’s geese act "acsi captiva pecora," as if they were captive livestock, or contrastingly, in the monk Henry Bradshaw’s 1513 Middle English Life of Werenburga, "as yf they had reason naturall." Words like quasi abound in other Latin accounts of Wereburga's miracle, while Felix describes Guthlac's birds with veluti and velut, for example, "as if conscious of its ill-doing," words that render the animal’s behavior only apparently more than instinctual.

No account of the story of Cuthbert and the penitential ravens that I know of loads its story with qualifications like this. In all of these, the birds are directly penitent, unscreened by metaphor. This is how the first, anonymous life describes them: "and settling above the furrow with outspread wings and drooping head, [they] began to croak loudly, with humble cries asking his pardon and indulgence. And the servant of Christ recognizing their penitence gave them pardon and permission to return." And here's how it looks 700 years later, in the long Middle English version:

Þe crawe spred hir wengys o brade,
And louted to him lawly þat tide
Reufully sho crobbed and cryed,
And schewed takyn expresse
Of praying of forgyfnes.
Cuthbert vndirstode hir dede
And leued hir to fle away gude spede.

Now, not every iota of Cuthbert hagiography tells the story: it's not in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica, nor in Alcuin's Bishops, Kings, and Saints of York, the metrical Cuthbert calendar, or the twelfth-century Cuthbert writings of Symeon and Reginald of Durham. The story's illustrated several times, most famously in Yates Thompson 26, and while these illustrations really do look like birds, they're even slimmer peg to hang an interpretation on than the texts I've offered you. I'll simply say that the story's not quite told everywhere, but it's still common, and where it exists, it is remarkably consistent.

I acknowledge as well that exegetical ravens are thickly symbolic, and I acknowledge that medieval commentators often agree with Dominic Alexander in taking stories like this as a sign of a saintly return to prelapsarian mastery over the animal world. I likewise acknowledge that this unique feature of the Cuthbert lives may be due to the inertia of storytelling or a respect for the integrity of the text: Bede makes some small changes, but mostly he just bookends it with explanations, “look to the ant o sluggard,” and so on. But I'm still struck that the stories that precede it - in Columbanus and in Athanasius's story of Saint Anthony and the hungry donkeys, which Bede himself cites - do not do what the Cuthbert story does, nor do the many avian miracles that follow Cuthbert's. Surely this unusual feature merits some kind of commentary.

Most striking is how much like ravens these ravens are. Paul Cavill emphasized this in his early article on animals and Cuthbert, and so does Susan Crane's superb commentary on the story, which stresses both the encounter's pastoral quality, with its notable combination of hospitality and submission, and what she calls the birds' "own ravenly, ravenous obedience," which is not just "a divine puppet show." 

For that "ravenly, ravenous obedience" to happen, and to happen meaningfully, the story needs translation, between the saint and the birds. Again, there are a number of ways this could happen: Goscelin of St Bertin's Wereburga life has its geese plead their case "as if with a human voice." This page from Tom Peete Cross's Motif-Index of Early Irish Literature neatly demonstrates that if an animal's going to talk, it's probably going to be a bird. The Cuthbert raven encounter could easily enough have been resolved simply by having the birds apologize vocally. Instead, with "humiliata uoce," a humble or abased voice, they begin, in the Middle English, to "ruefully" "crob and cry," or, in the anonymous life, to "crocitare," to croak, a word whose very rarity in medieval Latin marks a real effort to rightly represent this avian communication.

And when the ravens bow and stretch their wings, Cuthbert recognizes what they mean. This communication is in the style of monks, which discouraged or even forbade speaking, and which required a set of bodily movements to communicate the essentials of being a monk, chiefly, obedience and submission to the community. By bowing, the birds are "speaking" in a language that is understandable both to Cuthbert and the monks who produced these stories and among whom they chiefly circulated. Bede says that the raven uses "such signs as it could," or, to put this another, way, such signs as could be understood by a human. They are accommodating the communicative needs of this human monk. And when they furnish him with a chunk of pig lard, which he uses to waterproof his shoes, they are doing what they can to help him thrive in an environment much better accommodated to their capacities than to his.

That formulation is perhaps bizarre and over-clever, yet I am framing it this way to stress that this story strikes me as being about meeting in the middle. By preserving difference, by not likening the ravens' behavior to anything else, by requiring that Cuthbert recognize what the birds are doing - he "vndirstode hir dede" in the Middle English - the story preserves enough difference for translation to be both necessary and possible. The story refuses to simply wave away the difference in capacities and lived bodily experiences of human saint and penitential birds. Without requiring assimilation, it imagines the possibility of the satisfaction of mutual dependencies.

Medieval narrative was willing to imagine communication between humans and nonhumans; and on occasion it imagines these nonhumans making themselves understood not by speaking, but by making gestures suitable to the profession of their audience: kneeling ravens with a monk, or, another example, the outstretched paws, a gesture of homage, from the lion to Yvain, a knight. When we recognize that medieval texts also often trope nonhumans as impaired, and that communication still happens, without that impairment being miraculously "cured," we can take these medieval narratives of interspecies communication as a model for thinking impairment as something other than a condition that must be overcome for the sake of monolithic normativity. For these encounters are stories of multiple nodes of normalization, multiple ways of life: what is good for a raven is not good for a saint, necessarily, and still they can meet, and make themselves understood as they are.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary

Alcuin of York on Cuthbert, Latin.

Amelberga and the Geese, Acta Sanctorum, Julii III. Latin.

Athanasius of Alexandria, Life of Saint Anthony. Translation.

Bradshaw, Henry. The Life of Saint Werburge of Chester, ed. C. A. Horstmann. EETS. N. Trübner, 1887. Also includes Goscelin of Saint Bertin’s Life of Wereburga. Note that her name can be spelled many different ways.

Felix's Life of Saint Guthlac, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge UP, 1985.

Historia de Sancto Cuthberto, ed. and trans. Ted Johnson South. D. S. Brewer, 2002. Summary.

Illtud and the Geese, English. Manuscript image for the Latin. John of Tynemouth Latin, here.

Jonas of Bobbio, Life of Saint Columban. Translation. Latin.

The Life of Saint Cuthbert in English Verse, ed J. T. Fowler. Surtees Society, 1891 (for the Carlisle Couplets and Egerton 3309 (olim Castle Howard Ms)

Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge UP, 1940.

Wereburga in John of Tynemouth, Latin.

Wereburga in William of Malmesbury, Latin.

York Minster Cuthbert Windows.

Secondary

Alexander, Dominic. Saints and Animals in the Middle Ages. Boydell & Brewer, 2008.

Baker, Malcolm. "Medieval Illustrations of Bede's Life of St. Cuthbert." Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 41 (1978): 16-49.

Barrett, Robert W. Against All England: Regional Identity and Cheshire Writing, 1195-1656 University of Notre Dame Press, 2009. [for the politics of Bradshaw and Wereburga!]

Cavill, Paul. "Some Dynamics of Story-Telling: Animals in the Early Lives of St Cuthbert." Nottingham Medieval Studies 43 (1999): 1-20.

Colgrave, Bertram. "The St. Cuthbert Paintings on the Carlisle Cathedral Stalls." The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 73.424 (1938): 17-21.

Crane, Susan. Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.

Cross, Tom Peete. Motif-Index of Early Irish Literature. Indiana University Press, 1952.

Crumplin, Sally. Rewriting History in the Cult of St Cuthbert from the Ninth to the Twelfth Centuries. (PhD Thesis, U of St Andrews, 2004).

Duncan, Sandra. "Signa De Caelo in the Lives of St Cuthbert: The Impact of Biblical Images and Exegesis on Early Medieval Hagiography." The Heythrop Journal 41.4 (2000): 399-412.

Gretsch, Mechthild. Aelfric and the Cult of Saints in Late Anglo-Saxon England. Cambridge University Press, 2006 (Chapter 3, “Cuthbert: from Northumbrian saint to saint of all England)

Letty, Nijhuis Jantje.'Deor and nytenu mid us': Animals in the Works of Ǽelfric (PhD Thesis, U College Cork, 2008).

Newlands, Carole E. "Bede and Images of Saint Cuthbert." Traditio 52 (1997): 73-109.

Taylor, Sunaura. "Beasts of Burden: Disability Studies and Animal Rights." Qui Parle 19.2 (2011): 191-222.

Wakeford, Mark Reginald. The British Church and Anglo-Saxon Expansion: The Evidence of Saints' Cults. (PhD Thesis, U of Durham, 1998) [enormously useful for collecting goose miracles]

Medieval Muteness

by KARL STEEL

First, congrats Jeffrey on your excellent review, cited below. And second, GOOD LUCK to all prepping for Kalamazoo: may your papers cohere easily, and may you be grabbed and whirled by fun.

Schöneberger Südgelände Nature Park, Berlin.

The first biography of Thomas Aquinas had the job of turning this Christian Aristotelian and theological systematizer into a saint. As ideas themselves, sadly, cannot be sanctified directly, the scholar must be furnished not with a scholastic, but with a personal halo. Thus Willliam of Tocco has a nurse fail to convince the infant Aquinas to give up a wadded-up cartulary that, as it turns out, "contained nothing else but the Ave Maria, the greeting to the glorious Virgin" [nichil aliud continentem nisi Ave Maria, salutationem Virginis gloriose]. Thus the face of the young Aquinas shines like the sun, illuminating all around him. And most famously, Aquinas so humbly shuts up his genius in silence that his fellow students call him a "bouem mutum," a mute ox, as they are "ignorantes de eo futurum in doctrina mugitum" [ignorant about his future mooing in teaching/doctrine]. Only after witnessing a series of precocious intellectual feats does his teacher, Albert the Great himself, proclaim "we called this one a mute ox, but he will give such a mooing of teaching that it will resound throughout the world!" [Nos uocamus istum bouem mutum, sed ipse adhuc talem dabit in doctrina mugitum quod in toto mundo sonabit]. The story would be repeated in the second life of Aquinas, penned by the famous inquisitor Bernard Gui, and so on into G. K. Chesterton (who, in 1933, declared that his hero's big, square head  - like those of Napoleon or Mussolini or a "head waiter" - elevated him above the common run of otherwise thin and noisy Italians). And medievalists should be grateful for the superbly named Dumb Ox Books, dedicated to publishing English translations of Aquinas's Aristotle commentaries.

Unsuspected excellence is a hagiographical commonplace. Medievalists should know not to take the story of Aquinas's schooldays any more seriously than that of his mother's desperate efforts to keep her son from joining the Dominicans, a story whose chase, capture, and escape recall nothing so much as a romance (which is to say that the story can be taken seriously, as a romance). The quality of heroes is commonly misrecognized by their young playmates: as boys, Cyrus of Persia and Cú Chulainn alike startle and dismay their fellows with their innate sovereignty, while Moses, before he lays down the law, first complains of being tongue-tied. Narrative needs surprises, and it also wants us to feel that we're in on the secret (I knew who Aquinas was before it was cool). Sanctity also demands this quality of concealed genius, not just because the saint has to be persecuted, but also because true genius, like true sanctity, requires the cloak of sprezzatura. 

Thus Aquinas must be a bouem mutum. I am avoiding translating the adjective as "dumb," both because the Latin "mutus" has a wider range of common associations than the English "dumb," and because the English "dumb," combines silence and stupidity in a way that the Latin does not. To be mutus in Latin is not necessarily to share the qualities of a stupid person, but rather to have the qualities of speechlessness or, crucially, incomprehensibility. This is how Aquinas could moo and still be mute: it is not that the muteness would give way to mooing, but that the mooing would finally be understood for what it really was, the voice of a genius. Misunderstood noise gives way to astonished understanding. 

Not only animals are "mute," and not only humans (as the word "mutus" unsurprisingly tends to travel with "surdus," deaf). To be mutus is to share the qualities of an animal, or even of a stone (while I'll simply mark, without further development, the word's use as professional terminology in the grammatical manuals of Donatus, Priscian, and others). The condition of muteness slides from irrationality into inanimacy, from a life whose noise cannot be understood to one that has no life and no voice at all. It traverses the conditions of human impairment, animal inability, and material inertness. To be mute is not necessarily to be silent; in many instances, it is rather a condition of being silenced: not listened to, not taken seriously, ignored.

The muteness of things goes almost without saying. Habakkuk 2:18 mocks those who believe that the "simulacra muta" they themselves made possess divine power. (Though Habakkuk splits the silence of idols from the voice of the humans who made them, we postmodern sophisticates know that all distinctions between autonomous subjects and secondary objects are themselves fetish constructions and mere ontotheological baggage). 1 Corinthians 12:2 contrasts devotion to, again, "simulacra muta," to an appropriate devotion to spiritual things. All an idol can do is sit there, inert, and wait for someone to give it a little tap. And then it keeps waiting.

But that muteness is just one of its varieties. Consider Augustine's troubled response to Psalms 144:10. Faced with "Let all thy works, O lord, praise thee: and let thy saints bless thee," he insisted that no one should "think that the mute stone or mute animal has reason wherewith to comprehend God." Certainly not. Everything has its own place in the scale of being, and most things were created on the wrong side of the tracks. Yet, barring God, it turns out that everything is at least a little bit mute:

God has ordered everything, and made everything: to some He has given sense and understanding and immortality, as to the angels; to some He has given sense and understanding with mortality, as to man; to some He has given bodily sense, yet gave them not understanding, or immortality, as to cattle: to some He has given neither sense, nor understanding, nor immortality, as to herbs, trees, stones: yet even these cannot be wanting in their kind, and by certain degrees He has ordered His creation, from earth up to heaven, from visible to invisible, from mortal to immortal. This framework of creation, this most perfectly ordered beauty, ascending from lowest to highest, descending from highest to lowest, never broken, but tempered together of things unlike, all praises God.

Augustine's goal is clear enough: to sort kinds of being hierarchically according to their capacities. But his scheme suffers from an inconsistency caused by the problem of conceptualizing the voice. One of Augustine's scales establishes a set of discrete, hierarchically arranged types: at the top, God, then angels, humans, beasts, and finally, in one group, plants and stones. As I observed long ago, this arrangement is not dissimilar, even not dissimilar enough, from Heidegger's division between da-sein, weltarm (world poor, like the lizard on the rock), and weltlos (worldless, like the rock itself). This Augustiggerian scheme splits beings between those that have understanding, and therefore a voice of their own, and those that do not. One the one side, God, angels, and humans, and on the other, "mutus lapis aut mutum animal” (PL 37:1877), the mute stone or mute living thing (a word perhaps even translatable as "animal" in the modern, colloquial sense of the word).

With this scale is another one, still hierarchical, but in this case not discrete. Augustine likely did not intend this other "never broken" [nusquam interrupta] hierarchy to function differently than the first; but a scale that neatly splits sense from mere being, understanding from mere sense, and immortality from mere mortality cannot work like the second, uninterrupted scale, which, below the level of the Divine Itself, sorts without splitting. Continuity means contiguity, which means a basic point from poststructuralism: contiguity means that qualities are shared, however faintly, across the whole scale before stopping, as all things do, at the Great Infinite of God. At the bottom is  "a kind of voice of the dumb earth" [vox quaedam est mutae terrae]; but that quality must run across the whole scale, because everything but God can only have a vocem quaedam. When Augustine demands that we admire the fecundity of creation, and its beauty, and that we ask of it how it got these qualities, not just the earth, but everything in "one voice" [una voces] would respond  "I myself did not make myself, but God" [non me ego feci, sed Deus], for nothing has anything in itself, unless it comes from that Creator [non potuit a se esse, nisi ab illo Creatore].

Again, barring God, everything has just enough voice to speak of its own fundamental secondariness. Even those things that seem to have a voice - us, that is - have a voice that is only the effect of God's divine voice. We are therefore more like rocks that like God. Here is one quality of the voice, then: to have a voice is to have been granted a voice, that is, to be secondary. To have an inbuilt inability. To always carry a silence within the gift of the voice, because the voice you believe to be your own is not, finally, all yours. It is granted, at least in part, by the conditions that make it possible to be heard as a voice: as when, for example, Augustine calls on us to listen to all of Creation.

My second consideration on this point concentrates on the listener rather than the speaker. Augustine does not distinguish between mute stones, mute plants, and mute animals, but between things with understanding and those without. The same adjective applies either to a "mutus lapis aut mutum animal," so that "muteness" distinguishes not between sound and silence, but between sense and senselessness. Things we think of as noisy could be, in medieval writing, "mute," because - to belabor the point - muteness has less to do with silence than with incomprehensibility. Old French uses “mue beste” as a virtual pleonasm. The word "mutum" (to choose the accusative singular as my representative), which appears 469 times in the Patrilogia Latine, appears with the word "animal" 43 times. This is not more often than it appears with "surdus" (deaf) -- 160 times! -- but more than it does with any other word.

Of course, animals bark and hiss and low. They make noise. Sometimes, medieval writing distinguishes between silent and noisy animals, calling only the former mute: this is what Beroul's Tristan does, when Iseult saves Husdent's life by convincing Tristan to train him not to bark: for a dog that cannot keep quiet (1552; ne se tient mu) is of little value in the hunt. But in general, animals were still mute (or "dumb" in Middle English, def. 5), because the noise they made was assumed to be meaningless, or because it was indivisible into letters or even words.

This later characterization of animal muteness comes from the professional cant of grammarians. Isidore puts it like this: "every voice is either articulated or confused. Articulated is the voice of humans, confused is the voice of living things [or, again, simply "animals," in the modern sense]. Articulated is what can be written, and confused what cannot be written" [Omnis vox, aut est articulata, aut confusa. Articulata est hominum, confusa animalium. Articulata est quae scribi potest, confusa quae scribi non potest, PL 82:89B].Notably, Isidore sets out the division in two ways, with two distinct responsibilities for the fault of unwritable sound. Either the vox confusa is inherent to the voice itself, which is itself a sonic materialization of the irrational limits of the spirit: this classification divides human from animal. Or the vox confusa, by dividing writable from unwritable, becomes a problem of technology, and, in a larger sense, inadequate anticipation, training, effort, and care on the part of the listener (for more, on accessibility and accommodation, compare this and this). The former formulation assumes that the speaker is at fault; the second suggests that the listener, or scribe, might be.

Animals are either mute because they are irrational, or because humans make the mistake of assuming they have nothing to say. Anyone who's lingered in a birding guide ("'prreet,' 'prrlhr', 'prrūt-ūt,' and 'preeh-e,'" is what mine says the skylark says), or anyone who's listened to Messiaen's piano works, knows that bird sounds can be written down. Certainly, modern ethnography has demonstrated that some nonhuman animal species really do have, if not languages - with all that implies about trading second-order ideas about, for example, philosophy or sports - then at least dialect, so that specific groups of animals have their own vocalizations distinct from those of their conspecifics. A training in dialect requires distinguishing between sounds; it requires the divisions and differences necessary to any concept of writing, which operates within the supposedly primary function of the voice, too (again, elementary poststructuralism). Writing is possible, necessary even, even among these supposedly mute things.

The same might be said of other mute, presumably inanimate things, like the earth. Within a certain crowd, with my own training and inclinations, this final proposal would probably pass without much comment. I'm going to at least feign reluctance (without forgetting my debt to Cohen, for example, via Oppermann).While it might be tempting for scholars of a certain theoretical instinct to use impaired people as a figure for the "silenced" "voice of the earth," and so on, I cannot easily accept the advantage of reaffirming the mistaken medieval habit of using the same adjective, "mute," to characterize both impaired humans and mortal and submortal nonhumans, like animals, plants, and stones. Now that my work is belatedly straying into matters of disability, I am eager to emphasize the obvious: that humans face particular dangers of being rendered mute, of not having their reason recognized, of being treated like objects. The problem of muted humans is obviously a problem of justice of a different order than what nonhumans routinely face (and yet see Sunaura Taylor and Sue Walsh).

Yet there still may be an advantage in the word "mute." It has typically been applied from outside: someone hearing an animal's  voice as only noise, someone thwapping a stone and hearing only that. But William of Tocco's gives us the perspective of the bouem mutum. Here is a "mute" figure whose thoughts we know. No one would read this life of Aquinas without already knowing Aquinas as a thinker. As a mute ox, Aquinas is moving more slowly than his fellows; as William of Tocco tells us, he is ruminating. Given enough patience, given enough time of his own amid the expected metrics of his training and institution, his thoughts will burst forth, and astonish the world. In that gap between Aquinas's supposed muteness and his thoughts, we have at least a figuration of the split between subjective impairment and objective disability. In the gap between what they think they know and what we know, we have a hint at what might be muted.

In that gap, the word "mute" becomes a call to imagine, to wait, to meet others on their own terms (see a related move here, from Dominic Pettman). Jonathan Hsy has approached this problem brilliantly from the side of the voice. He has observed that medieval wordlists of animal sounds sometimes included nonanimal noises too: crows croak, donkeys whinny, and fire crackles: muteness and the possibilities of translation, or at least classification, encompass noise in a variety of ways; ultimately, Hsy argues that these and other, related texts show how "Earthly creatures, human and nonhuman alike, can creatively adapt to and accommodate all kinds of sonic utterances and diverse vocalizations that register as alien to their ordinary lived experience." Also essential is Robert Stanton's engagement with Anglo-Saxon riddles alongside classical Skeptic philosophy, which discovers in them an exploration of animal vocal performance that recognizes in these animals the deliberation that performance requires. Projection, patience, meeting (more than) halfway, and a transformation of understanding: even medieval texts could do this. 

I have approached a similar problem from the side of muteness, a word that at once means silence, noise, and, as I have pushed it, misunderstanding. We need not think of "mute" anymore as it's normally presented in medieval Latin. It does not have to paired with "surdus"; it does not necessarily need to be cured. In its not being the opposite of sound, in being on the side of what is experienced as noise, muteness can invite us to wait in the possibility it offers, and to rethink the difference between what we think we know and what we might come to know if we let ourselves suspect our own ignorance and its habits of muting.