Once More with Stonehenge

by KARL STEEL

Where have I been? Apart from surviving the shock of the semester's start, and suffering the siege of many writing projects, apparently all due at once, I've prepared--and submitted!--a book proposal. Wish me luck. The first part of the chapter sample looks like this (thank you to Wordle, reintroduced to me through Scott Kaufman (and, by the way, congrats Scott!). Of late, I've also been engaging in some girdle-based program activities over at the The Valve: medievalists, join in!

Now, I don't even want to calculate how long it's been since I last posted anything here that possessed more substance than a comment (and not an Eileen comment either!). It may be 3 weeks, but it could well fall into the geologic, deep time that's been fascinating Jeffrey of late. I have some ideas for part of tomorrow's undergrad lecture that I want to try out here (the class, by the way, comprises two texts: The Romance of Arthur and Hartmann von Aue's complete works). In honor of my class, in a tribute to Jeffrey's roche-amour, in tribute to a still-new anthology, and in tribute my first entry into thinking about Stonehenge, a favorite topic at ITM for the rest of us, let me propose a reading.


Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain catalogs of a few of his island's wonders: Loch Lamond, where prophetic eagles shriek the future, a nearby pool, neatly square, populated in its each of its four corners by a different species of fish, and the Welsh lake Llyn Lliawn, whose whirlpool swallows anyone foolish enough to face it, but leaves alone those who keep their backs turned. These wonders are the only ones in the sections the Romance of Arthur excerpts from Geoffrey, and, unless my memory fails me, they are, or virtually are, the only wonders Geoffrey includes.

We should be reminded of the Wonders of the East, and we might even be reminded of Gerald of Wales' Wonders of the (Irish) West in the History and Topography of Ireland (Section I.26-32, pp. 53-56 in the Penguin trans.). We're not in the East, nor indeed in Gerald's Ireland, but we're not far off. Barring an exception I'll produce in my ending flourish, none of Geoffrey's wonders can be found in Middle Britain, the area of Norman control. When Geoffrey situates the wonders at Loch Lamond and Llyn Lliawn, he brings us to the Scottish North and Welsh West, and thus to the wild edges against which a colonizing polity pushed. To confirm the 12th-century wildness of Wales for Norman and Angevin rule, we need turn only to Gerald. For Scotland, we need only remind ourselves of the fear and scorn of the Insular North in The Owl and the Nightingale, dated (according to the intro here) to within 50 years of Geoffrey:

Þat lond nis god, ne hit nis este,
Ac wildernisse hit is and weste:
Knarres and cludes hoventinge,
Snou and ha3el hom is genge.
Þat lond is grislich and unvele,
Þe men boþ wilde and unisele,
Hi nabbeþ noþer griþ ne sibbe;
Hi ne reccheþ hu hi libbe.
Hi eteþ fihs an flehs unsode,
Suich wulves hit hadde tobrode:
Hi drinkeþ milc and wei þarto,
Hi nute elles þat hi do;
Hi nabbeþ noþer win ne bor,
Ac libbeþ also wilde dor;
Hi goþ biti3t mid ru3e velle,
Ri3t suich hi comen ut of helle. (999-1014)
The land is poor, a barren place, / A wilderness devoid of grace, / Where crags and rock pierce heaven's air, / And snow and hail are everywhere -- / A grisly and uncanny part / Where men are wild and grim of heart. / Security and peace are rare, / And how they live they do not care. / The flesh and fish they eat are raw; / Like wolves, they tear it with the paw. / They take both milk and whey for drink; / Of other things they cannot think, / Possessing neither wine nor beer. / They live like wild beasts all the year / And wander clad in shaggy fell / As if they'd just come out of hell. (trans. is Brian Stone, the Penguin Owl and The Nightingale, Cleanness, and Erkenwald)

In Scotland, in Wales, we are, then, in lands at once propinquitous and far away. Near enough to frustrate dreams of a homogeneous Britain or England, the edges must be conquered. Wonder and horror both serve the desire to conquer. They transform the greed and uncertainty fueling the colonial project into a mission civilisatrice and an adventure; they allow the intellectual arm to support the colonizer's material forces, for the clerks first render the familiar strange and then subject the newly strange to the centripetal powers of knowledge.

Stonehenge is picked up on one of these civilizing missions. Aurelius Ambrosius (Uther's brother, hence Arthur's paternal uncle) steals it from the Irish on the advice of Merlin, who convinces him that nothing else will do to memorialize the Saxon wars. Although close by, Stonehenge is a wonder: built by giants from stones they brought from Africa, Stonehenge and its marvelous healing properties are the only medicine the Irish (or the giants: it's unclear) ever need. But something seems to go out of them when they're brought to Avebury, even though they're set up just as they had been in Ireland. What had been a hospital becomes a mortuary: poisoned kings, Aurelius and then Uther, are brought to Stonehenge only to be buried. What has happened to the wonder?

I propose one answer via Wace, who finishes his description of the Stonehenge episode as follows:

E Merlin les pieres dreça,
En lur ordre les raloa;
Bretun les suelent en bretanz
Apeler carole as gaianz,
Stanhenges unt nun en engleis,
Pieres pendues en franceis. (8173-78)
And Merlin erected the stones, restoring them to their proper order. In the British language the Britons usually call them the Giants' Dance; in English they are called Stonehenge; and in French, the Hanging Stones. (ed. and trans. by Judith Weiss)

Wace neglects to record what the stones had been called in "African," Irish, or indeed in the language of the giants. Having done its colonial work, wonder ceases, and all that remains is British, England, French, the "local," the mundane. Between the wondrous East and the distant West, the only power at Stonehenge is what's buried here, but despite having been buried, what is here is nonetheless still vital. Standing in the circle, with the bones of kings beneath us, we are in a kind of entrepôt of regal memory and the imperative to conquer.

Fans of Geoffrey of course know that I've left out a wonder: the two dragons beneath the foundations of Vortigern's tower, who fall to fighting when roused, and whose fighting, as Merlin interprets it, prophecies Vortigern's inescapable future. I'm certain I'm far from the first to make the following point, and I know that I'm making this point only with the inspiration of Jeffrey's attentiveness to the subterranean, but it's clear that this one wonder in the land of the mundane can best be understood--at least in the context of my argument--as the return of the repressed. The colonizer's dream of homogeneity in the centerpoint of Empire can be only a dream, for wonder is at our feet, at the very site of our national myth, where we had thought there to be only bones.

Cultural Diversity in Medieval Britain

by J J Cohen

The book's official date of publication is August 5, but why wait? Pre-order! Buy multiple copies! They make great gifts. And very expensive coasters. Or ineffective boomerangs.

For a short overview and Laurie Finke's generous blurb, go here. If you'd like to read the introduction, follow this link. The table of contents is below.

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Introduction: Infinite Realms--Jeffrey Jerome Cohen * Between Diaspora and Conquest: Norman Assimilation in Marie de France’s Esope and Petrus Alfonsi’s Disciplina Clericalis--Suzanne Conklin Akbari * Reliquia: Writing Relics in Anglo-Norman Durham--Heather Blurton * Cultural Difference and the Meaning of Latinity in Asser’s Life of King Alfred--David Townsend * Green Children from Another World, or The Archipelago in England--Jeffrey Jerome Cohen * Beyond British Boundaries in the Historia regum Britanniae--Michael Wenthe * Arthur’s Two Bodies and the Bare Life of the Archives--Kathleen Biddick * The Instructive Other Within: Secularized Jews in The Siege of Jerusalem--Randy P. Schiff * Subversive Histories: Strategies of Identity in Scottish Historiography--Katherine Terrell * Sleeping with an Elephant: Wales and England in the Mabinogion--Jon Kenneth Williams* Chaucer and the War of the Maidens--John Ganim * The Signs and Location of a Flight (or Return?) of Time: The Old English Wonders of the East and the Gujarat Massacre--Eileen Joy

It has arrived!

by J J Cohen

Look what was waiting for me in my office this morning.

More to follow.

Infinite Realms

Below you will find my introduction to the forthcoming collection Cultural Diversity in Medieval Britain: Archipelago, Island, England. Much of it will seem familiar to readers of this blog, who have been so very helpful in sharpening in its argument. The volume is currently in production at Palgrave for the New Middle Ages series. Look for the book next year.

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An alium orbem somniat infinita regna habentem?
[Is he dreaming of another world containing kingdoms without number?]
-- William of Newburgh, History of English Affairs (1.Prologue)

Other Worlds
Medieval Welsh and Irish texts offer stories of realms that exist in strange contiguity to everyday life. The otherworld of Annwn finds its gateway at a mound where adventurers sit seeking wonders. In the account of Cú Chulainn's love for Fand, queen of the sídhe, the hero enters a parallel universe through a nondescript tumulus. The Wasting Sickness of Cú Chulainn and the Only Jealousy of Emer [Serglige Con Culainn ocus Óenét Emire] describes the uncanny beings inhabiting this domain as differing from the Irish in their customs, elder history, and potency in magic. Cú Chulainn is cured of self-destructive love for his Fairy Queen only through the intervention of an oblivion spell: he must forget the riches of her world to reinhabit his own. Like many Irish and Welsh stories involving hillocks as portals, the dominant narrative of The Wasting Sickness of Cú Chulainn seems to enfold within it an untold story about the belatedness of a people to the land they possess, figuring the territory's earlier inhabitants as an inhuman race whose traces are dwindling, whose presence lingers as if at dimming twilight.

Oddly enough, a gateway to another world seems to have opened in a mound in twelfth-century Yorkshire as well. The English historian William of Newburgh describes the circumstances. As a nocturnal traveler returned home, his journey was interrupted when song resounded from what had until that moment been a familiar landmark:

A countryman from this hamlet had gone to meet a friend staying in the next village. He was returning late at night a little drunk, when suddenly from a hillock close by ... he heard voices singing, as though people were feasting in celebration.

William assures us that this tumulus is quite near his own birthplace, that he has seen it numerous times himself. On this particular night a door into the mound has opened [in latere tumuli januam patentem] to reveal a celebration in progress:

He approached and looked inside. Before his eyes was a large, well-lit dwelling crowded with men and women reclining at table as at a formal feast. One of the servants noticed him standing at the door, and offered him a cup.

Not the most polite guest, the man pours away the libation and flees to his village, clutching the empty goblet. The revelers pursue, eager to regain their stolen cup, but cannot overtake his horse.

The purloined vessel is described as mysterious in every way, "of unknown material, unusual color, and strange shape" [vasculum materiae incognitae, coloris insoliti, et formae inusitate]. The treasure is bestowed upon King Henry as a gift, and then from the king of England passes to his brother-in-law, David King of Scots, and thence to Henry II. The goblet circulates from the enigmatic mound dwellers to an unnamed Englishman to a succession of regents (Anglo-Norman to Anglo-Scottish to Anglo-Angevin). Yet the vessel’s path is determined not by some weighty history behind its fabrication (this is not the Grail, moving through a world it shapes), but via its inert status as mere curiosity. Through theft, the cup of unknown material becomes divorced from its history, becomes an object existing for an uncomprehending present. The goblet is transformed from the key to another world to a deracinated souvenir of some vaguely exotic elsewhere. The feast once refused recedes from memory, taking with it the story of that community glimpsed within a now permanently inscrutable mound, a lifeless curve of grass and dirt.

What would happen, though, if the English traveler had joined the celebration inside the tumulus rather than stolen its tableware and fled? Having stumbled across a queer intrusion into his accustomed space, could he have accepted the invitation to conviviality? What would have come to pass had the man risked conversation with the subterranean congregants, if one of these congenial revelers had spoken the tale of who they were and what they honored at their elegant repast? Whose history would this mound-dweller narrate? Barely glimpsed by a passerby who preferred the security of his village over the incongruity of the feast, this history would likely be very different from the narrative William of Newburgh otherwise composes.

For William, too, refuses the invitation from the tumulus, discerning at the far side of the mound’s open door a lost tale rather than a living one. A Yorkshire man for whom the hillock had been a quotidian boyhood sight, William is an author proudly English. At the beginning of his work he states flatly that he composes historiam gentis nostrae, id est Anglorum [“a history of our race, that is, the English,” 1.Prologue]. The Britons who had held the land long before “our race” are, in his account, barbarians whose displacement was both necessary and just. The Irish, a people whose land England was energetically annexing as William wrote, are likewise “uncivilized and barbarous.” For William of Newburgh insular history belongs to England. Anyone who insists otherwise – say, Geoffrey of Monmouth in his spectacular History of the Kings of Britain, a resolutely non-anglocentric account of the island’s past – is ridiculously “dreaming of another world containing kingdoms without number” (alium orbem somniat infinita regna habentem, 1.Prologue). Writing six decades after Geoffrey, William chronicles the story of a world containing precisely one realm, England.

Geoffrey had provocatively described a Britain possessed of so extensive a history that the Saxons became parvenus, mere interlopers. Long before Alfred and Athelstan reigned, according to the History of the Kings of Britain, Briton heroes like Brutus, Brennius, and Arthur flourished, achieving martial feats unparalleled in English history. Yet despite William’s vitriol for Geoffrey’s proliferative vision, despite his dismissal of Geoffrey’s Arthurian history as mendacity, as a space oneiric rather than factual, William’s History of English Affairs features a hillock that beckons with open doorway, the portal to another realm. The stately feast beheld within the tumulus transforms the mound from a local landmark of no great significance to an alien interstice quite unlike the mundane expanses that surround its rise.

Had the celebrants of the mound’s underground celebration been invited to speak their history, the narrative they would likely tell might reveal the difference between stories of England and stories of Britain, between the attenuated narrative of a kingdom that masqueraded as the entirety of an island and the histories of a tempestuous world too vast, too motley, too entangled in an archipelago of other worlds to be so reduced.

Archipelago, Island, England
“British History has been much in the air of late,” R. R. Davies observed two decades ago, “but it still seems strangely reluctant to come down.” Davies worried that embracing the label “British History” had enabled English historians to “confess their anglocentricity without performing practical penance,” a state of affairs made no better by the fact that historians of Wales, Scotland and Ireland often seemed “intent on cultivating their own corners” instead of adopting a more capacious, more gregarious mode. To move from England to Britain without sacrificing the diversity of the latter to an imagined uniformity in the former is, admittedly, not easy to accomplish – especially because medieval English writers had the infuriating habit of using Britannia or even totius Britanniae as a synonym for Anglia. Yet the difference between an analytical frame centered around medieval England and a wider, paninsular perspective has been well illustrated by Edward James in Britain in the First Millennium, a work that restores multiplicity to the island by examining its history over an exceptionally longue durée. James writes that his expanded temporal span (“the long first millennium”) enables Britain to be studied “as the whole of Britain, from Cornwall to the Shetlands, rather than (usually) England or (sometimes) Wales or Scotland.” A multifarious agent enmeshed within – indeed, inextricable from -- a wide and volatile European context, Britain thereby becomes something more than “a self-sufficient island occasionally invaded or visited as if by aliens from another world.” Similarly, Barry Cunliffe assembles a vast sweep of cultures into a heterogeneous, enduring alliance he calls “the peoples of the long Atlantic façade of Europe.” By resisting the impulse to linguistic segregation, Cunliffe is able to map how the shared experience of living between land and sea gathers seemingly disparate groups into a maritime network of unceasing interaction, shared experience, and cultural interchange, an Atlantic identity as evident in Norman conquistadors as in the Neolithic peoples of the southern British coast. Both James and Cunliffe make clear the critical gains that accrue through the adoption of this transnational ambit, especially when it takes as its point of departure a lively archipelago in constant and transformative contact with a far-extending world.

Most influential among medievalists attempting to emplace the insular Middle Ages within more capacious analytical frames has been the late R. R. Davies. His far-reaching work details how a restless expanse of islands contracted over time into the four well-delimited geopolitical entities we know today. In a vivid account of this long process of materialization and separation, Davies observes that countries

do not descend fully formed from heaven but are shaped and reshaped here on earth by the stratagems of men and the victories of the fortuitous. But once they take root and are bolstered by the habits and mechanisms of unity and by a common mythology, they soon acquire an image, if not of immemoriality, at least of almost inevitable and organic development.

"England," "Scotland," "Wales" and "Ireland" are not natural or even especially obvious partitions of the islands. Quadripartite division is the culmination of centuries of antagonism and alliance that could very well have produced a profoundly different configuration. The hard work of forging fate out of the vagaries of fortune, of creating circumscribed nations and discrete peoples from the sheer messiness of history, usually proceeds retroactively, positing in the past the unchanging solidities desired in the present. Patricia Ingham captures this process with eloquence when she writes:

The nation is always an illusion, a fantasy of wholeness that threatens again and again to fragment from the inside out. Fantasies of national identity teach peoples to desire union; they help inculcate in a populace the apparent 'truth' that unity, regulation, coordination, and wholeness are always better, more satisfying, and more fascinating, than the alternatives. Yet in order to promote desires for national unity, the nation, its core identity, must appear always to have been there, poised to fascinate its people, and ready to be desired.

Whether within the parameters of nation, city, race, or some other solidarity, this desire for unity is frequently engendered through narrative. When examining or imagining the past, such discourses typically assume that when events take one of many possible turns, then that outcome was predestined, even providential. Colin Richmond, contemplating the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290, writes of the "terrible and terrifying habit of viewing the past as inevitable." When history is taken as a record of what had to happen, when texts record as inexorable the emergence of a nation and the abjection of other peoples, the composition of history and the fashioning of narrative can become exercises in justification and excuse making rather than the opening up of the past to its fullest potentiality. To quote Davies once more, just because four well-bounded countries occupied Britain and Ireland by the end of the Middle Ages, "it need not, of course, have been so."

A similar mixture of chance and strategy accounts for the genesis of the communal identities of the peoples dwelling on these islands in the Middle Ages. None had necessarily to recognize themselves as constituting a distinct community, as a people set solidly apart from others. The fact that they did so should not obscure the contingencies behind the emergence of these separations, the ample potential that existed for history to have unfolded otherwise. Collective names can have profound historical effects, especially as categories humans deploy against each other or to delimit their own identities. Yet despite the stories such peoples tell themselves and announce to others, these groups typically possess limited internal homogeneity, and are never endowed with some core essence immune to historical change. Though nationalistic dreams posit enduring racial groups like the Romans, the Saxons or even the Jews and attempt to maintain such imagined purities through endogamy, intermingling and mutability are in fact human constants. When communal identities are built upon the embrace of a single language, culture, history, then variation and diversity can be difficult to discern. Yet heterogeneity and excluded difference lurk, banished perhaps to dwell underground and out of sight, but surfacing irregularly and in surprising forms.

Britain had once been part of an island chain as enmeshed with Ireland and Scandinavia as with Europe and the Mediterranean. It was once an expanse that, as William of Newburgh feared, did consist of infinita regna, "infinite realms." This multiplicity of dominions varied in size, stability, duration, cultural composition. Though the island of Britain eventually came to be dominated by a single one of its kingdoms, this ascendant England never did fully absorb or anglicize the hybridity, the obdurate and enduring differences out of which it had been formed.

The Infinite Realms Project
Though their authors invoke many recent critics for their inspiration, the essays collected in Cultural Diversity in Medieval Britain build upon long scholarly tradition, employing commodious frames for the study of what otherwise might be seen as isolated national literatures. Working almost a century ago, Roger Sherman Loomis could be said to be the first modern postcolonial theorist of the British Isles, arguing that English romance had absorbed (none too graciously) much of its material from Irish, Scottish, and Welsh sources, and implicitly linking this incorporation to the kingdom’s cultural conquest of its Celtic Fringe. Over time medievalists have refined such study of cultural imperialism and commingling, stressing the uneven arrangements of power inherent in cultural contact. This volume is in fact something of a companion to The Postcolonial Middle Ages, a collection of essays that attempted to emplace medieval texts within the context of a heterogeneous and self-divided world stretching from Britain to the shores of the Mediterranean. Our mission here is likewise that of provincializing England (to play upon the title of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe), of viewing the kingdom and its capital city within a lens so wide that it is no longer the world’s umbilicus, but one center among many, and not necessarily the actor of greatest importance.

Like more traditional scholarship in medieval studies, much postcolonial medieval analysis has tended to be international in its focus, placing England within a European context. Such a perspective is invaluable, especially because through examination of the crusades it typically stretches geographically to the Levant, effectively challenging any tendency towards parochialism. Yet this critical trajectory can sometimes lead too swiftly away from the archipelago where it commences. When England is tied more closely to distant nations and events than to the polities, peoples, and cultures with which the kingdom shared an island, and indeed a history, an understanding of the insular past in its full complexity can be constrained. Even in texts written within an England that might seem internally monolithic or homogenous, this book’s authors find portals to strangely contiguous other worlds where recalcitrant differences, abiding possibilities, and alternative histories vivaciously endure. Francophone Normans and Jews, for example, inhabited the kingdom from the eleventh century – as did at various times Flemings, Italians, Danes, Welsh, Irish, Scots. Though the Normans eventually assimilated into the population they had rendered subaltern in 1066, the Jews served as England’s most contemplated minority population even after wholesale expulsion in 1290. Because of their religious, cultural, and (in the terms of the day) racial difference, the Jews appear in medieval English texts with an obsessive regularity out of all proportion to their actual numbers in the country. Jewish presence therefore figures large in the essays that follow.

Since this volume undertakes to find truth in what William of Newburgh dismissed as a mere dream of an unbounded insular past, Cultural Diversity in Medieval Britain could as easily have been entitled the Infinite Realms Project. Through close readings of medieval texts (some widely familiar, many less so), the contributors attempt to read England as a single – if singularly powerful -- entity within a dispersive geopolitical network, within a capacious world. The contributors to this volume seek moments of cultural admixture and heterogeneity within texts that have often been assumed to belong to a single, national canon, discovering moments when familiar and bounded space erupts with infinita regna, kingdoms without number. This sudden door opening in a neighborhood tumulus invites those who would listen to the stories told by its subterranean congregants to hear narratives conjoining England, Britain, Sicily, Bohemia, Wales, Scotland, Normandy: other realms and other worlds.


Suzanne Conklin Akbari opens the volume with an essay intimately connecting Anglo-Norman literature to a worldwide network of culture and power. “Between Diaspora and Conquest: Norman Assimilation in Marie de France’s Esope and Petrus Alfonsi’s Disciplina Clericalis,” reexamines Anglo-Norman identity through the comparative study of Norman Sicily and England. Inspired by Horden and Purcell’s comparative Mediterranean history, Akbari argues that peoples are best understood as participants in vast cultural flows resting upon major geographical structures. Spanning Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, Norman culture of the Middle Ages was linked by sea routes that provided a economic and cultural continuity. Simultaneously, however, Norman identity evolved in dramatically different forms in France, England, Italy, and Sicily. In twelfth-century Sicily, Norman government sought to constitute a polity that sublimated ethnic and religious difference under the banner of the shared language of Arabic and a common administrative system. In twelfth-century England under Henry II, a heterogeneous collection of nations were also assimilated into a communal culture, but by very different means. Through a close reading of Petrus Alfonsi’s Disciplina Clericalis and Marie de France’s Esope, Akbari illustrates how the emergence of the frame tale narrative in twelfth-century Norman England mirrored forms of cultural assimilation that were simultaneously taking place. In a coda to the essay, she considers the cultural resonance emerging from a Hebrew adaptation of Marie de France, “The Story of King Solomon’s Daughter.”

With “Reliquia: Writing Relics in Anglo-Norman Durham,” Heather Blurton continues the focus upon the Normans, this time in a regional English context. Whether the poem known as Durham represents the last gasp of Old English or the first breath of early Middle English has been the central question of the text’s analysis. Blurton considers this mediality from a different angle, reading the poem as a document produced in the midst of the power struggle in post-Conquest Durham. Like an Old English riddle that does not name its object of description, Durham omits mention of the city’s most distinctive feature, the spectacular cathedral under construction at the moment of its composition. The poem instead describes the relics of saintly English kings, abbots and bishops and enshrines them in a poem that is artfully crafted in Anglo-Saxon poetic form and language. The poem’s single macaronism, “reliquia,” is, in Blurton’s reading, the key to the work’s meaning. Durham offers itself simultaneously as a reliquary for the past as well as a relic of that past. Its language and poetic form suggest that the poem is of much greater antiquity than it is -- but not for purposes politically nostalgic. In the early twelfth century, the monks of Durham were diligently engaged in creating textual evidence to buttress their community’s claims specifically to Cuthbert’s patrimony, and more generally to the power of the monastic community of the cathedral priory against that of the bishop and castle. Instead of understanding Durham as a transitional text, suspended between Old and Middle English, Blurton sees the poem as caught between two structures of power in early Anglo-Norman Durham, between castle and cathedral.

David Townsend deepens this emphasis on language, vernacularity, and corporate identity with “Cultural Difference and the Meaning of Latinity in Asser’s Life of King Alfred.” The Welsh priest Asser’s text is often read as a principal site of ninth-century West Saxon hegemonic consolidation, the coming into being of Alfred’s English nation. Townsend argues, however, that this biographical account of Alfred’s rise to power contains in its rhetorical pragmatics an implicit, and often overlooked, assertion of enduring cultural diversity in Britain. Rather than obliterating differences among peoples in the service of a unitary, homogeneous, alienated perspective, Asser’s Latinity deploys the metropolitan language of early medieval high culture to maintain a space for local difference. Such difference must exist in tension with the assimilative claims of the newly ascendant vernacular, but it need not be obliterated or abandoned by those for whom it holds definitional power. The possibility of local positionalities being refracted through the medium of Asser’s Latinity suggests a far more complex model of the relationship of medieval Latin as a metropolitan language to the articulation of local subjectivities.

Cultural heterogeneity beneath what may appear to be monolithic sameness is also theme of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s “Green Children from Another World, or The Archipelago in England.” Cohen turns to a late twelfth-century Latin text to study how tensions around colonization and assimilation found “subterranean” voice in the long wake of the Norman conquest. The English historian William of Newburgh narrated a vivid tale of green children emerging from the ground in contemporary East Anglia. Seeming arrivals from a distant world, these strange siblings differed from their English discoverers in language, clothing, customs – differed, in the end, in their race. Yet neither the boy nor the girl is as alien as they initially appeared. Once taught to eat local food, they lose their viridescence; once taught to speak English, they narrate their origin in a land that for all its distance touches England intimately. The account of the Green Children surfaces two stories that William of Newburgh cannot otherwise tell: how the Normans who had conquered the kingdom had vanished from the country without ever leaving, and how the contemporary nation had never come adequately to terms with the Britain that it pretended to have subsumed, with the archipelago of cultural difference and intractable hybridity dwelling still within.

Michael Wenthe likewise studies the difficulties of supposing discrete and enduring collective identities after the Norman conquest. “Beyond British Boundaries in the Historia regum Britanniae” argues that in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, Arthur's preeminence among the insular regents paradoxically depends upon his challenge to traditional understanding and preservation of British peoplehood. Arthur begins his reign as a champion who restores his people's fortunes within the island, but ends as the master of an international empire drawing allies drawn from diverse geographies. Arthur's federated approach to rule and his accommodation of foreigners among his counselors temper the force of British domination and ultimately color the sense of Britishness itself. The king's efforts to extend the British nation beyond Britain (and beyond Britons) challenge the conception of Britishness established by the nation-founder Brutus, rooted in ethnicity and place. Arthur's move toward hybridization and against traditional binarisms is thwarted by Mordred's rebellion, a rejection spurred by atavistic desire for a simpler expression of identity that depends on a purity imposed through exclusion. The limits of both Arthur's model of nationhood and Mordred's response can be seen in Arthur's failure to sustain his achievement and in Geoffrey's supersessionistic history, a history that repeatedly chronicles the replacement of one dominant group within Britain by another.

Kathleen Biddick extends this focus upon Geoffrey of Monmouth and island identities in “Arthur’s Two Bodies and the Bare Life of the Archives.” Biddick examines how the History of the Kings of Britain constitutes a formative moment in the medieval fabrication of what Ernst Kantorowicz called “the king’s two bodies,” the enduring body politic and the mortal body natural. Biddick demonstrates how archival practices were intrinsic to this invention, lodging themselves deep within Geoffrey’s text. The essay observes how the accounts of the Pipe Rolls trace the bureaucratic involvement of archdiaconal circles (in which Geoffrey moved) with the Crown; it examines archdiaconal anxieties over petty geographical jurisdiction as expressed in the Leges Edwardi Confessoris (Laws of Edward the Confessor), and it traces their theological notions of sovereignty as echoed in Norman Anonymous. According to Biddick, Geoffrey stages the archival violence at stake in fabricating the king’s second, divine body by bracketing his History with massacre, employing the Latin cognates of caedes [“carnage, slaughter”] to form these brackets. His use of massacre converges with contemporary Jewish concepts of the archive as the porphyrion, a vestment capable of transcribing every drop of blood of massacred Jews. The essay reflects on the political theology of mundane bureaucratic archives and archives of trauma at the edges of Geoffrey’s history.

As residents in a nation dissimilar in custom, ritual language, and religion, Jews in England found themselves objects of cultural fascination even after the Expulsion of 1290. Randy P. Schiff examines the role Jews played in a text composed after this forced departure. “The Instructive Other Within: Secularized Jews in The Siege of Jerusalem” argues that the alliterative romance should be read in the context of the contemporary collapse of the fantasy of English insular overlordship. Scholars have recoiled at the Siege’s endorsement of violence inflicted on Jews, reading the siege as Christ’s vengeance upon the citizens of Jerusalem. Schiff warns, however, that given the poem’s problematization of clear ethnic identification, critics should be hesitant to ascribe to the text a simple or reductive understanding of what the figure of the Jew means. Reflecting upon a Britain enmeshed in the painful, often violent process of border-formation, the author portrays the Jews as daunting insurgents rather than religious purists, undermining the theological pretensions of a Roman war machine – a machine motivated more by plunder than by its putative Christianity. By manipulating his sources to make a refusal of tribute trigger the Roman invasion, the Siege-poet links the Jews with the Arthurian rebels of romance, a genre ambivalently situated with respect to English empire. Apparently originating in western Yorkshire, the text speaks more to the bloody raids and sieges conducted by the Scots and English in the process of forming British borders —and perhaps also to the trauma of the 1190 massacre of Jews in Clifford’s Tower in York—than it does to abstract theological interests. Much as the Jew, for Langland, acts as ethical instructor to English society, so does the Siege of Jerusalem secularize its narrative events so as to release the ambivalent energies of a Jewish Other who reveals the limits of an unchecked English expansionism.

Katherine Terrell brings us to the center of the Scotland at the edges of Schiff’s essay with “Subversive Histories: Strategies of Identity in Scottish Historiography.” Terrell examines Scottish historiographical responses to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s myth of Brutus, a myth that repeatedly invoked in support of England’s colonialist ambitions toward Scotland. Discussing responses to Geoffrey’s myth in early fourteenth-century diplomatic texts and John of Fordun’s Chronica Gentis Scotorum, the essay argues that even as Scottish chroniclers established spatial and temporal boundaries to enforce the idea of a natural and autonomous Scottish identity, their persistently dialogic engagement with Geoffrey’s text reveals the hybridity underlying their constructions of identity. These chroniclers’ responses to Geoffrey cannot therefore be simply characterized as either unambiguously hostile or as complicit in what R. R. Davies has called the “Anglicization of the British Isles.” Rather, Terrell contends, the chroniclers resist English aggression as much by appropriating and adapting Geoffrey’s highly effective narrative strategies as by directly challenging his authority.

Jon Kenneth Williams looks closely at the literature of another people who felt the force of English expansionism throughout the Middle Ages, the Welsh. “Sleeping with an Elephant: Wales and England in the Mabinogion” proposes that several pieces of Middle Welsh literature lay a theoretical groundwork that would enable the Welsh to perpetuate their language and culture in an age of seemingly inalterable foreign political and military occupation. "Culhwch and Olwen," the oldest Arthurian narrative, describes the island of Britain as a geography always and already marked by invasion and colonization, negating the Welsh myth of entitlement to the whole of the island. "The Dream of Macsen Wledig" in turn encourages its audience to be of service to the occupier, literarily Roman but historically English, so that the Welsh language might be preserved. Finally, the third branch of the Mabinogi, "Manawydan Son of Llyr," uses (in Williams’ account) gentle satire to acknowledge the inescapable economic might of England. In so doing, the work playfully draws into sharp relief the twin worlds of the Wales of myth and the England of the medieval market economy, providing a vision of Welsh ability that is both striking optimistic and pragmatic.

Legendary histories, mythic foundations, and practical political considerations are likewise at the heart of John Ganim’s “Chaucer and the War of the Maidens.” Scholars have long puzzled why in the Knight's Tale Chaucer so severely shortens the spectacular battle against the Amazons as it was developed in his chief source, Boccaccio's Teseide, depending instead on the briefer account in Statius' Thebeid. Ganim speculates that the Amazonian materials acquired a new, unstable charge with the arrival of Anne of Bohemia and her marriage to Richard II. It is likely that the stories of the legendary founding of Prague by a prophetic female leader and through an associated battle against Amazon-like women (usually referred to as the "War of the Maidens") accompanied Anne and her courtiers to England. Recent scholarship on Queen Anne has provided a new window into our understanding of Chaucer and his culturally complex poetry. Ganim’s contribution to this new emphasis is to suggest that traces of the legendary history of Bohemia can be located in the political unconscious of the Knight's Tale and perhaps in Chaucer's intricate deployment of gender as local topic and as political metaphor. Even it is impossible to prove that Chaucer was aware of the cultural freight of the female foundation of Queen Anne's homeland, Ganim provocatively points to striking analogues to the ways in which Chaucer deploys the powers of his Bohemianized women. In those works by Chaucer connected in some fashion to Anne and her native land, he finds an uncannily similar dispersal and division of female power.

Eileen Joy also details how gender functions in tales of violent masculine adventure and cultural colonization in her temporally intercut essay “The Signs and Location of a Flight (or Return?) of Time: The Old English Wonders of the East and the Gujarat Massacre” Joy places the mass sexual mutilation, torture, and brutal murder of hundreds of Muslim women in Gujarat alongside the lines of the Old English Wonders of the East describing Alexander’s murder of giant women “unworthy in their bodies.” She argues that we can glimpse in both events a violence that can be understood to participate in what Dominick LaCapra, writing about the Holocaust, has described as a “deranged sacrificialism.” Such violence is occasioned by the attempt to get rid of stranger-Others as “phobic or ritually impure objects” that are believed to pollute the Volksgemeinschaft (community of the people). Both cases—one terrifyingly real, the other purely fictional—also reveal persistent social anxieties about the female body as formless contagion. Out of the horror and disgust that arises in the encounter with the female body perceived as monstrous, Joy traces an ancient and ritualized type of violence that is both morally condemnatory and ecstatic, and which can be seen, to a greater and more restrained degree, respectively, in the Gujarat genocide and the Old English text.

Eileen Joy’s essay leaves us in the very place we began: in a world that is culturally complicated, full of brutality based upon real and imagined differences, not much closer than medieval England was to realizing that the Other Worlds we banish to our undergrounds are in fact coextensive with our own.

Little Quote of the Day: Fetchez la vache

Been quiet around these parts. Here's a placeholder QOTD to supplement our various posts on heterogeneity and the English past (for example, here and here).

While browsing in a library, I ran across Bernard Ribémont's modern French translation of Jean Corbechon's Middle French version of Bartholomew the Englishman's De proprietatibus rerum. My curiosity did not disappoint me when I wondered what Jean would have to say about England.

We have the usual descriptions of England taken from Bede, but then Jean hits a snag: a wild praise of England as a land so rich that it needs nothing from other lands, a land whose people are generous, honest, fun loving, and then--you can just see him throwing his quill down in disgust--he declares that there's just too much to summarize and that the work praises England rather too much. It is 1372, after all. He then writes:

... il croit louer son pays et, en fait, il le blâme, car il dit que les Anglais descendent des Géants tout d'abord, puis de Brutus et des Troyens, enfin des Saxons. En disant ainsi, il en fait des bâtards en leur donnant plusieurs pères. Et puis il parle très imparfaitement de cette question, car il oublie la conquête faite par le duc Guillaume et les Normands, qui conquirent l'Angleterre si vaillamment qu'il en reste encore les traces dans les armoiries et les coutumes. Cela ne doit par être oublié, car il y a moins de honte à avoir été conquis par les Français ou les Normands que par les Saxons. (238)

He believes that he is praising his country, and in fact, he is scorning it, because he says that the English descended from giants first of all, then from Brutus and the Trojans, and then finally from the Saxons. In saying so, he makes them bastards by giving them several fathers. Moreover, he speaks very imperfectly on this issue, because he forgets the conquest of Duke William and the Normans, who conquered England so valiantly that there are still traces [of the conquest? of the Normans?] in the heraldry and customs of England. This should not be forgotten because there is less shame in having been conquered by the French or the Normans than by the Saxons.

(image taken from here)

Postscript: ALK just asked me, "Are there medieval accounts of boring people? Like some monk writing about another monk who was really boring." I had to say that I didn't know. Any suggestions?

London

Gibbous Moon, London
The hum of cars, the cool of night, and a gibbous moon linger at the window.
I lay in a small bed in a small room in an unfamiliar city,
drowsed by the hum, contented by the breeze, disquieted by the moon.
I have walked the streets of London.
I have tasted what wine the city offers --
tasted too much of the good wine.
Today I climbed the dome of St paul's
and seeing the crowd undistinguished from the floor tiles
thought I knew a god's eyes.
Today I saw Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
I had read the play once and thought Brilliant.
This day I have seen a city that swallows its astonished pilgrims
into green parks and streets that glow all night.
But the gibbous moon is draining the wine
And the sober beams remind me how much I paid the priest at the cash register
for that climb up the dome.
The rays recollect how bored I was during that play
and how angry I grew at myself for being bored in the midst of brilliance.
For all the color, for all the music, for all the marvel,
there were shabby sleepers in doorways
and others sifting the refuse.
Rising from the bes, I cross to the window,
pull down the dirty glass,
and draw the fading curtains.
London, gibbous moon.

Ah, London. It brings out the failed poet in all of us.

I composed these wretched lines twenty years ago. In the summer that separated the end of undergraduate study from the beginning of a doctoral program, I found myself on a humid night a tenant of a decrepit London hotel. As an aspiring teacher, I'd been awarded a small amount of money to pursue something educational and research-oriented in these months, so I decided to buy a plane ticket and backpack through as much of the British Isles as three months and my limited funds would allow.

I arrived in London filled with all the fantasies of the place an American English major could possess. From my study of Chaucer I learned to expect a cosmopolitan bustle; from Dickens some picturesque poverty; from Samuel Johnson a city of dreams. London turned out to be far more than the museum of distant literature I'd expected, alive with a vibe in many ways more modern than many American cities (and certainly much more contemporary in its ardors than Boston, where I grew up). London was also far more marked by its colonial past than I had anticipated. This was 1987, after all, and England was smarting from racial violence, anti immigrant sentiment, IRA bombs in the subway. Somehow everything seemed less romantic and more difficult than my books had led me to believe.

But, you know, two decades ago I was pretty much an idiot. My family had not been well off enough to travel internationally -- in fact, we barely traveled locally. I hadn't experienced many big cities other than Boston, Toronto, and New York. London, England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland were imagined geographies, places I'd studied in my literature and history and political science classes but locales more abstract than real, historical rather than possessed of a vivacious present.

Despite the effusions of poor poetry the trip triggered, a lasting positive outcome of that sojourn is this: meandering through the isles and wandering especially through London cured me of wanting to keep the past a monumentally still domain. If the London of 1987 could be possessed of so much vitality, shouldn't the London of 1387 be granted just as much ambivalence, joy, danger, messiness? I suppose I was fairly late in coming to this lesson, but I've always suspected that late bloomers are the ones who learn best.

I've returned to London frequently over the years and watched in wonder as the city has changed. Whenever I'm there I also can't help encountering the me of two decades ago, usually wandering some dusky street in Bloomsbury with his own portable cloud of gloom. If I could just touch that phantom, I'd grab him and shake him and tell him to snap out of his unearned melancholy. But then again, I'm happy that the ghosts of former selves have to remain as they are. They mustn't realize the future selves congregating around them, or it would be trouble for all of us.

This year for the first time the family is joining me on my London research junket. We've rented a flat not far from the British Museum for a few weeks. My wife lived in London as a student, and other than a week we spent there together in 2002 hasn't been back since. Kid #1 has been eagerly anticipating this trip for (according to him) his ENTIRE life (that would be ten years). Talk about former selves: he's a better adjusted version of me at that age, filled with enthusiasm for castles and dungeons and relics. He can hardly wait to be able to touch as solid objects the fortifications he's only dreamt about so far. Kid #2 likewise knows London only through books, and likewise feels quite confident that she will encounter the city as those books inform her it should be. Primarily this means that she KNOWS Peter Pan will appear by her bedside some evening to escort her past Big Ben skyward into Never Land. She has had a pink nightgown set aside for this trip for over two months. She realizes that you must be wearing a nightgown to be invited to Never Land.

So expect few postings from me in the future. I return on Friday July 13th (luckily I am not superstitious), but even then I anticipate being so slammed by work upon my return that it will be tough to blog. I will drop a note or two from London, though ... and promise not to compose any more poetry. Only Young Me did that. He was so sweet in his dire little way -- but Old Me will likely slap him if he catches him speaking of hunchbacked lunar bodies again.

Happy summer, and love to all.

Jeffrey

Wæs hal, the British tongue, and English as infection

From the intriguing blog Varieties of Unreligious Experience, Gervase of Tilbury inspires a meditation on toasts:

Otia Imperialia, Book II, chapter 17:

It was Hengist's daughter who introduced the well-known custom of extending a solemn invitation to drink by saying, 'wes hāl', which means 'be merry'; to this the guest in turn replies: 'drink hāl', that is, 'drink merrily'. In the British tongue the corresponding words are cantinoch and boduit.

Nowadays we write, 'wassail' and 'drink hail'—and that's 'hail' as in hale, ie. whole or healthy, rather than merry. According to the OED, the words are not attested as toasts in either Old English or Old Norse, but were probably first used as such by the Danes in England; the earliest reference is from Geoffrey of Monmouth, and in English from Lawman's translation of Wace's Brut, itself based largely on Geoffrey. The first time I toasted a health with Mrs. Roth—it was a small glass of port, my favourite drink, which she was happy to essay, and relieved to enjoy, on the occasion of her 30th birthday, spent in the City of Love; we were not yet married, but on our way—I softly called 'wassail', and was disappointed not to receive the correct response. (You say I have unreasonable standards? This I expected purely because she counts herself a mediaevalist, and an Anglo-Saxonist to boot. Still, she knew for next time.)

Gervase's editors footnote thus:

Professor Patrick Sims-Williams and Dr Marged Haycock suggest that cantinoch could be Old Welsh (or Cornish or Breton) can(t) tin uch, meaning 'with bottom up', while boduit could be Old Welsh (or Breton) bod (d)it, meaning 'goodwill to you' or 'thanks to you', influenced by Middle Irish is buide duit, 'it is well for you', or else equivalent to Modern Welsh boddwyd, 'it/he has been drowned', which is used metaphorically to mean 'celebrate'. The word can is attested in Welsh from the beginning of the seventeenth century with the meaning 'tankard'; it is quite conceivable that this loanword from English can was in the language for centuries before its first attestation, in which case the phrase would mean 'tankard bottom up!'

Conrad Roth then goes on in his blog to lament the fact that we seldom toast anything anymore. It's hard to disagree. In fact I'll toast that sentiment.

What's most interesting to me about Gervase's version of this famous scene from Geoffrey of Monmouth is that he provides -- or attempts to provide -- the "British tongue" version of the toast. In Geoffrey of Monmouth, the originator of the episode, we get a weird moment when Latin is interrupted by an outbreak of English. Geoffrey seldom interjects English (or Welsh, for that matter) into his Latin, "Stonehenge" being the other notable exception. In Wace, Geoffrey's first vernacularizer, the movement is from French to English, since the former language is being used to narrate the British story (though, admittedly, Wace has a way of making Geoffrey seem a historian of England, since Angleterre takes the place of Britannia). In Lawman, the archaic English into which Wace is being rendered is interrupted by ... more English. None of these authors gives the British version of the toast, since in each case Latin, French or English is substituting for the "British tongue." Welsh, it seems, is a language assumed incapable of communicating outside of the southwest of the island into which it has receded.

Further, for Geoffrey the English toast wassail is a kind of infection, propelled towards the British leader Vortigern by a Saxon seductress. Wassail is a fragment of Englishness that, once imbibed with the drink, lodges deep in Vortigern. He madly desires the speaker, whom he marries in a baleful miscegenation. For Gervase, it all seems so much more neutral, perhaps because the cultural stakes had by the thirteenth century become so low.

[The illustration above is a hoard of Roman drinking cups from Roman Britain (late 1st century AD) found in Hockwold cum Wilton, Norfolk. More information from the British Museum here. Though these cups had been crushed before interment, vessels from the underground which, had they been discovered in the Middle Ages, might have told a story of a deeper history of the land than was commonly recounted always remind me of a story from William of Newburgh which features a mysterious goblet purloined from a tumulus.]

Constriction, Circumscription, Critique: More Other Worlds

Why are these possible worlds and alternate realities I've been aggregating necessary, at least to the England that dreamed them?

In part -- as came through in the comments to yesterday's post -- these Other Worlds offer a potentially affirmative vision, a version of the world that doesn't necessarily include the circumscriptions, foreclosures, and abjections through which stable identities come into being. True, many times these worlds open a portal upon memories of historical traumas that limn the present. Just as frequently, through such a portal can be glimpsed a more capacious ordering of that present -- and by more capacious I also mean more enchanted and more just.

One way of explaining the allure of these Other Worlds is to emphasize their escapist potential, since they are in part oneiric geographies that, once entered, could allow the dreamer to depart a troubled present without changing it, at least for a while. But that's only part of the story. By asking what the present would be like if it were configured differently, by wondering what Now would be if Then were remembered either better or simply differently, these Other Worlds offer, at least potentially, the opportunity for trenchant social critique, for imaging the world otherwise.

Fantasy is likely never the best way to change the mundane givenness of a particular life, of a particular world ... but fantasies of alternate realities do emphasize the contingency, the non-inevitability, of the world as currently known. Medieval England's Other Worlds invited the nation to ponder what it had abandoned to become itself, what other possibilities there might be for forming community in the realm.

More on England and its Possible Worlds

Here, a further contribution to an emergent thread on wonder, possible worlds, medieval alternative realities, and modern fantasy as portal to the medieval. See also:

• An Embarrassing Revelation
  
• New World Medievalists, Fantasy and History
• Giving the Word 'Retro' New Meaning
• When Dinosaurs Roamed Eden
• Infinite Realms and Alternate Worlds
• Robert Bartlett on Medieval Other Worlds
• On Wonder
  

[from Medieval Identity Machines]

Postcolonial theory directed toward the study of the Americas has a tendency to describe western Europe as a community of nations with a shared set of values, especially in the outward thrust of their imperial zeal. Even within national boundaries, European countries are imagined to be homogeneous: the French, the English, the Spanish and so on are supposed to have discrete identities intimately tied to the stable and apparently natural boundaries of their homelands. Europe is thus composed of coherent corporate entities with a tendency to act uniformly, even when in competition with each other. In describing the exploitation machine erected by Columbus as a kind of "medieval vacuum cleaner" which sucked resources from the New World for deposit on distant shores, Antonio Benítez-Rojo can therefore assume that Europe acted as a singular agent in perfecting a structure which was initially rather inept, augmenting its Columbian bricolage with la flota (the machine formed of ships, ports, and flows of raw material and wealth), missionaries deployed to effect religious transformation, plantations with their adaptable structures for quick implementation and lasting domination, "an entire huge assemblage of machines" whose conjunction enabled efficient colonization and maximum profit (The Repeating Island).

Medievalists who study the European west are unlikely, however, to recognize the singular geographical actor at the receiving end of this impressive apparatus. Strangely enough, it is the culture of the meta-archipelago and the dynamic Caribbean machine which reverberate as possible figurations for the psychical and cultural complexity of the occidental Middle Ages. Recent work in medieval studies has undercut the possibility of assuming a transhistorical, corporate identity for Europe, arguing that the term organizes into an imaginary totality communities which did not necessarily perceive themselves as part of any such grand collective. Linguistically and culturally diverse, connected by shifting alliance and multiple affiliation, medieval Europa was a machine animated as much by conquest, alliance and shared history (consolidating or integrative movements) as violent counterstruggle and ultimate inassimilability (eruption, assertion, sedimentation of difference). Benítez-Rojo is writing of a specific time and place in their relation to constitutive histories and topographies, of a geotemporality of which the Middle Ages knew nothing and which -- "medieval vacuum cleaners" aside -- had in turn little knowledge of the European medium aevum. Yet his "polyrhythmic" conceptual figurations are useful in struggling toward a language in which to collect an entity as big as the western Middle Ages even while insisting upon the inherent inadequacy and potential violence which all such generalization performs.

What if like the Caribbean space described by Benítez-Rojo the western Middle Ages consist of islands of difference made contiguous through the shared embrace of turbulent, confluential seas? Bede, after all, described the flow of time (lapsus temporum) as both "churning" (volubilis) and "wave-tossed" (fluctivagus). Why not extend Bede's oceanic metaphors to include the possibility of more solid spaces within the temporal flux? Some of these islands might, like the barren outcroppings sought by early Irish eremites, stand in relative isolation. Most, however, would be more like monkish Iona. The loneliness of this island in the outer Hebrides dissipates the moment we recall that Saint Columba assembled there a polyglot community drawn from many nations; that the monastery which he founded was visited with some regularity by merchants from Gaul; that flows of books and boats and pilgrims traversed its shores; that little Iona's history is inseparable from epic battles waged in Ireland and Scotland, from the consolidation of a Christian Northumbria by Oswald, from the missionary effort to convert those Pictish kingdoms now lost to history. Adomnán, Columba's eventual successor and composer of his vita, even entertained at the monastery a storm-tossed pilgrim returning from the Holy Land. The Life of Saint Columba is a weirdly heterogeneous text, as likely to narrate a relentlessly local anecdote about a demon dwelling in the bottom of a milk pail or the saint's predicting an imminent spilled inkpot as to provide a sweeping evocation of how this "island at the edge of the ocean" disseminates miracles known beyond "the three corners of Spain and Gaul and Italy beyond the Alps." Iona in the Life is not ultimately much of an island. Even when Columba resides on its rocky shores his spirit wanders, participating in distant martial clashes, communing with angelic visitors, scattering his selfhood across the wide world. The Life of Saint Columba textually performs this sacred fluidity, resolutely refusing linear chronology or recognizable biography. Names and events recur irregularly; sometimes Columba is dead and sometimes he is alive; the action often unfolds in Iona, but sometimes we are in Ireland, or among the Picts, or watching the Loch Ness monster attack. We are constantly transported across marine expanses without transitional signals, taken back to Iona without warning, in movements that draw together distant geotemporalities without synthesizing them into a homogenous whole.

The western Middle Ages as expanse of diverse conceptual isles means existence in intimate, unexpected connection through the swirl of manifold currents, through swiftly changing movements which rapidly commix flows of peoples, goods, ideas, armies, languages, architectures, books, genes, religions, affects, animals, technologies. Scatterings of lands gathered in their mutual relations, gathered with the currents that animate but do not totalize them, a medieval meta-archipelago would lack fixed boundaries and contain multiple centers. European cultures, communities, nations become relational and provisional imaginings rather than ontological, self-possessed wholes. Think, for example, of Custance in Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, inscribing a colonial trajectory at once provincially English and transnationally Christian upon a world that includes Syria, Rome, Northumberland. A meta-archipelago requires that this cosmos be seen not only through that imperial gaze which frames the narrative, but also through the eyes of the Sultaness, the Northumbrians, Custance herself as a woman caught in a gendered game of cultural, religious, mercantile, bodily exchange. David Nirenberg has demonstrated that violence not only established medieval communities of diversity, but was integral to sustaining them (Communities of Violence). As the Man of Law's Tale also indicates, violence plays an important role in the instigation and maintenance of the flows that forcibly bind one conceptual island in the medieval archipelago to another.

Yet, in a kind of decolonization, the meta-archipelago enables the supposed margins of Europe to lose their status as peripheral geographies, so that Wales, Ireland, Brittany, Iceland, the Midi, Catalonia become centers in their own right, dynamic points of reception and dispersal in an open meshwork of transverse, transformative differences. No circumscribing map could capture the proliferating fullness of such islands, for every time the borders of a homogenous Britannia seem to have been securely delineated, another story begins to circulate of some interior, underground civilization where the people speak a long dead language, have green skin, or give other marks of their fairy alterity, of their inassimilable difference to an island that will never achieve its ambition of becoming a well ordered self-same.

These "figures of secret and unknown origin" (as Gervase of Tilbury called them) inhabited the interiors of mountains and ruled submarinal demesnes. Even the skies were populated by alien navigators of inscrutable intent. In the Otia imperiala, Gervase describes how a congregation leaving church beholds an anchor falling from the sky. In the distant clouds sailors can be heard struggling to pull the device back aboard their ship. Soon one of these mariners shimmies down the rope, hand over hand. He is immediately seized by the crowd, struggles for his life, and drowns because the "moistness of our denser air" is intolerable to his ether-adapted lungs. When "our" previously invisible air becomes weighty enough to function as someone else's sea, then "our" skies become the currents by which the medieval archipelago exuberantly connects difference to sameness in unanticipated ways. In mentioning such fantastic peoples living below the earth, under the waters, and in the clouds along with the real denizens of places like Wales and Ireland -- people who were themselves sometimes represented in just such "magical" and dehumanizing ways in order to exaggerate the challenge which they posed to English hegemony -- my intention is not to take any measure of concrete, lived reality away from any denizen of the medieval archipelago but rather, in sympathy with a medieval impulse, to populate its land, seas, and air with as much life as possible, to restore to this world its vastness, its vitalism, its irreducible heterogeneity.

[PS Here is a bit I found on Gervase's story of the enchurched anchor, including a mocking citation of Seamus Heaney's poem on the subject. And here is the citation itself.]

Quote of the Day: Robert Bartlett on Medieval Other Worlds

One of my favorite histories of the English Middle Ages is Robert Bartlett's encyclopedic England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings 1075-1225. The title might lead you to expect the usual "this king did this and then his son did that and then the barons got angry and did this,"but the book is nothing of the sort. In a stunning 772 pages Bartlett manages to cover everything from governance to war to rural society to the arts to the course of life to the cohabitation of humans and animals to the church ... and on and on, in passages that exude as much wit as erudition. My favorite chapter of the book is "Cosmologies," broken into the subsections Time; The World; The Chain of Being; and Beings Neither Angelic, Human or Animal. In that very last section Bartlett surveys the mysterious Other Worlds that the twelfth century imagined cozied up against and erupted at times into our own.

Here are a few snippets from that last section:

Although there was no simple all-embracing formulation that writers of the twelfth century could use to label green children from below the earth, diminutive household spirits, beautiful ladies dancing by night in woodland halls, and other fleeting and uncanny creatures, they were clearly considered to belong together and are not merely a category invented by modern historians and scholars. The evidence is that writers like Ralph of Coggeshall and Gervase of Tilbury group their stories about such beings together ... If such beings thus constituted a class, there was still no agreed explanation of their origin and nature ... The minds of the men and women of England in our period thus ahd room for a variety of beings that did not fit neatly into the orthodox and established trio of man, beast, and (good or bad) angel. There was nothing 'popular' about such beliefs, except in the sense that they were widespread ... Strange breeds and spirits were thus just as much at home with the gentry as the peasantry. Similarly, a learned education did not make one less likely to believe in such beings. The clergy was a s deeply enmeshed as the gentry ... The strange creatures that flitted across the borders of the human and the mundane world were not beyond the bounds of possibility. Below the Essex fields, within the Yorkshire barrows, and beyond the Suffolk shore were creatures who lived an alien life of their own.

I'd only add: I'm not sure that these aliens lived their own lives so much as they lived lives of possibility on behalf of those who dreamed them. Among these possibilities was that of an England that did not have to come into being through violent circumscription, a capacious rather than constrictive space that could be a part of an archipelago rather than a pars pro toto.

La disparition de Richard Taylor

I love the idea of this book. A French novel that unfolds entirely in England, with quotidian English characters who eat mushy peas and pork pies ... but who speak only in French (in fact those two foods are some of the very few English words in the book). Lucy Dallas writes of Arnaud Cathrine's La disparition de Richard Taylor in the TLS

The novel is pitch perfect; the absurdity of these British people speaking in French soon fades away, though perhaps it contributes to the unsettling atmosphere. ("Lost in London" 27 April 2007)

Something about this act of reverse translation and its estranging effect is certainly related to our little thread on wonder ... as it is to thinking about the compelxities of what it means to be English in an England that has ceased to be very English.

I've been ruminating over how contemporary writers in England narrate -- or assume, or critique -- life in the changed nation as my department initiates a new British Writer in Residency program with a transnational Britain focus. Nadeem Aslam will be our first guest, giving me the impetus to read -- finally -- his Maps for Lost Lovers. I suppose the project I was formerly calling Infinite Realms is the medieval symptom of all this.

Infinite Realms and Alternate Worlds

The day will come when I will be ruled ineligible for that endowed chair I have my eye on because my blog posts about office chairs with bungee cords reveal a disagreeable levity. Oh well. All end of the semester giddiness aside, however, here is the draft of one of my Kalamazoo papers, to be delivered in a session on "Wild Spaces in Medieval Romance." Suggestions very welcome. Sections of it have appeared on this blog previously; sections will also be published as part of a collection of essays I am working on.

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Infinite Realms and Alternate Worlds:
Barrows, Portals and Possibility

An alium orbem somniat infinita regna habentem?
[Is he dreaming of another world containing kingdoms without number?]
-- William of Newburgh, History of English Affairs, 1.Prologue

Medieval Welsh and Irish texts offer stories of worlds that exist in strange contiguity to everyday life. The Welsh otherworld of Annwn finds its gateway at a mound where adventurers sit to seek wonders. In the Irish story of Cú Chulainn's love for Fand, queen of the sídhe, the hero enters a parallel universe through a nondescript mound of earth. The Wasting Sickness of Cú Chulainn describes the strange beings who inhabit this subterranean world as other than human, differing in their customs, ancient history, potency in magic. Cú Chulainn is "cured" of his self-destructive love for this Fairy Queen only through the intervention of an oblivion spell: he must forget the riches of her world in order to reinhabit his own. Like many Irish and Welsh narratives involving mounds as portals to fay or demonic realms, The Wasting Sickness of Cú Chulainn seems to carry with it an untold story about the belatedness of a people to the land they possess, figuring the territory's earlier inhabitants as an inhuman race whose traces are dwindling, whose presence lingers as if at a dimming twilight.

My paper today begins at a similar mound, now transported into Yorkshire. The twelfth-century historian William of Newburgh described how as a drunken reveler stumbled home one night, he heard song resound from within a tumulus:

A countryman from this hamlet had gone to meet a friend staying in the next village. He was returning late at night a little drunk, when suddenly from a hillock close by ... he heard voices singing, as though people were feasting in celebration (History of English Affairs 1.28)

William assures us that this hill is quite near his own birthplace, and that he has seen it numerous times. On this particular night a door into the mound has opened [in latere tumuli januam patentem] to reveal a celebration in progress:

He approached and looked inside. Before his eyes was a large, well-lit dwelling crowded with men and women reclining at table as at a formal feast. One of the servants noticed him standing at the door, and offered him a cup.

Not the most polite guest, the man pours the drink from its cup and flees on horseback to his village. The revelers pursue him, eager to regain the stolen goblet, but his horse proves too swift for their feet. The cup is described as mysterious all around: "of unknown material, unusual color, and strange shape" [vasculum materiae incognitae, coloris insoliti, et formae inusitate]. In time the splendid cup is given to King Henry, Anglorum regi, as a gift. The object passes from the king of England to his brother-in-law David of Scotland, thence back to England's Henry II. Though the goblet circulates from the mysterious mound to an ordinary Englishman to a succession of regents (Anglo-Norman to Anglo-Scottish to Anglo-Angevin), its path is determined not by some weighty history behind the object, but via the object's agentless status as mere curiosity. The cup of unknown material and inscrutable origin is thereby transformed from the key to another world to a deracinated souvenir of some vaguely exotic elsewhere. The feast once refused recedes from memory, taking with it the history of that community glimpsed within the still mysterious mound.

What would happen, though, if the Yorkshire drunkard had joined the celebration inside the tumulus rather than stolen its tableware and fled? What would have come to pass had he entered into conversation with the subterranean congregants, if one of these revelers had spoken the tale of who they were and what they honored at their table? Whose history would this mound-dweller narrate?

My guess is that this other story, barely glimpsed by a passing English man and narrated as a wondrous fragment by William of Newburgh, would be very different from the history that William otherwise composes, a history that can discern in this fairy mound only a lost tale rather than a living one. Were the celebrants of the underground feast invited to speak, the narrative they would tell would likely reveal the difference between English literature and British literature.

As the twelfth century came to a close, Wales and Ireland no longer posed so fierce a challenge to English dominion. No prospect of renewed internal strife was evident. Edged by barbarian peoples whose land awaited the impress of civilization, England considered itself not only Britain's cultural center, but Britannia itself. Henry of Huntingdon declared blandly that "this most celebrated of islands" might once have been called Albion, might later have been labeled Britain, but was now simply named England. King Arthur begins the century as a mythic Briton, probably embraced in an attempt to inspire Welsh pride, but by its end has been converted into a superbly English monarch.

Yet the "victory of Englishness" over the diversity of the archipelago to which it belonged came at a price. Claiming that Britain was now, simply and straightforwardly, England ensured that the more recent term would always be haunted by its predecessor. The island was, after all, still inhabited by peoples who did not share with the English an identity, history, or political mythology. England, in other words, could never fully Anglicize itself, let alone the island it shared with Wales and Scotland -- or the history it shared with Romans, Britons, Picts, Danes, the Irish. There would always be an archipelago dwelling within England.

For the most part England responded to this living history in the way that most domineering powers respond in the face of ethical complexities, by ignoring them. Yet histories anxiously relegated to silence frequently prove themselves to be like the undead who haunt the halls and barrows of Icelandic sagas: eerily returning in strange forms, relentlessly demanding that the unfinished business they incarnate be acknowledged. Just as in the sagas, moreover, such revenants entered the present moment with disturbing stories about trauma, memory, and the limits of community.

William of Newburgh was a twelfth century writer who composed in the shadow of a formidable tradition of English history writing. Today William's narrative is cited most frequently for his angry condemnation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain. Geoffrey was essentially the inventor of king Arthur, and thereby an origin of medieval romance. Geoffrey taught the Middle Ages how to dream of fully realized Otherworlds, and though he composed a history, he helped to engender a new genre.

William of Newburgh, however, had little patience for romance or for proto-romantic history. He wrote that "clearly all that Geoffrey has published in his writing about Arthur and Merlin has been invented by liars to feed the curiosity of the ignorant," 1.Prologue). William's assertion that Geoffrey of Monmouth had been "dreaming some other world containing kingdoms without number" (1.Prologue) is, I would argue, intimately connected to William's narration of the alien feast beneath the English mound. Placed at an epistemic edge, the revelers figure a troubling fact that haunts William's unfolding English history: the lingering presence of aboriginal peoples in a Britain over which England has asserted complete dominion. On the one hand the island had by the end of the twelfth century been so long under a process of forced anglicization that English writers no longer bothered to distinguish between Britain and England; on the other the untimely intrusion of pre-English indigenous presence suggests that, even if the Normans became English, not every difference is so tractable. At once fragments of a fading past and a spectacular embodiment of a living people consigned to mere antiquity, the revelers in the tumulus undermine William's usually confident narration of the English nation.

Like most English writers of his day, William was no lover of the Scots, Irish, or Welsh. They are at best barbarians, at worst a feral people who amount to a national threat. The Scots are described as "thirsting for blood against the English people, through savage barbarity" (1.24; cf. 2.32, 2.34). The natives of Ireland are "uncivilized, and barbarous in their manners, almost totally ignorant of laws and order" (2.26). The Welsh are "a restless and barbarous people" (2.5). These last people, William explains, are

the remnant of the Britons, the first inhabitants of this island, now called England, but originally Britain ... when the Britons were being exterminated by the invading nations of the Angles, such as were able to escape fled into Wales ... and there this nation continues to the present day (2.5)

This passage makes it clear why Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain irritated William of Newburgh so much. William knows that the Welsh are the aborigines of the island; he knows that they once held the whole of Britain, and that they would argue strenuously against his declaration that "Britain" had been superseded by "England." William's rhetorical question ("Is he dreaming another world containing kingdoms without number?" 1.Prologue) is supposed to expose the patent ridiculousness of Geoffrey's narration. Yet it also reveals an anxiety that William implicitly voices through his prolonged condemnation of that author: what if Geoffrey is right? What if British history has not been subsumed into and assimilated by English history? What if Arthur resists conversion into an English king? Could it be that the island of Britain, despite the insistence of William and his contemporaries that it has been renamed and thoroughly Anglicized, what if that island remains so capacious that in fact its territories are rife with other worlds, with kingdoms lacking number?

Romance Spaces
English literature, and specifically romance written in English, betrays some cognizance of this possibility. Romance is replete with what by convention are called, resonantly enough, "Other Worlds." These spaces seem at once impossibly distant and unbearably close, intrusions into the quotidian of alternate realities. Through the portal of this wonderful realm beckons a place where the dreary rules that structure mundane existence are exchanged for eruptions of magic, strange transformations, fabulous wealth, landscapes fashioned of desire and dread. Jeff Rider describes romance other worlds as "dream worlds, wish worlds" ("The Other Worlds of Romance" 122), and we can see immediately what such expanses have in common with Geoffrey of Monmouth's kingdoms without number, with his infinite realms.

The action of the Breton lai "Sir Orfeo" is set into motion by such a dreamer of another world, of a realm without boundary that glimpsed in its fearsome allure. Heurodis falls asleep in a grassy orchard beneath an "ympe-tre" ["grafted tree," a living hybrid] and is snatched away by a radiant host. She beholds a "king o fairy" (283) who wears a crown "nas of silver, no of gold red / Ac it was of a precious ston"(15051) – no doubt William of Newburgh would have described the headpiece as of "unknown material, unusual color, and strange shape." This knightly incarnation of an Other world shows her sights of tremendous beauty, then announces that she must join him forever – not just in spirit, but in body, or that body will torn to fragments.

Though time prevents my analyzing this text at any length, let me offer a few observations. The fairy realm to which Heurodis is abducted is accessed by passing through a rock ("In at a roche the levidis rideth" 347), making it similar to the subterranean worlds envisioned by William of Newburgh, Gerald of Wales (Elidur's kingdom of tiny men), Marie de France (Yonec), as well as those Irish and Welsh mound-portals I mentioned at the beginning of my paper. There seems something quite British (that is, Welsh) about this Otherworld, since it seems to exist in strange contiguity to the England from which Heurodis is abducted. Anglocentric writers like William of Newburgh likewise imagined Wales to be, like all backwards countries as beheld through imperial eyes, locked in an unchanging time. Here bodies injured in war continue to bleed; those who have died are locked perpetually in the agony of their perishing; everyday life yields neither goal nor progress (e.g. when the Fairy King and his retinue go to hunt, they do not seem to pursue any animal, but simply make their mysterious way through the woods). "Sir Orfeo," it should be stressed, is – for all of its 605 lines of fast moving verse – one of the most ambitious colonial projects every launched in English literature, transforming the realm of classical myth into an English world (Orpheus is thus "king / In Inglond" [39-40]; his father and mother are Pluto and Juno; Winchester is shockingly declared the English name for Thrace). Yet perhaps the greatest violence that "Sir Orfeo" does to Britain is to vanish it entirely: like all examples from this quite English genre of writing, this lai claims origin not on the island but in Briatin's near homonym, Brittany (Breteyne), making it seem (as Marie de France does) that the story comes from a direct line of communication between England and an exotic elsewhere across the channel – dooming proximate Wales and a potentially multicultural Britain to oblivious silence.

Chaucer performs a similar set of maneuvers, though perhaps with more subtlety than the author of "Sir Orfeo." Internationally minded and far from jingoistic, Chaucer's works range geographically from Africa to Italy to the Mongol Empire, from heaven (Troilus and Criseyde) all the way to hell ('Friar's Tale'). Yet nearby Wales, Scotland and Ireland are almost entirely absent.

As an adolescent Chaucer was attached to the household of Prince Lionel, second in line for the English crown. As Count of Ulster, Lionel had inherited about half of Ireland through marriage. During his stay on the island in 1366, Lionel presided over a parliament in Kilkenny that issued a statute forbidding English settlers from adopting Irish language, customs, or dress (that is, forbade English assimilation). Even if he never set foot in Ireland, Chaucer was certainly aware throughout his life of the ongoing project of subjugating its population, partly through the promulgation of the very language in which he was composing poetry. Chaucer would also have been well aware of the colonial history of England in Wales, the site of sporadic but intense resistance long after its official conquest had ended in the previous century. He would have been frequently reminded of the fluctuating enmity and alliances that English nobles forged with Scotland, especially because his patron John of Gaunt became so embroiled in Scottish politics.

Chaucer's only avowedly "Celtic" narrative, the Breton lai told by the Franklin, completely ignores the non-English inhabitants with whom the writer shares the island by unfolding in Brittany rather than in nearby Wales. The setting seems especially perverse given that the names of the protagonists (Aurelius, Arveragus, and perhaps Dorigen) are taken from Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, a profoundly influential text that provided the island a rich, pre-English history – and a text that was central to contemporary Welsh nationalism. Like all the Canterbury tales set abroad, moreover, the "speech and customs are thoroughly anglicized," as if the Bretons were Londoners and all the world were England (John Bowers). When the knight Arveragus travels abroad to hone his chivalry, he goes to 'Engelond, that cleped was eek Briteyne' (810), silently granting as ancient fact an equivalence for which only England would argue.

Chaucer's single Arthurian narrative, the 'Wife of Bath's Tale,' implies that this genre so intimately tied to Welsh nationalism is quaint and outdated, as insubstantial as the disappearing elves and fairies that populate its prologue:

In th'olde dayes of the Kyng Arthour,
Of which that Britons speken greet honour,
Al was this land fulfild of fayerye.
The elf-queene, with hir joly compaignye,
Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede. (857-61)

The Britons (i.e. the Welsh) are aligned with the 'olde dayes' of the island (863). The "grene mede" is Chaucer's flattened version of the fairy mound we saw earlier in Ireland and Wales. It is the same mound inside which William of Newburgh's English observer witnessed a feast being celebrated and declined to participate, stealing from its riches but failing to comprehend the history and community behind the artifact.

Likewise, sadly, for Chaucer. "I speke of manye hundred yeres ago," the Wife of Bath declares as she gives her Arthurian romance its temporal setting. "But now kan no man se none elves mo" (863-64): Nowdays no one sees elves any more.