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.

An Eccentric Theory about the Franklin's Tale

by J J Cohen

So I'm presenting this paper at NCS in Swansea -- where, according to the weather gadget in my iPhone, it has been 55 degrees and raining since May.

Offered in a session on "The Politics of Memory," my presentation's point of departure is a favorite book of mine, the anthropologist Richard Price's The Convict and the Colonel: A Story of Colonialism and Resistance in the Caribbean. Combining the personal with the archival, interviews with text, the present with the past, narrative with images, the book is a lucid -- and for me, absolutely entrancing -- examination of how a contemporary way of life can be distanced into a living past.
Through processes he calls variously postcarding, museumfication, patrimonialization, and folklorization, Price maps how Martinique's "traditional culture" was frozen into revered objects and texts, thereby estranging that culture from those who actually live it, invent with it, change it. Fascinated by Martinique since his first visited the island in 1962, and a part-year resident who lived through many of the changes he describes, Price has created a métissage of a book that performs the vitality he seeks to unearth (he speaks of collective, "subterranean" memories at 172; cf. 60) beneath official versions of the past: versions of history in which colonial struggle and atrocities like slavery are forgotten, vanish as lives that bear their traces are stilled into museum displays -- a transformation into uninhabited, uninhabitable spaces that denies the possibility of coevalness, continuity and endurance.

The Convict and the Colonel focuses on Médard Aribot, an artist who in 1925 participated in collective resistance against France's heavy-handed, ongoing colonialism and was exiled to Devil's Island as a result. Médard's father was African, and he grew up on an island where slavery (reinstituted by Napoleon) was "a living and vivid memory" (61). After his return to Martinique, Médard built a colorful house, a "gingerbreaded jewel of bricolage" where he dwelled for some time, but that fell eventually into ruin. Fifty years later, when Price was living on the island, the power of Médard's story "seemed tangible to rural Martiniquans," since the world they inhabited was still "hemmed in by sufficiently palpable (post)colonial structures" for them to feel that his struggle remained their own (172). Passing the site of the crumbled dwelling reminded local people of that important moment of resistance, especially as France was then transforming the island "from a producer economy to a heavily assisted welfare-based consumer economy" (xiii), prelude to its eventual fate as engine of a tourism machine. In 1987, the dilapidated structure was renovated to render its freshly painted walls and newly paved walkways a picturesque roadside attraction. Dubbed "The House of the Convict," no special history was attached to the rebuilt structure beyond its status as an object incarnating an earlier, more pastoral way of life -- vague emblem of lost days. Postcards with the seabound boulder known as Diamond Rock looming behind the empty dwelling began to circulate: the house, evacuated of its anticolonial history, was as lovely to gaze upon as the local flora surrounding its quaint architectural flourishes, the azure sea stretching behind. The house became, like the dark monolith and the blue water that formed its backdrop, an image without a past.

Price is interested in what happens to people who find themselves deprived through such aestheticization of their own past, a history obliterated into "official folklore" (173). What present is left open to the Martiniquans who find their lives estranged from a contemporaneity defined as modern and French? What is lost to this demand to assimilate culturally, linguistically, cognitively? What happens when local history is absorbed into an "amorphous, atemporal period of 'before'"(xi) in order to allow this transformation to proceed unquestioned? What future remains after a people's lived time is materialized as artifacts or as an archive that can be consumed by others rather than "actively produced" (183) within an ongoing present, when "everyday lives are turned into folklore before their very eyes"(186)? Is it possible to outlive your own modernity, and who gains through this temporal displacement?

This overview is, I realize, a long preamble of a tale. Yet I believe it directly relevant to how medieval English authors, including Chaucer, treated Wales and the Welsh. Here were a people sharing an island with the English, sharing a history and a contemporaneity. Yet English writers were content to employ "England" as a synonym for "Britain," a pars pro toto that from vantage points sufficiently distant from London is as reductive as it is galling. This English synecdochic practice had good precedent, especially from the twelfth-century onwards: Henry of Huntingdon wrote of "the most celebrated of islands, formerly called Albion, later Britain, now England" (Historia Anglorum 1.13), while the poet Wace transformed Geoffrey of Monmouth's regum Britanniae [kings of Britain] into regents ki Engleterre primes tindrent ["who were the first rulers of England," Roman de Brut 4].

Chaucer inhabited a polyglot, culturally restless archipelago, yet the island from which he writes appears in his work as a diminished geography that held diversity mainly in its past. His attenuated vision of Britain reveals an essential component of his Englishness: participation in a long tradition of passing over in silence the vitality and contemporary heterogeneity of the isles, imaging that the only modernity Britain can possess is singular and English.

The Wife of Bath's Tale, his single Arthurian narrative, implies that a hero tied intimately tied to Welsh nationalism is out of date. The regal warrior who in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s seminal narration conquered most of the known world becomes as insubstantial as the elves and fairies who once populated Britain but have since dwindled to their vanishing point. The Britons (that is, the Welsh) are aligned -- like the fairies and elves who become their magical doppelgangers -- with the “olde dayes” of the island, with the stillness of ancient history, with folklore rather than national narrative.

Chaucer's only avowedly "Celtic" narrative is the Franklin's Tale. Like all examples from this very English genre of writing, this “Breton lai” claims origin not on the island of Britain but from its near homonym, Brittany. This small feat of geographical acrobatics, familiar from Marie de France and a whole subgenre of English romances such as Sir Orfeo, makes it seem as if the story arrives from a direct line of communication between England and a mystical place across the channel, dooming nearby Wales and a potentially multicultural Britain to an oblivion of silence.

So, Chaucer ignores the non-English inhabitants with whom he shares his island by placing the action of the Franklin's Tale in Brittany rather than proximate Wales. This displaced 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. With its resplendent envisioning of Arthur, Geoffrey’s History was also central to contemporary Welsh nationalism. Like all the Canterbury tales set abroad, however, the "speech and customs” of the characters in the Franklin’s Tale are (as John Bowers has observed) “thoroughly anglicized," as if the Bretons were Londoners and all the world England. When the knight Arveragus travels abroad to hone his chivalry, he goes to “Engelond, that cleped was eek Briteyne” (810), silently granting as primordial fact an equivalence of island and nation for which only England would argue.

And here is the eccentric -- or, at least, very difficult to prove -- part of my theory. The Franklin's Tale has typically been understood through reference to its primary source, Boccaccio's Filocolo -- as well it should be, since much of the story patently derives from that narrative. Yet the tale announces itself as the work of "old gentil Britouns ... rymeyed in hir firste Briton tonge" (709, 711), a narrative that the Franklin keeps "in remembraunce." I've already indicated that Breton "layes" are not necessarily all that "Celtic," representing more an English attempt at what Richard Price called museumfication, folklorizing, and postcarding -- one that involves playing up the magic of the temporally anterior culture. Such enchantment acknowledges that this world -- as charming and as beautiful and as dangerously alluring as it may shine -- that this nostalgia-tinged and now estranged world is resolutely premodern. Its time is that of the undifferentiated, amorphous, nonhistorical past, a period that has come to its disenchanted terminus, and can now be delectated only as "remembraunce."

The Franklin worries that he cannot add the expected "colours" (723, rhetorical ornamentation) to the Britoun narrative living in his memory, and that his performance will be "bare and pleyn" (720). The story he tells, however, is worse than sparse: it is subtractive, transporting Geoffrey of Monmouth's characters out of their British context completely, and fitting them into an Italian story that is not their own. Yet in a way Geoffrey's story returns, a kind of "subterranean memory" in the tale.

In the picture postcards from Martinique described by Richard Price, Médard's house (colonial history transported, decontextualized, and reinvented as a colorful remnant of forgotten past used to make render the present scenic) is haunted in background by the looming form of vast, dark Diamond Rock. Likewise the Franklin's Breton lai (Geoffrey of Monmouth transported, decontextualized, and reinvented to give a rather English story the patina of enchanted history while denying that past vitality, even meaning) is haunted by vast and looming lithic forms, the "grisly feendly rokkes blake" that so obsess Dorigen, the lai's heroine. Her anxiety, her fear that absolutely transfixes her is that these rocks will dash the happy life she enjoys with her husband Arveragus to pieces, will prevent him from returning from the errantry that brings him to England. "But wolde God that alle thise rokkes blake / Were sonken into helle!" she exclaims (891-2): her wish is that these stones that impinge upon her worried present with stark reminders of violence and death ("An hundred thousand bodyes of mankynde / Han rokkes slayn," 877-8) would sink below her field of vision, could be forgotten.

Thus the clerk Aurelius's hopeless task of making these rocks be swallowed into the oblivious sea ... a task that he performs with a book-derived magic that seems (erupting as it does from a tome-lined study that in many ways seems like Chaucer's own place of writing) like a recipe for composing a Breton lai ("He shewed hym, er he wente to sopeer, / Forestes, parkes ful of wilde deer ..."). This enchantment is easily dismissed for more mundane concerns, like dinner ("he clapte his handes two / And farewel! Al oure revel was ago"). It is also a spellbinding that can easily be disenchanted, since it has such a clear terminus, such a clear boundary ... since in its very application to the vanishing of the rocks it may involve nothing more than consulting a table of tides ("tables Tolletanes ... ful wel corrected").

Yet the rocks that may or may not dematerialize bring something more to the story, I would argue, than is evident at a first glance. Aurelius is, after all, a British king intimately connected in Geoffrey of Monmouth to the transporting to Britain of huge rocks: it is to satisfy this monarch that Merlin moves Stonehenge from Ireland to Salisbury Plain. There the towering circle of stones is supposed to commemorate feternally the victory of the Britons against the invading Saxons. Said to possess curative powers, these rocks do not destroy life, but give to those who have perished in battle an enduring and living memory. They materialize in the present an anticolonial history, while bringing into that present other stories (tales of giants and Africa and Ireland). How interesting, then, to find Geoffrey's chorea gigantum, Stonehenge, transformed into "grisly rokkes blake" limning the coast of Brittany, menacing the romantic dreams of a Chaucerian heroine, a perturbing backdrop to what should have been a pleasantly English tale.

Albina Myth: Standard Reading

So in the comments to this post, Karl writes:

As for the Lynch: "not only as a British foundation myth but also as a cautionary tale about the dangers to society of ambitious-and foreign-women who usurp masculine privilege." That's a standard reading of the text (admittedly little read when Lynch did her article, and still not much read)

That standard reading would be, um, mine ... I admit to being the one who gave it to Lynch, albeit at that time it was part of my dissertation. I think it was also the first time I made it into someone's footnote for something I said.

Anyway, I thought just for fun I'd cut and paste the standard reading here. It's from the second chapter of my book Of Giants. Read Karl's post first ... then, (as Slavoj Zizek would say) Enjoy!


--------------------
The Albina myth conjoins the rapinous tradition of biblical giants with Geoffrey [of Monmouth]'s secular version and produces a smaller product through the combination, a history with familial interests behind its nationalistic gestures. The spirits who copulate with Albina and her sisters in [the Anglo-Norman account of the founding of Britain] Des grantz geanz are called incubi, malfez, and deables; their offspring are consequently horrifying to behold (a regarder hidous) and abnormally large. Incubi in medieval myth are, like giants, always male. They have no material body of their own, but are nonetheless able to implant an organism (organization of being) within the bodies of the women they violate, causing the birth of a monster. Sexual mother, rapinous incubus, and infant monster are the vertices of an unholy family triangle which obscenely contrasts with the model medieval family of Virgin Mother, sexless Holy Spirit, and sinless divine Son. The Holy Family remains an incorporeal ideal by wholly eliminating sexuality and the body from its narrative of origins, but this second familial triangle violently reinscribes flesh and sex into bodily generation.

The Albina myth translates into monstrous form two conceptualizations of the biological origin of human life as medical science understood it in the Middle Ages. For medieval theorists of the body who followed Aristotle, the mother contributes formless bodily matter (materia) to the child, while the man imposes with his seed (semen) a structure that organizes this inert substance into a sexed and gendered being. The Aristotelian model is obviously another version of Brutus' mythology of nation-building: the woman is the elemental matter from which offspring are produced, just as the land is the raw materia of nation. The influential treatises of the physician Galen, on the other hand, argued that both men and women contribute seed (and therefore structure) to their progeny. The Galenic conceptualization of reproduction corresponds to the rejected model of origin which Albina represents. She and her sisters contribute as much to their progeny as their sexual partners. The conjoining of incubus and errant woman results in a new body that mixes the nature of both, the repudiating monstrum. This monstrous family invokes the domestic triangle of father, mother, and child to illustrate what happens when a body strays from its properly subordinate place in the regulative trigonometry of the idealized medieval household. Albina oversteps her (cultural, biological) place as submissive wife, and disaster ensues. Brutus must intervene and overwrite Galenic equality with Aristotelian masculinism: feminine bodies become as passive in the generation of progeny as they must be in the articulation of familia.

Geoffrey's Historia brought a fragmented political field into widespread coherence through an ideologically cohesive master-signifier: Britain/England, the "Nation-Thing" as sublime object of ideological identification. Circulated almost two hundred years later, long after that cultural unity has been achieved, the Albina myth extends the same ideological intervention to a basic identity relationship by which the larger imagined community writes itself in parvo. Albina and her sisters refused their subject-positions in marriage and attempted to erect a structure for human relationships in which femininity and the maternal were not dominated by or absorbed into masculine mastery. The sisters strove in Greece to bring about a world in which their agency would be absolute, where "none of them would be willing to have a master, nor be placed under anyone's duress, but always be mistress of her husband and of whatever he owned [mestresce de sun seignur e quant q'il out]" (58-61). Albina would destroy a culture which depends for its continuance on the replicative reinscription of the family, the miniature version of the patriarchal state.

After retelling the Albina story, John Hardyng wrote that "women desyre of al thynges soveraynte, and to my concept, more in this land than any other, for they have it of the nature of the said sisters." He could easily be quoting Chaucer's antimatrimonial nightmare, the Wife of Bath. The tale which the Wife tells begins, significantly, with incubi and threats of rape. Its hero is a knight who, in punishment for having casually violated a maiden, is compelled to discover what thing women most desire, and determines that "wommen desiren to have sovereyntee" (III 1038). This prideful desire for mastery in marriage motivates the Wife of Bath herself. Her prologue to her tale chronicles long fights to gain absolute dominance over a succession of five husbands, whom she consecutively reduces to subordination. The Wife of Bath inhabits that same male fantasy space from which Albina derives, so that she can be invoked by Chaucer in the "Lenvoy a Bukton" as a monstrous warning of the woe that is in marriage. Both Albina and Alisoun of Bath teach husbands that governance in marriage is as authoritarian and severe as the autocratic governance of the state. Rather than argue that this aggressive dominance comes naturally to men, or that submissiveness is an affect of the feminine body, the Albina myth naturalizes the occurrence of both by showing how, through "historical necessity," such an ordering of gendered relations came to be established. The myth constructs aggressively constricted roles for husbands at the same time as it illustrates through negative exemplum the properly domestic boundaries of the ideal wife.

Nature, Culture, and Language

This not owning of one's words is there from the start, however, since speaking is always in some ways the speaking of a stranger through and as oneself, the melancholic reiteration of a language that one never chose.
-- Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter 242

In translating into English Wace's French translation of Geoffrey's Latin Historia, Robert Mannyng of Brunne was forced to admit that he was uncertain about the existence of giants. As he describes the monsters who await the arrival of Brutus in England, Mannyng observes that: "Geant is more than man / so says the boke, for I ne kan" ("A giant is bigger than a man -- so says the book, but I don't know," The Chronicle 1751-52). They are "like men ... in flesch & bone," he asserts, even if "in my tyme, I saw neuer non" (1753-54). Mannyng's understated incredulity is endearing, but at the same time as he casts some doubt about the existence of the monsters, he is happy to pass along official information about them to his readers. Most of all, he states, giants are characterized by their similitude: they present an exact if inflated replica of a the masculine body (1755-56), a perfect simulacrum.

"Man" is used as if it were a universal category throughout Middle English writing, but in Mannyng's description of the giant it retains its gendered specificty. His "membris" and "lymes" mark the giant as man-like, but also as male -- as the description of Gogmagog and his monstrous crew which follows next in the Chronicle makes clear. The giant as the magnified, insistently physical masculine corpus is Geoffrey of Monmouth's contribution to medieval gigantology, and although Mannyng might undercut the possibility that giants existed, he does not doubt their sex. Whereas Galfridian tradition chronicles only male giants battling for supremacy against male foes, however, the Anglo-Norman Albina myth repeatedly inserts feminine and maternal bodies, even after Albina and her sisters have vanished into biological function. Invoking the giants' primal associations with sexual violation, the narrative details their race's continuance by linking its monstrous life to the transgression of what Claude Lévi-Strauss has called the first patriarchal law, the incest prohibition. The male first generation of giants begets children upon their own mothers. A cycle of historical repetition through incest is then set into motion, in which "filz et filles" (sons and daughters) engender more monsters "par grant outrage" -- sometimes on their mothers, sometimes on each other (434-36). The offspring of these unions likewise grow large, becoming a people "of immense body" (438-40). Until the arrival of Brutus, Albion exists as a hideously closed world of continuous sexual confusion which re-enacts, relentlessly, the failure of the first family triangle established in the narrative. Signification and sexuation are conjoined in their monstrous impropriety.

Maud Ellmann has observed that "Kinship laws, which govern the system of combinations in mating, correspond to linguistic laws governing the combinations of words in a sentence or letters in a word." The antifamilial, antimatrimonial system which the women established is doubly incestuous, somatically and linguistically. Its monstrousness inheres in its "bad grammar" that at first will not culturally differentiate wives from husbands, and then cannot separate mothers from children, brothers from sisters: "For without kinship nominations, no power is capable of instituting the order of preferences and taboos that bind and weave the yarn of lineage through succeeding generations." Albina does in fact establish that order of human relations which she sought to materialize through a usurped speech act, only to learn that she is excluded by the language she invokes, that its power will monstrously transform her feminine body as it flings her back to the passive materiality from which she fled. Albion under Albina devolves into a realm of pure, undifferentiated nature. It awaits the imprint of a new, masculine language to materialize an order, to precipitate culture through some foundational prohibition, through some heroic fiat.

The organization of bodies into culture through the instigation of a kinship system is very like the ordering of the phenomenological world into reality which language accomplishes, or of the past into history which narrativization executes. All three of these performances are strongly gendered acts. Yet they do not receive their gendering prior to their effects upon reality; rather, "gender" is produced through the very fantasies in which these systems ground themselves, and through the continued repetition of their "foundational" gestures. In order to assert male dominance within these structures, originary myths are invented which authorize an oppressive present through anchorage in a similar past. Lévi-Strauss bequeathed such a myth to anthropology when he wrote the Elementary Structures of Kinship, a work which equates "raw" nature with feminine bodies, and the legitimizing power of culture with the founding fathers who invent the incest prohibition (i.e., Law itself) and therefore also invent gender. According to Lévi-Strauss, "man's sexual life" (the gender of the noun is important) is originally wild, "natural" (12). The incest prohibition, synonymous with the institution of a law which generates family relations, organizes this formless sexuality into a culturally legible norm; it allows the exchange of women between men, which in turn generates endogamy and exogamy, which in turn transform nature into culture (because an "absence of rules seems to provide the surest criterion for distinguishing a natural from a cultural process," 8). Culture here is the same as kinship systems; culture arrives at the same time as "relationless" bodies are hierarchized into families.

Lévi-Strauss writes in an Aristotelian vein. Men invent the laws regulating sexuality which distinguish the human from the animal; women are passively invested with the meaning by these laws as their bodies trace paths of affiliation between the men who exchange them. Lacan reiterated this originary myth when he used Lévi-Strauss as his own foundation for a semiotics-inflected psychoanalysis: "The primordial Law is therefore that which in regulating marriage ties superimposes the kingdom of culture on that of nature abandoned to the law of mating ... This law, then, is revealed clearly enough as identical with an order of language" ("Function and field of speech and language," Écrits 66). The Albina myth is an early version of the same kind of originary narrative. It allows a masculinist logic to equate nature with femininity (a "mystery," because it is prelinguistic, and therefore also excessively corporeal), and culture and language with men (fully knowable, because they invent speech, and speech orders the world). The Albina myth, Lévi-Strauss' incest fantasy, Lacan's dream of a wholly phallogocentric language are all moments in a long history by which the masculine gender is erected as a universal, and women are allied with the abjected, the marginal, the monstrous. If the world and the linguistic structures used to understand it inevitably and eternally took their origins in this way, men and women alike would be right to heed Luce Irigaray, and despair of ever using language to construct a nonexclusive reality for all bodies, regardless of anatomy. Fortunately, the Albina myth suggests a different fate for masculinist originary fantasies: a change in the structure of linguistic and cultural signification via some historical rupture which reconfigures the "master-signifiers," resigning old myths to the quiet loneliness of the archive, where they can teach but cease to harm. No system of human meaning is ever complete, invulnerable, and impervious to history.

Like many medieval writers, Alain de Lille imagined in his "handbook" (enchiridion) on the laws of nature that the power of language over material reality, including sexuality, is absolute. A telling scene of De planctu naturae (The Complaint of Nature, c.1165) describes Genius at his writing table:

In his right hand he held a pen, close kin of the fragile papyrus, which never rested in its task of inscription. In his left hand he held the pelt of a dead animal, shorn clear of its fur of hair by the razor's bite. On this, with the help of his obedient pen, he endowed, with the life of their species, images of things that kept changing from the shadowy outline of a picture to the realism of their actual being. As these were laid to rest in the annihilation of death, he called others to life in a new birth and beginning.

The (masculine) stylus, perfect vehicle of an unfailing language, inscribes the world upon the stilled surface of the vellum -- once a living body, now passive materia. Likewise, the Anglo-Norman version of the Albina myth imagines an unchanging masculine order of pure language through which human and historical identity are solidified. Divorced from its own materiality, the male body becomes as impossibly airy, disembodied, and indestructible as a language that exists outside of time and change; the male body becomes synonymous with the frozen verba et grammatica that inscribe meaning upon the body of the world, as well as upon bodies in the world. Albina's naming of the land linguistically parallels Brutus' expressed desire for geographical immortality, his fathering of a country and a people through a name:

Albine est mon propre noun,
Dunt serra nomé Albion;
Par unt de nous en ceo pais
Rembrance serra tutdis. (ll.347-50)

Because my name is Albina, this land shall be called Albion; by this our eternal memory shall live in this country.

Compare the same scene written in the masculine gender in the Historia:

Denique Brutus de nomine suo insulam Britoniam appellat sociosque suos Britones. Uolebat enim ex diruatione nominis memoriam habere perpetuam. (13-14)

Brutus called the land Britain after himself. His intention was that his memory be made eternal through the derivation of the name.

Albina invokes the reifying power of language, as if she were a hypermasculine Trojan hero, not a monstrously transgressive Greek woman. She "repeats" in the past the same linguistic ritual which will render Brutus the generative parent of Britain. Fathering a nation (and its substructure and support, the family) is metaphorically possible without recourse to female agency; indeed, both rely upon female passivity, on the provision of a "natural state" or formless materiality on which to impose structuration. Albina's linguistic ordering of reality yields only monstrous forms: bodies which are at once male and female and incestuous, bodies that do not know their proper cultural place because they pre-exist the masculine "invention" of place. Brutus is able to repeat the same words and, by reference to a linguistic authority his by dint of the subject-position from which he articulates his words, he produces a nationalistic matrix for the proper gendering of identities, a model for male dominance.
In Brutonian history, both the monsters and the feminine body vanish at this moment of origin, evacuated of meaning "in their own right" and installed into the progress narrative of history. Like those monumental statues in Guildhall, they commemorate a monstrous past which exists only to envalue an architecture of power in the present. This haunting presence-in-death is foregrounded by giving the giants an archeological reality. The monsters are visible now not only as huge petrified bones qe hom puet trover / En mult des leus de la terre ("which a man can find in many places across the land," 443-56), but as earthworks and ruins. The narrative stresses that these remnants are, like Gogmagog's Leap in Geoffrey's Historia, still a part of the landscape of England. Past and present intersect and filiate. Brutus slaughters the giants upon his arrival in Britain, but he spares Gogmagog. This giant tells him the very tale which Des grantz geanz itself relates: the creation and lineage of the giants, how they came into the land, and why Britain should once have been called Albion. Brutus responds by ordering the story memorialized "so that others afterwards might know the marvel of this story," 543-4. Appropriately enough, historical narrativization is performed through the mouth of a monster.

Medieval England is far from alone in imagining that its land was once ruled by a primordial matriarchy. The Albina myth partakes of a long tradition of fantasies of female sovereignty. One manuscript of Guiron le Courtois, a French grail quest romance which opens with a survey of English history, compares the Greek sisters directly to the archetypal gynecocracy of the West, the Amazons. Since the publication of Jacob Bachofen's Das Mutterrecht in 1861, many scholars have seen in the pervasive literary imaginings of primal matriarchies like the Amazons an encoding of historical fact. Other critics have pointed out that these myths of female rule function instead to justify the subjugation of women "by providing a purportedly historical account of how this reality came about." Such times and places in the Western imagination are primarily the creations of men, who imagine these inversions in order to validate their own dominant position. According to the classical myth, Theseus invades the Amazonian mutterland, and the rebuked matriarchs are transformed into properly subordinated wives. Similarly, Brutus and his men purge the land of its subhuman citizens in order to rewrite the wrongdoing of the Greek sisters. Along the way, they also establish a double sovereyntee: for the management of the nation, and for the management of the family. In both, the feminine body is conjoined with the monster, to vanish in a foundational act.

The story of Albina's colonization of England was wildly popular. Manuscript evidence suggests that the narrative was originally composed in Anglo-Norman, then quickly translated into English and then Latin. As Carley and Crick point out, vernacular texts were rarely rendered into Latin in the Middle Ages, so that "when it did occur, it represented an elevation of the text, its enshrinement in linguistic authority." This translation into the language of Geoffrey's Historia Regum Britanniae also marks an elevation into history: from the early fourteenth century to the last surviving days of the giants in Guildhall, the maternal body and the monstrous with which it is intimately connected receive a foundational, structural positioning within the identity of the English historia. Albina and Gogmagog become mother and son.

Geoffrey of Monmouth, Race, and Women

Yesterday in my Myths of Britain class I taught the segment of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain that begins with the birth of Brutus and ends with the discovery of demon-born Merlin -- quite a chunk. We take a special interest in this course in those whose stories are alluded to but not fully narrated within the larger histories that feature them: Beowulf through the eyes of Grendel, or his mom, or Wealtheow, or Hondscio. With Geoffrey we spoke about his interest in some strong female characters.

Below is a section of my book Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain relevant to the topic. It was fun to revisit the subject with eighty interlocutors.

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(parts of this have appeared at ITM previously. Please see the book version for proper footnotes and references)
No matter what else the text might be, the History of the Kings of Britain is a foundation myth. As the twelfth-century Welsh who found in its narrative the promise of glory to come would attest, the History gives solidity and continuity to a dispersed people. It could legitimate the promulgation of a communal identity based upon shared history. By projecting a Norman mode of kingship and conquest into the past, it also implicitly buttresses the Norman conquest, and reinforces the distinctiveness of both the Normans and the Britons from the English. Perhaps this desire to keep the insular peoples distinct explains why the text recurrently envalues purity of blood.

When a womanless band of Picts arrive from Scythia and ask the Britons for wives, they firmly refuse to intermarry with such an inferior race (4.17). Once the fiercely expansionist leader Maximianus subdues Gaul, he imports a population of Britons for the area. Conanus Meriadocus, left in charge of this "second Britain," strives "to prevent any mixture of blood" between colonists and indigenes. Conanus therefore has seventy-one thousand women imported from the homeland (5.15). The misplaced passion of Brennius for a Danish princess almost causes Britain's ruin (3.2). Part of the great evil of Vortigern, the tyrant who improvidently invites the Saxons into Britain as mercenaries, is his refusal to respect the separation of peoples. He allows "pagans to mingle with the local population" (8.2), degenerating his kingdom to the point at which "no one could tell who was a pagan and who was a Christian, for the pagans were associating with [British] daughters and female relations" (6.13). Vortigern himself marries Renwein, daughter of the Saxon leader Hengest (6.12). Vortimer, Vortigern's pure-blooded son by a previous wife, rises against his father in an attempt to take Britain back for the Britons; he is poisoned by his treacherous stepmother (6.14). Perhaps a certain magical pool described to a wide-eyed Arthur says it all. Naturally fashioned in the shape of a perfect square, the pool harbors four types of fish, and "the fish of any one corner were never found in any of the others" (9.7). Substitute Britons, Picts, Scots and Saxons for the allegorical fish and Britain suddenly becomes perfectly unmixed, impossibly pure.

Square pools do not exist in nature, nor do fish self-segregate; that is why the pool is a marvel. In Geoffrey's British history, despite the fact that the purity of collective identities is so often declared paramount, peoples nonetheless intermingle. Just like the Norman-English and Norman-Welsh unions of Geoffrey's day, these couplings produce children who carry in their blood a compound heritage. At first glance, it seems that such mixed blood progeny cannot fare well. Assaracus, son of a Trojan mother and Greek father, agrees to help the exiled Brutus because of his anger at having been disinherited by a brother of undiluted blood. Brutus is happy to employ the man so long as he is useful, but the Trojan's subsequent talk of preserving the "purity of noble blood" suggests what he really thinks of his mongrel ally (1.4). Habren, the daughter of king Locrinus by a German concubine, is hurled into a river by his angry wife (2.5). Bassianus, the son of a Roman puppet ruler through a British woman, finds himself raised to the insular throne because his people prefer him over his brother of pure Roman descent (5.2). His reign is quite short, however, because a man named Carausius, humbly born but of untainted British ancestry, rallies the Britons to "massacre the Romans and wipe them out of existence and so free the whole island of that foreign race." The half-blood Bassianus soon lies dead on the battlefield (5.3).

Yet Constantine, the son of a Roman named Constantius and the Briton Helen, becomes not only the king of the whole island but emperor of Rome, "overlord of the whole world" (5.8). The founding father of the Britons, Brutus himself, takes the Greek princess Ignoge for his wife, mixing his genealogical line with that of an inveterate enemy. It could perhaps be argued that only the race of the father counts in a patriarchal society, overwriting or overcoding the blood of the mother. Such a model seems almost Aristotelian. The mother contributes inert matter to the child, the father gives identity and life. Thus Earl Morcar, an English rebel against the Conqueror, had a sister named Ealdgyth. She bore a daughter to her first husband, Gruffudd ap Llewelyn, upon whom was bestowed the resonantly Welsh name of Nest. Ealdgyth also had a son by her second spouse, King Harold II of England. This Ulf carried an Anglo-Scandinavian appellation that well embodied his royal father 's own heritage. In both cases the descent of the father determines the child's name. Perhaps, then, the children of Brutus are just as Trojan, and therefore just as British, as he.

Yet carrying the blood of two peoples in the History of the Kings of Britain seldom allows a singular or stable identity to be embraced, or for a dual ancestry to be forgotten. Despite the bias in favor of the separateness of the insular peoples throughout the History, in the actual unfolding of historical events Geoffrey demonstrates the impossibility – and sometimes even the sheer destructiveness – of rejecting out of hand hybridity and difficult middles. Attempts to maintain purity of blood invariably fail. Contrary to the British prohibition against taking their women as wives, the Picts do just that, "intermarrying more and more with the Britons" (5.3). These marriages are enabled by Carausius, the pure-blooded Briton who rallied his people to commit genocide against the Romans to keep the island free of foreigners. The intermingling of Saxons with Britons enabled by Vortigern cannot simply be undone, for in the wake of widespread intermarriage pagans and the Christians become indistinguishable (6.13). The desire of Conanus Meriadocus to prevent his soldiers from mixing with the Gauls spectacularly backfires when he sends to Britain for suitable wives. Of the 71,000 women shipped across the channel to meet his demand, the luckiest drown when their ships founder. The remainder is blown so far off course that randy barbarians either slay or enslave them (5.16). Conanus Meriadocus and his men, we must assume, were forced to take their brides from Gaul after all. Even Cadwallo, Geoffrey's reinvented and newly heroic leader of the Britons against the treacherous Saxons, is said to take a sister of Peanda of Mercia as his wife. Their son, Cadwallader, presides over the final loss of British hegemony on the island.

As Peggy McCracken has written in her penetrating analysis of the role of women's blood in medieval literature, descent might be claimed from the father, but the mother's contribution to her offspring's identity can never be completely effaced. Blood, especially when it comes from a woman, tends to be multivalent. A similar observation might be advanced more generally about women's roles in twelfth century historiography, especially in their relation to collective identity. Although from time to time a powerful female figure will emerge (Hild, Æthelflæd, Cordelia), the chronicles of the past written at this time are for the most part accounts of the deeds of men. Geoffrey is no exception, imagining a vigorously martial world in which most of the great leaders are male. Women are seldom eligible to have their stories told. There are, of course, vivid exceptions: Gwendolen, Estrildis, Cordelia, Tonuuenna, Genvissa, Judon, Renwein, Ygerna, Guenevere, Helena. Even women not given a name by the text can sometimes have moving stories narrated about them. Take, for example, the 71,000 women assembled in London to provide wives for the Britons in Gaul. They do not know that they are doomed to perish at sea, be slaughtered by enemies, or become slaves, yet few want to abandon home and family for unknown shores. "They all had their personal wishes in the matter" Geoffrey observes (5.16). When it is acknowledged that the desires of these women are not consonant with maintaining the purity of the Briton bloodline, we realize that the community being built with them is predicated upon a coercive harmonization.

No woman's story in Geoffrey's text resonates more lastingly than that of Ignoge, the Greek princess forced to become bride to Brutus. Geoffrey of Monmouth ordinarily composes his narrative with sangfroid: little human feeling animates its accounts of battles, wonders, political intrigue, strife. He is not given to moments of aching identification such as William of Malmesbury's wrenching account of the sinking of the White Ship (Deeds 5.419). Ignoge has little presence in Geoffrey's text, but as she sets sail with a husband she never chose for a future that is wholly uncertain, we are given a lingering depiction of her last vision of her native land. The episode is at once so evocative and so moving that, as Robert Hanning observes, it "interrupts the flow" of the narrative, so that "for a moment the issues of national birth and freedom are forgotten; history itself is forgotten." Here is Geoffrey's vivid portrayal of the fading shores of home as glimpsed through bereft Ignoge's eyes:

The Trojans sailed away ... Ignoge stood on the high poop and from time to time fell fainting in the arms of Brutus. She wept and sobbed at being forced to leave her relations and her homeland; and as long as the shore lay there before her eyes, she would not turn her gaze away from it. Brutus soothed and caressed her, putting his arms round her and kissing her gently. He did not cease his efforts until, worn out with crying, she fell asleep (1.11)

As Ignoge's home slowly recedes, lost are the possibilities for any life she might have desired for herself, for any history she might have dreamed. Destined to become an appendage of Brutus, the source of his progeny, we next see Ignoge in what appears to be an afterthought, legitimating the birth of three sons (2.1). She is not mentioned again. Her children divide the land and carry on their father's work. It never occurs to them that in their bodies the blood of Troy mingles with that of Greece, that they possess hybrid blood in which two enemies have uneasily been conjoined. The sons of Brutus assume that they are simply Britons, as their father christened his people. They never dwell upon the complexities of history and descent.

Ignoge's gaze opens up the possibility of another story. An alien among strangers, suspended between cultures and no longer able to be of one or the other, Ignoge embodies everything her children so easily forget. Yearning for a home that can never be hers, this princess conveyed to an unfamiliar place suggests the difficulties faced by those who carry an identity full of difference, ambivalence, conflict. Ignoge inhabits that middle space where conqueror meets conquered, where a war unfolds between loathing and desire. She looks back to a receding homeland and forward to the impossible bind of mixed progeny on an island increasingly dominated by a single people. Ignoge is Greek, her husband Trojan, her children Britons, but her tears prevent such easy separations.

Geoffrey of Monmouth dreamed of a world where at first glance history and descent keep insular peoples solitary. As his textual world unfolds in all its intricacy, however, the peoples that populate Britain mingle and become -- despite their own fervent belief to the contrary -- impure. Geoffrey's ambivalent entwining of purity with hybridity is rather like William of Malmesbury's. Both writers posited clean separations but undercut them with anxious, medial spaces: one through marvels, the other through blood. The separateness of the island's peoples might be an impossible dream, but that did not stop this dream from being passionately embraced, much to the sorrow of those who carried blood that could never seem untainted. For these impure beings history was filled with heartache, and the present never ceased to hurt.