I've just submitted this for a new collection on historicism in medieval studies. Since I've yet to write a word of the actual essay, I'm wondering: suggestions? bibliography? blind spots?
Time out of Memory: The Medieval Prehistoric
This essay examines how material objects that predate the known historical record were fitted into medieval British cultures and histories, and how the time before history was imagined in medieval historiography. The analysis will focus upon two objects that might seem capable of offering nothing but mute testimony, but which in fact speak quite eloquently: the fossil of an ichthyosaurus worked into the porch floor of the Norman church of St John the Baptist in Tredington; and Stonehenge, especially as embedded by Geoffrey of Monmouth into his History of the Kings of Britain. Both instances, I argue, do not petrify their objects into some unchanging historical moment, but encounter the alien materiality of the past in a way that gives new life to what might otherwise seem an inert materiality. I then look at the prehistory of Britain as imagined by Bede, Geoffrey, and Gerald of Wales, arguing just the opposite: that in all three authors we see an impulse to fossilize the past in order to stabilize the present. Using recent work on materiality and temporality by Rita Felensky, Gil Harris, and Manuel de Landis, I will then emphasize the inassimilable residue that such medieval historicization leaves behind, and the other stories that might be told from these histories' gaps.
