postmedieval Wins 2011 PROSE Award

Figure 1. cover layout for an issue of postmedieval from your future 

by EILEEN JOY

It's very exciting to share that yesterday, at the annual awards luncheon of the American Publishers Association, held in Washington, DC, that postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies was awarded the 2011 PROSE Award for Best New Journal in the Humanities & Social Sciences. It feels good, especially if we want to believe [and I do] that this award might place a little spotlight on what I think has been true from way before the advent of postmedieval -- that medieval studies as a collective field and set of interrelated disciplines has been developing for a while now some of the most theoretically informed, historically capacious, socially committed, and creatively adventurous work within the humanities.

At the risk of sounding corny, it takes a village to raise a journal. There have been several reviews lately of the journal's overall project and its inaugural issue in particular ["When Did We Become Post/human?" edited by myself and Craig Dionne], appearing in Medieval Feminist Forum, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, The Medieval Review [TMR], and elsewhere, and these reviews have said some really positive things while also offering some really good constructive criticisms and cautions that the editors have taken to heart, but what I was thinking of most today is how almost everyone has remarked, approvingly, upon the look and style of the journal [its covers, layout, etc.] and that has reminded me, especially today, of how we came up with the cover design and look of the journal: by crowd-sourcing it! In May of 2009 we asked readers here at ITM and also friends on Facebook to help us design the cover; Palgrave provided initial designs, of course, but they needed major tweaking and over 50 persons helped us do that. It was a lot of fun to do it that way, actually, and I just want to thank everyone who helped with that again. For me, this has also meant that, from the very beginning, the journal has been a little bit like a delightfully boisterous party, and I like that.

It's also really important to say here that, other than the inaugural issue, when we initially launched the journal we really had no definite concrete ideas regarding the issues after that one, and we really depended on the assistance of Board members and others who came to us early on with ideas for essay clusters and special issues, and so we are really indebted to our friends and colleagues and to the collective will and spirit that animates this project. And what I am really trying to say here is: the PROSE Award is really theirs because it was based on the content of the first two volumes of the journal [2010 and 2011]. We are also really grateful to those from outside of our field who jumped in, sight of the journal "unseen," so to speak, to think and write alongside us, and who believe, as we do, that the so-called "Middle Ages" and modernity are in richly and endlessly complex and critically productive relation to each other. In short: thanks to all. Or rather: congratulations.

New Critical Modes (postmedieval 2.3)

by J J Cohen

As announced and discussed here, here and here, Cary Howie and I are co-editing a special issue of postmedieval entitled New Critical Modes, to be published late next year. We thought you'd enjoy a preview of the essays that we are bringing together. Comments welcome.

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New Critical Modes

postmedieval 2.3 (2011)

ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen and Cary Howie

This issue examines and embodies some of the new critical modes that are emerging among contemporary medievalists. Critics have often been content to adopt the voice, citational practices, textual apparatuses, forums and ambit of those who trained them, leading to a great deal of continuity in published scholarship over the years. Others, however, have become restless with such modes and models, choosing to disseminate their work and perform its content differently. This special issue will examine new modes of writing, new media, and the very idea or possibility of critical novelty. Possible topics include the reinvention of scholarly and authoritative voice; the affective turn in critical practice; performativity and embodiment; amateurism; popular medievalisms; anachronism; and hybridity of critical investments, genres and identities.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction (Jeffrey Cohen and Cary Howie)
2. Rick Godden, “"Getting Medieval in Real Time”
3. Brantley Bryant and Carl Pyrdum, “On Medieval Blogging”
4. Catherine Brown, “The Writing on the Wall”
5. Eileen Joy, “Shafts or Freight Tunnels Constructed Between Objects that Otherwise Would Remain Quarantined in Private Vacuums: Chaucer’s Griselda and Lars von Trier’s Bess McNeill”
6. Dan Remein, “A Critical Poetics of Allure: 10 Antiphons for the Bringing-to-Appearance of the Place of Allure as a Complicity of Human And Non-Human Matter In Writing, Or, The Physis Of the Whale In Anglo-Saxon England”
7. Karmen MacKendrick, “Always Already New: The Possibilities of the Enfolded Instant”
8. Anna Klosowska, “Alcibiades and Sartre's Bad Faith”
9. Jeffrey Cohen, “An Abecedarium of Vertu”
10. Cary Howie “Uncritical”
11. Book Review Essay by Sharon Kinoshita

Abstracts of Essays

1. Jeffrey Cohen and Cary Howie

Introduction

2. Richard Godden

“Getting Medieval in Real Time”

From making it easier to collaborate and share work to making manuscripts available through digital imaging that once would have been only available through costly and time-consuming travel, the emergence of new technologies such as email, digital media, Facebook, and Twitter have radically re-shaped what it means to do academic work. This essay explores the timeliness of these new technologies. Firstly, by “timeliness” I do mean a sense of fortuitous timing. As an academic with a physical disability, the advent of email and electronic databases full of searchable journal articles could not have been more timely. Without tools like these, pursuing a PhD would have been far more laborious than it already was. But by “timeliness” I am also asking the following question: How do we describe the time of the academic? Using my personal experiences as a starting point, I consider the intersection of Disability Studies and recent work on time and temporality in order to provide the beginnings of an answer. Rather than conceiving the time of the academic as that of working in solitude in our own pockets of time, I suggest that we consider how the social capabilities of new technologies produce a sense of being-together, of working at the same time.

3. Brantley Bryant and Carl Pyrdum

“On Medieval Blogging”

It is no great stretch to say that Carl Pyrdum and Brantley Bryant run two of the Internet's most successful medieval interest blogs -- so long as one defines "successful medieval interest blogs" as "blogs read by people not typically interested in medieval things." Got Medieval and Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog, their respective endeavors, occupy a middle space between the academic middle ages and the rest of "teh internets," and in this paper, Carl and Brantley will attempt, through a collaborative mutual mock interview, to chart the dimensions and extent of this middle ground. Among the questions they will entertain are the following: 1) To what extent do the two blogs act as points of entry into the more serious academic medievalism on the web? And to what extent are they a barrier to entry? 2) How do the blogs manage to remain "in the middle" without becoming In the Middle or The Medieval Comedy Hour? In a sense, 3) Does their comedic discourse magnify or obscure their academic discourse? Over the next few months, Carl and Brantley intend to correspond via email about their blogs and about blogging generally, and the mock interview will be constructed out of these email exchanges. In other words, while the finished product will not be the transcript of any actual interview, it will take the form of one, a dramatized interaction between the two bloggers that attempts (with jokes!) to get at some meaningful truth about medieval blogging.

4. Catherine Brown

“The Writing on the Wall”

Imagine a graffito in Pompeii. Imagine it says this: Meet me here tomorrow and bring a stick this big with you. Since we’re imagining, it can say this in any language you like. What matters is that it says it, and you think, Here I am. Or: Imagine you’re at Belshazzar’s feast: “In the same hour there appeared fingers, as it were of the hand of a man, writing over against the candlestick upon the surface of the wall of the king's palace: and the king beheld the joints of the hand that wrote. Then was the king’s countenance changed, and his thoughts troubled him” (Daniel 5:5-6). Ephemeral writing as artifact and trope: the reading present articulated by figure and interpellation. And what is the reading present, anyway?

5. Eileen Joy
"Shafts or Freight Tunnels Constructed Between Objects that Otherwise Would Remain Quarantined in Private Vacuums: Chaucer’s Griselda and Lars von Trier’s Bess McNeill"

In their essay “Getting Post-Historical,” which serves as the introduction to their edited collection The Post-Historical Middle Ages, Sylvia Federico and Elizabeth Scala acknowledge that “historicism has become the Jamesonian ‘cultural dominant’ of our field,” and they call for a reexamination and redefinition of historicism’s dominant status, even suggesting that the Freudian, Marxist, and Lacanian approaches to the Real that have founded both the materialist and psychic historicist enterprises are ultimately inadequate to the task of a scholarship that might seek in medievaltexts a type of knowing “unavailable to their ‘original’ readers and beyond the intent of their writers” (pp. 1, 7).

My essay will entail a purposefully historically inappropriate (mis)reading of sacrificial ethics in the “lives” of the fictional characters (and queer saints of a sort) Griselda in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale and Bess McNeill (played by Emily Watson) in Lars von Trier’s film Breaking the Waves. I will follow the thought of Walter Benjamin, in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, that the work of art possesses its own history, one that is not readily reducible to the time period in which it was produced nor to the intentions of its maker, and further, that the goal of criticism might be to apprehend the historicity of the artwork that is not part of historical life, per se. And this would be best accomplished by considering the artwork as an object among other objects, all arranged in a non-linear constellation that does not privilege the place of one work over another and which produces certain dialectical images that give to historical time a particular shock. The work of interpretation, in this scenario, is the thinking — necessarily creative and non-teleological — that gives rise to the constellation, which is also formed when temporally disparate objects are seen to be in tactile and affective proximity to each other. Cadging from Deleuze and Guattari, my essay will also argue that texts do not form images of the world, but rather, they assure the world’s deterritorialization, but only if we can properly shake ourselves loose from the hegemony of the ways in which we usually read the signifiers of these texts, and for which enterprise we must get out of history proper through a process of critical hallucination and what the philosopher Graham Harman calls “vicarious causation”: what happens when “objects [Griselda and Bess as textual and visual networks; language; filmic image] confront one another only by proxy, through sensual profiles found only on the interior of some other entity [the reader-viewer-scholar-me]”? Therefore, this paper also aims to show that the “side-by-side proximity of real and sensual objects is merely the occasion for a connection between a real object inside the intention [my desire to be absorbed by these objects] and another real object lying outside it. In this way, shafts or freight tunnels are constructed between objects that otherwise remain quarantined in private vacuums” (“Vicarious Causation,” Collapse : Philosophical Research and Development, vol. II, March 2007: pp. 184, 185).

6. Dan Remein

“A Critical Poetics Of Allure: 10 Antiphons For The Bringing-To Appearance Of The Place Of Allure As A Complicity Of Human And Non-Human Matter In Writing, Or, The Physis Of The Whale In Anglo-Saxon England”

A truly new critical mode in the humanities might be considered as an act with illocutionary effects resulting in actually new structural and formal alternatives for the human to certain tyrannies of thought which have perhaps contributed to the need for a volume on new critical modes in the first place. Such a new critical mode—perhaps most importantly within medieval studies—could no longer prohibit critical writing from the production of poesis as its primary orientation, and perhaps should, without giving up close reading, consider how to move beyond constative statement. I attempt to ask, with the critic Walter Benjamin not only of the attitude of one’s work towards the relations of production of the time, but also of the work’s place within them, in terms of technique—and how to intervene or alter these relations (“The Author as Producer”). To alter and not just describe such relations we should consider attempting to produce writing we would not know how to read, which does not mitigate the difficulty of reading it with supposedly transparent self-explanatory framing. Given the current important discussions of the ‘posthuman’ and the ‘posthumanities’ (within Postmedieval, for instance) as one possible site of a current attempt to alter the above-mentioned relations with increasingly pressing consequences, I have explored the possibility of a new critical mode in relationship to the question of how a still-human poetics can maintain a commitment to history, the human, finitude, secularity, et. al. while operating as a collaborator to, or in complicity with, non-human matter. This essay names the place of allure as the place of complicity between language, human-matter and non-human matter, and attends to this allure in an operation of writing in complicity with whale-bone from Anglo-Saxon period England and the Old English ‘Whale’ Physiologus poem from the Exeter Book.

7. Karmen MacKendrik

“Always Already New: The Possibilities of the Enfolded Instant”

Friedrich Nietzsche considered himself an inverse, generally taken to mean anti-, Platonist. But in the admittedly strong interpretation of Pierre Klossowski, the eternal return shows affinity with the thought of Neoplatonists Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa: for all, the newly emergent and the recurrent beyond origin curiously coincide; no thing, and no time, is only itself. Eckhart demands an infinite birth of an already-crucified God; Nicholas mutually enfolds all possibility and all actuality in a God who is neither simply (actually) a being nor not. And Klossowski’s sense of affirming the return demands that we affirm not only the “tremendous moment’ in which Nietzsche comes upon the thought, but also every possible mutation of that moment, because everything returns, every possibility is unfolded from any actuality. For all of these thinkers, a revelation appears as the astonishingly new which is precisely the same as the old without a first.

8. Anna Klosowska
“Alcibiades and Sartre's Bad Faith”

I juxtapose two canonical scenes of flirtation: Alcibiades's drunken confession in Plato’s Banquet, and Sartre's bitter unveiling of feminine artifice that serves as the illustration of bad faith, one of the key insights in Being and Nothingness. The two scenes of flirtation not only help define and sustain philosophical arguments but, as if bound to demonstrate the functioning of a deconstructive dynamic, also disrupt them. However, while Alcibiades is supposed to disrupt the banquet, Sartre's scene of flirtation belies his demonstration of bad faith. The scene, as Sartre records it, undoes Sartre's reading of it, and undermines the concept it is supposed to illustrate. Alcibiades scripts his confession as a dialogue, with stage directions and a sublime sense of comic pacing. His interruption in the Banquet is analogous to a commentary: it is both in (with respect to the structure) and of (with respect to the theme) the text that hosts it. And yet, it is distinct from its matrix: like a commentary, it is an incursive vein cross-secting the matrix. Sartre, meanwhile, creates a distance from the scene of café courtship as a third-person omniscient narrator. For Freud, shame is a proleptic twinge of pain that directs the ego away from a risky trajectory that may result in an even greater pain. While this description fits Sarte's vignette of bad faith, Alcibiades's story cannot be subsumed to it. I would argue that a different mechanism is in play. I analyze it closely, and propose it as an alternative to shame as a both a seductive and critical modality.

9. Jeffrey J. Cohen

“An Abecedarium of Vertu”

Inspired by ludic and deconstructive alphabet books for children (Chris Van Allsburg, The Z Was Zapped; Edward Gorey, The Gashlycrumb Tinies) and biblical, classical and medieval abecedarian poems (Psalm 118, the “ABC of Aristotle,” Chaucer’s “La Priere de Nostre Dame”), this essay explores the polysemantic Middle English word virtu. An assemblage rather than word, vertu brings together the life force of animals and flowers; sidereal radiation and pull; cognition and the brain at war with itself; communicative and translational devices employed by the humors to bend the body to their desires; chivalric virtue; materiality as a matter-energy flow. Although some of its meanings are spiritual and theological, vertu also yields a way for medieval texts to frame a secular or at least non-teleological world where the only constants are strivings for movement, newness, and change. Virtu is more than life-force: it is an aesthetic impulse inherent in materiality, a creativity or generativity with irresistible allure for human, but in excess of anything the merely human world or even the divine world can contain.

10. Cary Howie

“Uncritical”

This essay attempts to think an uncritical relationship to its--to our--objects. Specifically, what value could there be in reading uncritically, where this kind of uncritical reading would be understood in light of other practices of unsaying? An uncritical reader would not, in this way, escape criticism (understood in its various modes as dialogical, interpretative, professionally-based, evaluative, and generally invested, overtly or covertly, in authority) any more than, for example, the practitioner of medieval apophasis would escape affirmation. But the coordinates would shift: if my drive to affirm is shaped by the ultimate excess of its object (in a certain tradition, God; in another, the world) to each of these affirmations, so too might my drive to critique (to criticize: and notice the ugliness of these verbs) be shaped by the ultimate excess of its object to the process and procedures of criticism. The uncritical reader might attempt to give voice to something that criticism is too hoarse (or, perhaps, too busy speaking) to express, something uncaptured by criticism: namely, the sense in which objects, even and perhaps especially literary objects, elude our capture. To read uncritically would, in this way, be to read attentively, but where attention waits, where scholarly scrutiny goes a little unfocused, reaching out without grasping (or grasping many things at once, or grasping only to let go). If crisis designates, in at least one etymological register, a kind of separation, this kind of uncritical practice would be a bringing-together, not exactly a unification but, perhaps, a drawing-close, a binding, a becoming-unseparate. (And this is where uncritical reading and uncritical loving have something else in common.) There is no sense in which I can ever 'be' uncritical (or 'be' uncritically); I require you, or something in your place, to be uncritically 'with': the uncritical gesture is unthinkable--but here is another puzzle: what would unthinking amount to?--in isolation.

11. Book Review Essay by Sharon Kinoshita

[Oceanic] Critical Modes

[illustration: stone and water, by J J Cohen et famille]

by Jeffrey Cohen and Cary Howie

Cary Howie and I are co-editing a special issue of postmedieval (November 2011) with the inadequate working title of "New Critical Modes." We have some of the issue's structure already planned out, but we thought we'd share with you some of our notes back and forth about what we are trying to accomplish. We welcome any thoughts of your own on this topic, tied so intimately to much recent discussion here on the blog.

Please, comment.

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It also occurs to me that one of the things that tend to get swept under the rug every time anyone does an anthology on 'new' anything is a reflection on novelty itself; this could be what makes our project different--obviously in content but also in tone--from, say, the new philology or new historicism of twenty years ago. But who would be up for talking about the risks and rewards of novelty? Or, even, of its not just temporal but also semantic ambiguities? (Novelties for me will always be an advertising word on a summer ice cream truck: "Ice Cream Sandwiches /Popsicles / Novelties.")
*
You know, I never get blocked in thinking about projects: usually just the opposite, I have too much to say or too big a vision and so wind up doing two or three things at once. But I have been a little blocked with New Critical Modes, and I think it is partly because I can't see clearly what the intersection of new media will be with new modes (and the new modes I am most interested in and that spur my wanting to do this volume are new affective modes, primarily) … Novelty, you say? I like that. It's funny, today I ran at 5 AM and it was so humid that -- with the music in my headphones too loud -- I went into a kind of trance like I sometimes do when I am way too tired. I began to think a lot about creativity, and about the relation of the newness to innovation (which means an in-folding of newness, right?). I was also thinking about how routine and habit are the nemeses innovation. I don't know if that is either here or there but it is a longwinded way of saying that we should absolutely think about novelty (as light as summer ice cream, absolutely, the antidote to the heaviness of reiteration?) -- if not as an essay (do you want to do an essay on it) then as part of our introduction. Homi Babha asked the question "How does newness enter the world?" and it has always kind of obsessed me.
*
It was interesting to read your account of the block you've been experiencing around the intersection of new media and new forms of criticism. (Everywhere I walked in Montreal, there were 'trottoirs barrés' and 'rue barrées': blocked access, in that way, became a part of the texture of the city for me.) I've been experiencing something similar, primarily, I think, because I'm always wary of the 'state of the profession' panels at conferences, and the discussion of new media, as I fear it (perhaps unjustly), would threaten to become something of the sort. I'm also becoming less and less convinced that what I do is criticism in any sense--although what's the word for it, then? Could part of the problem (but problem says this too strongly; it's more like what you've called a block) be the working title of the issue? (For example, would something like Forms of Medievalism--just the first phrase to come to mind--provoke different kinds of responses?) … part of what intrigues me about this project--perhaps the main thing--is its potential to embody the fact that scholarly misfits (those who are felt, by themselves or others, to be not rigorous enough, not period-specific enough, not academic enough; who are felt under the sign of lack) are not lacking but, in fact, overflowing. To me, one of the best things we can do with this issue is to give voice to that excess and to try to convince others that there are worse things in the world than letting oneself get swept away.
*
Those words have been really sticking with me, and they really strike a chord with me (even if I am cautious about loving my own missing fit too much, since at this point in time it has allowed me to be a full professor and chair of a department -- how can someone in those positions say that he doesn't feel at home in the field?) Anyway, it does make me think that the pseudo-rupture you identified as disingenuously lurking with scholarships that label themselves New might be a reason NOT to call the issue New Critical Modes. But what other title comes to mind? Misfit Modes? Scholarly Excess? "Misfit Modes, the Scholarly, and Excess"? Coming up with a title adequate to the task is a challenge, but is at the heart of the question of focus.
*
I couldn’t agree more, Jeffrey, and one thing that suddenly strikes me, reading back on our exchanges (while trying not to make this too much of a meta-discussion), is that displacement runs through them. (Literally runs, in your case; in mine, it’s more likely to walk or drive.) What would it mean to be critically displaced? Not in the sense of yet another articulation of how impossible everything is, nor in the sense of a romanticism of the marginal (along the lines of “Hey, isn’t exile cool?”), but in the sense of wanting to acknowledge, formally and materially, how what we’re working with comes from elsewhere: our own bodies and words no less than the texts we claim to study. It’s also a question—for me at least—of a kind of adequatio between the things in the world that interest me and the form of my interest. To speak in a voice inflected, however obliquely, by the Middle Ages—and, let’s be frank, isn’t it still rare in critical discourse to acknowledge that anything between Augustine and Rousseau might have happened?—is to speak in a particular way, or in several, possibly innumerable, particular ways. The last thing I’d like to say before opening this up to the ITM community follows upon this: I was reading Jacques Rancière the other week and found myself struck (but you can use other words here, like ‘annoyed’) by the fact his authors are frequently the same damn authors that haunt so much of the critical idiom I have, for better or worse, inherited. I know that other folks—much further away geotemporally (so to speak) than my own middle America from twentieth-century France—have written passionately about the blind spots of these thinkers who have, perhaps not even in spite of themselves, remained French schoolboys. But it matters, and I think it bears repeating, that a critical discourse inflected by Boccaccio or Bonaventure (or the contemporary American young adult fiction I’m reading right now) not only can but must look different from something inflected by Flaubert and the other usual suspects. In fact, there’s a line in the novel I’m reading (P. E. Ryan’s Saints of Augustine; I found it on a remainder table) that expresses this situation concisely: “ ‘Yeah,’ Sam heard himself say from a great distance, as if he had an ocean between himself and his own voice” (190). I want to invite folks to give an account of the ocean that intervenes between any self and any voice, the ocean that also, crucially, keeps us afloat. Those waters are going to have a different texture, a different buoyancy, if they come at least in part from medieval sources.
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My final thought, and then this goes to ITM: I spent the last five days on the seacoast, the only region that ever feels (literally: the touch of salt wind on skin) like home. The ocean can keep us afloat, as you say, I know it anchors me … but in its tidal indifference (or at least its difference) its possibilities are lethal as well as sustaining. Hurricane Bill passed Maine so distantly as to be wholly invisible, but the waves the storm sent to record its passing crashed through parking lots, swept over rocks accustomed to being land not sea. I think of that girl swept to her death in Acadia, at Thunder Hole: a favorite place of my childhood. I know why it happened, why that family got too close, because it almost occurred in Ogunquit while we walked the Marginal Way. The waves smashing rocks captivated, called people closer and closer, and it was easy to forget the outcome of that beautiful force. The police sensibly closed the beach. I’ve blogged before about the ephemeral lithic sculptures that have proliferated on the southern Maine coast. When the waves receded, the ocean’s scoured edge was bare of the little monuments. My family erected some new ones, knowing these too wouldn’t last, knowing that most art cannot last, but beauty inhabits that fleetingness. Some of that allure comes from the history the standing stones carry, these seaside stonehenges, these unnecessary fragments of a language not English or French or Latin or some tongue washed away by the relentless years, but part of all these things. A different buoyancy, then: one that surfaces the past, and one that knows from the start its impermanence, forcefully offers an invitation to a world both for us and against our own.

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So we invite you, readers, to comment: what is the place of the medieval in what we have been calling new critical modes? Are the Middle Ages a source for novelty? Are you as weary as we are with desiccated critical voice? If you could edit a special issue of a fabulous new journal, what would you include?

March 2009 PMLA: Best Ever?

by J J Cohen

Though the MLA website is so poorly maintained that the January 2009 issue of PMLA is listed as the most recent -- and information there about the journal's contents is, to say the least, skimpy -- medievalist will want to ensure that they grab a copy of the March 2009 issue (volume 124 number 2). Mine just arrived at my office, and for once I think I'll be reading most of the thing.

A guest column on "Why Animals Now?" by Marianne DeKoven kicks the issue off. Then comes a Victorian Cluster which looks quite interesting ... followed by a Theories and Methodologies cluster on Animal Studies with contributions like "The Eight Animals in Shakespeare; or, Before the Human" (Laurie Shannon); "Zoos, the Academy, and Captivity" (Nigel Rothfels), "Literary Animal Agents" (Susan McHugh); "Animals, Anomalies, and Inorganic Things" (Rosi Braidotti); "Postcolonial Critique in a Multispecies World" (Neel Ahuja) -- and many more, as the saying goes. The Changing Profession column features Cary Wolfe on animal studies and the humanities.

Next a second Theories and Methodologies cluster devoted to "Medieval Studies in the Twenty-First Century." Contributions include Peggy McCracken (on the crusades and romance narratives of captivity); Karla Mallette (Aristotle and the medieval Mediterranean -- the ocean that seems to be this cluster's "In" destination); Karma Lochrie (Mandeville, cosmopolitanism, and provincializing Europe); Sharon Kinoshita ("Medieval Mediterranean Literature"); Steven Justice (on D. W. Robertson's critical fate); Bruce Holsinger (animals and the material conditions of medieval writing; Karl Steel makes an appearance in this one); Christine Chism (medieval Arabic); Jessica Brantley (the book's "prehistory"); and Josiah Blackmore (melancholy and desire in the Coita d'Amor). Immediately evident to the Anglo_saxonists among this blog's readers will be the utter absence of their field: the Middle Ages of the issue is temporally not very deep, even if geographically capacious.

I've done no more than skim the issue, but can hardly wait to spend some time with the essays. That doesn't happen for me all that often with PMLA.

Big Changes at Exemplaria

by J J Cohen

It's official: after twenty years, R. Allen Shoaf has retired as editor of Exemplaria. The journal was among the first high-profile venues for publishing theory-savvy medieval and early modern research. Honestly, I believe that Exemplaria is the major reason that medieval studies became so receptive to theory early on. The journal also paved the road along which book series like the New Middle Ages followed.

Recently the journal moved to Maney, which repackaged Exemplaria as a slimmed down and glossier periodical, rather like a science journal. Exemplaria is now published four times a year, which will no doubt alleviate its infamous backlog. With the new year comes the reign of its new editorial board:

• Patricia Clare Ingham Indiana University
  
• James J Paxson University of Florida
  
• Tison Pugh University of Central Florida
  
• Elizabeth Scala University of Texas
  

The advisory board has also been completely changed: all have been sent notice that a new advisory board is being put into place, serving five year (rather than indefinite) terms. I've been on the board since 2001, so I am happy to give up my place to someone new. This infusion of fresh brains (horrible image) can only be a good thing ... so look for many changes to come at this journal.

New Journal: Different Visions

by J J Cohen

Over breakfast at NCS last July, Debra Higgs Strickland told me about Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art. Web-based, open access, and peer reviewed, the journal presents an important new forum for theory-savvy medieval studies. Because it is electronic, Different Visions can also afford to be image-rich. Matthew Gabriel points out that the first issue is up. The journal's mission statement pretty much speaks for itself:

Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art is a web-based, open-access, peer-reviewed annual, devoted to progressive scholarship on medieval art. Different Visions seeks to fill a significant gap in current publishing venues by featuring articles employing contemporary postmodern and poststructuralist theoretical frameworks to examine medieval visual culture. Authors are encouraged to explore the application of such approaches as feminist and gender analysis, historiography, semiotics, post colonialism and queer theory to works produced during the period from the fourth through the fifteenth century. The journal will also consider essays on medieval visual culture that emerge from multiple disciplinary perspectives.

Different Visions offers a central publication to serve authors and readers interested in the full gamut of medieval objects and in contemporary critical theory. The journal covers the entire range of visual culture—architecture, manuscripts, sculpture, stained glass, and portable arts—and accepts articles about Byzantine and Islamic cultures as well as central, eastern and western Europe. Its electronic format provides a low-cost delivery, allowing Different Visions to avoid a subscription charge and permits more illustrations at less expense than standard print media. It also offers new opportunities for such innovative features as audio clips and virtual tours of monuments.

What a valuable addition to the electronic publishing landscape ... as well as to medieval studies more generally. The first issue contains essays from Kathleen Biddick, Madeline Caviness, and many others.