ANNOUNCEMENT: 2014 Biennial Michael Camille Essay Prize [postmedieval]

by EILEEN JOY

As was noted by Arnold Van Gennep, one of the first anthropologists of the edge, "the attributes of liminality are necessarily ambiguous since [they] elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space."

~from Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art

Myra Seaman, Holly Crocker, and I are thrilled to announce that it is time once again for the Biennial Michael Camille Essay prize, jointly sponsored by postmedieval, Palgrave Macmillan, and the BABEL Working Group, and the deadline is: JULY 31, 2014.

The competition is open to early career researchers: those currently in MA/PhD programs or within 5 years of having received the Ph.D. (that will include those graduating in 2009 or later). Although the contest is inspired by and dedicated to the memory of an art historian, essays in all disciplines are encouraged, and we are especially interested in work that, similar to Camille's, is cross-disciplinary, theoretically-informed, and attentive to the ways in which the medieval inhabits the modern. The prize is for the best short essay (4,000-6,000 words) that speaks to the 2014 theme: MEDIEVALISM AND THE MARGINS (conceptualized and imagined in any way the author sees fit). The award for 2014 will include: publication in postmedieval, 250 dollars, and one year’s free print and online subscription to the journal.

During Palgrave Macmillan's ACCESS ALL AREAS month (March 2014), you can read and download the previous winning essays by Haylie Swenson, David Hadbawnik, and Alison Hudson HERE.

The prize is named after Michael Camille (1958-2002), the brilliant art historian whose work on medieval art exemplified playfulness, a felicitous interdisciplinary reach, a restless imagination, and a passion to bring the medieval and modern into vibrant, dialogic encounter. In addition, we wish to honor Camille for his attention to the fringes of medieval society -- to the liminal, the excluded, the ‘subjugated rabble,’ and the disenfranchised, and to the socially subversive powers of medieval artists who worked on and in the margins. The prize is also named after Camille because his work was often invested in exploring ‘the prism of modernity through which the Middle Ages is constructed’ and because, as his colleague at the University of Chicago Linda Seidel said shortly after his death, he had ‘a mind like shooting stars.’

Submissions will be judged by a panel of scholars selected from postmedieval’s Editorial Board, and the winner will be announced at the 3rd Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group, to be held October 16-18 at University of California, Santa Barbara. Please send submissions, to include a cover page with all contact information -- name, affiliation(s), mailing address, email address(es), title of submission, and with no identifying information on essay itself (formatted in Word and following Chicago Manual, author-date format with endnotes + list of references at end) -- to the editors at postmedievaljournal@gmail.com. If you have any questions or concerns, you can contact Eileen Joy at eileenajoy@gmail.com.

Arizona and the MAA

by J J Cohen

There's been some Facebook discussion about the fact that the Medieval Academy of America is holding its annual meeting next April in Arizona. Members of the Academy were notified of this long ago, of course, but the recent dissemination of a CFP reminded us of the location at a time when many of us are none too pleased with the terrible choices the state government has been making regarding social issues we care about. Governor Jan Brewer's signing into law an immigration bill that seems almost carte blanche for police intimidation and harassment is, to my mind, racist and just wrong. Now comes the possibility of banning ethnic studies.

So when the MAA CFP arrived in my inbox I wrote back asking "Given the recent and reprehensible choices that the Arizona state government has made, will the Medieval Academy consider moving its annual meeting to another state?" Today I received a reply from Elizabeth Brown, the Academy President. I am sharing the letter because it brings up several points that deserve a wider (public) audience:

        Thank you for your eloquent message, which Paul Szarmach, our Executive Director, has just forwarded to me.  On behalf of our Vice-Presidents and Treasurer, and Robert Bjork, who is organizing the meeting, I want to express our gratitude to you for writing to us. 

    The situation is very complicated indeed, and we are monitoring it carefully. We have been concerned about this problem from the moment the governor of Arizona signed the bill concerning immigrants.  We are all following developments closely and are keenly aware of the importance of the issues that are at stake.  I have responded to inquiries from many colleagues, and have followed up with Bob Bjork, who has established that cancelling the meeting now would cost something in the neighborhood of $30,000. 

    We at the Academy are attempting to monitor the situation attentively and are fervently hoping that the offending legislation will be nullified or radically changed -- which we understand is a very real possibility. Like you, we are concerned about the legislation's implications, which go beyond the federal requirement that identity papers be carried (as is true in many countries). In short, we are adopting a policy of watchful waiting.

    We will do our best to keep you informed about developments and would appreciate any further counsel you can give us as we attempt to deal with these problems.

    With every good wish,

     Elizabeth A.R. Brown (Peggy)

     Professor emeritus of History, CUNY; President, The Medieval Academy of America

I understand very well that the situation is complicated; that's why I wrote asking if moving the meeting was on the table, rather than insisting (with whatever insistence a member can voice) that the meeting must be relocated. And you know, maybe it is completely hypocritical of me to have ever written, because I am not attending the meeting in April for reasons having nothing to do with its location (though if I had been intending to go, I doubt I would as things currently stand). Still I'd like to think that I have an investment in this professional organization that represents me, and indeed I'm heartened that the political context is being taken seriously. I can hope -- as I think many of us do -- that the law will be modified or nullified soon. Robert Bjork has done a great deal of planning for the meeting, planning that I know can often seem thankless; I am truly grateful for the labor that Professor Bjork has undertaken. Yet I also can't help wondering: would it be the worst thing in the world for the MAA to be out $30K and skip a year of meeting if that sends a message to the state that the law it has enacted is so unjust that as a measure of support we medievalists will not convene in Tempe?

I ask that as an open question. I wonder what our readers think.

[EDIT 1:30PM More on the letter from President Brown at xoom]

Is there a Methodology in this Class?

by Mary Kate Hurley

I was sitting quietly in my library carrel (where I spend approx. 20 hours of every day) when a friend sent me a Gmail chat, asking “Are you going to the talk?” I was feeling a bit tired, and a bit confused – “what talk?” I typed back, thinking that there was very, very little that would get me to leave the library that day. “Stanley Fish!” he answered. “12.30 in 523 Butler. Only Grad Students and Faculty invited.” Since I didn’t have to leave the library to walk downstairs, and it was even on my side of the building, I figured I didn’t have much to lose.

I was curious, and that was the major reason I wanted to go. I’ve had my share of disagreements (one-sided to be sure) with Prof. Fish. I’ve taught him in class and read his NYTimes blog when I manage to get past my email backlog while procrastinating. I don’t always agree with him. In fact, I actually don’t think I agree with him much at all – as he’s a Miltonist, this hasn’t really been a central facet of my increasingly Beowulf-focused life in recent days (as a side note: Hi, everybody! It’s been ages!). But I’m always interested in hearing what another “giant” of the field is like when giving a talk – will he be well-spoken? Dismissive of grad student questions? Funny? Irascible?

Thus I found myself at Stanley Fish’s talk, on “Milton and Theory.”



I have to say: I was quite impressed. I found his analysis of other Miltonists quite amusing at times, and enlightening at others, if often a bit harsh. His central claim revolved around how theoretical readings of texts tend to turn the literary works they treat into “allegories” which simply prove the reader’s point, again and again. As a medievalist, I found this assertion quite interesting: I hate allegory with a firey passion, mostly because I often have trouble finding where the allegory ends and where whatever takes its place begins. Fish was speaking on a very specific kind of reading of Milton, Deconstructionist with a Capital ‘D’. Again, it’s a theory I’ve largely lost interest in as I’ve gotten further into my own work. Deconstruction is fascinating, and an important theoretical tool, but I’ve never been able to see it as more than just that, a tool.

In the end, Fish’s talk made a single claim with three major points, beyond his annoyance with other interpreters of John Milton. The claim was about “what to do with John Milton and Paradise Lost,” a question to which Fish gave three answers:

1. Find out what the author meant. (Find the author’s intention).
2. Find out how other critics have read the author, for example, how the Romantics read Milton.
3. Find out what you can make with the text in question.

For Fish, the only one of these which was really worthwhile as a literary endeavor was the first: an avowed intentionalist, he defined his premise as believing that the text means what its author says it means. He ended the talk with a call for what he termed “professional humility,” which if I read him correctly, meant that remembering that the endeavor of the literary critic is to treat the text in a way that is limited to the text itself: in short, that we should not pretend we’re saving the world here.

I was curious about Fish’s point here. In college, while working on my senior thesis, a biweekly colloquium convened to help us work through the difficult task of writing a paper longer than anything we’d ever written. I remember one colleague, struggling with the awesome difficulty of beginning to write on Shakespeare (the details of her argument are fuzzy now) who was petrified of beginning. With everything others had said already, she explained, what could she do? What if she was wrong? I vividly remember turning to her, saying the single thing that I would give anything to be sure of now: “Shakespeare will be fine. There’s nothing you or anyone else can do to him that will ‘mess up’ the plays.”

At 21, apparently I knew something that I have trouble remembering at 27: the critics rarely become anything more than just critics. That is to say: while literary criticism is difficult and beautiful and life-changing, the consequences are perhaps more humble than our highest aspirations (or deepest fears) would have us believe.

But, returning to Fish’s talk, I was very interested in the three theses he proposed. So, like all good sixth year graduate students do at such events, I asked an evenhanded but still (I hope) engaging question. Explaining that I was a PhD candidate working with Old English texts – a tidbit of personal information that I hoped would contextualize the question I went on to ask – I inquired as to Prof. Fish’s ideas about Methodology. Is it possible to ask a fourth question of a text? I asked. Is it possible what a poem or other literary work does -- that is to say, not what does it mean so much as how does it construct this meaning? Could we productively raise a question of methodology here, and might the methodology literary scholars seek to employ also determine (or pre-determine) what types of evidence is admissable, and does this have ramifications for our enterprise?

To begin a response, Prof. Fish acknowledged that these questions were very complicated – and I’m sure they were more so when constructed on the spot during the question and answer session. But what it seemed to come down to, in his response, was that being an Intentionalist meant that one believed the text meant what its author said it meant. It is a critical affiliation, to be sure, but it is not a methodological point. Fish averred that our best option is using the “usual empirical way” – interpretation, for Fish, is an empirical activity, not a theoretical one. There is no methodology that attaches to it. This accumulation of empirical research may “take too long” – but there it is.

I’ve been mulling over this since Tuesday: what does it mean, if we are to be empirical in the pursuit of literary studies? On some levels, I suppose, it means what I always tell my students: use textual evidence. But at the same time, aren’t close readings also a form of methodology, and doesn’t empiricism hold its own theoretical rather than interpretive troubles? To wit, can’t empiricism itself proceed from a single (and allegorizing) premise? That everything is both explainable and reproducible, and moreover, that steps taken in an orderly proceeding will inevitably point us to an explanation for – well – everything?

Fish raised some important questions, and I was glad to find him humorous and erudite, and very much accepting of questions from all levels of scholars. I want to engage the points he raised, but in part I don’t know how to begin: all I know is that some of the evidence I accumulated while writing my most recently completed chapter was taken very well, and some of it was deeply disliked and disapproved of. There are, it would seem, certain ways that It Is Okay to Read Beowulf – and stepping outside those is difficult, if not impossible. How, then, to define a literary endeavor? How do we accumulate evidence to interpret a text – what tools do we have to use, and can we use them as tools rather than allegory?

What, dear readers of In the Middle, do you think? What is Methodology, and how does it relate, or not relate to Interpretation? Or to the study of Medieval Literature? Is there a difference between interpretation done in pre-modern and early modern/modern texts? And as regards literary criticsim, is there a methodology in this field?

Signaling to Each Other from Inscrutable Depths: A Response to Gabrielle's Spiegel's "'Getting Medieval': History and the Torture Memos"

by EILEEN JOY

I don't understand why scholars -- even my favorite ones -- totalize fields when they talk about them, and usually do so without citing any work at all. (Jeffrey, from here)

What does the regulating principle of medieval/modern periodization hold in place, and what does it help to obscure? (Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time)

Recently, someone passed on to me the text of Gabrielle Spiegel's presidential column from the September 2008 issue of the American Historical Association's Perspectives on History, "'Getting Medieval': History and the Torture Memos." I had heard this short essay [really, a kind of op-ed piece] described elsewhere as Spiegel "speaking vehemently against modernist uses and usurpations of the Middle Ages," which is definitely an overstatement--the essay is in no way "vehement" but it does characterize medievalists who believe that they possess historical knowledge that could be of use to the present [e.g., to the analysis of the Bush White House torture memos or to the critique of "neomedievalism," a term first developed by British international studies scholars in the 1980s to describe a supposed "return" to non-centralized feudalism and tribalism in certain "rogue" states] to be guilty of engaging in possibly false or facile analogies. Further, in Spiegel's mind, analogy itself,

with its tendency to transfer insights from one domain to another without demonstrating the validity of the transference, is not a useful historiographical method. Precisely because analogy promises so much more than it delivers, both conceptually and theoretically, it is more often than not a weak instrument of historical thinking, generating similarities where comparisons and contrasts are more apt and, in its tendency to slip into genealogy, arguing on behalf of false continuities and/or legacies. Linguistically and rhetorically, analogy is akin to metaphor in that, like metaphor, it promotes a whole/whole substitution that decontextualizes both parts of the equation and leaves little room for the kind of interpretive operations that properly govern historical investigation.

Spiegel's remarks in her presidential column last October were partly a response to a debate in which she participated with Bruce Holsinger at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Center for 21st-Century Studies in March of 2008, where Spiegel served as the respondent to Holsinger's talk, "Neomedievalism and the Church of Theory: Academic Prose from the Cold War to the War on Terror." Holsinger's talk was related to his recent chaplet-book Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War of Terror [Chicago, 2007], which we have blogged about here more than once. According to Spiegel, in her AHA column, Holsinger's talk at Milwaukee, and also his book, highlight

the use of medieval analogies in contemporary discourse, not least by a handful of neoconservatives, who have drawn upon an odd field of policy studies called "neomedievalism," first developed by British realist international relations scholars in the 1980s, and adapted by neocons after 9/11 for their own purposes. It was this latter incarnation of "neomedievalism" that proffered a cache of analogies about the "medieval" nature of contemporary non-state actors, including terrorists, which subsequently influenced the reasoning behind the legal judgments expressed by the authors of the torture memos as they set about demonizing the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and recommending the use of torture to a world that, in earlier "enlightened" days, had voluntarily abdicated its use. Although the actual number of analogies with the Middle Ages was limited, they were the sole historical comparisons to be deployed by the authors of the torture memos.

While in both her remarks at Milwaukee and in her column, Spiegel [somewhat] praises Holsinger for delineating the "medievalizing" and falsely analagous moves of neoconservatives in their war on terror [especially in relation to policies on torture initiated during the Bush administration], at the same time, she questions whether medievalists should have anything to do with such policy debates, or even with trying to impart "better" historical understanding to such contemporary political issues:

That both the torture memos and the "medievalizing" moves that helped to frame their thinking appeared to be a suitable subject for scholarly debate by practicing medievalists suggests that we are living at a moment when the temptations for such analogizing between the medieval and contemporary world seem to be spreading in current political language. Something about the post-9/11 world, both in public discourse and among medievalists themselves, is giving rise to ill-considered uses of the term "medieval," a phenomenon that raises the larger historiographical issue of the place of analogy in the logic of historical thought and the risks that indulgence in such analogizing, whether by the torture memo-writers or by medievalists themselves, entail.

Later in the column, Spiegel asserts that, similar to the neoconservatives,

medievalists themselves are beginning to argue that, as medievalists, we possess crucial knowledge about the ineffectuality of torture currently practiced by our government, since study of the Inquisition demonstrates "conclusively" that torture produces false confessions and lies, and therefore is counter-productive and misleading in generating information. But does one need to study the Inquisition to know this? How about the Gulag, or Algeria, or any of the more proximate examples of the use of torture in the modern world? Analogies such as these may have heuristic value, but they tend to lose their analytic utility when they become reified and slip into a kind of genealogy. "Getting medieval" all too easily turns into "being medieval." There is a kind of special pleading in these efforts that I find dangerous, since it diverts us from more useful forms of critique and engagement.

In her Milwaukee remarks, Spiegel intimated that some of those more useful forms of engagement with contemporary government policies included voting and protesting on the streets, because, in the final analysis, either medieval studies is not relevant to these policy issues [no matter how much we want to believe they are and, in any case, in order to demonstrate that relevance, we ourselves start analogizing in logically fallacious or overly facile ways], or our critiques would fall on deaf ears, anyway [i.e., those in power are not interested in historical understanding since they knowingly pervert history to certain ends they have determined ahead of time]. Spiegel ultimately asks that we abjure the use of analogy altogether for it is a "weak instrument of historical thinking." As to what the "interpretive operations that properly govern historical investigation" are, more exactly, Spiegel does not elaborate [although her use of the adverb "properly" implies that some forms of historical interpretation can be placed, hierarchically-logically, above other forms].

I have several problems with Spiegel's arguments here, but please allow me to first say how much I admire Spiegel's scholarship as an historian of the Middle Ages. Her book, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography, as well as the article she contributed to Stephen Nichols's special issue of Speculum on the New Philology, "History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages," have both always had privileged places in my study. Nevertheless, Spiegel's column in the AHA journal troubles me. It troubles me, first, because she herself seems to take a great leap of illogic when she asserts [and/or assumes] that all work by medievalists that addresses contemporary issues, such as the use of torture by the Bush administration, does so only through the mode of analogy [i.e., torture did not work during the Inquisition and therefore it will not work now is the specific example she provides, yet with no citation of any actual scholarship]. This is a facile and I think inaccurate representation, or description, of the scholarship by medievalists, with which I am familiar, on the U.S.'s war on terror and the use of torture in that war [by which I mean, recent articles by Steve Guthrie and Michael E. Moore, both published in Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages, but also Holsinger's book--and it is hard to tell if Spiegel exempts Holsinger's book from her critique: she seems to both thank Holsinger for the exposures of illogical "medievalizing" his book provides while also asking, why did you even bother, don't you have better things to do as a medievalist?].

Which also leads to my second problem with Spiegel's column: she does not refer to any scholarship or authors directly when she claims that "medievalists themselves are beginning to argue that, as medievalists, we possess crucial knowledge about the ineffectuality of torture currently practiced by our government." To whom, and to what work, more specifically, is she referring? This bothers me because, without referring us directly to the work that she claims mainly employs the "weak instrument" of historical analogy, we have no way to enter into a more engaged, critical conversation over the very problem she has claimed to detect in such scholarship. Spiegel refers, obliquely, to a medievalist (or medievalists) who has (or have) argued that the Inquisition is directly relevant to the present situation, and then claims that Algeria might be a more relevant historical analogy because it is more proximate to the modern world in which we live now. Again, she provides no specific citations of actual scholarship.

Many things bother me about this claim/argument. First, in the case of Steve Guthrie's essay [and I have no idea, again, if Spiegel is even aware of it, so I just refer to it as an example of the type of presentist-minded scholarship she seems to argue we should abjure], "Torture, Inquisition, Medievalism, Reality, TV," Steve discusses Algeria [especially vis-a-vis Henri Alleg's book The Question] as well as the Inquisition, as well as CIA interrogation manuals dating back to the Cold War, the short-lived British reality television "torture" show Guantanamo Guidebook, the Bush White House legal memorandums on torture, modern human rights discourses, and classical, medieval, and early modern laws regulating practices of torture. Nowhere in Steve's essay is it his purpose to simply draw either positive or negative analogies between the Middle Ages and the present, nor does he argue that the contexts [legal, social, cultural, and otherwise] of any historical period are easily transferable to any other historical period--obviously, that would be facile. Clearly, when we discuss the Bush White House torture memos, we are within the realm of the law, as well as the realm where issues of the law and sovereignty intersect: these are realms in which history matters a great deal and is invoked and instrumentalized in a variety of ways [and with serious material consequences impinging on human lives]. Part of Steve's purpose in his essay, which was altogether and painfully too short, in my mind, was to provide, not simple analogies, but rather, a longer historical perspective on juridical torture within the realm of state law, not in order to draw some sort of oversimplified genealogy of medieval-to-modern torture, but rather, in his own words, to argue that

[o]ur use of torture is indeed medieval, although in a more complex and troublesome way than popular understandings of the term comprehend. Physical brutality itself is not especially medieval--it seems to be an inclination of the species--and most of the techniques and machines used now are either ancient or modern in origin, but the political and emotional climate of the phenomenon, and the legal policies its rests on, have counterparts in late medieval and renaissance Europe. Our fascination with things superficially medieval can be read as the expression of awareness on some level of this deeper cultural contact.

Michael Moore's chapter, in the same volume, "Wolves, Outlaws, and Enemy Combatants," focuses more narrowly on the symbolic figuration and legal definitions of the "outlaw," or one who stands outside of the law, in classical and medieval literary and legal texts, and in the Bush White House legal memorandums on "enemy combatants." Again, the point of Michael's essay is not to draw simplified one-to-one analogies between these figurations and legal definitions; rather, it raises profound and troubling questions--questions that have long and not necessarily analagous histories--about whether or not the removal of certain persons from the realm of law and torture "undermines the human world," whether or not justice transcends "positive law," and whether or not "any terrain still lies open for humanism." Both Steve's and Michael's essays address subjects that are immediately troubling in the present yet which have long, heterogeneous histories. The past, in this scenario, is not simply analagous to the present [in either positive or negative terms], nor, in Steve's and Michael's essays, are they offering or arguing on behalf of, in Spiegel's terms, facile continuities and "legacies." Rather, their presentist-minded "medieval studies" scholarship demonstrates that the past offers deep resources for thinking the present differently than it ever was or is, while also usefully demonstrating all of the ways in which history is often misused, misplaced, and mistaken, left behind and returned to [and never in the same ways].

This kind of work is especially critical, in my mind, when it attends to matters of the law, which itself relies on historical precedents for many of its arguments and judgments, and which can have such a profound effect on individual lives [whom the law can choose to exile, torture, murder, etc.]. This kind of work is also critical when we realize, as Kathleen Davis well illustrates in her book Periodization and Sovereignty, that time itself and its governance are political matters with seriously material [often violent] consequences, and if medievalists do not want to attend to the ways in which "medieval time" is parceled out and "divided" from other times in contemporary legal, governmental, ecclesiastical, cultural, and other discourses and mechanisms of state and other [global] powers, then who should attend to that? The question is a profoundly unsettling one if we are persuaded by Davis's provocative argument in her book [and yes, I am persuaded], that "the history of periodization is juridical, and it advances through struggles over the definition and location of sovereignty" [p. 6].

To say, also, as Spiegel does, that Algeria is more relevant to Guantanamo Bay than the Inquisition because the two are more "proximate" to each other in time raises the further troubling question of what might be called a normative historical teleology that seems to be operative here, as well as of a certain type of Western historiographical method that, as Michel de Certeau has written, labors to inscribe a definitive "break" between "now" and "then." As Certeau writes,

Modern Western history essentially begins with differentiation between the present and the past. In this way it is unlike tradition (religious tradition), though it never succeeds in being entirely dissociated from this archeology, maintaining with it a relation of indebtedness and rejection. . . . it ubiquitously takes for granted a rift between discourse and the body (the social body). . . . It assumes a gap to exist between silent opacity of the "reality" that it seeks to express and the place where it produces its own speech, protected by the distance established between itself and its object (Gegen-stand). [Certeau, The Writing of History, pp. 2-3]

Simply put, Western historiography, from the Enlightenment forward, has labored mightily to inscribe a "break" between the dead Others and ourselves that, in my mind, was shaky to begin with and simply won't hold [or as Certeau might have said, its "irreducible limit" can never be determined]. Spiegel's remark about Algeria's proximity to our "present" situation seems to posit the notion that the further away something is in time, the less relevant it is to the present, by way of analogy or any other way. What does this mean, exactly? I'm always fascinated by how a geologist or biologist thinks about time versus the way a humanistic scholar does. For some of us, 500-700 or so years is so long, that we often assume people who lived in, say, 1300 bear practically no resemblance to us at all, and yet an evolutionary biologist will spend a good part of her career tracing meaningful relations between individuals of a species separated by hundreds of thousands of years. And cognitive scientists are beginning to prove, more and more convincingly, that certain structures of mind are much more transhistorical than we have wanted to believe [as well as they have also demonstrated there is no such thing as dispassionate, or disembodied, reasoning]. Certainly [and who would really argue this?] the past is, in many ways, a very different place than the one we inhabit now, and there have been certain mechanical and technological and other innovations that have so radically altered the way we live our lives, and at such fast rates of speed, that we might say that some of the fundamental conditions of life have changed to such an extent that if a medieval person were to show up among us now, she would think she was on another planet or in another universe, and the level of her discombobulation [perhaps, even, her psychosis] would be severe.

To continue to claim, however, as I will continue to do, and strenuously, that the past is relevant to the present, and that medievalists have something to say about contemporary life and thought that is meaningful and important, is not to argue that the past is like or unlike the present or even to craft little genealogies of the past leading to the present in certain [more false or more "true," more straight or more queer, Foucauldian] ways and "lines" of descent; rather, it is to recognize that, in some sense, every present moment is inhabited by and also inhabits [consciously and unconsciously] multiple, heterogeneous temporalities--some at a distant remove and other more contiguous, and the task of the historian today might be to make those heterogeneous temporalities more visible and more traceable, in order to aid us in cultivating a deeper attention to, not the genealogies of history, but its entanglements. For time is all knotted up, and we, we are knotted up with time. This recalls me to something Kofi Campbell wrote when Jeffrey asked him last April to write a weblog post on David Wallace's book Premodern Places, and it is worth returning to, I think:

I was re-reading some of the writings of Albert Einstein, and one sentence in particular struck me again: “The only reason for time is so everything doesn’t happen at once.” The image that grew out of this sentence, for me, was that of time as a ball. Within that ball is the sum of all experience on this planet (choose whatever beginning point you will). All of it is contained within the ball. As more people are born, as more stuff happens, as more human experience accumulates, that ball expands. But there is no straight line, only all human experience swirling around within that ball, each aspect touching and jostling against the others and affecting them in ways we can’t ever know. We make the obvious connections and call those time; so that, as Einstein put it, everything doesn’t happen at once. But those connections don’t account for the refusal of history to be ultimately and finally linear. In that ball, 1341 can touch 1941 as easily as it can touch the advent of the Middle Passage, or the fall of Rome, Chaucer can speak to a Guyanese of Indian descent and lead him to study English at Cambridge while writing of the dissolution of the Caribbean’s ties with Europe.

To say that 1341 can touch 1941 is not the same thing as saying either time can fully reveal itself, or be known, to the other. It may even be that, properly speaking, they do not "touch" at all, but rather, following the thinking of the philosopher Graham Harman on object relations,** they "signal to each other from inscrutable depths," with the historian serving as the vicarious, third "object" and "causation" through which past and present come into sensual, if brief contact ["On Vicarious Causation," Collapse, Vol. II (March 2007): p. 187]. The alterity of history, and of different times, events, persons, texts and other artifacts in history, will always obtain and thereby, will always remain as a proper object of medieval historiography [as well as a caution against the exhaustion of any historical method--by which I mean, we never exhaust history's alterity by any one method, but rather, work to make its alterity more complex by a variety of methods and approaches, which is a good thing, in my mind]. At the same time, to say that only those events most proximate in chronological time have the most to say to us about our present situation [whatever that present situation might be], strikes me as an altogether too impoverished view of what history can do and say in the present, and also of where it is we think we are in time--on some island called modernity, floating in open space, completely untethered from "the medieval"?

The fact of the matter is, although many will not allow it, all scholarly studies are really excavations, in one form or another, of the site of the Now, which has folded within it, all of time. We can do this more, or less, mindfully, and yes, some things--things beyond just the "relevance" of medieval studies--really are at stake.

**My thanks to Michael O'Rourke, Nicola Masciandaro, and Myra Hird, who all, through different routes, led me to recent work in "speculative realism," including Graham Harman's writings on "vicarious causation."

Identities and Impurities

[illustration: Winter Shack with Child, photo by author]
by J J Cohen

The close of December is a difficult time of year for anyone whose identity is pure. The holiday that looms tomorrow is too secular; is being warred against; is too Christian; is too commercial; carries with it too much paganism; distracts from Easter; doesn't matter; matters too much; carries a weight it does not merit; should be replaced by the ten days of Newton; and so on.

I was going to compose a long post about hybridity versus purified identities, modern and medieval, Christian and Jewish. Some notes (or at least some URLs) towards that post are collected here. I thought I had the duration of The Care Bears Movie to get those words assembled, but a series of phone calls involving an unexpected saving of a stranger's life and the complications of a surgery have conspired to leave me with about three minutes before those polychromatic ursines save the day. Then I've obligated myself to construct a house out of frosting, graham crackers, and leftover Halloween candy.

So I'll say this. Over the past year I have been engaged in two simultaneous reading projects, some small fruits of which have appeared on this blog: surveying new work in the history of Jewish-Christian identities (e.g. Boyarin, Yuval, Elukin, Horowitz), and researching contemporary [youth] reinventions of Jewishness via media old (Heeb, Nextbook) and new (Jewschool, Jewdas, Jewcy and the like). The two projects have much in common, though I'm not certain that the scholars from group one would agree that they have fellow travelers in group two. Both movements redefine what Jewish identity means in the past or the present (and in Boyarin's case, both at once, especially in Border Lines. If Gloria Anzaldua read Talmud and patristics, she'd have composed Border Lines). Both groups have seen strong public reactions against what they propose: Boyarin condemned as anti-Jewish, Yuval having been informed it would have been better had he never published his research, contemporary movements feeling a backlash as in this article from n+1 or the predictable identitarian comments to this story. Two common emphases within this criticism are (1) the border line must be drawn somewhere in order to provide coherent identity, so why not draw the line where it has always been drawn? (2) those who refuse the inherited identity paradigm are actually rejecting the hard work that it takes to merit such an identity.

Neither of these seem to me particularly cogent critiques: if the identity border is arbitrary, then why retain the same-old same-old after all? This same-old same-old is typically NOT the timeless and unchanging identity it has passed itself off as being. A longer historical view provides effective counter arguments to both. And what could be more labor intensive than forging an identity out of inherited and new pieces? Nothing facile about that process...

You'll hear more about this history of hybridity and mutability in the future (though in a way you've heard quite a bit about it from me already, here and here). For the time being, though, I simply offer this thought, appropriate to the ending of the year and the completion of another twelve months of this blog.

The medievalist identity advocated at ITM, often implicitly, always with passion, is an impure one: practicing a contingent rather than a known-in-advance Medieval Studies, touching present and past, embracing the creative potential of both. We've never argued that codicology or paleography or philology or any other -gy ought to be denefestrated from the House of Medieval, but we do want to keep our doors open wide enough to welcome whatever rough beast, Tiny Shriner, Muslim punk, mestizo, or monster slinks our way. We want -- I want -- not so much to change the field, but to acknowledge that medieval studies has already been deeply and enduringly transmuted. If it ever had a stable and well bounded identity, that went out the window some time in the 1980s, when feminism changed its rules, made it a space more welcoming to strangers. Maybe the welcome arrived even before that, when atheist Marxists were grumbling against allegory-mad Robertsonians (or maybe that was just one doctrine replacing another; it is hard for me to tell). I've suspected that sometimes in my own work I've imported new shibboleths, turns of phrase and schools of theory implicitly necessary to belong to the reconfigured field: if you can't say extimité you can't drink mead in this hall, buddy. On this blog and in my work, I've now attempted to submerge the theory somewhat rather than cite it as frequently as I did in some of my earlier publications. I have worked towards a more congenial prose style, one that invites rather than simply sorts its readers, one that develops that lingua franca et jocundissima that I mentioned in my Kzoo paper.

This blog is an ongoing part of that project, and I thank you for being among its community this year. Whether you are in the midst of celebrating Hanukkah, or hanging your stocking for Christmas, or festivating at the solstice, or doing the Saturnalia or holding a Molochmas or even if you are just enjoying the trickling away of the last month of 2008, Wæshail.

So, how are you celebrating? And if you feel like answering a much harder question, for what [medievalist] identity do you yearn?

Convivial literary studies

by J J Cohen

The office of department chair yields much fodder for complaint: the hours can be long (yesterday I arrived on campus at 7:15 AM, and wasn't home until 9:00 PM), the paperwork an endurance test, personnel issues can mount, deadlines come like piranha schools and nibble your soul to its skeleton, the tiny aggravations can accumulate in the course of days and months.

Whatever. Readers of this blog have likely gleaned already that I'm not much given to complaint, that in fact I have very little tolerance for kvetch modes. I'd much rather be involved in affirmative projects with clear goals and tangible outcomes. I've enjoyed being chair of the English Department at GW. My three year term comes to a close this spring, and I am nostalgic in advance as its end looms. I hope that what I have called my Reign of Terror will in fact be remembered for attempts to build a lasting, convivial community that includes faculty, students, alumni, and the world outside this particular university. I leave it to my colleagues to decide if I have been at all successful.

Last night I ran an event that gave me some hope that this community really has come into being. I put together a panel called Literature in a Global Age, and invited GW's faculty and undergraduates. We made a special effort to reach out to alumni as well, hoping to lure them back to see how energized and vibrant our English department remains. The event was not a celebration of globalism in literature, but an exploration of how scholars and creative writers analyze, meditate upon, and produce art that explores, reflects, deflects, critiques the culturally complicated time into which it is born. We had a wide ranging discussion of universals, humanism, particularities, posctcolonialism, neocolonialism, politcs, power ... and art. So many people registered for this event that we reached our capacity of sixty-five: who knew there was such an audience for professorial pontification? The only drawback is that we had so much to say on the panel, yet had not allocated sufficient time for discussion: convivial indeed, but all too brief.

I share this at ITM because I believe -- contra the Charlotte Allens and Nancy Partners of the world -- that medievalists do not in fact suffer from a congenital inability to communicate with their colleagues in later periods, and that attempts at conversation are not symptoms of desperation or loneliness. Quite to the contrary: this globalism panel was in many ways an extension into the present of work undertaken by medievalists. Sure, many of the panelists did not know this in advance ... but the Middle Ages were referenced repeatedly as having been reapproached as a time period not of local solitudes but of nomadism, world movement, cultural flow. Globalism as catalyst to change, creativity, discontent is one of the more obvious topics through which medievalists can enter into lively conversation with their colleagues in other time periods and disciplines. Gerry Heng has already proven this well. Globalism in its complexity is also an excellent way to break down the divide between what is scholarly and what is artistic, part of what I have called (stealing a line from Wallace Stevens) a lingua franca et jocundissima that allows us to "to roam that space where philosophy and narrative embrace or even become art."

At least, that's what I beheld my colleagues doing last night ... and extending the conversation to form a community that extends well beyond the faculty of an English Department. I don't think I've ever seen such a lively group attend one of our events. So, all hail convivial literary, artistic, and cultural studies. All hail.

Guest Post: Justin Brent, "Becoming the Medieval Jongleur"

by J J Cohen

At SEMA last week, Justin Brent gave a talk at a BABEL-sponsored panel entitled "The Place of the Medieval in the Present." A continuation of a conversation instigated at Kalamazoo, the panel was rich indeed, featuring excellent presentations by Myra Seaman and Erica Carson; Betsy McCormick; and closing remarks by Anne Clark Bartlett.

Justin's paper was, I thought, one of the most moving presentations I've attended, starting with an acknowledgment of his personal investment in the project and his own embodied response to that ownership ("If I have a tremble in my voice..."). We asked Justin if he'd be willing to post his paper here at ITM, and he was gracious enough to assent.

“Becoming the Medieval Jongleur”

The other day a colleague of mine was recalling what she was doing on the morning of September 11th, 2001. Still a graduate student, buried amidst moldy books in her studio apartment, Molly sat preparing for her orals, happily oblivious to the smoke and helicopters circling the Twin Towers in New York City. It was a phone call from her mom later that afternoon that broke her studious reverie and awakened her to the horror. Molly’s a first-year professor at Presbyterian College; for her, the anecdote was a testament to the otherworldliness of graduate school, allowing one to shut out the external world and inhabit a textual reality. Her story resonated with me because of how different my own 9/11 experience was. I had just begun teaching at Presbyterian College when the Towers fell; I was, in short, where she is now, learning as no doubt all of you know that teaching requires us to be creatures of this world, of the here and now, even if our subject is remote. Within an hour of the first plane’s impact, I knew about it. At our campus-wide convocation that morning, we learned of the second crash; we began with a prayer for those involved, hastily went through the motions of the convocation, and then rushed to our television and computer screens. Had I wanted to remain oblivious to the events of 9/11, I couldn’t have. Even at my provincial liberal arts college, an hour’s drive from a major city, it was impossible to remain aloof, insulated from the threat.

Mulling over my conversation with Molly, I couldn’t help thinking about the grad student both Molly and I were, not so long ago. So focused, so blinkered. I wonder: have I ever been as medieval as I was in graduate school? My Old English, Old Norse, Old French – hold your ears everyone – my LATIN all proclaim emphatically NO! My teaching load laughs uproariously at the ridiculous question—“ha ha ha, a medievalist? With this kind of course load?” And my family life, now far more complicated than it was then, replies with genuine curiosity, “Daddy… what’s medieval?”

With the explosion of non-medieval demands on my time, I often feel as though my ability to do medieval research has stagnated. There are no blocks of time for striking out into terra incognita. Even conference papers, until recently, were rehearsals of dissertation chapters. On the other hand, the courses I teach are now terra firma, thanks to the virtues of trial and error. I’m better at playing my medievalist part, at least for the limited duration of eighty minutes, and better as well at filing the medieval away in order to take up linguistics, composition, faculty status committee, school newspaper, and various other demands. The juggling routine no longer compromises my performance. I’ve become, in short, the medieval jongleur, quite adept at playing limited roles, intensely aware of and responsive to the audience in front of me, and dismissive of the content beyond the horizon of my class notes or conference presentation. Like a good jongleur, my performance introduces anachronisms from my audience’s present—Chaucer’s Pardoner becomes Jerry Falwell; Gutenberg’s press, the World Wide Web; Welsh literature, a discourse circumscribed by Western hegemony; Charlemagne’s siege at Saragossa, the Liberation of the Iraqi People. The connections, moreover, make sense, they feel relevant, build community, and my audience typically likes them.

And yet, I don’t entirely disagree with Nancy Partner, a trailblazer of medieval feminism who more recently has grown skeptical of “theory’s” relevance to the Middle Ages. At Kalamazoo last spring, she derided a Babel panel entitled “What is the Place of the Present in Medieval Studies?” One of her more critical comments went something like this:

…[M]edievalists suffer from a collective resentment at being ignored and slighted, a fear of being considered boring by definition, and are thus pathetically susceptible to acting out in exaggerated bids for attention.

Admittedly, Partner showed little tact. Are we all, for instance, pathetically susceptible? Be that as it may, the jongleur in me acknowledges, if not resentment at being ignored and slighted, at least anxiety about being overlooked; it acknowledges as well a fear of being considered boring; and yes, most emphatically does my jongleur acknowledge exaggerated bids for attention.

On the other hand, Don’t we all? Isn’t the historicizing or new-critical curmudgeon who feigns insulation from the things of this world nevertheless offering his own bid for attention? In all honesty, I’m less worried about bids for attention, indeed even exaggerated ones, than the opposite—an exclusively hindward gaze that overtly dismisses relevance to the present. To imply an exclusively backward focus risks relegating our discipline to the dustbin of the past.

Fortunately for us, some incredibly bright people in our field are refusing to consign us to the dustbin. Partner’s position, I am convinced, would change if she read their work. At present, I’m thinking of Steve Guthrie (though I could easily add Steven Kruger, Bruce Holsinger or Kathleen Biddick, but let’s stick with Steve G). His connection between the torture policies at Abu Ghraib and 14th Century Inquisition practices is breathtaking. Guthrie makes you realize that the past does have predictive power, that those of us who study it have an obligation to make our voices heard.

Jeffrey Cohen’s sense of temporality suggests we should be doing even more. It’s not enough that the past help us “understand better the present” or “render predictable the future” (Medieval Identity Machines). For Cohen, time itself must become a problem, and the medieval “middle” a hermeneutic for understanding it. He discerns … and let me throw Eileen Joy in there with Jeffrey … They discern in good scholarship an unsettled restlessness, a joie de vivre that embraces, even loves, the past, refuting any possibility of stability or consensus. I suspect that a good deal of the jongleur I’ve uncovered for this presentation owes its formulation to the “nomadic, mobile, vagrant” scholarship that Cohen called for at Kalamazoo this past Spring. His blog, moreover, has left a stamp on the field that will endure for many years to come. Consider for instance his recent post on “Messages to an Uncertain Future,” in which he characterizes Stonehenge, the Cairn at Maeshowe, and York Minster as “time capsules” and “messages to a known-in-advance receiver,” colonizing space and time in excess of our typical historical parameters. He invites us to consider: “How do you communicate with a future to which you will have become remote history?” While he doesn’t really offer an answer, Cohen implies that we look to Stonehenge, Maeshowe and York Minster as models.

Make no mistake, these are compelling cases for the relevant restlessness of the past. They’re big, they’re exciting, they’re important, and they’re changing medieval studies. Like Nancy Partner, I’m not always comfortable with the presentist claims they make, but unlike her, I wouldn’t want a field without them! Medieval studies, like any other scholarly discipline, should be receptive to what Betsy McCormick calls “hermeneutic juxtapositions”: it must allow divisions and indeed thrive on the rifts that these juxtapositions create. Failure to give voice to them isolates us, deprives us of relevance, invites snickers and spitballs from the back row, and leaves us vulnerable to academia’s grim reaper. If we fail to bring the present to medieval studies, provosts may decide medieval studies has no place in the present.

But eternal optimist that I am, I believe those who represent the future of medieval studies are jongleurs like myself, juggling their research endeavors with a variety of institutional demands and non-medieval teaching obligations. Perhaps we remember a time somewhat fondly when we could block the present out of our lives, bury ourselves in o-stem declensions, lose our way in the tangle of medieval romance, maybe even shiver with delight at holding a fourteenth century Book of Hours. Like the Roland jongleur, we may look back with nostalgia and reverence at our past, wanting to revisit it, caress it, even love it. But if love calls us to our medieval past, it also calls us to the things of this world.

Returning to the question at the beginning of this essay – that is, have I ever been as medieval as I was in graduate school? – let me now reply with an emphatic yes! Indeed, a much better one, and better because of the demands of this world. For although they tend to shatter and refract my medieval gaze into an unsettling array of fragmentary pieces, the jongleur eventually grows adept at assembling the pieces and integrating them into the audience’s present. Recalling the aftermath of my 9/11, I remember now that following convocation most of my History of the English Language students showed up for class, eager for someone to make sense of the crisis. But I was equally stunned, so we sat there in a state of uncomfortable silence until finally I dismissed the class. My inner-grad student had little training for such a crisis and therefore stood frozen, like Chaucer, before the gates of horn and ivory. But my inner jongleur, now seasoned with hindsight and a healthy dose of presentism, knows that I missed an opportunity. I should have turned on the classroom TV and grieved with them, like Margery Kempe at Calvary.

On behalf of a reader: Defending medieval studies

by J J Cohen

Ken Tompkins writes:

This isn't exactly of concern to you and the "Middle Folk" but I have heard echoes of it from time to time. I hope you -- and others -- will respond.

Finally, attempts to eliminate teaching the Middle Ages has hit Stockton. Because I am entering our retirement program, my Program (read Department) is thinking about my replacement. The administration of the college has not so subtlety suggested that we should hire someone to teach more modern theories of literature and represent more modern approaches (not a direct quote but close). The Program prefers to replace me with another medievalist -- and will resist administrative pressure -- but eventually may be forced to agree.

A bit of information. As I said, I am in my 43rd year of teaching and am in the process of retiring. I have taught both Medieval and Renaissance literature here for 37 years. My classes are always full so, unlike other colleges, our enrollments in the Medieval courses is not declining. We have felt fortunate until now not to be faced with pressure to replace Medieval studies with something more "current".

I have volunteered to provide material about other, similar colleges and to come up with a list of justifications for keeping the Medieval position. I am, then, turning to you and the others on "In the Middle" for any leads to documents or statements that colleges have produced when faced with similar pressures. Who, out there, has successfully defended continuing Medieval studies? What were their justifications/defenses? Etc.

It would help us if I could be pointed to resources I might include.

One last point: this is NOT a crisis. It is the beginning of a long discussion between our Program and members of the administration. We are likely to be able to hire a Medievalist in a year. It's just that we want to write a thorough, researched, conclusive document on the present state of Medieval studies and why we must continue them here.

Thanks, in advance, for any help you and others may send us.

ken tompkins
professor of literature
richard stockton college of nj

So there it is, the existential question: why must we be?

Trigg and Prendergast on Medievalism

by J J Cohen

From Humanities Researcher, a preview of an important new essay on medievalism, presentism, and all those temporal -isms we salivate over here at ITM:

We talk about the opposition between medieval studies and medievalism studies, and argue that medieval studies often abjects the latter as involving too much pleasure to be taken seriously. The real "work" belongs to medieval studies proper. "Contemporary medievalism is now tarred by the same brush that in conservative circles continues to dismiss cultural studies as mere chat about television, cinema and the Internet; that is the accusation that there is too much pleasure, too little work in its study." We also suggest that while the opposition between the medieval and the post-medieval is a crucial component in the formation of the modern subject "who thus emerges as capable of both forgetting and remembering the past," this dynamic also characterises the relationship medieval men and women had with their own past; that the medieval is just as often medievalising, as it is not. That is, that the opposition between medieval and post-medieval, medievalist or even, we might say, the non-medieval, is never as crystalline as the strictest medieval scholars might like to maintain. That in fact, the medieval is always being made, by medieval scholars, as well as by popularising medievalists.

And, what's more ... the essay is followed by a response from Carolyn Dinshaw, which in part takes up some of her paper given at the New York NCS, on Rip van Winkle, engaging with the pleasure of this text, and its "temporal heterogeneity", courting the dangerous threats to one's professional identity as a medieval scholar that might ensue from engaging with popular fiction. What's not to like about that?

Read the whole essay in New Medieval Literatures (volume 9, for 2007).

I'm a Pleasure Seeker, Looking for the Real Thing: We're All Presentists Now

Figure 1. A GeoTimeSpiral

by EILEEN JOY

[titled cadged from "Funplex" by the B-52's]

Consider this a timely post on the International Medieval Congress at Leeds from just this past week [7-10 July] and a belated post on the BABEL Working Group's Kalamazoo Congress panel, "What Is the Place of the Present in Medieval Studies?" [8-10 May]. I attended many great sessions at Leeds, including three of the four panels organized by Asa Simon Mittman and Debra Higgs Strickland on "The Unnatural World" [which featured really memorable papers on medieval monsters and monstrosity by Asa, Susan Kim, Eomann O Carrigain, Craig Davis, Patricia Aakhus, and Heather Blurton, among others]; a roundtable organized by the Society for Feminist Medieval Scholarship on whether or not it would be possible to locate a "feminist poetics" or aesthetic of the female body in the texts of the Middle Ages [a question posed by Beth Robertson the year before, and from what I could tell from the roundtable's discussants, apparently either unanswerable or conducive to a lot of discomfort as to what constitutes either "feminist" or "female," textual, aesthetic, or bodily--although Ruth Evans raised here the provocative possibility of approaching the question through some current narratives on aesthetics and singularity as well as through the philosophy of alterity: for example, through Derek Attridge's The Singularity of Literature and through the work of Badiou, respectively]; and an excellent session on the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book Riddles, which included a really good paper by a graduate student at Trinity College, Alice Jorgensen, that analyzed tropes of pain and violence in the Riddles concerned with tools and other utilitarian objects [such as pens and keys] through the lens of Elaine Scarry's work in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. I also attended one of two sessions devoted to "Englishness and the Sea," where Jeffrey's colleague Jonathan Hsy gave a wonderful paper on the fluidity and un/homeliness of linguistic "travels" [on land and sea] in Margery Kempe, and in this same session Kathy Lavezzo delineated a new inter-between space of post-coloniality for us: the "sludge" of the English channel into which Arthur and Gawain wade in the alliterative Morte Arthure. And in a session sponsored by the [new] Institute for Mediaeval Studies at St. Andrew's, I heard a fantastic paper by one of Clare Lees's students at Kings College London, Josh Davies, "Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." One session that really stood out for the fact of all three papers being so excellent was the session sponsored by the Society for the Study of Homosexuality in the Middle Ages, "Queer Landscapes," with papers by Dominic Janes, Albrecht Diem, and Lara Farina. Lara's paper, "Touching Landscapes," was especially memorable for raising the provocative question of how it is, after so many years of visual and picture theory, we do not yet have a theory of the visual that also incorporates a theory of touch: what does it mean to see with touch, while touching, or as touch [and really, can we even have a visual theory that is not embodied?], and further, how does touch, in certain contexts, undo certain objects [bodies, but also buildings, landscapes, etc.] that threaten within the visual field? In what ways did medieval persons inhabit a practice of reading that was visual-tactile and how can we read the sites of seeing-touching within medieval texts?

But it has to be said, the one session that really kind of grabbed and got me [and which I can't shake off] was the one organized by Tom Prendergast, "Does Medievalism Have a Past?" in which Stephanie Trigg delivered the amazing talk, "When Is the Medieval? Medievalism as a Critique of Periodization." It has to be stated here that since Stephanie and Tom are currently at work together on a book on medievalism, both her talk and his ["Medievalism and the Naked Truth"] were, as they themselves noted, co-productions. Stephanie's talk was one of those great bomb-throwing [and also highly entertaining] affairs, and sitting in the very back I noted the body language and furious scribbling in notebooks all around me that connoted some discomfort in the audience with Stephanie's and Tom's arguments. In short, Stephanie opened with the attention-grabbing argument that, while some will always be at pains to distinguish "real" medieval studies [of a decidedly historicist bent and which apparently is "serious" and "difficult"] from "medievalism" [of a decidedly more presentist bent and which is supposedly "pleasurable" and therefore "too easy"], all of medieval studies is "medievalism," and cadging from Bruno Latour, "we have never been medieval."

In one form or another, all of us working within medieval studies are practicing some form of "medievalism" [in which--let's face it--there is always "serious" labor and also pleasure: is anyone really a medievalist who wasn't drawn, libidinally, to the subject, and is there any work within our field that hasn't come at some amount of physical and psychic cost?], although we might like to believe otherwise, when, for instance, we consider ourselves scholars of only the "hard-edged alterity" of the past, and which some of us labor mightily to move out from under the aegis of the present or any past that supposedly comes "after" the Middle Ages.

In order to offer one avenue for escaping the trap of thinking about history only through teleologically linear narratives that don't allow room for what Stephanie described as post-historical reflection, Stephanie began with a discussion of Jeffrey's thinking in his book Medieval Identity Machines [in his chapter "Time's Machines"] on the need for medieval studies to incorporate critical temporality studies [such as the work of Latour, Manuel Delanda, Rita Felski, Elizabeth Grosz, etc.] and a better understanding of nonlinear dynamics into its work, in order to, as Jeffrey writes in his book,

discover how time might be thought beyond some of its conventional parameters, outside of reduction into monologic history, . . . outside of enchainment into progress narratives, with their "ever upwards" movement of evolutionary betterment and abandonment of the past for a predestined, superior future, and outside of linearization, the weary process through which a past is not encountered for its own possibilities, but either distanced as mere antecedent or explored only to understand better the present and render predictable the future. [pp. 2-3]

Stephanie also noted the importance of Jeffrey's insistence on "thinking time" in relation to corporality and "movements of becoming over the immobilities of being" [Jeffrey's words in Medieval Identity Machines, p. 3], and she described an amazing [under-noticed] moment in Malory's Morte d'Arthur [in the Book of Sir Tristram], where, during a banquet after a tournament [in which tournament Lancelot had placed women's clothing over his armor], the knight whom Lancelot defeated, Dinadin, appears [after having been knocked off his horse and dragged into the forest by Lancelot's men to be forcibly stripped of his armor and then dressed in women's clothing], occasioning Guenevere to laugh so hard that she falls down [as if she were "ded"]. Stephanie did not explicate or interpret this scene so much as she noted the ways in which it marked a moment of atemporality [or maybe of "out-of-jointness"?] within Malory's text that might beg certain questions: what to do with such an anomalous moment that is, quite explicitly, about the movement and affect of bodies and which, by its unexpected and strange nature within the context of this particular text/world, disrupts the "regular" time of the narrative? [I might note here that Stephanie herself, in order to dramatize the temporal dis-jointedness of such a moment, orchestrated her own fall behind the podium: medieval studies has now officially gone "slapstick"--it was great! How can anyone not love this woman?]

Stephanie then drew our attention to the polytemporality of Bruno Latour's spiral time, which is analogous, I might add, to Bergson's conception of time as duration: this is not time that can be neatly divided nor segmented, and events are continually moving/flowing along certain lines in which matter, space, and consciousness are inherent in time and vice versa, and to "fix" a moment of the past at a particular point, in the same manner that a lepidopterist might pin a dead butterfly to a piece of cardboard, is essentially a futile exercise in "capturing" the past. More important, how do we capture history in flight--all the ways, as Stephanie put it, that the medieval and the modern are moving in all directions, up and down, north and south, east and west, forward and backward, along time's spirals?

When one of the audience members confessed that it made her really uncomfortable when she read the Kalamazoo 2009 call for papers and saw that there was a session on the Harry Potter books [with the codicil that she loved the books but she wasn't sure they were a proper subject for medieval studies], Tom Prendergast raised the question of responsibility: although the Harry Potter books may have only a very tangential relationship to the Middle Ages, isn't it partly our responsibility to determine what that relationship might be and why it matters? This immediately connected with a point I was already somewhat anxious to make: that medievalism--although it often seems to be about movies and fantasy novels and children's literature and Victorian poetry and other cultural productions that take the Middle Ages as their subject--can also be deadly serious in its choice of subject matter that is often the very opposite of "entertaining"; for example, in BABEL members Steve Guthrie's and Michael Moore's work on the Bush White House torture memos and medieval law, or Daniel Kline's work on the Bush White House's Lancastrian and Derridean pretensions [go here for more on the book that contains these essays]. It seemed to me then [at the Leeds session] and now in our present moment when human [and other] rights are under terrible assault in a country--the United States--that calls itself an historical democracy and that supposedly believes in historical due processes of law, and which has no problem calling its enemies "medieval," that medieval studies has a great responsibility, indeed, and one that must never forget its location in the [troubling and troubled] present.

When John Ganim told me later in the evening that he had sidelined the comments he had prepared for the roundtable [following Tom's and Stephanie's session], "Futures for Medievalism: A Roundtable Discussion" [featuring John, Larry Scanlon, Anke Bernau, David Matthews, Andrew Lynch, Tom Prendergast, and Jenna Mead], in order to re-raise my point about a medieval studies [which is also always medievalism] having a responsibility to take on certain "deadly serious" political subjects [wow--thanks, John], apparently the general discussion drifted toward that worn-out chestnut I've heard time and time again: we can try, but no one is ever really listening to us [the medievalists], anyway, so wouldn't that be a colossal [and frustrating] waste of time? Isn't it always? I was immediately reminded of Steve Guthrie's comments, in his remarks for BABEL's Kalamazoo roundtable, "What Is the Place of the Present in Medieval Studies?", that it is not a question of whether or not medievalists can do a better [or worse] job at this than anyone else [investigative reporters, perhaps?], but rather a matter of us acting "as if." Here is how Steve put it more precisely:

. . . . good scholarship has predictive power, and predictive power may just save us from the present catastrophe, if we’re willing to exercise it and anyone is willing to listen. Our record is not good, but we must behave as if. So the question, for the survival of the Constitution (see Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception) and maybe the species, to the extent that that outcome is in the hands of medievalists — and we might as well take it on; no one else is doing a very good job — is not whether medievalists ought to write about Abu Ghraib but whether the presentist approach or the pastist is more likely to save us from our present circumstances.

A good pastist depends on the agenda of the period, and on the question of torture there are no flags waving in the published record. There is plenty to make sense of, but only in the presence of a motivating question — a hunch — drawn from now. The published record is there if you have an idea of the pattern to look for. So the useful medievalist is like I. F. Stone, the independent Washington reporter who for decades published his influential weekly newsletter by starting with a question or a scent, combing the papers and wire services, and putting two and two together. The person who does it best now is Noam Chomsky. It’s investigative journalism at the level of scholarship. Its purpose is to salvage the present in the name of the future.

Think of this in reverse: scholarship at the level of investigative journalism. So let me substitute “investigative medievalism” for “critical interrogation.” The difference is important to me. It’s the difference between feeling like I.F. Stone and feeling like Donald Rumsfeld. That substitution in place, I’m all for presentism. It boils down to this: We start with the present because that’s where the bodies are buried.

But even just the phrase "as if" has such forceful power for me--it would not be an exaggeration to say [confess] here that there has never been another reason or cause for which I myself have expended so many personal and scholarly labors as I have for "as if." I have never understood those who make the argument--no matter the disagreement or subject at hand--that one should not do a particular thing if the outcome can generally be assured [or safely predicted] to be, again, generally non-consequential. Whether we are talking about love or intellectual work [or even a general predisposition that we might adopt toward the world], I cannot see that we have any other choice but to proceed "as if" things could be better if only we were to believe they might be emended, recuperated, attended to, saved, ameliorated, healed, touched, moved, affected, changed, etc. by our labors--labors, moreover, rooted in a fierce attention to and regard for others, wherever they might be, past, present, or future. This has something to do as well with something I know I have [perhaps annoyingly] quoted here again and again from my friend Michael Moore's essay, "Wolves, Outlaws, and Enemy Combatants," where he argued that,

Displays of hatred have been common in recent years, thriving in a moral atmosphere of decline. Nationalism has formed the crucial backdrop to the legal atavism and return to more primitive forms of law . . . . The attempt to preserve a humane culture and to assert our rights or our love of the right, should not be left in the hands of a distant state, since these are qualities of the virtuous life. One should highlight the possibility of friendship and the connections between friendship, liberty, and joy. It is by no means easy to orient oneself during a period such as this one. While pondering the theme of this essay, I went on retreat in the monastery of Maria Laach (Monasterium Sanctae Mariae ad Lacum). Walking the paths lined with ancient beech trees or sitting in the quiet of the old liturgical library, I found that the topic troubled my thoughts. It seemed like a violation of the peace of the monastery to study torture and terrorism inside the walls, and yet those walls gave my reflections a hopeful and dignified frame.

We have been given the world as a setting in which to practice virtue and to attain self-knowledge; we are also bidden to study the world and the human tradition. Only this can open the prospect of contemplative happiness, "to which the whole of political life seems directed." In periods of disturbance and change, personal constancy and discussions with like-minded friends become more important. If we can remain true to our friends, then new paths will appear . . . .

I would draw attention here to Michael's invocation of friendship as a political project of intellectual life, and I would only add that, when told that our work, as medievalists, may have no impact on the so-called "real world," that we must remember that we do this work [by which I mean a medievalism concerned with the present] together with others who are bound to us in the present--whom we may [must] call our friends--and that, again together, we are leaving records, testimonies, and witnesses to this present. This is ethical work, it is political, it is affective [both libidinal and pleasurable], and it matters. It is what we leave behind in the space of the "as if" it were otherwise.

I think the remarks provided by the panelists on BABEL's Kalamazoo panel in May, although they [temporally] preceded Tom's and Stephanie's in Leeds just this past week, provide a terrific and beautiful [and yes I use too many superlatives, shoot me] response [or maybe it's a preamble] to Stephanie's and Tom's call for a more polytemporal approach to our studies, and for a field that would better recognize the interrelated labors and pleasures of its [mutual] work. I will leave everyone with some snippets from those remarks, and for those who would like to read the more full texts of that session, you can access those here:

To think temporality otherwise; to discern in our Now the living traces of multiple pasts (even the United States carries within it the burden and the possibility of medieval pasts); to recognize that time is so complex that futures can curve to sink their teeth deep into histories long passed; to touch these times and to love them: that’s the place of the present in medieval studies. Such emplacedness challenges us to reconceptualize the Middle Ages and history more generally, to think them outside of the points of view that have hardened around them and seem true – but only because we’ve repeated them for so long. Such congealing into doctrine says more about our reverence for imagined pasts and our fear of unstable futures than about the Middle Ages. Doctrinaire modes of analysis strive to encapsulate this geotemporal expanse, to still into a museum display. A more restless approach will grant the medieval its life in the present. [Jeffrey J. Cohen]

. . . it seems to me, those working on the premodern past and those working on the postmodern present (or post-postmodern, if you wish) share much more than we might commonly recognize or acknowledge. What might it be like for both groups to practice a historicism that brings the past and the present, premodern and postmodern, alongside each other in a rich heterogeneity, that stresses a temporality and spatiality that is coincidental, affective, and performative rather than stabilizingly teleological, segmented, or hierarchized? In terms of sexuality and gender, for example, such an encounter between past and present would seek to uncover in the premodern that which is in excess to the discourses of modern heteronormativity. If, as Christopher Nealon has recently noted of current queer critique, “we need to read sexuality as historical, that is, as made out of found materials, secondhand,” then I think the premodern, with its diversity of gender and sexualities, competing and interwoven models of virgin, virago, good wife, chaste marriage, chivalric masculinity, clerical celibate, etc., can provide a powerfully heterogeneous set of “found materials” to bring alongside the present. Such a historicization, focused on what cannot be assimilated to the logic of a repetition that is conducive to periodization and stabilized identities, enacts its own logic of the beside, necessarily and profoundly engaging with the present as it attempts to move, in Lee Edelman’s words, into “the space where ‘we’ are not.” Such a richly and self-consciously performative historicization of past and present could help instantiate how both past and present (not just the present, as Edelman would have it), are “project[s] whose time never comes and therefore [are] always now.” [Glenn Burger]

. . . what I would like to suggest is that the present should function in medieval studies not only to bring new theories and histories to bear on the past, but more importantly, as the site of potential transformation. Here, I want to refer to Elizabeth Grosz’s marvelous book, The Nick of Time. Drawing on Nietzsche, Grosz argues that “what history gives us is the possibility of being untimely, of placing ourselves outside the constraints, the limitations, and blinkers of the present. This is precisely what it means to write for a future that the present cannot recognize; to develop, to cultivate the untimely, the out-of-place and the out-of-step. This access to the out-of-step can come only from the past and a certain uncomfortableness, a dis-ease, in the present” (117). This notion of untimeliness as the goal of historical work, by which she means the dislocation of the present, seems to me to argue for a present in medieval studies that cannot hold. In other words, I think that many of us on this panel today would consider our work in medieval studies to serve as a kind of intervention in the present. In my own recent work, I am explicitly interested in the ways in which the medieval past can dislodge our heteronormative present and help us to imagine a “world not normatively organized around heterosexuality,” in the words of Michael Warner. In fact, Warner thinks this effort of imagination is nearly impossible, but I would argue, alà Grosz, that we can cultivate an untimely sense of our own present through the study of the past, even as we study that same past through modern theories and especially in conjunction with contemporary political events. The role of the present in my fantasy of medieval studies is to serve as the discomfiting position from which we write and speak with the knowledge that our present cannot be detached from the medieval past. [Karma Lochrie]

One peculiar trait of literature is its proclivity for endless temporal regeneration: the “I” of the lyric, for example, is re-activated, bound to the reader, no matter the distance of that reader from the historical moment of composition; it is an essential component of lyric form that it lives again, with each new voicing, in more than a superficial way. As a phenomenon, what do we do with this subject, part textual artifact of the medieval century, part contemporary reader? I do know that our current dominant modes of literary criticism are not well equipped to handle that disjunction, burying it beneath History. I think bringing to bear our critical faculties on the immediacy of that phenomenological moment should occupy us as vigorously and seriously as the application of endless social and historical contexts. [Andrew Scheil]

I hope I will be forgiven for such a long post, but the subject is one that has long obsessed, and will continue to obsess me, as well as the BABEL Working Group, for a long time to come.

EDIT [@ 10:00 p.m.] I have just noticed that Stephanie Trigg has also posted some of her own thoughts on the session she shared with Tom Prendergast here, and her anecdote about a response from a reader on a book chapter on medievalism that she and Tom have co-authored, where the reviewer wrote that, "the most important element of being a medievalist is not medievalism (entrancing as it may be), but the Middle Ages themselves, embodied in what we have left from the past: words, texts, buildings, paintings, tapestries, books and so on," immediately reminded me of another point I meant to share in this post, stemming from a conversation I had with Clare Lees, Diane Watt, and Lara Farina when we were together at Leeds about the censorious nature of Anglo-Saxon studies toward modernist approaches to its subject matter. There is nothing more forbidding, I don't think, than an Anglo-Saxonist telling you what you are not supposed to be doing in your scholarship and sometimes I think I chose the field out of some kind of unconscious masochism [but I hope not]. In any case, Lara Farina [who is not an Anglo-Saxonist, in the strict sense of that term, but who has written on Old English texts] pointed out that the university is the one place in which a kind of critical freedom to scholarly self-definition is of central importance [and where that self-definition must also be safeguarded]: isn't one of the very hallmarks of a university its supposed openness as regards the pursuit of knowledge? This point is so banal I can't believe we have to defend it at this late date, or perhaps "this late date" is precisely the problem, and this is why Derrida had to remind us, in "The University Without Condition," that the university constitutes the site of "the principal right to say everything, even if it be under the heading of fiction and the experimentation of knowledge, and the right to say it publicly, to publish it." And this we can't forget.

CORRECTION [7/15 @ 8:30 pm] Alice Jorgensen is NOT a graduate student at Trinity College, Dublin but a professor there. My apologies.

Nadia R. Altschul on the postcolonial Middle Ages

by J J Cohen

For a comprehensive and sympathetic overview of the subject, check out Nadia R. Altschul's essay "Postcolonialism and the Study of the Middle Ages" (History Compass 6/2 [2008]: 588-606). The piece bursts with references to favorite ITM scholars: Patty Ingham, Sylvia Huot, Kathy Biddick, Carolyn Dinshaw, Sylvia Tomasch, Lees and Overing, Michelle Warren, Kathleen Davis, Bruce Holsinger, John Ganim, Kofi Campbell. The essay's point of departure is the hesitancy of some medievalists to affirm the value of re-approaching the medieval period with PoCo theory an ally.

I'm frontpaging Altschul here because her essay has much to offer our unfolding discussion of disability studies. She wonders, for example, about the risks of anachronism and applicability when transporting back in time a body of theory developed around a modern encounter. She argues that, provided a two-way conversation unfolds (with both postcolonial and medieval studies open to change), the anachronism and inapplicability arguments are unpersuasive.

Of course medievalists need to be cautious (JJC adds -- because who is more cautious than the etymology- and codex-addled medievalist?) but medievalists must also (he continues) be open to the fact that the facts of the Middle Ages are a lot less inert than we might think. They aren't like those burials at Stonehenge, dozing for a few millennia as they await a discovery that will announce the whole complex to be nothing more than a gravesite. In fact the burials proved nothing of the sort, declaring only that the stones, mounds, and ditches were an architecture that gathered together human lives and human deaths. Graves can also (as Geoffrey of Monmouth insisted) be places of healing, of transformation: a space where history assumes a new life.