How to Celebrate "Whan That Aprille Day" (2017)

guest posting by COURTNEY RYDEL

[cross-posted at Global Chaucers]

Cover the program for “Whan That Aprille Day” celebrations last year at Washington College. Program designed by Olivia Serio (President of the Poetry Club, Washington College, class of 2017).

Coming at the beginning of April, National Poetry Month in the United States, “Whan That Aprille Day” is a holiday begun by the @LeVostreGC persona behind “Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog” and “Chaucer Doth Tweet” in 2014. @LeVostreGC proposed medievalists unite in our efforts to celebrate “the beauty and great loveliness of studying the words of the past. Our mission is to bring to mind the importance of supporting the scholarship and labor that brings these words to us…and the teaching of these…languages. For without all of this, the past would have no words for us” [read the full 2017 iteration of this open call in this earlier post at In The Middle].

In spring 2016, I curated an event on Multilingual Chaucer, gathering students and faculty from across Washington College, the small liberal arts college in Maryland where I teach.  Since then, I’ve participated in another large-scale Chaucer project that was directed towards the larger community, #MedievalBirds with ornithologist Jennie Carr, work on which is still ongoing. Currently I am planning a major Chaucerian event for spring 2018, with guest speaker Kim Zarins, that will involve collaboration with the Education department and local high school teachers.

Based on these experiences, I would like to offer some suggestions for other medievalists looking to create exciting events to celebrate “Whan That Aprille Day” on their campus. Although the event originated with celebrating Chaucer, that context should not be limiting. “Whan That Aprille Day” has the goal of celebrating the “beauty and great loveliness” in all languages.  Any language, literature, or poetry is welcome!  In this contemporary moment when the NEA and NEH are threatened, we need to come together as humanists and poetry lovers.  The more that medievalists connect with scholars of modern languages and across disciplines, and with our larger community, the stronger we will be.

• Celebrate the gifts and skills of your students and faculty, and show them how they connect to Chaucer. At Washington College we hosted a reading of “Multilingual Chaucer,” which included students and faculty reading poetry in languages including Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Latin, Spanish, French, Russian, German, Hindi, Old English, and Middle English.  Some readers read their favorite poems in other languages, and some read Chaucer or Chaucer translations.  The mixture of languages and diverse poems brought alive how “The Father of English Poetry” inhabited a multilingual space, and allowed us to hear the many languages of our polyglot, increasingly international campus.

• If you’re going global, check out the fantastic Global Chaucers online archive, created by Jonathan Hsy and Candace Barrington. This resource for post-1945 global non-Anglophone translations of Chaucer offers sample texts, blog posts and scholarship on Chaucer in modern contexts, and reflections on his impact in the contemporary landscape.

• Look to interdisciplinary and collaborative research. My biologist colleague Jennie Carr and I undertook a project on #MedievalBirds in fall 2016, in which we combined her expertise on ornithology with my research to create an interactive downtown gallery exhibit on Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls.  We involved students in creating a physical tree that branched onto the ceiling, showing how Chaucer’s categories of birds overlapped with evolutionary development, and in creating videos of students reciting passages from the Parliament of Fowls with present-day English translations in closed captioning.

• Think about going beyond your college into the community. For Spring 2018, Washington College is planning an event that brings together high school teachers with our community to think about Chaucer in relation to the brilliant YA lit retelling of the Canterbury Tales by Kim Zarins, Sometimes We Tell the Truth. This event will give us an opportunity to bring together our LGBTQIA student groups as well as our secondary ed community with lovers of poetry and medieval studies.  Kim has graciously agreed to come and do a reading and craft talk, and the Education department is collaborating with us on a workshop with high school teachers to help them craft more in-depth lesson plans and relate Chaucer to contemporary issues.

• Consider contemporary retellings of Chaucer, like the aforementioned Sometimes We Tell the Truth. Students at the Multilingual Chaucer event also read from Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales, giving us a chance to hear Nigerian-accented English in a different perspective on the Wife of Bath.

• Include other medievalists, faculty, and even emeritus faculty with a love of Chaucer! Our beloved emeritus faculty Bennett Lamond, who taught Chaucer for decades at Washington College starting back in 1965, read at our Multilingual Chaucer event.  He gave a hilarious, spirited reading of “To Rosamunde,” likening it to the Rolling Stones song “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”

• Get students involved in their own retellings and rewritings of Chaucer. David Wallace’s undergraduate Chaucer course at the University of Pennsylvania in spring 2014 held an event in which students debuted both their own readings of Chaucer in the original Middle English as well as inspired, irreverent translations into present-day English.

• Direct your event to increase opportunities for outreach on your campus. Are there other departments or programs with which you want to collaborate?  How can Chaucer connect to other time periods and topics?  Maybe you want to celebrate Chaucer’s influence on later art and media with your Media Studies or Art History departments.  Perhaps you want to work with your Gender Studies department on an event that looks at gender roles in Chaucer, or with Comparative Literature or Modern Languages scholars on an event that highlights translation.

• Advertise! We had co-sponsors who also helped to publicize the event, including the Global Education Office, Department of English, Department of Modern Languages, Rose O’Neill Literary House, Poetry Club, and Sigma Tau Delta (English Honor Society).  Their efforts, along with our posters, tweets, and announcements, ensured a good turnout for the event.

• Use social media for collaboration, connections and archiving. This international holiday was created and promoted through social media, so it’s important to create records, post pictures and videos, and tweet, blog or Facebook with the hashtag #WhanThatAprilleDay17 (please note the spelling).

Of course, all of these reflections come from the perspective of a medievalist working in English, who teaches Chaucer. Although “Whan That Aprille Day” started from a Chaucer parody account and remains Middle English heavy, its goal is wide and universal, and it offers possibilities for global and multilingual exchange, just as Chaucer himself makes in his poetry.  In the words of @LeVostreGC, “we hope that the connections, affinities, and joys of this made-up linguistic holiday will widely overflow their initial medieval English context.”

Readers pose for a group photo after the “Whan That Aprille Day” event at the Rose O’Neill Literary House, Washington College (2016).

RELATED LINKS:

• Open Call for "Whan That Aprille Day" from @LeVostreGC himself (2017)
• #WhanThatAprilleDay video from Middle English Texts Series, with a nod to #MedievalDonut (2016)
• Online and social media celebrations of "Whan That Aprille Day" (2015)
• Recordings in dead languages by some of the ITM co-bloggers (2014) and twelve modern languages at Global Chaucers for "Whan That Aprille Day" (2014)

Medieval Studies: Rallying Cry and Affirmation

by JONATHAN HSY

My #MLA17 "hot take" for medievalists: we all have to STEP UP.

Look at what the professional organizations and most prestigious journals in earlier historical periods are doing. The Society for Classical Studies has a leadership statement against racism and its major conference featured a politically urgent plenary (had to be delivered by proxy) by a prominent scholar who is also an undocumented immigrant; the most recent issue of Shakespeare Quarterly addresses early modern race and Shakespeare reception with essays by ethnic minority academics; the Shakespeare Association of America has an annual social for Scholars of Color (and allies).* We as a discipline and a community need to unambiguously stand up against white nationalism and the abuse of the past -- especially in a field that fuels racist fantasies. Medieval studies is not just about the past; it must build a better future.

*Note also a AIA-SCS session on immigration (organized by the Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups) and Affiliated group for Classics and Social Justice with a CFP for 2018; the linked SAA program schedule features among other things a plenary on the "Color of Membership" but the SOC social is not yet listed.

For an AFFIRMING thread broadcasting the many things we ARE doing in medieval studies (rather than just calling out what we "oppose"), check out this public thread at BABEL Futures.

Any other efforts, schemes, affirmations, hortatory speeches, or news you'd like to share? Add to the comment thread below (it's moderated, so please be patient!)

3,000 Kalamazoos: Play, Change, Community

by JONATHAN HSY

PROLOGUE

My annual swag summary of Kalamazoo (click image to embiggen). [May 18, 2016]

It has been just about a week since the 2016 International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, MI (aka #Kzoo2016). About three thousand attendees made the journey to Kalamazoo this year (note also this great writeup before the conference), and there are thousands of stories can be told about the experience as a result.

The medievalist blogosphere has been active this week, and I'll let these varied accounts speak for themselves:

• Karra Shimabukuro, "#Kzoo2016 Reflections" (May 14 post at Folklore <--> Milton <--> Popular Culture)
• Kathleen E. Kennedy, "The Future of Medieval Conferences" (May 15 tumblr post)
• Maggie Williams, recap of Material Collective activities (May 16 blog post, with links to livetweets from the relevant sessions)
• Travis Neel, general reflections (May 17, public Facebook note)
• Shamma Boyarin, reflections on inclusion and disability approaches (May 16 and May 22)
• Josh Eyler's blog is hosting guest postings from the "Teaching the Humanities in the Current Climate of Higher Education" roundtable at Kzoo: Cameron Hunt McNabb: "Teaching to the Choir" (May 17); Leigh Ann Craig: "So Are You Going to Open A History Store?" (May 19); Kisha Tracy: "A Plea for Research, Part 1" (May 23)
• MW Bychowski, "Genres of Embodiment: A Theory of Medieval Transgender Literature" (May 17 blog post at Transliterature: Things Transform)
• Shyama Rajendran, "Kalamazoo 2016 and The Work We Still Have To Do" (May 18 blog post)
• David Hadbawnik, "Kalamazoo 2016 Redux" (May 21 blog post)
• Danielle Trynoski, "Digital Humanities at K'zoo: A Recap" (May 22 for Medievalists.net)
• Susan Signe Morrison, "Female Fun at Kalamazoo: All the Single (and Married) Ladies at the 51st International Congress on Medieval Studies" (May 23 blog post)

I'm still processing my own intellectual and affective responses to Kalamazoo 2016. Many of my perceptions are shaped by my own idiosyncratic social circles but do I have a general sense that this Kzoo felt … different, in ways I can’t quite express. Perhaps due to #femfog and the whole Frantzen affair earlier this year, Kzoo felt more overtly affirming and welcoming than previous years (more mentorship networks, sessions and panels foregrounding new voices, a range of inclusive gatherings and initiatives) and it also felt profoundly serious about considering the state of the field and how it can improve in structural ways (such as the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship roundtable on harassment in the academy, online conversations about conference sociality and accessibility, frank discussions about social media use in medievalist circles). 

What sticks with me the most vividly from my own experience of Kzoo this year is a sense that new structures are being built and we don’t yet know what shape they will take. I feel like medievalists are collectively inhabiting an intriguing zone of potential and possibility.

My blog reflections are clustered by three key words: PLAY, CHANGE, and COMMUNITY.

PLAY

BANANA CAR spotting in downtown Kalamazoo! [May 13, 2016]

One reason I enjoy heading out to Kzoo each year is experiencing its sense of play. As always, Kzoo reminded me of the love that medievalists have for what we do (be it teaching, research, publishing, artistic production) and both the sessions and the social events can generate a shared sense of purpose and belonging.

• Medieval Donut 2.0. This donut-centered informal social gathering, graciously hosted by Jeffrey Cohen on Wednesday night, marked the second year of what is now becoming a Kzoo tradition. Although I missed the event (sniffle!), it clearly provided a low-key way to socialize and meet new people. For tweets and photos from this event and related festivities throughout the conference, see this curated 2016 #medievaldonut archive.

• PLAY roundtable. GW MEMSI (Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute) hosted a ludic roundtable/playground that featured (among other things) balloons, a bouncing beach ball, toys on each seat, and some pretty awesome interactive game-presentations; for photos and tweets that nicely capture the spirit and the intellectual content of the event see here.

• Living Latin. The Paedeia Institute hosted a session on Latin language instruction that was actually held in Latin. *insert shocked emoji*

• Ooh astrolabes! An session teaching medievalists how to use an astrolabe culminated in enthusiastic applause.

• Fandom and role play. I participated in a session (organized by Anna Wilson) on fandom in medieval studies; this conversation touched on topics as wide-ranging as Mandeville marginalia, genderswapping and queer subjectivities in interactive novel roleplaying games, and the contemporary appropriation of medieval storytelling traditions beyond Europe.

CHANGE

Embrace the #femfog! SMFS swag. [May 15, 2016]

Much of this playfulness and spirit of experimentation (with new ideas and new social formations) extended into the conference sessions themselves. Some sessions not only asked how we can push the boundaries of our respective academic domains/disciplines but also explored how we can collectively transform the underlying social dynamics of the field.

• BABEL roundtables. The BABEL Working Group hosted two roundtables: "Where Else?" and "Far Out!" (see this archive of tweets from these sessions). I've been involved with BABEL for a few years now, and what I find so compelling about this community is its capacity to bring together (seemingly) unlikely people and things. In this spirit, the "Where Else?" roundtable incorporated varied disciplines and methods (art history, literature and ecotheory, Judaic studies and world literature, medical humanities and plague epidemiology) and disparate spaces (Cuba, medieval Britain, West Africa, the Bahamas, the Underworld). All of the presentations got me thinking specifically about how medievalists who for a variety of reasons occupy the "margins" of (a habitually Western/Eurocentric) medieval studies can find "homes" within their respective disciplines or institutions while also thriving as deliberate exiles/outsiders to such structures.

• SMFS roundtable on harassment. This session was originally planned around the anonymous online survey on harassment in the academy conducted by SFMS in 2015, and the conversation (as one might expect) addressed not only the climate of medieval studies in the wake of #femfog but also become an opportunity to brainstorm ways to make the profession more supportive for everyone (students and faculty). What was clear to me from this conversation (from survey data, speaker presentations, and some personal stories that emerged in the discussion) was that harassment can affect anyone regardless of gender, status, or sexuality. Harassment is about power, and anyone can be a potential victim or abuser. Consulting my handwritten notes during the session, I notice that just about 70% of survey respondents said they had experienced some form of harassment but around 70% never reported it. What I hope the SMFS survey and conversations can encourage is the creation of clear, accessible resources for those among us who have experienced harassment or seek to help others. For what it's worth, I'll just say that the Shakespeare Association of America has crafted an excellent sexual harassment policy (see page 9 in the January 2016 SAA Bulletin) and other professional societies could think carefully about building and sustaining similar structures. [Side note: SAA deserves kudos for its policies (including sexual harassment and social media usage) for three reasons: the guidelines are clear, the organizational structures are transparent (i.e., each was crafted by an ad hoc committee of scholars of varied stages/backgrounds), and the labor is acknowledged (SAA Bulletin, January 2016, pages 9-10).]

• Twitter roundtable and social media ethics. I took part in a roundtable (organized by Ben Ambler) on the ethics of live-tweeting academic conferences, and it morphed into a broader conversation about the ethics of social media use in academia more broadly. (You can consult this twitter archive for a fuller sense of the whole session and related conversations). The session addressed positive aspects of live-tweeting (such as timely access for people who can't attend, playful banter and community, signal boosting and disseminating work) as well as its negative aspects (graduate students and vulnerable scholars being "scooped," unease about the ethics of twitter as a corporation, potential for users to experience online abuse). Eileen Joy stressed the transformative capacity of social media (it can instigate tough conversations that wouldn't take place otherwise), but Angie Bennett pointed to some of its limits (not everyone has access to technology/mobile devices and conversations can unwittingly exclude as well). I've enthusiastically supported conference live-tweeting in the past, but I've since become ambivalently optimistic (or optimistically ambivalent) about it all. I'd say my "take home" message was that we as a medievalist community need to be better about establishing shared expectations and "best practices" for live-tweeting and clear guidelines would help; see some of the excellent examples and points by various folks near the end of this #Kzoo2016 twitter archive.

COMMUNITY

Donut diversity (photo: Cameron Hunt McNabb). [May 11, 2016]

It's probably no surprise that I'm ending this blog post with a section about community. I felt that community building was one of my personal priorities this year, and I'm so encouraged by the ways medievalists are coming together during and since Kzoo to creating a better field (and world).

• Inclusivity was a major theme in my experience of Kzoo. I was proud to see people wearing T-shirts with affirmative, inclusive sentiments (the proceeds of BABEL's #inclusivity fundraiser campaign go to SMFS) or displaying other signs of support for SMFS and a more capacious medieval studies. I'm also energized by ongoing efforts at Kzoo such as the annual Anglo-Saxonist "New Voices" sessions; mentoring initiatives; various informal gatherings attentive to LGBTQ communities and scholars of color; a BABEL gathering at Bell's Brewery open to anyone; and medievalists asking important questions about uneven access and exclusion in our field (along the lines of class, financial conditions, disability, age).

• Addressing transphobia. Over the past week or so medievalists have been responding to some unfortunately gender essentialist and transphobic presentations at the Pseudo Society session. The Pseudo Society immediately issued an apology and announced a new policy, and it gives me hope that medievalists quickly came together against transphobia: note this moving statement posted by Kaitlin Heller during Kzoo and a very powerful transformative blog post and essay by MW Bychowski (see also here).

• Rethinking access. I've been following with great interest some emergent conversations about accessibility at medieval conferences. Jeffrey's pre-Kzoo 2016 posting gives us much to think about in terms of social venues and practices, and Karra Shimabukuro has shared some good suggestions that she included in her responses to the annual Kzoo survey (here and here). (These links are not specifically Kzoo-related, but check out recent reflections by Rachel Moss on attending academic events as a new parent, and consult the Modern Language Association of America's helpful access guidelines before you prepare for your next conference.)

• Swangate. Last week, a story went viral about medievalist (known only as @chevalier_cygne) who brilliantly responded to a UKIP politician's racism and xenophobia (he had objected to a nonwhite actress portraying [Shakespeare's] medieval queen Margaret of Anjou). The story has since been picked up by the Independent and the Toast (with ancillary "cygnal boost" by Jeffrey and yours truly). If you're on twitter, you can follow the #swangate and #swantruther hashtags for more.

• Medievalist tattoos. Picking up on a recent conversation on social media about medievalists with tattoos, @izzybeth (on twitter) has created a tumblr blog called Badass Tattoos on Medievalists. If you're a medievalist who has a story to share about your tattoo (or otherwise have something relevant to contribute), feel free to check out the site!

This blog post ended up being much longer than I had intended, but I've tried my best to convey my sense of this year's vibe and ethos. I hope that some of the productive energy of Kzoo 2016 will continue to spark new thinking about our understanding of the Middle Ages and the future we'd like to see in our present-day communities.

Medievalists and the Global Refugee Crisis

by JONATHAN HSY

[UPDATED September 8 with more links! Scroll to the end of this post.]

This entry falls somewhere between a compilation of links/resources and a proper essay. In this blog posting, I wanted to reflect a bit on the global refugee crisis that's currently in the news and consider how (or if) medievalists might respond to what's happening in Europe and elsewhere.

Part I: Medievalists on Twitter

[Images from my twitter feed yesterday (September 6), including premodern iconography of the biblical Flight into Egypt.]

The image above is a screenshot from my mobile device yesterday morning—and it happens to provide a sample of different ways medievalists (premodern academics) are engaging with media coverage of the plight of refugees in Europe and other places around the globe:

• The Refugee Tales Walk is a collective effort by activists and storytellers to showcase the stories of refugees indefinitely detained in the UK; taking its cue from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the project tells stories of lives in transit. Note this brief blurb on the Global Chaucers blog; you can also follow "Refugee Tales" on Facebook or on twitter.

• The Chaucer tweeter (@LeVostreGC) urges his followers to support the UN Refugee Agency.

• Kees Teszelszky, historian of early modern Dutch-Ottoman-Hungarian relations, chimed in on the plight of refugees by tweeting depictions of the biblical Flight into Egypt (Mary, Joseph, and infant Jesus on horseback) from 16th-century sculpture and stained glass; another tweet suggests the recursive history of refugees in transit through Hungary in particular. [Medievalists.net also linked to an article about medieval refugees fleeing Hungary during Mongol invasions.]

Popular media (especially social media) has deployed the adjective “medieval” to varied ends: sometimes the term targets refugees themselves, but other times refers to the perceived mentalities of governments (European as well as Middle Eastern) in response to this crisis [I won't link to particular examples here, but a quick search for "medieval" and "refugee crisis" certainly brings up examples].

In mainstream news media, people of varied religious backgrounds are discussing the ethics of refugee welcome, including

• Jewish traditions of welcome for strangers (from The Guardian, September 5).

• Coverage of the Pope's very recent call for Europe's Catholics to welcome refugees (The Washington Post, September 6).

• Forceful critiques of nativism and Islamophobia in responses to the refugee crisis in Europe and online (The Conversation, June 24).

Historical context: In an earlier conversation on twitter (after the mass murders in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC, and subsequent news coverage of an online racist screed attributed to the shooter), Karl Steel stated that we as medievalists must be prepared to disrupt racists’ idea of "Europe." As indicated in the article about nativism and xenophobia linked above, the refugee situation has laid bare political anxieties over a "Muslim takeover" of Europe, and related fantasies of a white, Christian nation can become the implicit or overt basis for excluding refugees from over land or sea—and not only in Europe but also across the so-called “Global North” of industrialized countries (e.g., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United States).

Part II: Discomforts of Analogy

[Top half of image: The opening to The Man of Law's Tale (illus. Edward Burne-Jones) in The Kelmscott Chaucer (William Morris, 1896) depicts Constance set adrift on a rudderless ship. 

Bottom half of image: In the opening scene of the 2003 BBC adaptation of The Man of Law's Tale (written by Olivia Hetreed, directed by Julian Jarrold), Constance is a Nigerian refugee.]

In addition to addressing a broader historical view of "Europe" and its meanings over time, how might medievalists think more carefully about analogies made between the lives of medieval people and refugees today?

• The Refugee Tales Walk (mentioned in Part I) provocatively invites people to contemplate similarities between the plight of present-day refugees and experiences of medieval travelers, with a clear ethical and political objective: building compassion and solidarity with displaced peoples and using art and storytelling to combat prejudice.

• In a blog post from over a year ago, Steve Mentz reflected on Caroline Bergvall's book Drift (2014), a work that juxtaposes the Anglo-Saxon elegy "The Seafarer" with the story of a boat of Algerian refugees that was seen—but not rescued—by NATO vessels in March 2011.

• Chaucer's The Man of Law's Tale tells the story of Constance, a tempest-tossed and much-imperiled protagonist. Her story begins in Rome, but her subsequent transit to (Muslim) Syria and (pagan but Christianizing) Britain—with many travails and dangers in between—have invited comparisons between this story and refugee experiences in the present. In a 2003 adaptation of The Canterbury Tales for the BBC, six tales were set in modern multiethnic Britain. The Man of Law's Tale (written by Olivia Hetreed and directed by Julian Jarrold) casts Constance as Nigerian refugee who mysteriously washes ashore in northern Britain—and the story goes on to consider modern-day complications of race, trauma, religious community, and cultural assimilation. This adaptation is complete with a scheming mother-in-law figure and courtroom drama scene (all present in Chaucer's original), and I've found this attentive adaptation useful when teaching my medieval literature classes. [For more about this production, see Susan Yager's 2007 article; I also address some linguistic aspects of this adaptation in a 2014 essay collection.]

I'll end this post by referring, in a roundabout way, to my own discussion of medieval Constance narratives (Chaucer's rendition as well as analogues by Boccaccio, Gower, and Trivet) in my book Trading Tongues (2013). The focus of my analysis on that book was on perpetual disorientation of the protagonist and she moves across space and language. Earlier this year, Pamela Troyer reviewed my book in the Rocky Mountain Review, and I was intrigued by her account of how she brought my chapter into her classroom. I quote these paragraphs here not because of what Troyer says about my book itself but what rather for her attentive reflections on the varied perspectives and life experiences of students from recent immigrant backgrounds:

After reading Trading Tongues, I experimented with Hsy's ideas in a required course I teach that includes readings from Canterbury Tales. The class had students majoring in literary studies, secondary or elementary education, and creative writing. Three of them were bilingual and most of them from area public schools, which are now multilingual communities; the Denver Public Schools posts its "top languages spoken" as Spanish, Vietnamese, Arabic, Somali, Amharic, Nepali, and Russian. Since we only spend six weeks on Chaucer's works, I have never assigned the Man of Law's Tale, but after reading Hsy's treatment of the Custance story [...] I wondered if the students might identify with her traumatic experience of geographical and linguistic displacement. [...]

I fully expected the class to be perplexed and stymied by the strange elements of the story and by Custance's impossible travel trajectory—the story is so medieval!—but a surprising number of the students related to her vulnerability and powerlessness. They saw her as a recognizable victim of racial violence, religious persecution, and sexual harassment, bartered by "pimps" or "slave traders." A student whose parents immigrated from Guatemala wrote with unexpected clarity that Custance "is just like many women in the world today, a social outcast with no access to justice except the fantasy of God's grace." My students found Custance's peripatetic suffering plausible and accessible. What they found "medieval" and unrealistic was the conclusion of the story: Custance survives her travails (the French root of travel) without having been raped or beaten and without losing her healthy child to kidnappers or death. Unrealistically she is reunited with her people in material comfort in her homeland. One first-generation American summarized it as "typical immigrant wishful thinking." (Troyer 98)

Troyer's discussion tantalizingly ends there, and there's much more about this classroom experience that could be explored. How does an affective response to a seemingly alien medieval world change how one thinks about (im)migraiton, desire, hope, nostalgia, life trajectories? I'll just end this posting by asking few questions. What are the ethical investments of medievalists in this current humanitarian crisis (or any crisis, for that matter)? How (or should) we address urgent present-day concerns in our scholarship, in our classrooms, online, or in the streets?

UPDATES [September 8]:

• Steve Mentz: "Notes toward a Migrancy Syllabus" (September 8)
• Cynthia Haven: "'Mountainish inhumanity': Thomas More, Shakespeare, and the refugee crisis" (September 7)

TODAY: Whan That Aprille Day 2015 #WhanThatAprilleDay15

by JONATHAN HSY

Image search results for #WhanThatAprilleDay15 on twitter (11:20am EST). 

For current images, go here.

Hey ITM readers! TODAY is Whan That Aprille Day!

Last year, we responded to a call from the Chaucer blogger (@LeVostreGC on twitter) to launch a new holiday to celebrate old, dead, and/or zombie languages (check out the 2015 iteration of this open call; and here's the recording we posted last year featuring some of the ITM bloggers reading texts in Latin, Middle English, and Old English). The Global Chaucers blog celebrated the first holiday (somewhat mischievously) by posting the opening lines of the the General Prologue in twelve modern languages.

Whan That Aprille Day 2015 has already featured some notable participants. The TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (METS) staged a social media countdown throughout the month of March leading up to today (view the entire archive of tweets here); this effort was spearheaded by Jenny Boyar (@JennyBoyar on twitter). And check out this surprise video of METS staff reading from The Floure and the Leafe!

To join in on the fun, check out the #WhanThatAprilleDay15 hashtag on twitter and marvel at people all over the world tweeting in old languages. And, if you're so inclined, contribute something of your own!

Briefly Noted: Reorienting Disability at #NCS14

by JONATHAN HSY

Hope all our readers are doing well, enjoying the last days of summer and (if you're teaching) preparing for the beginning of the new academic year.

The New Chaucer Society Congress held earlier this June in Reykjavik was a memorable conference; KARL blogged on-site about "whale not-watching." JEFFREY offered his reflections on ice and magic rocks; and we had a guest-posting by Boyda Johnstone about twitter at #NCS14.

Here (better late than never!) is an informative blog posting by Julie Orlemanski about the "Re-orienting Disability" seminar that she and I co-organized at NCS. If you weren't able to attend the conference (or were attending one of the other concurrent seminars or poster session), here's a chance to find out more: ‪http://tinyurl.com/ncs14-7d-disability

P.S. Stay tuned for more in these blog-threads at ITM:

• A discussion of race, heritage, and the legacy of the "Vikings" [Read Part 1 and Part 2 of KARL's postings on this topic]

• A series of posts about diversity and "things medieval" (including academic medieval studies). [Read Michelle Warren's posting launching that thread]

Diversity and #medievaltwitter

by MICHELLE R. WARREN [Guest Posting]

[Hello readers! This is the first in a series of blog postings on diversity and (medieval) academia that we will feature on this site. This posting comes to us from Michelle R. Warren (on twitter: @MichelleRWarren). Stay tuned for more perspectives. - The ITM co-bloggers]

[EDITED 24 August 2014: In this thread, note also Dorothy Kim (on twitter @dorothyk98), Helen Young (on twitter @heyouonline), and Jonathan Hsy; note Karl Steel in a related thread here and here.]

Diversity and #medievaltwitter

"When things break, make collage." I made this my Twitter motto when my students convinced me to branch out and open an account. Never could I have predicted that tweets would bring me to a blog post on this space, sharing some of thoughts on racial and ethnic diversity in the US academy. For the past four years, I've served as the faculty director of Dartmouth's Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program (MMUF), a research and mentoring program for students committed to diversity issues and curious about earning a PhD. The fellows pushed me to those first tweets. Almost immediately, a bunch of medievalists—friends, acquaintances, strangers—followed me. It was exciting. I ignored them. I had joined for other reasons.

Recently, those distinctions collapsed, and all for the best. In MMUF, I engage students (most of whom identify as minorities in one way or another) to consider the "hard choice" of an academic career. While I help demystify academia for them, they help me identify the structural barriers and individual concerns that make diversifying the professoriate difficult—time to degree, expectations from family, presumed incompetence, stereotype threat, employment prospects, lack of mentorship, etc. Numerous programs, policies, and organizations are dedicated to countering these pressures, supporting individual success while working toward institutional change. So my ears perked up when a medievalists' conversation (as retweeted by Jonathan Hsy) turned to academic diversity. And instead of ignoring them, I chimed in. Then, in a reply to the thread, Adrienne Boyarin retweeted an announcement about the Faculty Diversity Program at SUNY: immediately I sent off a nomination for one of our MMUF alums. Now everything is connected.

"Lead from wherever you are." This is one of our mottos in MMUF. Many people feel helpless in the face of the numerous problems that plague the education system; few of us have direct influence on hiring practices. But everyone has influence on something. The potential to diversify the professoriate is affected by many things that happen well before anyone gets to college. Change seems slow and uneven at best. The pipeline is not flat. So just about anything can be a contribution (I'll leave aside why diversification matters). Transformation is possible—whether it's teaching something you don't know, speaking out against injustices, finishing that dissertation…or even just sharing a tweet.  

Who Gets a Voice on Twitter?

by Boyda Johnstone (@BoydaJosa), a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at Fordham University.

A few months ago, medieval twitter blew up. In a guest post on this blog, Dorothy Kim called medievalists to tweet the MLA and argued persuasively that “twitter, as a multimedia communication platform, functions like the space of marginalia in medieval manuscripts.” And Jonathan Hsy after #kzoo2014 posted a Buzzfeed-style article outlining the ways in which twitter is “not just a diversion or pastime for conference attendees but can actually be a useful tool.” Both bloggers built on the official conference-tweeting guidelines established by Roopika Risam before the 2014 MLA Convention. I’ve been on twitter for quite a few years, and after having read these posts and followed remotely on twitter some of the conversations at Kalamazoo, I was excited at the prospect of engaging in the twitter conversation during the New Chaucer Society biennial conference in Reykjavík, Iceland, held between July 16-20, 2014.

And my experience tweeting this conference was so much better and more enriching than I’d even anticipated. As a graduate student at a conference with many well-respected scholars, twitter allowed me to find my voice, helped me feel like I was part of the intellectual conversation. Discovering an alternative digital discussion happening across tablet, smartphone, and laptop; gaining new perspectives through the reactions and analyses of others; finding cross-currents and cross-connections with other panels in other rooms; gaining followers; meeting people in person who, amazingly, recognized my name from Twitter; feeling more confident speaking to more senior scholars in person due to our digital interactions.

On a more personal and/or practical level, twitter kept me awake and alert through multiple presentations, encouraged me to become a more active and engaged listener, helped me hone my critical and analytical skills, and helped me imprint ideas and arguments more firmly in my memory. I loved that I could follow fragments of the conversation in other panels as well, or catch up on panels I missed, which is important in such an intensely scheduled conference. Together, we NCS tweeters created a beautiful polyphony of fragmented, fascinated, confused, and curious thoughts and ideas, a multiplicity of voice and response that is crucial, I think, for ethical scholarship. Many of us are dedicated in our teaching and in our work to encouraging and uncovering active readerly engagement with texts, so this kind of polyphony has pedagogical and academic ramifications as well.

However, twitter also has its limitations, and I noticed a few problems as I observed the physical and virtual spaces around me. And so to the question: who gets a voice on twitter? As Hsy noted, not everyone has a twitter account, or possibly even the wireless technology to follow along in a session. In actual fact, the “multiplicity” of twitter voices was really only 15 or 20 people in a conference of 500, and of those 15, only a handful were tweeting regularly throughout the panels (though many more chimed in after the conference). Not everyone who has a twitter account interacts with it in the same way: some people need time to let arguments simmer and distil before they can actively respond to them, and so they can’t necessarily engage with sessions in real time; some people concentrate and learn better when just sitting and listening rather than dividing their attention among many different outlets; some people have political and/or personal objections to publicizing themselves online in such a way (for the NSA or future job committees to read). As much as we need to be listening for twitter’s variegated vocalizations online, those marginal responses to real-time scholarly activity, we also need to be listening and looking for the various degrees of silences surrounding the more vocal tweeters, and we should never fool ourselves into thinking that the sounding voices are more important than the quiet.

More to the point, we urgently need to maintain ‘Best Practices’ for twitter that exercise awareness of issues of representation, privilege, access, and attribution. My panel at NCS was wonderful: my paper felt good to deliver, the three papers spoke to each other in interesting ways, and we had a riveting discussion in the Q&A that left me wishing we had more time to talk. In short, I really couldn’t have asked for a better session. However, if you search the hashtags #ncs14 and #6d, you will find...nothing.

According to twitter, this productive session on Chaucer’s House of Fame—and its shimmering, vanishing surfaces of ice and glass—didn’t even happen, an ephemeral event that, if the future archive depended solely on the Library of Congress’s official twitter catalog, will be completely forgotten. While I fear this complaint may sound whiny or like a kind of humble-brag, it is simply a fact that I am a graduate student being trained in a struggling profession, and the future is uncertain. I would ideally like to secure a permanent, nonprecarious job, and if we are increasingly depending on twitter as an outlet for recognition and remembrance, the twitter archive of conferences such as this one is important to me.

On the other hand, if someone had been tweeting my paper and panel, there are a few guidelines I would have wanted that person to follow; for the other harsh reality is, we young scholars at a prestigious conference need to be careful not to allow our ideas to slip out of our hands, to lose their attribution and find homes somewhere else. One great thing about conference twitter etiquette is that if one’s ideas are properly cited, they are henceforth archived and remembered as yours, not someone else’s. And at this conference, I noticed that not everyone was observing such best practices: ideas and individual tweets were still floating around on twitter without attribution to their progenitor, mostly due I think to oversights and overexcitement (I even found myself doing this once or twice as well, admittedly). I think I speak for all graduate students and young scholars present at this conference when I say that this loss of attribution is a hugely pressing concern.

So, I’d like to outline and reiterate, firstly, one thing that I think needs to happen on Twitter during conferences such as NCS, and secondly, six things that should happen to ensure ethical scholarly practices, for students and faculty all. While Hsy, Kim, and Risam have already outlined most of these guidelines, they bear repeating from the perspective of an emerging young scholar. I welcome any further additions, objections, or insights.

What needs to happen: with a few understandable exceptions, every single tweet must contain named attribution to at least the last name of the presenter of the idea (formats such as “[tweet proper] [#conference #session] [last name pinned to the end]” are fine, though it is best if the first tweet contains a fuller statement of who is presenting, followed by briefer attributions later). This means that if you choose to tweet a number of the presenters’ (or questioners’) ideas in a row, every single tweet should contain the name of the idea’s progenitor. Imagine what would happen if one unattributed tweet amongst many suddenly went viral: suddenly it is the tweeter, not the presenter, who receives the credit. Scholarly chaos ensues (....no, but really.). If you are adding your own ideas to a presentation or tweeting a thought completely your own, make that clear (eg. “Brown says X, and I would add Y” or “I wonder what Brown would make of Z”). This is no different than citing and grappling with the ideas of others in our scholarly work, and should not be difficult.


What should happen:
1.     Try not to overtweet. Others have said that tweeting is like note-taking, but I would complicate this notion a little bit; note-taking tends to be much more profuse than the summative actions of tweeting should be. Be aware, when tweeting, that the scholars whose ideas you are reproducing may not be thrilled to have every single point they make in their laboriously constructed paper haphazardly flung across the internet, attribution or no (and they might not think or wish to announce this preference at the beginning of their talk, as it might seem overly defensive and set a bad tone). While I wish my paper had received an enthusiastic tweet or two, I do not wish that the entire thing had been published online in 140-character portions. Again, the currency of the idea is volatile and unstable, and issues of consent and ownership are at play here, especially for young scholars.

2.     Be aware of other tweeters. When choosing to tweet in real-time, follow the session and conference hashtags and observe what other people are saying. Twitter is supposed to be a dialogue, not a monologue, and as such you should listen to the multiplicity of voices around you; remember Kenneth Burke’s famous claim that when entering into conversation, you should “listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar.” One of the most exciting twitter experiences I had at this conference occurred when I and co-tweeters in a different session, in a different room, realized that we were having parallel discussions about manuscript paleography/codicology that could speak to one another in productive ways. This new awareness could trigger further conversations and cross-pollination of ideas outside the panel sessions, and would not have occurred if we weren’t looking and listening for the tweets of others as well as our own.

3.     Be respectful of the physical space you inhabit as you are tweeting online. Try to maintain a courteous posture (ie. do not bend far over the table on your phone lest you resemble a bored, texting undergraduate), try to make eye contact with the speaker, take manual notes perhaps, try to convey a sense that you are at least as much present in the room as you are present online. Remember, again, that not everyone tweets, not everyone has read the previously cited manifestos on conference tweeting, not everyone is technologically savvy. I have heard stories of people in sessions becoming offended at the tweeting postures of others, perceiving them as rudeness; and although I don’t want to victim-blame, being aware of your physical body as you tweet communicates respect to the diversity of persons around you—including the speaker—and minimizes misinterpretation of your twitter-stance as rudeness or boredom.

4.     Be aware of which panels are and aren’t being represented. The degree of panel representation depends in large part upon who happens to be sitting in the room and how prolific of a tweeter he/she is. If one panel or paper is tweeted more than another, that panel or paper receives disproportionate representation online. I don’t fully know how to remedy this problem, but I wonder if, in the future, there should be an official “Tweeter” stationed in every room (or perhaps a job for the moderator) so that every panel and/or paper receives at least one or two summative and/or representative tweets. Until that day, just look around you and observe whose ideas are being tweeted and whose aren’t, and consider actively seeking out an underrepresented panel to broadcast it online.

5.     Be aware that tweets cannot encompass complex arguments. In one of the most well-attended sessions at NCS, 8A on the question of the “Agential Object” in critical theory, an audience member (unfortunately and somewhat hypocritically I don’t know who it was!) pointed out that one of the problems with new methodologies is that we as scholars tend to want to translate them into functional machines that allow us to pump out scholarship and articles as fast as possible. Similarly, when tweeting, we must be aware of the dangers of domesticating complex ideas into facile 140-character boxes. Judith Butler, in her essay “Ordinary, Incredulous” in The Humanities and Public Life (Fordham UP, 2014), argues that we need to be wary of breaking down complex arguments into the language of instrumentality, because that kind of simplification can cheapen and indeed betray our very calling as critical humanities scholars. To avoid this problem, treat tweets as imperfect containers of ideas that—as panel 10D on “Monument, Edifice, Container,” organized by Elaine Treharne and Noelle Phillips, taught us in regard to medieval manuscripts—possess fragments, ruptures, limitations, even as they present exciting possibilities for distilling ideas into graspable and memorable bits.

6.     Finally, with this last problem in mind, be aware of the form of your tweet. As this is the first time I have ever tweeted a conference or panel, I don’t entirely feel like I have the authority to say this, but in my opinion a good conference tweet contains both local and global (or specific and general) components. Local so that there’s something educative or some substance for your claim, but global so that outsiders looking in—and those whose twitter-feed is currently being bombarded by tweets from excitable Chaucerians—might derive some kind of general application from our conferencing. Don’t fill your tweets—at least not all of them—with esoteric facts and alienating coded details. Tweets with general instead of or as well as specific content help avoid the problem, mentioned above, of overexposing the intimate details of someone else’s argument. And also, tweets with general instead of or as well as specific content are arguably more fun and engaging to read.


This last suggestion brings me to my final point, as the question of how we present ourselves on twitter to the wider world is, again, about privilege and voicing: we scholars at this exotic academic conference (if I may include myself amongst this group), some of whom have letters after our names and stable institutional positions, are always already privileged by the very nature of being here, and by nature of belonging to institutions that in many cases still support such expensive events. As much as we’d like to believe that it is the virtue of our scholarship that has brought us to such a place, in actual fact there are powers and institutions that have contributed to bringing us here, that have given us a voice. Using twitter as a digital resource means that we are not only speaking to other people at the conference, but also to those who could not make it, who were not accepted, who have been cast outside the academic institution, who deride the academic institution, who have no interest in the academic institution, or who have never been able to get into the academic institution for various personal, material, political, geographic, or economic reasons. And as we are increasingly called (rightly) to make our work legible to audiences outside the ivory tower, and (less rightly, perhaps) to justify our work to such institutes as funding organizations, we need to become more conversant in how to package our ideas for the looking and listening nonacademics around us who, well, may not fully understand this weird and wild field of medieval literature. This stuff is going online, friends, and others are listening: please be aware of who is getting a voice.

*I am grateful to Zachary Hines, University of Texas, for his valuable feedback on this entry.