Medieval Studies, Sexual Harassment, and Community Accountability

by DOROTHY KIM [Guest Posting]

[More post-BABEL postings (including more SCALE presentations) are to come! Meanwhile, check out this important posting from Dorothy Kim (twitter: @dorothyk98) with suggestions on how we can collectively create a better future for medieval studies.]

Medieval Studies, Sexual Harassment, and Community Accountability

After my last In the Middle post, I had a number of people reach out to me with stories about similar things happening at medieval conferences in regards to racial, gender, and disability microaggressions. In other words, my colleague’s public encounter was a normal part of the lives of certain divergent medievalists. On the interwebs, I also had several people tell me stories about other things that happen at conferences that I have decided to write about in this post. A number of female junior medievalists (graduate student and junior tenure-track and non-tenure track faculty) have told me that certain conferences have become the hunting ground for male, white-cishetero men. What I mean by this is that there have been witnessed incidents of sexual harassment happening at medieval conferences. Though conferences alone are not the only space where this happens. I think we have all witnessed sexual harassment at medieval talks, seminars, and in other professional spaces.  

In particular, all this was brought to my attention because at the New Chaucer Society conference in Reykjavik, a certain male, white, cishetero faculty member (who is also married) has been sexually harassing junior female medievalists at conferences in front of witnesses. Apparently, he did this at the previous New Chaucer Society in Portland and he struck again in Reykjavik. NCS is not the only conference that this has been happening, but I call on organizers—NCS, BABEL, MAA, Leeds, Kalamazoo, etc.—to seriously consider what their resources, statements, and consequences are for these events.

Feminism and Silence

In this great written piece in THE, the author writes: “As I learned intimately during my doctoral studies, the university is an intensely hierarchical space, and students are structurally positioned to seek the approval of the academic staff to whom they are entrusted. This makes students vulnerable to abuses of that power.” There are power dynamics and power abuses at play in sexual harassment in academic spaces. But the point is and what angers me the most is why must students and junior colleagues—often the most vulnerable and with the least resources in these situations—be the one who must fight to change the harassing and toxic environment? Why must they be the ones to do all the labor (both emotional, bureaucratic, and eventually legal) to call out, fix, and address these situations? Why is there so much silence? Our silence is not helping the victims nor creating accessible, safe spaces. The author of the THE further points out that “Secrecy did not protect me or the other women. It didn’t even protect the university management. The only person it protected was the professor, whose years of abuse were hidden from the public eye.” [Read the entire opinion piece HERE.] It is time to take it out of the closet, to air it out, to give it sunshine and let others hear and see. It is time to stop protecting the abusers.

Codes of Conduct and Only the Beginning

This issue of sexual harassment at conferences is not new—it has surfaced in mainstream media in relation to women at tech conferences. A very recent issue of ModelViewCulture looks at Codes of Conduct at Events and issues surrounding inclusive events. I encourage everyone planning to organize anything to read that issue.

Closer to home, there has also been an ongoing discussion amongst librarians because Joseph Murphy (@libraryfuture) is suing two librarians for libel to the tune of $1.25 million dollar in the Canadian courts. Nina de Jesus @satifice and Lisa Rabey chose to speak out against sexual harassment at library conferences (which eventually may have gotten the ALA to revamp their Code of Conduct statements). You can read more about this HERE and here and HERE. Nina de Jesus and Lisa Rabey have a funded site for donations for their legal defense and a call for witnesses to stand up: http://teamharpy.wordpress.com. Likewise, someone has organized a change.org petition asking Joseph Murphy to withdraw the lawsuit. I have already signed the petition. Nina de Jesus is a writing colleague of mine from ModelViewCulture and is also a DH Projects librarian. You can follow what is happening with them and this lawsuit at #teamharpy on Twitter.

Medieval Studies and Sexual Harassment

Several victims and witnesses have identified this serial sexual harasser. I will not name names here on this blog because I do not have the permission of any of my sources to divulge nor have I been the victim of sexual harassment at NCS. However, the problem with whisper networks is that in the end it allows the continued behavior to happen with no consequences. Likewise, recent events in Canada have been a conversation-starter on Facebook. Alexandra Gillespie recently posted a Facebook post about the Jian Ghomeshi firing at CBC. [EDITED on November 2 to indicate that thread is no longer public; instead the conversation can continue in the comments section below.] The commentary on that post speaks to a long, persistent history of sexual harassment in medieval studies spaces. As with many things I have written more publically, it’s time to break this silence, this medieval whisper network that tells particularly junior women and graduate students who are the sexual harassers in our field. I encourage people who want a community conversation to either post on Alexandra Gillespie’s public post on Facebook that already has numerous narratives being shared among female medievalists. I also call anyone who feels more comfortable with Twitter to use #medievaltwitter to share their stories of harassment at medieval academic events. We need to begin by speaking about what is happening. We have all been witnesses, heard, and or been victims.

Steps Conference Organizers Can Take

My question now is what should conference organizers and societies do about this? I have dug around the NCS website, there is no Code of Conduct on there anywhere about what the standards are for conferences in general (though feel free to correct me anyone if I just missed it). I would strongly suggest that all societies who have conferences write Codes of Conduct, but write ones with some bite. I will also say that though the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship has never run its own conference, I will ask that an agenda item on Codes of Conduct be put on our Advisory Board Meeting for Kalamazoo 2015.

What I mean by this is that serial sexual harassers are not going to stop harassing young women at conferences unless there are consequences. NCS moves around the world every two years. Conference attendees show up, often foreign shores, at unfamiliar conference sites. There is no clear delineation of resources in relation to what happens when sexual harassment, sexual assault, violent assault happen at a conference. Along with a clear set of resources, conference organizers must be clear about conduct expectations and then what the rules are if these expectations are broken.

Nina de Jesus’s post on transformative justice addresses many of what we can do beyond Step 1—breaking the silence. Code of Conducts must be victim-centered at all times. This is one of the biggest steps our communities must address. As she points out in her post (I, not Nina, have bolded key sections): 

Frameworks and clear support for victims. One of the reasons why situations like this continue, despite the offender being known, is that, within our communities (both libraries and beyond), there is little-to-no support for victims and/or survivors. I don’t only mean support in terms of victim services (although these are important as well), but even the very minimal support of the benefit of the doubt. 

The problem with habitual abusers/harassers is that they tend to know exactly what sorts of things they can get away with. They know who to target. They know that, even if their targets voice their experiences, that the victim will be doubted (and blamed) or that, in the absence of ‘proof’, nothing much will come of it. And, importantly, they know how to engage in their abusive, harassing, and potentially illegal behaviour in ways that leave very little evidence behind.

The NCS’s known serial harasser in the whisper network of junior women has consistently harassed young junior women medievalists. These things are about power, opportunity, and a lack of consequences because sexual predators know they can get away with this behavior. If we want conferences and particularly NCS to be a safe space for all, more has to be done to support victims and call out this behavior. Nina de Jesus points out in her post that the gender statistics in fields does not necessarily mean anything: the harassment is happening in library studies (a field filled predominantly with women).

A transformative justice, community accountability, and victim-centered approach also means conference organizers have to stop imagining that “proof” is actually an issue. As Nina de Jesus eloquently writes:   

Many people think that these situations boil down to ‘he said/she said’ and that we can just really never ‘know’ what actually happened. Of course, this generally means giving tacit approval for the predator to continue abusing and harassing people. 

In case people have forgotten, we are neither the police nor the judicial system. We do not have to adhere to their evidentiary requirements. We do not have to assume innocence. We don’t have to build a ‘case’ against someone. We don’t, in actual fact, require ‘proof’ that would hold up in a court of law. We don’t need to gather evidence and conduct investigations.

This is about community accountability. Holding abusers/predators accountable to the community and holding the community accountable to itself.

So as a medieval community, I am calling on you to hold your colleagues accountable. Otherwise, your silence is tacit permission for sexual harassment and abuse to continue in these academic spaces.

If talking about it, getting it out in the open, not having it as a whisper network secret is the first step then step two requires concerted efforts for a victim-centered approach that at its bedrock is about community accountability.

Nina de Jesus’s community accountability post outlines exactly what these steps look like.  

1. Victim-Centered means actually supporting the victim.

•    “Don’t ask for ‘proof’.

•    Don’t treat ‘both sides of the story’ as if they hold equal weight.

•    Do not engage in any type of victim blaming behaviour.

Listen to the victim. Do it. And don’t judge.”

2. We need Codes of Conducts that are enacted when people break professional boundaries. 

There is no point writing such statements without actually making sure they are actionable. What are the consequences? What is the follow through for these consequences?

Her post makes excellent examples and I am sure conference committees and come up with other ones:

Did a woman just report getting sexually harassed? Eject the man from the conference. Don’t ‘ask’ him to stop. Eject him and let him know that he can try again next year. Did a presenter just make a racist joke?Stop the presentation. Call it out. If this manages to derail the talk (eg., the presenter gets defensive and is unwilling to apologize), then the talk is over. Does someone have a reputation for being a sexual predator? STOP INVITING THEM TO SPEAK. Essentially: hold people accountable for the harm that they cause. 

She concludes with this great point: 

The thing is, is that if we don’t hold people accountable for small, seemingly innocuous (microagressions anyone?) behaviour, we give them tacit permission to escalate this behaviour. If people are held accountable for their bad behaviour it also gives them a chance to learn and grow and (hopefully) stop behaving that way. If accountability becomes normalized, instead of silently accepting that abuse and harassment are something that we just need to grin and bear, then accountability doesn’t have to be this big boogeyman. It also doesn’t need to mean that a person’s reputation and career are ruined.

Because if accountability is what gets normalized, then we’ll all eventually have this experience (since there are no perfect people).

NCS London 2016 is a little over 2 years away. That is plenty of time to draft a code of conduct, get information out about resources, and set up victim-centered, community accountability measures. Inform your panel moderators, explain and give them training on addressing moments when the Code of Conduct is violated. I would also suggest that societies and conference organizers make sure that all conference organizers are appropriately trained in regards to sexual harassment and sexual assault. We must take responsibility for what happens in our communal academic spaces.

I have been asked and have agreed to be a part of organizing the BABEL Conference for 2015 in Toronto. So, yes, expect a Code of Conduct, expect victim-centered, community accountability, and transformative justice as a major component in organizing this conference. Feel free to send me your thoughts on anything via email (dokim@vassar.edu) or Twitter (@dorothyk98). I hope #medievaltwitter and the Facebook comment area can be a space where we can  discuss what kind of medieval community we want for the future.

Signs Taken as Wonders: Žižek and the Apparent Interpreter

by JONATHAN HSY

[Hi ITM readers: This posting also appears on the blog for “Reorienting Disability,” a seminar that Julie Orlemanski and I are organizing for the New Chaucer Society Congress in Iceland in July 2014. We invite anyone with interests in medieval disability to follow along and join in on the conversations that unfold there, even if you aren't attending the conference!]

In this posting, I’d like to respond to an increasingly complex story about the “fake sign language interpreter” at a highly publicized memorial for Nelson Mandela. As reported by the Associated Press:

[Thamsanqa] Jantjie told the AP last week he has schizophrenia and hallucinated, seeing angels while gesturing incoherently just 3 feet away from President Barack Obama and other world leaders during the Tuesday ceremony at a Soweto stadium. Signing experts said his arm and hand movements were mere gibberish. (16 Dec 2013)

Deaf communities in South Africa and worldwide have justifiably perceived Jantje’s faux-signing as an insult or affront (see HERE and HERE, for instance), but Slavoj Žižek claims in his remarks in the Guardian (read the whole piece HERE) that hearing people can find the mere bodily presence of the sign interpreter at an event like this in self-congratulatory terms, regardless of whether the signing is meaningful or not:

Now we can see why Jantjie's gesticulations generated such an uncanny effect once it became clear that they were meaningless: what he confronted us with was the truth about sign language translations for the deaf – it doesn't really matter if there are any deaf people among the public who need the translation; the translator is there to make us, who do not understand sign language, feel good. (Guardian, 16 Dec 2013)

While this overstated critique—which seems to reflect more upon Žižek’s view of the government than the issue at hand— is perceptive in some ways, this discourse (however it is intended) still has the effect of speaking for a “‘public’ or ‘us’ [that] does not seem to include the deaf or disabled,” as Rick Godden has stated (in the Facebook discussion that precipitated this blog posting). Indeed, Žižek doesn’t use the term “disabled” in this piece, as if to avoid directly invoking or including them as such (he uses the terms “underprivileged and hindered” and later “marginalised and handicapped”). Žižek—in order to score irony-laden political points—rhetorically “[renders] deaf people unimaginable and unencounterable” (as Chris Piuma nicely pointed out). And the signifying force of the interpreter is reduced, as Julie Orlemanski stated (again, via Facebook conversation): “his interpretation dissolves the ‘signifier’ of deaf people to get to the ‘signified’ of ‘poor, black South Africans’ as explosive ‘collective political agent’ (i.e., the ‘aliens’).”

This story is complex and a wider entanglement of other sociopolitical issues remain to be explored where disability is concerned: what emerges here is that a story seemingly “about” one kind of disability perceptible via outer actions (deafness) is implicated in another: the much more difficult-to-discern external manifestations of schizophrenia and mental illness. I should state here that I align deafness and schizophrenia under the umbrella of “disability” here only provisionally. There are vigorous debates within the disability community about the implications of drawing varied kinds of physical impairment and mental illness into the same interpretive and political category. Does mental illness or a chronic condition qualify as disability? Are the deaf even disabled or a linguistic minority within a hearing majority?[1]

What interests me is how such misperceptions about the meaning of this “fake signing” arise. This is not about “hearing vs. deaf communities” per se but a dynamic relation between them: two simultaneous modes of perception and meaning-making that only sometimes overlap with one another. An interpreter—in order to be an interpreter—does not stand squarely in the world of the hearing or the world of the deaf; she or he must necessarily inhabit both worlds concurrently. Rather than embodied lingua franca, two worlds (is it just two?) encounter a disconcerting lingua incognita and register a sequence of alien signs in divergent ways. Deaf viewers perceive the gibberish as mockery; hearing people (at least those unaccustomed to sign language) see the “exotic” hand movements no differently than they see other signed languages—and project whatever misconceptions or fantasies they might have upon it.

So why am I writing about this on a medieval studies blog? I am thinking about Žižek’s strange discourse of miracle and wonder that emerges halfway through the piece: “What lurked behind these concerns was the feeling that Thamsanqa Jantjie's appearance was a kind of miracle—as if he had popped up from nowhere, or from another dimension of reality.” This sense of encountering alien embodiment as miracle makes me consider how wonder in contemporary disability studies and premodern culture operates as an ethically charged force. While Žižek is attempting some sort of social critique, I’m more sympathetic to criticism that more earnestly expresses its investment in the lives of people with disabilities or whose bodes otherwise read as unfathomable. In a foundational essay on ethical beholding, feminist and disability theorist Rosemarie Garland-Thomson shifts attention from the “starer” in any encounter to the “staree” who is perceived as “different” in her embodiment. Garland-Thomson observes that the “stareable body” can act not as a mere object (of wonder, marvel, or disgust) but as a transformative agent, a catalyst for meaningful social change.[2]

This notion of an ethical beholding of an extraordinary body yielding transformative effects resonates so well with medieval hagiography and its host of angelic and otherworldly messengers. In interviews Jantje reports hallucinating and communicating with angels, and Žižek briefly amplifies the effects of these statements to apparently dismiss them and move on discuss other things. However perceptive his points might be (in general), I can’t help but feel that Žižek risks romanticizing lived schizophrenia—not to mention deafness—as a set of mysteriously unknowable experiences that ultimately serve no other purpose than to signify for “us” (the so-called “normative” majority). This still leads back to wonder: the question of what—or how—disability signifies.

[Ruth Evans posted this great response to this story on Facebook: Note that the guy purported to be having a "schizophrenic" episode, which Zizek does not follow up on (his purpose had nothing to do with Jantjie's mental state), but there are interesting things to say about this. According to Darian Leader (What is Madness?), the paranoiac often presents themselves as "the sole interpreter" of a law or knowledge, but the schizophrenic wants to communicate that "there has been a change,", so the choice of a meaningless sign language seems especially apposite: Jantjie was not interpreting a truth but registering change (his own; South Africa's) and allowing himself, through this weird performance, to structure his world. To see this as an affront to deaf people is to assume that he was there as an official interpreter (was he?) and to ignore the need that schizophrenics have to make sense of their world.]

I realize this is more than an issue of linguistic misperception and this story’s entanglement with mental illness is very complex (various reports suggest he was institutionalized at some point and had other gigs as sign interpreter)—but these unexamined discourses of wonder in Žižek’s response strike me as requiring closer consideration.

I’ll end here with some thoughts on what this whole story might say for those of us interested in disability studies and/or scholarship on premodern culture and theory. I might venture to say that medievalists and others working on historically distant cultures try to cultivate a generous understanding of the perceived alterity of minds and experiences in the distant past. As Julie Orlemanski has stated in an article on leper-kissing in postmedieval, putting premodern culture and contemporary theory in conversation enacts a complex “interface” between worldviews (see HERE), and Alison Hobgood and Houston Wood (in their intro to Recovering Disability in Early Modern England) urge a mode of scholarship in which premodern culture and contemporary disability studies “generously behold the other” (10) (see HERE). If we actually restore deafness and schizophrenia into this discussion perhaps a more ethically transformative understanding can emerge. This story serves as a reminder to be attentive to the communicative and transformative potential of all minds and embodied experiences—even if (or particularly if) they are perceived as alien.

[CORRECTION: The original posting had the word "singing" a few times when "signing" was intended. I've since corrected the typo. A provocative transmodal typo, but a typo nonetheless!]

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[1] For instance these varied perspectives in the Disability Studies Reader, 4th Edn, ed. Lennard Davis (Routledge 2013): Margaret Price on defining mental disability, Bradley Lewis on the “Mad Pride” movement, Catherine Prendergast on the “unexceptional schizophrenic,” and Susan Wendell on chronic illness.

[2] Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look (Oxford UP, 2009), esp. 194.

Portland, Oregon ....

by J J Cohen

... is a great place to dine. It's also a great place to hold a conference, and New Chaucer Society will be doing just that in 2012.

There's still time to dream up a panel proposal. And if you are thinking about oceans or ecologies, send it my way.

Ecologies (convener: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, jjcohen@gwu.edu
How do we analyze ways of living and forms of life? Possible topics for sessions include: decentering the human; the lived environment; posthumanism and landscape studies; textuality and the imagining of worlds; nature and ethics; preservation, sudden change, and catastrophe; problems of scale; natural and unnatural disaster. Sessions might contemplate mountains, rivers, forests, rocks, air, glaciers, trees, fire or weather in texts and as actors. This thread will conclude with a session on 'Ecology/Sciences,' examining the intersections of ways of knowing with forms of life.

Oceans (Convener: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, jjcohen@gwu.edu)
What happens when we reconceptualize communities as shared marinal and littoral spaces (the Mediterranean, the Channel, the North Sea, the Irish Sea) rather than as land-based, national or regional demarcations? Possible topics for panels include the sea in medieval texts, shipwrecks, piracy, being lost at sea, transit, human trafficking, merchant narratives, maps and utopias. We also welcome proposals on contemporary oceans as a way of collecting current medieval studies (e.g. Chaucer and the Pacific or Chaucer in Japan). This thread will conclude with a session on 'Neighbor/Oceans,' bringing together different ways of thinking about propinquity and community.

NCS Portland 2012: What would you like to see on the program?

by J J Cohen

You may have heard that the next meeting of the New Chaucer Society will (following its tradition of convening in beautiful cities like Siena) be held in Portland, Oregon. The Biennial Chaucer Lecture will be given by Anne Middleton. The program committee consists of:

Glenn Burger
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
Holly Crocker
Simon Horobin
Patricia Clare Ingham (co-chair)
Karma Lochrie (co-chair)
David Lawton (ex officio)
Carolyn Dinshaw (ex oficio)

You are welcome to contact anyone on the program committee, of course, and let them know your thoughts about what to include in 2012. Since yours truly will be journeying to St Louis early next month for the meeting of the committee, you are also welcome to post a comment here or at the ITM Facebook page, send a tweet (direct it to me or use hashtag #ncs2012) so that your brilliant thoughts, break through ideas, tiresome rants and mere opinions are heard.

Here are my initial thoughts. Since Portland is renown for being a city that takes sustainability seriously, a substantial thread on Green Chaucer (or the Green Middle Ages): environmental and ecological approaches to medieval materials. We medievalists have a lot of catching up to do in this vibrant school of analysis. Eco-approaches are everywhere in Early Modern studies, for example, but are just now having an impact for the Middle Ages. Since Portland is a progressive city, and because we need such a thread, a series on feminism and Chaucer studies, perhaps a "where we've been, what next" series. Many NCS members are, I know, angry at a historical paucity of feminist sessions, and Portland seems a good place to start setting that right. Please add your comments, though, to say more -- I don't want to speak on anyone's behalf since this is an issue some NCS members have put a great deal of time and thought into.

What about you? What would you like to see on the program?

Medievalists di moda: Fashionline Siena

by J J Cohen

The Cohen family is back, at least for a week, from their peregrinations round the Atlantic and into the Mediterranean. I hope to post something of some substance about the MAA and AZ when jet lag abates, but meanwhile: for your entertainment, a guest post written by someone who saw you and judged you at NCS Siena. Ah, Italy, land of fashion and elegance. Just look at these two movie star quality medievalists resplendent in the sun of San Gimignano. We can't all be Stephanie Trigg and Myra Seaman, but now don't you wish that your socks had at least matched, that you'd pressed that shirt, that the pasta splotch on your shoulder hadn't been quite so visible? I know I do.

I've sworn to keep our guest poster anonymous due to fear of reprisal, but before you start believing that it was me let me point out my numerous faux pas in Siena, including the wearing of a plaid shirt (albeit a crisp purple one) and a T shirt (albeit one with an alchemical equation upon it). Also my wearing of shorts was an attempt to instigate a Sexy Legged Medievalist Contest, not a symptom of the heat.

Without further ado ...

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Fashionline Siena
by Gloria Lechelle

NCS Siena, 15-20 July 2010, was possibly the most stylish conference for medievalists in recent memory. (Lamentably, putting “stylish” and “medievalist” in the same sentence has been an oxymoron of late.) The exquisite Italian setting, fabulous cuisine, and enticing shops were unparalleled. Medievalists arrived in droves each evening on Il Campo, in places like the Palio Bar, where people-watching (and being watched) became a spectator sport. As the nights lingered on, more and more of the Sienese came out to enjoy the cool temperatures. Their footwear, among other features of their attire, made the confusion between natives and i turisti absolutely impossible. But against this background, it soon became unavoidable to notice the more stylish, more fashionably savvy members of the NCS—as well as some of our more fashion-challenged colleagues. It is our hope that the Siena conference will set some trends and raise the bar, even, for all medievalists, who appear (from reports from Kalamazoo) to have become too comfortably frumpy in their apparel of late.

 

Here we offer the TOP TEN highlights from NCS Siena in the hopes that future Congresses may see something of a fashion renovatio:

7-10: The baseline of style was kept by a strong showing in crisp linen: George Edmondson, Claire Waters, Jeffrey Cohen, and David Lawton always looked cool, crisp, and un-crumpled, even at the end of the day. Cohen gets extra points too for wearing shorts in a never unprofessional way. Well done.

6: Sarah Kay—we all lamented Sarah’s absence from the closing plenary, where we also missed her neat skirts and fun blouses, a chic French style not to be daunted by the Siense heat.

5: Matthew Goldie—made me reconsider my rule against t-shirts at the closing banquet. A neat, plain black shirt, coupled with pale pink trousers took Villa-banquet style to new places. Points for originality without sacrificing neatness.

4: Ruth Evans—knows how to ACCESORIZE. Famous for her shoes (showcased on her Facebook page), Ruth never lets us forget medievalists have style too. She’d regularly be misrecognized as a Romance language scholar at the MLA Convention. We love her for keeping us on our toes.

3: Cord Whitaker—did anyone miss Cord’s white slip on shoes, his white collared and cuffed shirts or those cuff links sported in Siena? Well, if so, you just weren’t paying attention (and I don’t want to know what you were wearing)! Freshly pressed every day from breakfast to dinner, Cord has set a new style trend for NCS men. One can only hope for imitators.

2: Kellie Robertson—Whether on her own or en famille, Kellie gives classic style a new twist, adding vintage accessories to a plain, neat linen trouser and blouse. Never with a hair out of place, Kellie looked as comfortable on the podium as on Il Campo.

1: As is only fitting, our new NCS President once again shows herself off as an NCS trendsetter. With as many smart dresses as there were days in the sun, Carolyn Dinshaw made her mark as she splashed fashion sense all over the NCS presidency. We can only hope to see the entirety of the next congress in such sophisticated attire. It can only reflect well on our collective self-possession.

Some trends to avoid were also observed. Here are some fashion lessons to take to our next congress:

1. Men certainly have a harder time in the heat. No cute sundress is going to get them through Italy neatly. Matthew Goldie not withstanding, t-shirts were a big no-no. It’s hard to be taken seriously when you are wearing what looks like sleepwear.

2. Plaid is almost universally deadly unless monochromatic (and generally very small), so as not to look like plaid. This is a fashion faux-pas to be avoided at all costs, particularly if it’s crinkly. Never to be worn by women. NEVER.

3. Cargo anything is OUT. It’s hard to look neat, chic, or serious if you are covered in pockets. Worse if anything is actually in those pockets! Neatness gives way to saggy. Best to avoid entirely.

4. Black. Too hot in the heat, too severe for the day, black can be worn only by the young and really, only at night. Lighter colors worked much better, especially against pale skins accustomed to much work in dimly-lit libraries and unaccustomed to the Tuscan sun. And finally, nothing really beats some nice navy linen pants—as Kellie showed. Never underestimate the value of a good blue (or grey) suit.

Erkenwald and the Muslims

by KARL STEEL

For thoughts on NCS, please continue reading Jeffrey's post below, late edit, Derrick Pitard at "Gladly Wolde He" for late medieval devotion at NCS, and, as well, Miglior Acque, who writes:

the highlight of the conference, and certainly among the conference's most important papers, was one that was never mentioned again. This is most curious considering how much time we spent talking about manuscripts, theorizing about manuscripts, salivating over manuscript illuminations. Estelle Stubbs gave a paper on the morning of the first day in which she identified the famous 'Scribe D' as John Marchant. The importance of this scribe in copying work by Chaucer has always been recognized, but his identification now allows us to place this copying in a much more specific context (and Stubbs threw the Guildhall into relief in this respect). It was a groundbreaking piece of work, compellingly and elegantly presented, and should have been the talk of the conference.

Now, back to me.

If you were up at 9am on a Siena Monday, and decided to head out to the train station, you might have heard the latest work on my continuing Erkenwald project (earlier versions here and here). The paper? "The Past as Past is its Disappearance: Erkenwald and the Jews": the interested may look for the whole paper elsewhere, but my argument, in essence, was to assert that the past Erkenwald creates (and erases) is not only pagan but also (what it figures as) Jewish, and that it figures this Jewish past as past (which is to say static and ultimately untouchable by the 'present'). I offered only an implicit connection to the "Touching the Past" theme. To elaborate more, briefly: it's Erkenwald v. Faulkner.

Some evidence:

• Erkenwald's opening explodes with multiple temporalities, which it just as quickly resolves into two times: the past (time of law) and present (time of grace), as if the poem explicitly illustrates how to condense the heterogeneity of time into coherent temporal polities;
• Among the "pagan" temples the poem converts to Christianity is "Þe Synagoge of þe Sonne," which is "sett to oure Lady" (21): since Gollancz the criticism has ignored the "Synagogue" or apprehended it as yet another pagan temple. I read it, however, as signaling a particular building, a synagogue taken by King Henry in 1243, given to the Brethren of Saint Anthony [paranoiacs will suspect a porcine insult in this dedication] and rededicated as a chapel of Mary (Close Rolls Henry III, 1242-47, 142), an event recalled in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and perhaps also in the intervening centuries (follow the link above to the paper itself for a tendentious sophisticated exegesis of the "Synagogue" being off-kilter from the central site of the poem, the demolished [not converted] temple where St Paul's would be built);
• As Erkenwald criticism knows, the closest analogue for its unbaptized righteous judge appears in the Trajan material of either Piers Plowman B.XII.270-95 (Schmidt ed.) and C.XIV.194-217 (Pearsall ed.), or, more exactly, commentaries on Purgatorio 10.73-75, either by an Anonymous Lombard (1325) or by Iacobo della Lanna. Trajan's righteousness? He has his own son executed for murdering a widow's son. Trajan includes himself wholly within the law, utterly committed to following it even if doing so means destroying his own progeny. He is therefore at once a figure and victim of merciless justice, of law that offers only destruction, no expiation. Erkenwald's judge is likewise a figure of justice without grace, exit, or future: the substitution of pagan emperor for pagan judge thus intensifies judicial elements already present in the original story or indeed in Pauline doctrine as it tended to be understood by medieval Christianity (key texts: Romans 4:14 and Galatians 5:4-5);
• Finally, because honestly I could go on, Harley 2250 (made in 1477), a miscellany of exempla, clerical guides, and saints' lives (partial listing here; thanks to Alan Stewart for sending me a more complete list), where our sole surviving copy of the poem resides, contains little or no reference to England's pagan past, barring its Alban legend (I think the same as Laud 108 South English Legendary version), of interest no doubt because it is an English martyrdom. It does, however, include (at least) three works concerned with Jews: one on the conversion of the Jews of Beirut, another on a Jew robbed between Bristol and Wilton, saved by the virgin, who converts, and another, notably, on the Jews' vain attempts to rebuild their temple. No doubt I will talk more about this at the 2011 MLA Convention in an Erkenwald session organized by Philip Schwyzer and starring Seeta Chaganti, Naomi Howell (U of Exeter), and me, your most humble of sinners.

Read on for the Muslim question!

The converted temples of Erkenwald's opening also include these: "Þat ere was of Appolyn is now of Saynt Petre, / Mahoun to Saynt Margrete oþir Maudelayne" (19-20, that which was dedicated to Apollyon [or Appolo] is now dedicated to Saint Peter, and Mohammed to either Saint Margaret or Magdalene).

I'm asking you, blog readers, lurkers and otherwise, to weigh in. As Sarah Salih asked (and I paraphrase: apologies for memory slips), in Erkenwald's grand narrative of past and present, of creating the past and separating it from what it wants to be present/presence, what do we make of the continuing present of Islam, this most recent of world faiths, situated here in the distant past of London as it is situated in the now of Christianity? What to make of these, given my arguments about the "past as past"? No doubt Mary Kate's paper on Chaucer and the Anglo-Saxons could help here.

My answer was, I have to say, a bit weak. I had read "Synagoge" closely, so in all fairness I couldn't just read past the Mohammed reference. So: I answered by speaking of the poem's "Islamic idol" as further figuring the inability to close off the past as past; more simply, the Mohammed reference might suggest the resolution of all non-Christian faiths into one homogeneous glob: pagans, Jews, and Muslims are all equally lost; alternately alternately, we might understand that Erkenwald grants Islam an antiquity medieval Christianity tended to deny it, thus undercutting one of the key arguments against Islam, namely, its newfangledness.

Surely, though, there's more that could be done?

(postscript: for the image, above: I read Erkenwald as medieval kindred to John Stow's early modern account of a discovery made during repairs to Ludgate in 1586: here, mixed in with the supposed remnant of London's legendary foundation by the pagan King Lud, workers discover a stone “grauen in Hebrewe caracters,” the very image of what Christianity understood to be its foundational, superseded past.)

post ncs post

by J J Cohen

Thank goodness I have Google Voice and can make two cent per minute calls to the UK. Otherwise I wouldn't have been able to endure the 35 minute wait time to determine that my Heathrow-abandoned notebook is not yet recovered, and not likely ever to be so. RIP small black notebook that substituted for neural encoding.

The conference is already becoming a blur

That places me at a disadvantage for narrating the conference, since my archive has vanished and I'm left with mendacious and reconfabulated recollections -- and as I've just demonstrated, my memory is eager to make things up, like the word reconfabulated. So take the following cum grano salis. Or an entire shaker full. You won't get anything as comprehensive or truthful as my NCS Swansea posts, or the NYC overview. You may as well stop reading now.

Some memory fragments in search of a larger narrative:

• On our tour of San Gimignano, our guide -- histrionic in a lovable way -- declared that because Siena had no water, it had banks. She meant that in the absence of the trade a riverway brings, financial enterprises had to flourish; and indeed I did notice that Siena now has a remarkable number of ATMs per square mile. The guide later declared that medieval people had no perspective in their paintings because the church had forbidden direct representation of truth. We medievalists make careers of undermining blanket statements about our time period like these. Yet a truth in what she said stayed with me long after the tour, and I would express it this way: because Siena has no water (no river cutting the town, no conduit of waters running its walls), it seems self-enclosed, and lacks perspective. I stayed near the university, and traversed the entire town to reach a friend at the Hotel Athena before I realized the beauty of the surrounding countryside, with its olive trees and cypress and azure skies: only at the city walls does this undulating geography come to view. In the absence of a map, walking Siennese streets demands navigation via landmark. The pathways are narrow; blue is visible above, but the effect is of trodding an unspooling maze. You know a larger swathe of sky is somewhere near the middle (the Campo, the living room of the city), and yet you can't always locate yourself well enough in relation to that space to find it without knowing something of what tunnel-like street leads to its airiness. At conference end Stephanie Trigg and I traveled to Florence, bisected by the flow of the Arno, and in retrospect I realized how constricting a space Siena yields. Siena lacks perspective was the phrase I wrote in my notebook. I didn't mean the dictum negatively: more that when you are there, you are in middle space, a geography that will not yield itself easily to a god's eye view. Such spaces have their strengths, their virtues, but often demand departure before a frame coalesces.
• The NCS Siena program was arranged into multiple thematic threads. Though nearly impossible to follow any single one from inception to conclusion, many of us did choose a strand and arrange our conference by its panels. The effect was to offer a series of micro-conferences in search of a larger perspective. My NCS was mostly about animals, since that's the thread to which I was faithful. I'm pleased I chose it, since so many of the presentations were good and spurred enthusiastic discussions. Especial standouts for me were Bob Mills' first steps towards a larger project on biopolitics and animality; Sarah Elliott Novacich's breathtaking reading of Noah's ark as archive; Sarah Stanbury on Derrida's cat and Jerome's lion; Carolyn Dinshaw on the Green Man and the Green Movement; Bruce Holsinger's intentionally riling piece on vellum ethics; and Susan Crane on the creaturely, the technological, and dispersed embodiment.
• From other sessions I attended, some papers that even with my notes lost have left an enduring impression: Aisling Byrne on otherworlds as invitations; L. O. Aranye Fradenburg (the Biennial Chaucer Lecturer) on intersubjectivity, affective companionship, life and play and becoming; Holly Crocker on ethics, performance, and Chaucer as conduct literature; David Wallace's awesomely performative, sometimes even liturgical piece on Jephtha's daughter; the blogger panel; and of course the six presentations that constituted "Touching the Past."
• If I could make a suggestion to the planning committee for the next meeting of NCS (Oregon, 2012), it'd be the following: email session moderators a month beforehand asking them to contact the presenters on their panels and remind them of the time allotted for each paper. The reminder should be positive: the reason to keep papers within their limits is so that the audience can have a conversation about the session. These discussions are the lifeblood of the conference; going over one's allotted time and thereby reducing the participation of the twenty or thirty in the room who have come to talk to the panel is ungenerous. Moderators shouldn't be shy about gently reminding those who go long to move to their conclusion: again, such actions are done not to be cruel to the person who has reached the 25 minute mark when the paper should be 20, but to advocate on behalf of the audience, who shouldn't be consigned to passive audition.
• Maybe keeping on time is my hobbyhorse; it's possible that on this issue, as in too many in life, I'm simply uptight. For the sessions I arranged, I asked each of the speakers to hold forth for no longer than 15-18 minutes, and threatened to start interpretive dancing to any portion of the paper that went longer. It's immodest of me to say this, I know, but because we had about 45 minutes for discussion in each of these sessions, we had some  intense conversations in which twelve to fifteen audience members were able to participate. Their questions were serious, and terrific; the sessions would have been impoverished without them. (Shout-out to George Edmondson: his questions were especially provocative).
• Tom Prendergast gave a much-talked about paper on the subjectivity of place that I wish I had seen. I've convinced him to email me the piece, though I wish I had witnessed its performance: I don't think anyone's paper was mentioned as frequently as his. I had a memorable last dinner in Siena with Tom and his family. His son is Alex's age and possesses the same interest in quirky fantasy novels. It was also my second time eating pici cacio e pepe, my favorite local dish.
• The Saturday conference dinner was held on the roof of the Enoteca Italiana, a sixteenth-century fortress within the city. The evening was warm, the terrace lit by candlelight. Wine flowed, the food was excellent (except for the White Plate that constituted the vegetarian main course): a convivial evening that reminded me once more of why consuming food together is an integral part of forming community.
• No conference is without its interpersonal tensions, its misunderstandings, conflicts, sniping. These things existed at NCS Siena, I will not lie. But I will always remember the conference not for its inevitable, all too human undercurrent of mixed emotional responses, but for its joy: meeting many, many new people; learning so much; celebrating simply being together each night as we drank prosecco in groups of six or twelve or eighteen or twenty-five on the Campo.
• OK, I got up at 5:30 to begin this post, and I can hear one of my kids moving above me so my time is running out. I am departing for London on Wednesday, but hope at least to write about the blogger panel before then. Please add your own impressions of the conference in the comments below.

Initial NCS Thoughts: Squirrels, Animals, and the Flood

by KARL STEEL

Expect a flood of NCS posts over the next week. Some brief comments to begin:

Italy: why no squirrels? My wife claims she saw a squirrel; I saw none. The Siena natural history museum tells me they are general throughout Italy, barring Sardinia and Sicily, but they must be fibbing, or describing what now has only a historical reality, or perhaps they have no idea how dense a population of squirrels must be to qualify as "common." I welcome the physici of Siena to visit my Brooklyn backyard.

I have convinced myself of two things: that the Italian squirrel can be found only in Genoa, and that Catherine of Siena must somehow be responsible. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland; Italy lacks flying pigs because of Paulinus of Nola; but by the time Catherine of Siena arrived, there was little left to expel but squirrels. This was no small miracle. Those who keep a garden know the annoyance of sciurus vulgaris or carolinensis. They would be wise to offer Catherine a prayer of thanks lest they also be driven from their home to satisfy the convenience of others. Ireland, beware, for one day the snakes will find their own saint!

I attended all but one of the Animals sessions at NCS: I was grumpy not to be cited once, but found the lack of citation a nice, humbling counterweight to claims of blog triumphalism; I was happy to hear Jeffrey cited so many times; and annoyed, deeply, that Susan Crane, who has written and continues to write so perceptively on animals, was cited barely at all. The field feels itself to be barely finding its feet (or hooves), but the field should recognize that much has happened in medieval animal studies since Salisbury and Yamamoto!

I want to recall here, briefly, a very fine paper I saw at the first Animals session: in "Uxor Noe and Animal Inventory," Sarah Elliott Novacich, a graduate student in English at Yale, discussed the ark as archive (through, in part, the mnemotechnics and glossing in Hugh of St Victor's writing on the ark), the language of penning and herding for bringing Mrs Noah (see here for a brief discussion of some of her 103 names) and how Mrs Noah refuses to be caught up in this memory practice. If I remember this argument aright.

As often happens with good papers, my mind was led to wonder again at a text I thought I knew well, in this case, one I've known since I was knee-high to a flood, Genesis 6, 7, and 8. Mrs Noah's refusal to join the party might be read as resistance to what Noah wants, and by extension to what God wants, and by further extension to what men or the dominant in general want. She is a site of resistance.

But the Genesis account is muddled, and not only because it's obviously a poorly edited amalgamation of two separate accounts (does Noah bring 7 pairs of clean and 2 pairs of unclean animals on board; or just 2 pairs of everything? Cf. Genesis 7:2-3 to Genesis 7:8-9). It's muddled because God's desires themselves are muddled. Being sophisticates, we know God is not the Big Other, the one supposed to know, the one out there who's impossibly whole; we know that such unity, when sought, will never arrive, and that it never can have existed. We know God is a split subject too.

But we don't expect to find such knowledge so obviously given in an ancient text without being made available through some manner of paranoid extraction. But it is obvious here. In the Noah story, we see that God at once wants to destroy the world and to preserve it, to start again and to keep something afloat. As so often in Genesis, He regrets almost as soon as he decides to act (Genesis 7:6-8). The Mrs Noah of the Middle English drama, far from being (only) a site of resistance, is a further witness to God's split desires, to his inability to act simply, to his ever being able to do just one thing. She is indeed outside the archive, then, attesting to the multiplicity even in this most monolithic of Others.

Thanks Sarah for your excellent paper!

Siena, and Summer

by J J Cohen

Passport: check. European adapter for my laptop: check. Headphones to drown out potential annoying seatmate on endless trans-Atlantic and trans-European flights: check. BABEL t shirt: check. I depart tomorrow for the New Chaucer Society conference in Siena, and am hoping to see many ITM readers there. We medievalists are underpaid and unfairly stereotyped, AND on top of that our archives, conferences and historically relevant sites are in such shitty locations, but we deal.

For this NCS I put together a two sequence panel on "Touching the Past" that I hope you'll consider attending:

Session 37: TOUCHING THE PAST (Thread C)
Session Organizer: Jeffrey J. Cohen (George Washington University) Chair: George Edmundson (Dartmouth College)

• Jaime A. Friedman (Cornell University) “The Surfaces of Emelye’s Body”
• Claire Barbetti (Duquesne University) “Ekphrasis and Polytemporality in Pearl”
• Miriamne Krummel (University of Dayton) “The Touch of Happenstance or a Staged Encounter? Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ Reenacts The York Mystery Cycle”

Session 62: TOUCHING THE PAST (Thread C)
Session Organizer and Chair: Jeffrey J. Cohen (George Washington University)

1. Mary Kate Hurley (Columbia University) “Chaucer's Anglo-Saxons”
2. Eileen Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville) “No Longer Quarantined in Private Vacuums: Chaucer's Griselda and Lars von Trier's Bess McNeill”
3. Karl Tobias Steel (CUNY Brooklyn) “Weeping with Erkenwald, or Complicit with Grace”

That second session is history making: all four ITM bloggers! In the same room! At the same session! We expect the supernova that results from simultaneous bodily presence to blast a crater through Siena that will someday form a volcanic lake. Yes, some medieval tchotchkes will be lost in the resultant firestorm but, whatever, they've been around for a long time.

I'm also presenting in NCS's first ever-blogging panel:

Session 60: BLOGGING, VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES, AND MEDIEVAL STUDIES (Thread M) Session Organizer: Stephanie Trigg (University of Melbourne) Chair: John Ganim (University of California Riverside)

• Jeffrey J. Cohen (George Washington University) "Blogging Past, Present and Askew"
• Carl S. Pyrdum, III (Independent Scholar) “Blogging on the Margins: Got Medieval, Medieval Blogging, and Mainstream Readership”
• Stephanie Trigg (University of Melbourne) “How do you find the time? Work, Pleasure, Time and Blogging”
• Jonathan Jarrett (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) “An Englishman’s Blog is his Castle: Names, Freedom and Control in Medievalist Blogging”
• David Lawton (Washington University, Saint Louis), Respondent

For those who are traveling: safe and happy journeys. For those who are not: don't worry, this is 2010. The conference will be blogged.