"The Brutal Middle Ages" and other smug modern errors

Still from Marketa Lazarová.

by KARL STEEL

There's a big blog post about to spring up here tomorrow, so I'm squeezing in to beat the crowds. Once you read that, obviously, those of you lucky enough to be at Leeds must go to this excellent feminist medieval event, which is happening next Wednesday.

What follows is the opening of my 9,000-word (! yes! that was our limit: mine is exactly that) chapter on Animals and Violence for the Routledge Handbook for Animal-Human History (ed. Hilda Kean and Philip Howell), which I'm delivering a month late, because although I write about animals, I too am human. Roughly speaking.

The whole thing is called "Animals and Violence: Medieval Brutality, Margery Kempe’s Vegetarianism, and the Smugness of Modern Humanism." You've perhaps already seen earlier drafts of later sections here, here, and here. If so, great!

And now to read my co-presenters' papers for the "(Dis)abling the Human/Animal Body" session for the New Chaucer Society...

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Few readers of this chapter will be surprised to learn that examples of medieval cruelty to animals are easy to come by. William FitzStephen’s thirteenth-century portrait of London lauds the city for its entertainments, which include wrestling, target-shooting, and riverboat jousting, and also spectacular fights to the death between bulls or boars and dogs. The fourteenth-century Middle English poem Cleanness adapts Jesus' parable of the rich man's feast, so that, like a good English magnate, he proclaims the completion of preparations with a hearty ‘my bulls and my boars are baited and slain’ [my boles and my bores arn bayted and slayn]. And one early sixteenth-century English recipe meant for a convalescent begins notoriously: ‘Take a red Cock that is not too olde, and beate him to death, and when he is dead, fley him and quarter him in small peeces, and bruse the bones everye one of them.’[i]

I start here because this ‘medieval brutality’ is what would be generally expected in a chapter on the medieval and animals. ‘Medieval Brutality,’ a cliché in the general culture—as with this, from the New York Times: ‘experts in radicalization said that understanding the process by which people fell for the medieval brutality of a religious ideology is vital to combating it’—distinguishes the medieval from the modern as filthier, crueler, and more ‘ferocious’ (from the Latin ferox, wild animal, as ‘brutal’ comes from the Latin brutus, ‘beast’).[ii] In this self-regard of modernity, the medieval is more animal than the present. Recall the mudcaked peasants of Monty Python’s Holy Grail, the feral pagan temptress of Marketa Lazarová, one of František Vláčil’s medieval existential tragedies, or the damp, fleshy, fecal crowds in the streets and noble courts of Alexei German’s unendurable ‘medieval’ science fiction film, Hard to be a God.[iii] The assumptions hold that the past is cruel, the present civilized; the past superstitious, the present rational; and by extension, the past animal, and the present human. According to these assumptions, medieval people were more ‘in touch’ with animals, in part because they were more like animals than those of us presumed to belong fully to the present.

My study of violence and animals focuses on the Middle Ages because of this period's strange relationship to the paired conceptions of modernity and humanity. The idea of modernity often operates by looking to the Middle Ages either as its origin—where languages, religions, cuisines, and customs arose organically—or as what it had to leave behind in order to form itself as modern, by abandoning faith, aristocracy, and the ferocious violence of medieval peoples.[iv] As Kathleen Davis argues, a supersessionary model, itself borrowed from the Middle Ages, drives these assumptions. The model was itself a central feature of medieval Christian anti-Semitism. Since the earliest Christian scriptures, Christians portrayed Jews as outmoded, hidebound in irrational laws, and parochial, superseded by a (Christian) present that is forward looking, free, creative, rational, and cosmopolitan. Davis observes that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial administrators developed the concept of the ‘medieval’ to divide European modernity from colonies they preferred to think of as still trapped in the past.[v] The same assumptions of modernity persist into the present in a ‘developmental narrative,’ as Geraldine Heng writes, ‘whose trajectory positions’ the West as modern ‘and the rest of the world as always catching up.’[vi] It is an obvious irony that to the degree that the middle ages is thought of as superstitious, irrational, excessively traditional, and ahistorical—possessing only a homogeneous unchanging ‘pastness’ until the modern arrives—it becomes modernity’s ‘Jewish’ past, this while modern movements dedicated to closing borders to preserve their supposed Western freedom claim as their irrevocable heritage what they believe to be the medieval origins of their languages, nations, and especially faiths.

Left behind, yet necessary as a foundation, launching pad, or authentic core, the medieval is the animal in relation to the human of the modern. Whether this animalized medieval is actually in the past or in present-day regions, cultures, or activities disdained as ‘medieval,’ the Middle Ages is understood to be bound in a way of life like that of a mere animal: driven by instinctual appetites, beholden to the uncomprehending superstition of religious fundamentalism, and tyrannized by a rule founded only on direct, violent domination, the so-called ‘law of the jungle.’ If the animal is fundamentally ‘brutal,’ so the medieval is fundamentally animal. Both are what must be denied for the human to emerge, or both the true core concealed beneath a veneer of reason and temporary, merely decorative consumer culture.

For all these reasons, a critical reassessment of medieval attitudes towards violence against animals counteracts two interlocked delusions simultaneously, that of ‘modernity’ and ‘humanity.’ One way to resist these splits and the various paternalistic violences they justify is accurate representation, which demonstrates the heterogeneity, contradictions, and intellectual mobility of both sides of a presumed divide: Jewish exegesis was never stolidly literal, Christians could practice ritual every bit hieratic as what they accused the Jews of, and both engaged in an ongoing development of their own faith, often through exegetical exchanges, not always hostile, with each other.

So too does the notion of ‘medieval animalistic violence’ fail.
[and so on!!]

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[i] W. Fitzstephen, Norman London, F. Stenton (trans.), New York: Italica Press, 1990, p. 58; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Pearl; Cleanness; Patience, A.C. Cawley and J. J. Anderson (ed.), London: Dent, 1991, l. 55; A. W., A Book of Cookrye, London: Edward Allde, 1587, image 13, Early English Books Online, Cambridge University Library.

[ii] K. Bennhold, ‘Same Anger, Different Ideologies: Radical Muslim and Neo-Nazi’, The New York Times, 5 March 2015 [accessed 30 June 2016].

[iii] T. Gilliam and T. Jones, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, EMI Films, 1975; F. Vláčil, Marketa Lazarová, Ústřední půjčovna filmů, 1967; A. German, Hard to be a God [Trudno byt’ bogom], Kino Lorber, 2013.

[iv] For a well-known example of this tendency, see S. Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, New York: W.W. Norton, 2011.

[v] K. Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008; I am also drawing on her as yet unpublished work ‘Convolutions of Time: Why an “Early Modern” Period?’, presented at Common Eras: Law, Literature, and the Rhetorics of Commonality in Medieval and Renaissance England, Freie Universität Berlin, 19 May 2016.

[vi] G. Heng, ‘The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages 1: Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages’, Literature Compass, 8.5, 2011, p. 264.

Postcolonising the Medieval Image

by J J Cohen

A new website dedicated to postcolonial approaches to medieval visual materials is now live. Supported through an AHRC grant, the site was founded by Eva Frojmovic and Catherine Karkov of Leeds University. "Postcolonising the Medieval Image" offers a growing collection of resources including conference announcements, a library of abstracts, and lists of news and events.

Bookmark this one.

Historicism, Aesthetics, Postcolonial Theory and Psychoanalysis ...

by J J Cohen

... are just some of the topics being touched upon in the discussion to this post. If you haven't been reading the comments, you should.

Nadia R. Altschul on the postcolonial Middle Ages

by J J Cohen

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

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

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

Towards a Restless Medieval Studies

For your delectation, my Kalamazoo paper, an offering to the BABEL god at the roundtable "What is the Place of the Present in Medieval Studies?"

You will remember that we had some preliminary discussion here ... and I wish I could have composed something a little longer, because I didn't have the space to detail spatial investigations very well. In the longer version I'll keep permanently filed in my mind along with my other Platonic Forms, there is mention of Sara Ahmed, Yi Fan Tuan, Christopher Tilley, cultural geography, archeology, and phenomenology. Possibly there is also a chorus line of grass skirt clad penguins as well. But in this version, we're down to a bare minimum.

I should also add that a catalyst for this paper is Jehangir Malegam's work on medieval peace. His meticulous research strongly suggests that earthly serenity was not something to be desired -- that stillness was reserved for the heavens. This mundane realm had of ethical necessity to be perturbed, restless.

My apologies for the fact that this piece is rather allusive: it responds to opening remarks by Nancy Partner, the gist of which you will glean from what appears below.

Towards a Restless Medieval Studies
"What is the Place of the Present in Medieval Studies?"
Kalamazoo 2008

Over the past ten years, much of my scholarly work has been organized around questions of temporality, especially in time’s relation to identities. I’ve wanted to know more about the place of time, especially as the past, the present and the future curve or knot in ways that resist reduction into arrows of progress or a stasis of culmination. This untimely and unhistorical project, shared with many other medievalists, has been enabled through alliances formed with queer, feminist, and postcolonial theory -- schools of criticism that have examined the enabling fictions of modernity and found them wanting.

Itinerant and unsettled, contemporary medieval studies is opening innovative spaces for community, spaces in which to be more gregarious, more challenging, more PRESENT. Some of these efflorescent communities take advantage of new technologies: I wouldn’t be here today with so much to say on this subject if I didn’t participate in a blog. I also don’t think it is a coincidence that many of us seated at this panel are or have been department chairs – an office we’ve held not because no one wants to listen to us medievalists, but because our colleagues know that we who study times long passed have much of value in the present to say – to say about the present, to say about the place of history in the present, to say about place and about time.

So, “the place of the present in medieval studies.” Without the challenges posed and the friendships offered by queer theory, by feminism, by postcolonial studies, I would not have been spurred to think temporality in words like this:

a progressive or teleological history in which time is conceived as mere seriality and flat chronology is inadequate to the task of thinking the meanings and trauma of the past, its embededness in the present and future. Once homogeneity and progressive or hierarchizing "developmental" models are denied history - once simple, linear sequences of cause and effect are abandoned for more complicated narratives of heterogeneity, overlap, sedimentation, and multiplicity -- time itself becomes a problem … and the medieval .. “middle” becomes an instrument useful for rethinking what [the contemporary] postcolonial might signify. (The Postcolonial Middle Ages)

Or this:

how time might be thought beyond some of its conventional parameters, outside of reduction into a monologic history … and outside of linearization, the weary process through which a past is not encountered for its own possibilities, but either distanced as mere antecedent or explored only to understand better the present and to render predictable the future. (Medieval Identity Machines)

I stand by those words, written at that time before (according to this session’s opening remarks) 9/11 intervened to teach us a lesson in the bluntness of the world, at a more innocent time when medievalists just wanted to have fun. In a pitiable attempt to get somebody – anybody --among their colleagues to listen to them, medievalists (it seems) were exploring the fragility and dispersedness of human identity.

Yet I don’t think that any of us were forming these alliances out of resentment at being ignored, or even because such work is pleasurable. Well, it is fun, don’t get me wrong, but such scholarship is not to be dismissed as mere fun. To think temporality otherwise; to discern in our Now the living traces of multiple pasts (even the United States carries within it the burden and the possibility of medieval pasts); to recognize that time is so complex that futures can curve to sink their teeth deep into histories long passed; to touch these times and to love them: that’s the place of the present in medieval studies. Such emplacedness challenges us to reconceptualize the Middle Ages and history more generally, to think them outside of the points of view that have hardened around them and seem true – but only because we’ve repeated them for so long. Such congealing into doctrine says more about our reverence for imagined pasts and our fear of unstable futures than about the Middle Ages. Doctrinaire modes of analysis strive to encapsulate this geotemporal expanse, to still into a museum display. A more restless approach will grant the medieval its life in the present.

So, the place of the past in medieval studies: it has no place, if place is thought only as stability, as dead exhibit, as bounded subject. We need our monsters, our postcolonialists, our feminists, our queers. We need to recognize kindred spirits, to engage with meticulousness and a sense of common cause the ponderings of our fellow scholar-wanderers. Theory has given us a lingua franca, a border space where we can have “temporally promiscuous” (Gil Harris) conversations. Let’s go further and imagine what Wallace Stevens urged -- “To compound the imagination's Latin with / The lingua franca et jocundissima” – to roam that space where philosophy and narrative embrace or even become art.

Place needs to be as peripatetic as time. I’ve said it before. I will say it again: Medieval studies -- and scholarship more generally -- ought to be nomadic, mobile, vagrant. Not built upon imperturbable convictions, not built upon repudiations. The place of the past in medieval studies: it’s what our presiding genius Eileen Joy called “unsettled”: a restless medieval studies. That’s what I’m signing up for. That’s what I see here today.

[image: "Le città della Gojia: Partenikos," from here]

Aimé Césaire, Leopold Senghor, and the Postcolonial Middle Ages

At the age of 94, the poet, politician, and postcolonial theorist Aimé Césaire has died.

Blogs and websites around the world are offering their thoughts on his legacy. I was happy to discover this morning that a Blogger site is wholly dedicated to Césaire: Negritude offers a rich archive of materials, from primary sources to scholarship to collations of media mentions. Had I not encountered le poète martiniquais in my ninth grade French class, I might not have felt the gravitational tug of postcolonial studies, and might not have been inspired eventually to put together The Postcolonial Middle Ages.

During my first year of studying French, it seemed that the gates of linguistic heaven had opened ("There's a tense called future perfect?! I'm all over that!). My second year course, however, had reduced the language to the robotic mouthing of alien syllables and the memorization of conversation scripts. On a typical morning, Madame Allard would hook us to a tape player with multiple jacks, order us to don our headphones, and then command Écoutez et répétez! The voice on the tape would tell us that he was going to go shopping, or to the library, or to the cinema, and we would repeat his statements. He would remove a franc from his pocket to purchase a ticket or some cheese, and we would repeat that statement as well (yes, this anecdote of mine includes two artifacts lost to history: cassette tapes and French francs. It was that long ago).

If we weren't repeating from the tape loudly enough, Madame Allard would shout Répétez! Répétez! Répétez! in the exasperated way that only a teacher who has been in the classroom too long can -- you know, with sharp imperatives that carry a subtext of Mon dieu why do I have to teach these snotty dunderheads day in and day out until I retire? Meanwhile La Canard (as we naturally called Madame Allard behind her back) would have designated one lucky student to run to the doughnut store on the same block as our school, charged with bringing her back a croissant and un petite café with just touch of cream. She'd sip and munch as the tape held us captive to its tales of livres, fromage, and chiens.

Each day as I hooked in my headphones and the tape whirred to life, the protolinguist in me died a tiny bit. I remember, though, about midway through the term we opened our text book to a page that featured a small blurb on current francophone poetry. We were told to skip over the section to read some more conversation scripts (about purchasing une voiture, I believe, but maybe it was des escargots) -- but I didn't turn the page. I was hooked on what I saw.

Brief biographies of Aimé Césaire and Leopold Senghor demonstrated how their political ardors (one a member of the French parliament representing Martinique, the other the first president of Senegal) were accompanied by and entwined within artistic creation. A politician-poet? Could such a being exist? Wasn't politics the realm of the prosaic, wasn't art a realm untouched by cultural turmoil and decolonization movements and racism? I read what I could about Negritude ... and read what I could of each of their poetry. And you know, I was hooked. The beauty of the language, the rhythm of their poems ... now I could understand why French was worth the labor of studying. Forget buying une voiture. I was shopping for Cahier d'un retour au pays natal.

So what about you? What encounter with unexpected literature influenced you in a surprising way?

Chaucer: An Oxford Guide / Postcolonial Chaucer

The latest Studies in the Age of Chaucer has an appreciative review of Steve Ellis's Chaucer: An Oxford Guide, a volume to which I was a contributor. A proliferation of guides, companions, and introductions have burgeoned around Chaucer like microbes in the human genome. Each has a distinct personality (typically reflecting the temperament of its editor), and each is useful in its own way. The only guide I've used in my undergraduate classroom, however, is this one.

My students for the most part liked the volume. I paired major essays with various tales, and used the pieces as an entryway into each day's discussion. The essays invite readers into conversation, rather than lecture them with Things They Must Know Before Even Thinking About Studying Chaucer. The Guide enabled my class to understand how contemporary scholars analyze Chaucer's work. I was hoping that such familiarity would improve their own critical analyses (it mostly did). Oddly, the most beloved and most detested of the essays I assigned was Glenn Burger's on "Queer Theory," an essay that made several of them feel like their heads would explode. It's a dazzling study, centering around category confusion and medieval capitalism. The students who loved it were truly enamored: several then went off and read Burger's monograph Chaucer's Queer Nation, becoming hardcore Burgerphiles as well as protodeleuzians.

Chaucer: An Oxford Guide is composed of sophisticated essays that are also quite lucid. All were written for the book, and many contain significant new work. The range of topics covered is quite broad: from a nuanced overview of Chaucer's life and the limits of what this information allows in the interpretation of his works (Ruth Evans, connecting Chaucer to the scandals that haunt his biography, and usefully invoking parallels from Sylvia Plath to Paul de Man) to a nifty tour of the problems of editing Chaucer (Liz Scala at her best, witty and contrarian) ... even an overview of the genre of Chaucer handbooks.

Below, I excerpt a small piece from my own essay, 'Postcolonialism.' This section centers upon the Prioress's Tale, loss and remembrance.

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In this closing section I would like to turn to a function that medieval studies has always shared with postcolonial theory: memorialization of that which might otherwise be forgotten. We live in a frightening and dangerous world, mainly because we human beings are so frightening and dangerous. But we are also creatures of history, both formed by the past and desirous of the past. Postcolonial critique refuses to see history as inert, and turns to what has gone before in order to remember it differently, less absolutely and less singularly – a way of seeing that isn't so much relativism as perspectivism.

In the tale told by the Prioress, a schoolboy decides to memorize a Latin hymn to Mary, an endeavor that necessitates neglecting his primer. In the religiously plural Asia that the 'litel clergeon' inhabits, the 'litel scole of Cristen folk … in which ther were / Children an heep' (495-97) performs an important differentiating function. That the children are 'ycomen of Cristen blood (497) may hint at a biological dimension to their community. Yet it is the 'litel scole' that imparts to the young pupils the culture and history that will ensure they know their difference from the 'Hebrayk peple' (560) of the 'Juerie,' as well as from the Muslims who apparently govern the land. In choosing the hymn over his primer, the young boy's act of rebellion is not all that subversive: his passion serves to remind the Christians of his unnamed city and the Christians of the Canterbury pilgrimage that a shared and timeless inheritance, codified in the song's Latin words, separates them from the rest of the world, renders them a people with an exclusive history, specially chosen and protected by God. The clergeon's worry over punishment at school is misplaced, for it is the nearby Jews through whose neighborhood he passes twice a day who will harm him, not his teachers. These very same Jews will, by the end of the tale, be tied to horses, dragged through the streets, and then hanged.

The ardor of the 'litel clergeon' for the Latin words which he does not fully understand is supposed to be admirable. Precocious sanctity should inspire exactly the kind of reverential awe that greets the ending of the 'Prioress's Tale' ('Whan seyd was al this miracle, every man / As sobre was that wonder was to se,' 691-92). Yet what happens when the ears through which the echoing hymn is heard are not Christian, but Jewish? Alma redemptoris ('nourishing [mother] of the redeemer'), the opening line of the clergeon's song, means little to a people whose sacred language is not Latin and whose messiah has not arrived. Cried 'ful murily' twice a day in passing through the ghetto (553), the hymn becomes an act of violence, announcing to its unwilling auditors that their religion, culture, and very identity have been superseded.

Postcolonial criticism encourages us to pay attention to how communities come into being and who is excluded. It asks us to listen with the other's ear and interrogate what is at stake when a body of knowledge is created, codified, promulgated as universal and peerless. The culmination of the 'Prioress's Tale' is the eradication of its Jews, leaving its narrative as empty of 'Hebrayk peple' at its close as the English nation was in Chaucer's day. What history is being remembered here, and what is being forgotten?

Though the action is set in ancient Asia, the Jews of the 'Prioress's Tale' are not as distant as they seem. England expelled its Jewish population in 1290, but rather than rid itself of anti-Semitism, the Jew who was no longer anywhere came to be everywhere. Jews were central to post-Expulsion 'English religious devotion and national identity,' an absent presence around which community solidified.' Once Jews no longer lived in England, their eradication was repeatedly performed figuratively, a repetition that demonstrates that violence committed long in the past can still trouble and haunt for many years, seeming to have happened 'but a litel while ago' (686). The Prioress ends her tale with an apostrophe to another boy martyr, Hugh of Lincoln, 'slayn also / With cursed Jewes' (684-85). Young Hugh's corpse had been discovered in a well almost 150 years earlier, but to an England that owed its sense of cohesiveness to the absence of its Jews, that death possessed an enduring vividness. The ideological uses to which his corpse was put can obscure the fact that a boy named Hugh really did perish, probably an accidental drowning, likely at the home of a Jewish friend. Because this death, all the more terrible because it claimed a child, was believed to be an act of murder, other innocents likewise lost their lives. According to Matthew Paris, the ringleader of the group of Jews who had supposedly crucified the boy as part of a secret ritual was tied to a horse, dragged and hanged -- exactly the punishment repeated on the Prioress's Jews. King Edward himself took a special interest in punishing the supposed malefactors; eighteen more Jews were eventually hanged as coconspirators.

Hugh of Lincoln's death and the violence that exploded around it harkens back to the first recorded accusation that Jews routinely kill Christian children, and the first attempt to create a boy martyr for communal reverence. When a boy named William was found dead in the woods outside Norwich in 1144, the grisly murder was blamed upon the local Jewish population. In this first instance of the blood libel, the accusation that Jews commit murder as part of their religious rituals, enough citizens of the city were sceptical of the charge not to attack their accused neighbors. Yet the boy's corpse was eventually interred in the cathedral and worshipped as a saint. Again, I would like to point out what is obvious but often overlooked in the scholarship attempting to analyze the significance of this episode: a young boy died horribly (gagged, stripped, tortured), and a demand is made that other innocents forfeit their lives in order to give some meaning – any meaning -- to this utterly senseless act. This makes William's fate similar not only to Hugh's, but also to that of another boy who died under terrible circumstances, this time at his own mother's hand. Unlike William, Hugh, and the nameless 'litel clergeon,' however, this boy was Jewish.

Besieged by Crusaders who, on their way to the Holy Land, decided that they ought not to spare God's domestic enemies, a group of Jews found themselves trapped inside the archbishop's palace at Mainz. Realizing that barred doors offered only some few moments of safety, these Jews chose to take their own lives rather than be forcefully baptized or hacked by Christian swords. Two surviving Hebrew chronicles narrate the martyrdoms of 1096. A chilling scene centers upon a mother named Rachel, who declares to her companions that her four children must predecease her so that the 'uncircumcised ones' will not convert them to their pseudo-faith.' As her friend takes a knife to her youngest boy and her two girls are cut in turn, Rachel realizes that her older son, Aaron, ought not to have witnessed his siblings' deaths because he is too young to face his own demise with resolve. 'Mother, Mother, do not slaughter me!' Aaron wails, then cowers beneath a bureau. Rachel

lifted her voice and called to her son: 'Aaron, Aaron, where are you? I shall not have pity or mercy on you either.' She pulled him by the leg from under the bureau, where he had hidden, and sacrificed him before the sublime and exalted God.

It is difficult not to see in Rachel a shocking coldness. As she announces to hidden, terrified Aaron exactly what fate she will inflict upon him, as she drags him by the leg from the only spot of safety he could find in this room flowing with blood, as Aaron pleads with his mother not to be cut open like his siblings, her actions seem inhuman … and that is exactly the point of the episode. Rachel's heroism resides for the chronicler in her ability to transcend human emotion and maternal attachment. Aaron is young and weak and human in order to ensure that his mother becomes timeless, a sublime example rather than a mere historical fact. Aaron, in other words, exists in that innocent space between infant insensibility and the adult ability to choose self-obliteration; he is able to feel the pain of martyrdom but horrifically unable to desire it. Aaron suffers so that his parents and his community accrue the glory of kiddush ha-Shem ('sanctification of the divine name'). The story in which he figures is not ultimately about him at all, but about his mother Rachel's sacrifice.

The Jewish choice of mass martyrdom over conversion shocked their Christian antagonists. Based upon the pioneering work of Israel J. Yuval, however, John McCulloh has argued that the fantasy that Jews ritually murder Christian children arose in the aftermath of the Rhineland Jews' choice of death for themselves and for their own offspring. I would go even further and argue that this spectacular choice to take one's life 'in the sanctification of God's name' and the flow of blood which resulted from these actions resulted in an enduring Christian fascination with Jews and sanguinary ritual. The violence that connects the 'litel clergeon' to Hugh of Lincoln, William of Norwich and Aaron of Mainz also binds together Christian and Jewish boys who did not and could not choose their own martyrdom. When childhood becomes the orientalized space of edenic purity, existing only so that adult ideologies can assert themselves, then lives are lost once again. Chaucer's eerily bloodless narrative of the 'litel clergeon' can hide in its conventionality the fact that behind its piety a flow of blood emanates from a boy who, when faced by an inflexible demand to suffer and die for an ideology he knows imperfectly, can answer back only the very human, 'Mother, Mother do not slaughter me!' If there is a historical voice that resonates after death in the 'Prioress's Tale,' it is indeed an innocent one, but it is also a hybrid one, speaking not just in Latin and in English but in Hebrew.

In the gruesome but highly literary demise of the 'litel clergeon' can be witnessed the historical deaths of three boys, two Christians and a Jew, whose furthest thought was martyrdom. I do not think that this knowledge makes the 'Prioress's Tale' unreadable, but it does inalterably transform the text. In the process it also illustrates well what postcolonial critique ultimately aims to do: not simply offer one more interpretation among many, but to alter profoundly the grounds upon which interpretation is conducted.

Some thoughts on Chaucer, history and Englishness

I'm currently in the midst of composing an essay about "British Chaucer" for a Festschrift. In preparation I'd been reworking my way through the materials that eventually became the essay "Postcolonialism," in the volume Chaucer: An Oxford Guide, ed. Steven Ellis. For your edification and/or amusement, I offer a section that was cut when that essay grew far too lengthy for the guide. It formed part of a larger rumination on the embedment of the study of Chaucer within an educational system that owes much to colonial encounter.

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It is sobering to keep in mind that university education in the United States and in England has been historically tied to the production of an enfranchised group of men whose knowledge of a shared tradition enabled them to (1) recognize their own and (2) exclude from the circles of power those too poor to have access to the educational system and those whose cultures differed from what had become canonized as the best of the best. It allowed these men to imagine that they were the culmination of a long and singular history stretching from ancient Greece and Rome through medieval Europe, all the way to contemporary Britain and America. Chaucer was usually included in this tradition as a precocious figure for Anglo modernity, a universal man who happened to live in the fourteenth century but who described the soul of the nineteenth and twentieth. Never mind that this tradition's seamless unity, its purified genealogy, were never more than a passionately held fantasy. The elite it formed went out into the world, seized land that was not theirs, and eradicated cultures that (they had been told, and believed) were self-evidently barbaric compared to their own.

Knowledge, in other words, is never disinterested. When an uprising in Jamaica was violently quashed by its British governor in 1865, Goldwin Smith, professor of history at Oxford, condemned his compatriot's actions. Under vehement attack by the governor's supporters, Smith resigned his post and was replaced by William Stubbs. The historian Kathleen Biddick notes the "monastic-like silence" on contemporary issues maintained by the new Regius Professor of History throughout his career:

This silence continues to leave unspoken the conditions of his appointment in the midst of a traumatic debate over British colonial race relations conjoined with the colonial transformation of the British university. The silence still lingers. (The Shock of Medievalism p. 9)

Stubbs retreated into the past, teaching no subject beyond the seventeenth century and refusing to publish in anything but scholarly journals of limited and specialized circulation (Shock of Medievalism p. 8). Biddick wonders if this professional stance of turning away from the world is not a way of being complicit with past violence and injustice. In her estimation, contemporary medieval studies still bears the guilt of this silence, for it has not yet adequately acknowledged how the field has been historically shaped. Biddick implies that the dead – the scholars who bequeathed the very shape of our disciplines to we moderns attending universities -- must be called to account for their war crimes, even when these were sins of omission. She also leads us to wonder if a disinterested study of medieval authors like Chaucer would ultimately be possible, let alone desirable. [It is also important to admit that not every founding father can be found quite so condemnable as Stubbs, nor does a postcolonial mode necessitate moralistic or negative critique. For every Sir Frederic Madden, who produced the first edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and thereby legitimated its specialized study – and who also fulminated against the "deadly poison of Democracy" – there was a Frederick J. Furnivall, a liberal agnostic socialist whose passion was that Middle English be available to all readers, and who did more than any other scholar to construct a canon of texts. (See especially David Matthews, The Making of Middle English, pp. 113-61).]

An examination of the dispiriting history of how the contemporary disciplines formed extends to exploring how the era we call the Middles Ages was itself constructed. No one who lived during this period, least of all Chaucer, would have conceived of themselves as living in some middle time, a mere prelude to Renaissance and modernity. Chaucer knew well that "in forme of speche is chaunge / Withinne a thousand yeer," that words once familiar could become "straunge" (Troilus and Criseyde II.22-24), but to his mind he wrote in English (or englissh, as he spelled it), not Middle English. That distinction was not made until Henry Sweet periodized the language into Old, Middle and Modern English in 1874, an act of separation that underscored the discontinuities between an undeveloped past and a confidently complete present.

John Ganim has demonstrated how the medieval period was imagined at this time as an analogue to England's new possessions overseas. In order to justify the absorption of India into the empire, for example, its people had to be figured as locked in a primitive mode of living. Acculturating the subcontinent to English modernity meant the loss of indigenous languages, customs, religions, but all these could be taken from the colonized under the banner of progress, as a healthful movement from "Old" and "Middle" into "Modern." The Indian village was therefore imagined as similar to life in Anglo-Saxon England: "Where the English were in the Middle Ages, so was India in the nineteenth century" (John Ganim, "Native Studies" p. 127). Implication: interject India with a greater dose of English modernity, and it will soon enough catch up. This otherness of the Middle Ages – and the medievalness of places like India – was emphasized not only in scholarly and popular writings of the time, but through pedagogical public exhibits like the Worlds Fair, where "authentic" medieval villages could be recreated next to "authentic" villages from the colonies as if the two were versions of the same universal human journey.

In reaction to this transformation of the Middle Ages into an underdeveloped country, medievalists eventually claimed a modernity for their era of study, describing a Middle Ages full of enlightened philosophical inquiry and reassuringly contemporary values. In their defensiveness over what therefore counts as medieval, these scholars were careful to minimize the presence of the irrational and the impure. As a direct result, an exploration of the relations between courtly Arthurian romance and the supposedly unrefined Celtic world by R. S. Loomis scandalized traditionalists, while the possibility of a deep connection between courtly love and Arabic literature likewise provoked outrage when it was proposed (Ganim, "Native Studies" 131). This impossibly contemporary and Eurocentric Middle Ages had no place for the non-Christian, the non-scientific, the strange. Chaucer escaped some of this debate over the possible primitiveness of the Middle Ages because he was considered not a great poet of the fourteenth century but "a great English poet who happened to live in the Middle Ages" (David Matthews, The Making of Middle English, p. 30), and the effect of his reputed timelessness was to allow a convenient escape from history. The fact that he monsterized Jews and Muslims, that his vision of Britain (or perhaps more accurately, his complete lack of interest in attempting to envision Britain) means that he has created a world almost empty of Welsh, Scottish, and Irish content, did not disturb scholars for whom timelessness and universality were synonyms for a contemporary kind of exclusive Englishness.

The Caribbean Medieval

Island Love
[photo at left of the Palm at the End of the Mind by author]

I've been in love with the Caribbean since visiting Saint Lucia in 1990. In the years that followed I've been to Cozumel, Key West, Saint Martin, Saint Thomas, Grand Cayman, the Bahamas -- as well as Bermuda (an island that floats in the Atlantic, but similar in many ways to those farther south). Perhaps there is just something about islands that draws me: I proposed to my wife atop the crumbling fortress on George's Island, in Boston Harbor; the first extensive trip we took together, a year into our marriage, was to Kauai and Oahu (that was as far as our frequent flier points would carry us); and of course I give over much of my life to thinking about Britain. As Mary Kate is frequently arguing here at ITM, place suffuses meditation, often in surprising ways.

It's the end of the semester: classes to conclude! meetings to attend! papers to grade! exams to compose! deadlines to miss! All of us academics are nearing exhaustion. I invite you, dear readers, to mix yourself a rum drink, turn the heat way up and switch on a fan, find some internet radio station that streams steel drums all day -- or skip all the fantasies of island life and read this piece on George Odlum, or this great book by Richard Price -- and then skim the following, some excerpts from previously published work that suggests how the Caribbean might transform the medieval. [For some insight on how the medieval did in fact transform the Caribbean, on the other hand, you can't do better than Kofi Omoniyi Sylvanus Campbell: read his book, or read his talk at GW].

I opened The Postcolonial Middle Ages with this quotation from Antonio Benítez-Rojo: "Where time unfolds irregularly and resists being captured by the cycles of clock and calendar..." (The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, 2nd ed., trans. James E. Maraniss). Benítez-Rojo describes the Caribbean as a "meta-archipelago," a figuration I found especially useful in struggling toward a language in which to collect an entity as big as "the Middle Ages" even while insisting on the violence generalization performs. In Medieval Identity Machines, I finished the thought, so to speak, offering this account of how Antonio Benítez-Rojo's model might provide a useful figuration for time as well as space.

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Islands and Middles

How does one encounter the past as an anteriority that continually introduces an otherness or alterity into the present?
-- Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture

Unlike Hamlet's description of unknown futures, time is probably less an "undiscover'd country" than a postcolonial expanse. Medieval studies has long known that its lands, peoples, texts are nearly always indelibly marked by long histories of colonization, resistance, assimilation, coexistence. This section explores some recent scholarship on another hybrid geography, the Caribbean, to suggest the ways in which a particularly deleuzian strain of thought in postcolonial theory might be useful to medievalists interested in rethinking the relations among space, time and cultural admixture in their discipline, as well as to theorists of the contemporary postcolonial who might want to account with greater temporal depth for the complexities of colonialism's histories.

A vastness of islands scattered over a confluence of troubled seas, the Caribbean is difficult to totalize. Produced over centuries through multiple colonizations (five European tongues have mingled with numerous aboriginal and African languages, catalyzing hundreds of dialects, creoles, pidgins), Caribbean space is diverse, a place of category-defying syncretism, symbiosis, fusion. Collective designation, moreover, runs the risk of simply repeating the colonialist demand that the heterogeneity of the islands be reduced into some neatly describable territory in order to better dominate its supposed disorder with Western technologies of government and industry. In his attempt to articulate the "discontinuous conjunction" of this wide expanse, Antonio Benítez-Rojo deploys a conceptual construct which he labels la isla que se repite, the "repeating island" or "meta-archipelago." Because a chain of islands consists of a territorial harmony, a geographic unity plotted across the still space of a map, Benítez-Rojo insists that such a domineering view can never capture the fullness of Caribbean reality. Possessed of neither center nor absolute limits, indifferent to any precision of green spots fixed with individuating latitudes and longitudes in an ocean of blue, the meta-archipelago which he describes is not a collection of islands but an amalgam of "processes, dynamics and rhythms" conjoining familiar repetitions of history to unexpected eruptions of the new. The Caribbean meta-archipelago does not enchain but gathers into loose alliance a heterogeneous mixture of phenomena not amenable to easy synthesis: "unstable condensations, turbulences, whirlpools, clumps of bubbles, frayed seaweed, sunken galleons, crashing breakers, flying fish, seagull squawks, downpours, nighttime phosphorescences, eddies and pools, uncertain voyages of signification" (The Repeating Island, 2-3). This sensuous mélange assembles into animated conjunction the geographic, the topological, the natural, the human, the mythic, the material, covering "the map of world history's contingencies, through the great changes in economic discourse to the vast collisions of races and cultures that humankind has seen" (5). Lands, waters and histories exist in a dispersed togetherness that never congeals into finite unity. In an essay which Benítez-Rojo does not cite, Gilles Deleuze similarly envisions a conceptual archipelago which could also be described as anti-universalist, conjugative, perspectivist, "an affirmation of a world in process":

Not even a puzzle, whose pieces when fitted together would constitute a whole, but rather a wall of loose, uncemented stones, where every element has its value in itself but also in relation to others: isolated and floating relations, islands and straits, immobile points and sinuous lines … an infinite patchwork with multiple joinings.

Within remarkably similar poetics of fluidity and movement, Deleuze and Benítez-Rojo independently transform the quotidian archipelago into an aqueous assemblage which has less to do with actual islands than with a multiply connected meshwork of scattered "middles" which might decenter the world, but does not necessitate the abandonment of speaking about that world's shared immensity. The meta-archipelago, Benítez-Rojo writes in summary, is a restless machine of uncertain borders composed of unceasing flux (5).

Postcolonial theory directed toward the study of the Americas has a tendency to describe western Europe as a community of nations with a shared set of values, especially in the outward thrust of their imperial zeal. Even within national boundaries, European countries are imagined to be homogeneous: the French, the English, the Spanish and so on are supposed to have discrete identities intimately tied to the stable and apparently natural boundaries of their homelands. Europe is thus composed of coherent corporate entities with a tendency to act uniformly, even when in competition with each other. In describing the exploitation machine erected by Columbus as a kind of "medieval vacuum cleaner" which sucked resources from the New World for deposit on distant shores, Benítez-Rojo can therefore assume that Europe acted as a singular agent in perfecting a structure which was initially rather inept, augmenting its Columbian bricolage with la flota (the machine formed of ships, ports, and flows of raw material and wealth), missionaries deployed to effect religious transformation, plantations with their adaptable structures for quick implementation and lasting domination, "an entire huge assemblage of machines" (8) whose conjunction enabled efficient colonization and maximum profit.

Medievalists who study the European west are unlikely, however, to recognize the singular geographical actor at the receiving end of this impressive apparatus. Strangely enough, it is the culture of the meta-archipelago and the dynamic Caribbean machine which reverberate as possible figurations for the psychical and cultural complexity of the occidental Middle Ages. Recent work in medieval studies has undercut the possibility of assuming a transhistorical, corporate identity for Europe, arguing that the term organizes into an imaginary totality communities which did not necessarily perceive themselves as part of any such grand collective.

Linguistically and culturally diverse, connected by shifting alliance and multiple affiliation, medieval Europa was a machine animated as much by conquest, alliance and shared history (consolidating or integrative movements) as violent counterstruggle and ultimate inassimilability (eruption, assertion, sedimentation of difference). Benítez-Rojo is writing of a specific time and place in their relation to constitutive histories and topographies, of a geotemporality of which the Middle Ages knew nothing and which -- "medieval vacuum cleaners" aside -- had in turn little knowledge of the European medium aevum.

Yet his "polyrhythmic" conceptual figurations are useful in struggling toward a language in which to collect an entity as big as the western Middle Ages even while insisting upon the inherent inadequacy and potential violence which all such generalization performs. What if like the Caribbean space described by Benítez-Rojo the western Middle Ages consist of islands of difference made contiguous through the shared embrace of turbulent, confluential seas? Bede, after all, described the flow of time (lapsus temporum) as both "churning" (volubilis) and "wave-tossed" (fluctivagus). Why not extend Bede's oceanic metaphors to include the possibility of more solid spaces within the temporal flux? Some of these islands might, like the barren outcroppings sought by early Irish eremites, stand in relative isolation. Most, however, would be more like monkish Iona. The loneliness of this island in the outer Hebrides dissipates the moment we recall that Saint Columba assembled there a polyglot community drawn from many nations; that the monastery which he founded was visited with some regularity by merchants from Gaul; that flows of books and boats and pilgrims traversed its shores; that little Iona's history is inseparable from epic battles waged in Ireland and Scotland, from the consolidation of a Christian Northumbria by Oswald, from the missionary effort to convert those Pictish kingdoms now lost to history.

Adomnán, Columba's eventual successor and composer of his vita, even entertained at the monastery a storm-tossed pilgrim returning from the Holy Land. The Life of Saint Columba is a weirdly heterogeneous text, as likely to narrate a relentlessly local anecdote about a demon dwelling in the bottom of a milk pail or the saint's predicting an imminent spilled inkpot as to provide a sweeping evocation of how this "island at the edge of the ocean" disseminates miracles known beyond "the three corners of Spain and Gaul and Italy beyond the Alps." Iona in the Life is not ultimately much of an island. Even when Columba resides on its rocky shores his spirit wanders, participating in distant martial clashes, communing with angelic visitors, scattering his selfhood across the wide world. The Life of Saint Columba textually performs this sacred fluidity, resolutely refusing linear chronology or recognizable biography. Names and events recur irregularly; sometimes Columba is dead and sometimes he is alive; the action often unfolds in Iona, but sometimes we are in Ireland, or among the Picts, or watching the Loch Ness monster attack. We are constantly transported across marine expanses without transitional signals, taken back to Iona without warning, in movements that draw together distant geotemporalities without synthesizing them into a homogeneous whole.

The western Middle Ages as expanse of diverse conceptual isles means existence in intimate, unexpected connection through the swirl of manifold currents, through swiftly changing movements which rapidly commix flows of peoples, goods, ideas, armies, languages, architectures, books, genes, religions, affects, animals, technologies. Scatterings of lands gathered in their mutual relations, gathered with the currents that animate but do not totalize them, a medieval meta-archipelago would lack fixed boundaries and contain multiple centers. European cultures, communities, nations become relational and provisional imaginings rather than ontological, self-possessed wholes. Think, for example, of Custance in Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, inscribing a colonial trajectory at once provincially English and transnationally Christian upon a world that includes Syria, Rome, Northumberland.

A meta-archipelago requires that this cosmos be seen not only through that imperial gaze which frames the narrative, but also through the eyes of the Sultaness, the Northumbrians, Custance herself as a woman caught in a gendered game of cultural, religious, mercantile, bodily exchange. David Nirenberg has demonstrated that violence not only established medieval communities of diversity, but was integral to sustaining them (Communities of Violence). As the Man of Law's Tale also indicates, violence plays an important role in the instigation and maintenance of the flows that forcibly bind one conceptual island in the medieval archipelago to another.

Yet, in a kind of decolonization, the meta-archipelago enables the supposed margins of Europe to lose their status as peripheral geographies, so that Wales, Ireland, Brittany, Iceland, the Midi, Catalonia become centers in their own right, dynamic points of reception and dispersal in an open meshwork of transverse, transformative differences. No circumscribing map could capture the proliferating fullness of such islands, for every time the borders of a homogenous Britannia seem to have been securely delineated, another story begins to circulate of some interior, underground civilization where the people speak a long dead language, have green skin, or give other marks of their fairy alterity, of their inassimilable difference to an island that will never achieve its ambition of becoming a well ordered self-same.

These "figures of secret and unknown origin" (as Gervase of Tilbury called them) inhabited the interiors of mountains and ruled submarinal demesnes. Even the skies were populated by alien navigators of inscrutable intent. In the Otia imperiala, Gervase describes how a congregation leaving church beholds an anchor falling from the sky. In the distant clouds sailors can be heard struggling to pull the device back aboard their ship. Soon one of these mariners shimmies down the rope, hand over hand. He is immediately seized by the crowd, struggles for his life, and drowns because the "moistness of our denser air" is intolerable to his ether-adapted lungs. When "our" previously invisible air becomes weighty enough to function as someone else's sea, then "our" skies become the currents by which the medieval archipelago exuberantly connects difference to sameness in unanticipated ways. In mentioning such fantastic peoples living below the earth, under the waters, and in the clouds along with the real denizens of places like Wales and Ireland -- people who were themselves sometimes represented in just such "magical" and dehumanizing ways in order to exaggerate the challenge which they posed to English hegemony -- my intention is not to take any measure of concrete, lived reality away from any denizen of the medieval archipelago but rather, in sympathy with a medieval impulse, to populate its land, seas, and air with as much life as possible, to restore to this world its vastness, its vitalism, its irreducible heterogeneity.

As David Wallace observes in his General Preface to The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, the Middle Ages have been badly treated by scholars who desired find in them a "future that comes to early" -- who wanted to discover the same delineations of nation and imperial power which they unproblematically celebrate in their own present. Wallace's succinct, insightful reading of The Cambridge History of the British Empire (first volume published 1929) and Cambridge History of English Literature (first volume 1907) emphasizes the awkwardness which such teleological rhetoric engenders. Because medieval England with its "plurality of languages" was "a culture more colonized than colonizing," no "secure point of origin for imperial history" exists, mandating that the Middle Ages be commemorated in order to be quickly forgotten (xii-xiii). In contrast, Wallace's own edited volume ambitiously aims for and largely achieves a "dizzying complexity" of cultures, languages, and material realities (xiv). In envisioning a British Isles resistant to harmonization rather than a unified and premature England, The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature attains something like the archipelago-like spread articulated by Benítez-Rojo. In the dazzling series of chapters labeled "Writing in the British Isles" (179-309), sections on Wales, Scotland, and Ireland are allowed to "write their histories, so to speak, from the inside out (with the English sometimes visible, sometimes not)" (179). In decentering the island into a scattered multiplicity, the volume's project is admirable, even awesome.

It therefore feels almost criminal to critique its achievement, especially because Wallace's editorial restructuring of how insular history gets narrated will be felt in the field for a long time, catalyzing further decolonizations of the "English" Middle Ages. Yet one might object that within the large geographic and collective structures which the volume keeps in place, communities of difference (what Anne McClintock calls the "internally colonized") are left out, are rendered ineligible to write their histories. The preface to this bulky and inclusive book argues that the chapter on London in the "Writing in the British Isles" section "must stand in, methodologically, for accounts of other places that have yet to be written, cannot yet be written, or have found no space for inclusion here." Among these excluded narratives are "the writings and public inscriptions of the Jews" (xvi). One cannot say that such a Jewish account cannot be written; see, for example, the documentary narration of exactly this history in Joseph Jacobs, The Jews of Angevin England, published in 1893. That such an account has simply "found no space for inclusion here" is not a reassuring explanation for why a volume notable for its capacious embrace of cultural difference nonetheless presents an unselfconsciously Christian -- and therefore an ultimately singular and reduced -- Middle Ages.

A reconsideration of geographical emplacement is as vital to the future of the Middle Ages as it is to the analysis of Caribbean and other postcolonial spaces. Just as importantly, as Wallace has already implied, within these places of shared histories conjoined to disparate experience and expression, time likewise loses its smooth universality, its exteriority, its rigidity. While contemporary critical theory has developed a sophisticated vocabulary for dealing with that which is unheimlich ("uncanny" "un-home-ly" "out of place"), a problem just now being explored is that posed by the untimely. Without much further elaboration, Antonio Benítez-Rojo observes that inside the fluid and sinuous Caribbean machine, time "unfolds irregularly and resists being captured by the cycles of clock and calendar" (11). Benítez-Rojo's throwaway observation can be usefully extended using recent work by other postcolonial theorists. The Caribbean, the medieval west, English India, and any other geography produced through colonizations are likewise composed of multiple, hybridized temporalities, of what Sara Suleri has called disparate, thick, "colonial intimacies" in which time unfolds differently at different vantage points, according to divergent "logics of origin."

The adjective "postcolonial" has been accommodated comfortably enough into the contemporary critical lexicon for the hyphen that used to divide its constituent parts to vanish. This disappearing punctuation, like all ghosts, tells an interesting story about time. "Post-colonial" suggests straightforwardly enough that a historical period exists which is after colonialism. "Postcolonial," the hyphen digested but its constituent elements bumping against each other without synthesis, has come to signify a temporal contiguity to rather than an evolutionary difference from the noun that forms its linguistic base. The postcolonial can be said to originate "from the very first moment of colonial contact," as a "discourse of oppositionality which colonialism brings into being." Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge describe the postcolonial as "a splinter in the side of the colonial itself," leading Michelle R. Warren to conclude that postcolonial theory opens a window "into any time or place where one social group dominates an other." Just as there was never a time before colony, there has never yet been a time when the colonial has been outgrown, left behind. For this reason Gayatri Spivak has suggested replacing "postcolonial" with "neocolonial," but for accuracy's sake it would make more sense to speak of the "midcolonial": the time of "always-already," an intermediacy that no narrative can pin to a single moment of history in its origin or end.

Anne McClintock has cautioned that the term "postcolonial" is nonetheless haunted by a "commitment to linear time and the idea of 'development'" ("The Angel of Progress" 85). One could go farther and argue that postcolonial theory in practice has neglected the study of the "distant" past, positing instead of interrogating the anteriority against which modern regimes of power have supposedly arisen. This exclusionary model of temporality denies the possibility that traumas, exclusions, violence enacted centuries ago might still linger in contemporary identity formations. It also closes off the possibility that this past could be multiple and valuable enough to contain (and be contained within) alternative presents and futures.

No definition of postcolonial theory has gained the same citational weight as that by Homi Bhabha: "Postcolonial criticism bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority within the modern world order." Postcolonial interventions into the "discourses of modernity" fragment the clean and easy identity narratives which cultures tell themselves, offering "critical revisions" which stress difference, conflict, and (to cite Bhabha citing Habermas) "widely scattered historical contingencies" (171). "Bearing witness" would seem to be an activity one does in the present in order to address a recent past -- thus the haunting of Bhabha's definition by the modern. Yet there is nothing especially recent about the "differential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races," social antagonism, and irreducible difference he describes. Indeed, the temporal boundaries that Bhabha draws seem especially arbitrary in that an important challenge offered by this essay and by his work in general is a rethinking of temporality itself from a postcolonial perspective.

The progress narratives of that traditional history which has left its traces in the names assigned to the major epochs of the West declare that the Middle Ages began in darkness and ended at a rebirth which rendered them obsolete. As the possible alliance between the contemporary Caribbean, English India, and the medieval West suggests, however, a progressive or teleological history in which time is conceived as mere seriality and flat chronology is inadequate to the task of thinking the meanings and trauma of the past, its embeddedness in place, its active relation to the future. Once homogeneity and hierarchizing, developmental, or overarching models are denied history, time becomes an active component within the open structure of alliance which both Benítez-Rojo and Deleuze call a machine, an assemblage "of diverse elements … which generates new structures without homogenizing the components … the emergence of a form, a form in which the materials themselves have a say."

An advantage, moreover, of conceptualizing temporality as multiply centered movements among unstable isles rather than as a unidirectional river is that distance in space no longer implies distance in time. Too often that which is geographically far from some ideological center is represented as primitive, undeveloped, Other, so that travel toward the periphery is coded as travel back in time. Because it possesses no margins per se, the medieval archipelago resists such easy conflation. Dublin and St David's c. 1300 are no more nor less backward than London c. 1300 or Washington DC c. 2001. Creation of a nonspatialized, shared, coeval time allows the possibility of what the anthropologist Johannes Fabian calls "the radical contemporaneity of mankind," the opening up of a world without temporalized violence against that which is different and distant. In arguing that temporalities separated by centuries may also in a sense be coeval, I am taking Fabian's argument further than he intended, since for him coevalness applies to cultures contemporary to each other but geographically removed.

Once progressivist narratives of chronology have been abandoned, can movement in time ever be "back," with all the negative connotations which anterior temporality (as undeveloped, as primitive) carries? The possibility of coevalness across time, it must be noted, does not imply a radical moral relativism, but simply carries an insistence that "advanced" civilizations cannot claim an innate ethical superiority over those at their temporal or geographical margins. Coevalness requires as well an acknowledgement that the achievement of a tolerant or non-persecuting society is at best a fragile and temporary gain rather than the irreversible attainment of some higher stage of societal evolution, some permanent state of enlightenment. A constant vigilance is by implication absolutely necessary to maintain these moments as tenuous as they are rare.

The Middle Ages have been too often characterized as a field of undifferentiated otherness against which modernity emerged, an exclusionary model of temporalization at least as old as the construction of the "Renaissance" as an epoch of classical rebirth. By establishing a continuity between the pre- and post-medieval, this periodization precipitated the Middle Ages as middle while at the same time banishing them from any kind of center. The medieval thus constructed becomes, in Louise O. A. Fradenburg's words, unchanging, inert, "lost to us by its very pastness." Alterity removes the Middle Ages from temporality altogether, rendering it inviolate. Conceptualizing this same temporal expanse as a middle space of scattered islands collected via ceaseless currents produces a rather unmedieval Middle Ages. The medieval as meta-archipelago -- as interminable, difficult middle -- stresses not simple difference (the past as past) or predictable similarity (the past as present) but temporal interlacement, the impossibility of choosing alterity or continuity (the past which opens up the present to a multitude of futures).

This resolutely medium aevum therefore lacks both a Genesis-like in principio at which to locate a destiny-laden foundation and a Day of Judgment to organize manifold circulations into a linear temporal movement. If this Borromean knot which entwines disparate temporalities, supplanting the teleological chronology of more traditional history, seems uncannily similar to the theoretical displacement of linear history within postcolonial studies, that is no coincidence, since the "middle" of the Middle Ages is already forging a productive alliance with the nontemporal "post" of postcolonial theory. It makes sense, then, to explore the complex ways in which the medieval touches the "midcolonial," making both more familiar and more strange. The past need not function as a field of simple origin, as a time of mythic wholeness which underwrites contemporary fantasies of ethnic, national, or even epistemological homogeneity. Janus-faced, biformis, the Middle Ages performs a double work, so that the alliance of postcolonial theory and medieval studies might open up the present to multiplicity, newness, difficult similarity conjoined to complex difference.

A conceptualization of time as unbounded middle is not simply the recent invention of critical temporal studies and postcolonial theory, but is evident even in medieval authors, including one of the most canonical writers, Geoffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales are best known for a temporal opposition between the still and confident eternity of which the indestructible bodies of saints partake (incorruptable Cecilia in the Second Nun's Tale, the murdered but uncannily animate "litel clergeon" of the Prioress) and the hurried measurement of days and hours which obsess Harry Bailey and the Canon's Yeoman ("capital time," a figuration of temporality which has much in common with the transmutational fixations of alchemy and humoral theory). Yet this same collection of heterogeneous narratives also produces a meta-archipelago of its own. Like Salvation History itself, The Canterbury Tales are possessed of a beginning (the General Prologue, the departure from Southwark, the instigations of Fragment I) and a definitive end (the approach at sunset into Canterbury, the Parson's sober recitation, the contrite Retraction), but this unfinished assemblage is actually all middle. The Tales combine politics, religion, art, commerce, social critique into an unsynthesized amalgam of romance, hagiography, history, fabliaux, fantasy, sermons, exemplary narratives, poetry, prose. They produce a motley assortment of persons who often overstep the boundaries of their textuality and begin to act as if alive.

Deleuze and Guattari label such works transversal or rhizomatic, lacking an exterior unity and composed not of a "system of units" but of "directions in motion." As nonhierarchical and acentered as a meta-archipelago, rhizomatic books do not argue a point or mirror a world, but create an assemblage which "operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots" (A Thousand Plateaus 21). Chaucer appears to have finished the concluding section of his opus fairly early in the project, and so we know, therefore, that the Canterbury Tales were supposed to culminate at the tomb of the "holy, blissful martyr" Thomas à Becket, where in the sacred space of a cathedral the quotidian pilgrimage is transubstantiated into the soul's journey to celestial eternity. Yet, having written that orthodox ending in the face of which there would seem to be nothing more to say, Chaucer sabotaged at every point the possibility of everlasting resolution.

Not only did he continually rework the General Prologue, energizing its wide-ranging fellowship by adding an inspired assortment of new characters (including himself), he also seems to have been constantly revising the overall plan for the tale-telling. Derek Pearsall has argued that Chaucer's original plan was for each pilgrim to provide one story on the way to Canterbury. Chaucer later modified the tale-telling frame to allow two or more narratives by each figure before arrival at the final destination, then at a later date opened up the possibility of multiple tales by each pilgrim on the journey to the cathedral as well as during the return trip to London. It is perhaps shocking enough to think that the Canterbury which the Parson transfigures into Jerusalem Celestial allows a return. Yet Chaucer also decided to introduce the possibility of expansion for the company via chance encounters along the road, such as the alchemist and yeoman who explosively overtake the narrative, rendering the Canterbury company less pilgrims defined by their destination than simple compagnons de route, fellow travelers.

The Canterbury Tales project could not be finished by Chaucer because it aspires to no totality. Bernard of Clairvaux described the body as the tabernaculum (tent) "in which we wander as pilgrims," a vivid image which Bruce Holsinger glosses as a body which "is not a permanent home or native residence, but … an ever-present but mobile reminder of humanity's displacement from the true Holy Land above" ("The Color of Salvation" 172-73). Chaucer likewise intricated pilgrimage with bodies, but without reading the peregrinations of these pilgrim corpora back from what for Bernard is their overarching goal. Infinitely dilating, framed but in no way contained by the artificial book-ends of London and Canterbury, The Canterbury Tales construct a middle space that is all motion, containing a vision of pilgrimage that does not end at the bones of a long dead martyr. In this world between worlds, Egeus declares in his inept but unexpectedly insightful way, "we been pilgrymes, passing to and fro" (Knight's Tale 2848): an extraordinary pilgrimage that is simultaneously towards and from, a journey without telos or simple origin, a journey of pure movement, pure encounter, pure becoming.

Chaucer's rhizomatic drift has allowed me to wax utopian, but in the end it is necessary to pull back and make one final observation about such assemblages of proliferation. Despite Benítez-Rojo's frequent claim that the meta-archipelago that he describes structurally excludes the possibility of violence, the history of the Caribbean would suggest otherwise. In the same way, even the extraordinary middle space that Chaucer envisions has its imperialistic movements of colonization, reclamation, and control. The action unfolds in distant geographies, but is always ultimately quite English. Although marked by occasional eruptions of Latin, French (the urbane friar of the Summoner's Tale, with his "je vous dy sanz doute") and Flemish (the proverbial quotation of the Cook's Tale, "sooth pley, quaad pley"), as well as regional English dialect (the "northernisms" of John and Aleyn in the Reeve's Tale), as a whole the Canterbury Tales are linguistically reductive, promulgating London English as the only possible literary language for the nation. The Canterbury Tales even contains a narrative which takes great joy in purging itself of non-Christian presence, reducing a ghetto which affronts Christian integrity with its resistant difference to a heap of mutilated and eternally silenced bodies (Prioress's Tale). The Jews suffer a doubled temporal death. Not only do they represent an anachronism for Christianity, since they refuse to believe that Christ is the messiah and therefore consign themselves to perpetual inhabitation of an outmoded Old Law, these Chaucerian corpses are a reminder of a specifically English history, the anti-Semitic violence of the twelfth and thirteenth century which culminated in the Expulsion of 1290. English national identity is sutured around the figure of the absent Jew, a body out of time which reminds not only of the violent limits of the British Isles as a medieval archipelago, but more generally of the centrality of bodies to any thinking about time.

More on England and its Possible Worlds

Here, a further contribution to an emergent thread on wonder, possible worlds, medieval alternative realities, and modern fantasy as portal to the medieval. See also:

• An Embarrassing Revelation
  
• New World Medievalists, Fantasy and History
• Giving the Word 'Retro' New Meaning
• When Dinosaurs Roamed Eden
• Infinite Realms and Alternate Worlds
• Robert Bartlett on Medieval Other Worlds
• On Wonder
  

[from Medieval Identity Machines]

Postcolonial theory directed toward the study of the Americas has a tendency to describe western Europe as a community of nations with a shared set of values, especially in the outward thrust of their imperial zeal. Even within national boundaries, European countries are imagined to be homogeneous: the French, the English, the Spanish and so on are supposed to have discrete identities intimately tied to the stable and apparently natural boundaries of their homelands. Europe is thus composed of coherent corporate entities with a tendency to act uniformly, even when in competition with each other. In describing the exploitation machine erected by Columbus as a kind of "medieval vacuum cleaner" which sucked resources from the New World for deposit on distant shores, Antonio Benítez-Rojo can therefore assume that Europe acted as a singular agent in perfecting a structure which was initially rather inept, augmenting its Columbian bricolage with la flota (the machine formed of ships, ports, and flows of raw material and wealth), missionaries deployed to effect religious transformation, plantations with their adaptable structures for quick implementation and lasting domination, "an entire huge assemblage of machines" whose conjunction enabled efficient colonization and maximum profit (The Repeating Island).

Medievalists who study the European west are unlikely, however, to recognize the singular geographical actor at the receiving end of this impressive apparatus. Strangely enough, it is the culture of the meta-archipelago and the dynamic Caribbean machine which reverberate as possible figurations for the psychical and cultural complexity of the occidental Middle Ages. Recent work in medieval studies has undercut the possibility of assuming a transhistorical, corporate identity for Europe, arguing that the term organizes into an imaginary totality communities which did not necessarily perceive themselves as part of any such grand collective. Linguistically and culturally diverse, connected by shifting alliance and multiple affiliation, medieval Europa was a machine animated as much by conquest, alliance and shared history (consolidating or integrative movements) as violent counterstruggle and ultimate inassimilability (eruption, assertion, sedimentation of difference). Benítez-Rojo is writing of a specific time and place in their relation to constitutive histories and topographies, of a geotemporality of which the Middle Ages knew nothing and which -- "medieval vacuum cleaners" aside -- had in turn little knowledge of the European medium aevum. Yet his "polyrhythmic" conceptual figurations are useful in struggling toward a language in which to collect an entity as big as the western Middle Ages even while insisting upon the inherent inadequacy and potential violence which all such generalization performs.

What if like the Caribbean space described by Benítez-Rojo the western Middle Ages consist of islands of difference made contiguous through the shared embrace of turbulent, confluential seas? Bede, after all, described the flow of time (lapsus temporum) as both "churning" (volubilis) and "wave-tossed" (fluctivagus). Why not extend Bede's oceanic metaphors to include the possibility of more solid spaces within the temporal flux? Some of these islands might, like the barren outcroppings sought by early Irish eremites, stand in relative isolation. Most, however, would be more like monkish Iona. The loneliness of this island in the outer Hebrides dissipates the moment we recall that Saint Columba assembled there a polyglot community drawn from many nations; that the monastery which he founded was visited with some regularity by merchants from Gaul; that flows of books and boats and pilgrims traversed its shores; that little Iona's history is inseparable from epic battles waged in Ireland and Scotland, from the consolidation of a Christian Northumbria by Oswald, from the missionary effort to convert those Pictish kingdoms now lost to history. Adomnán, Columba's eventual successor and composer of his vita, even entertained at the monastery a storm-tossed pilgrim returning from the Holy Land. The Life of Saint Columba is a weirdly heterogeneous text, as likely to narrate a relentlessly local anecdote about a demon dwelling in the bottom of a milk pail or the saint's predicting an imminent spilled inkpot as to provide a sweeping evocation of how this "island at the edge of the ocean" disseminates miracles known beyond "the three corners of Spain and Gaul and Italy beyond the Alps." Iona in the Life is not ultimately much of an island. Even when Columba resides on its rocky shores his spirit wanders, participating in distant martial clashes, communing with angelic visitors, scattering his selfhood across the wide world. The Life of Saint Columba textually performs this sacred fluidity, resolutely refusing linear chronology or recognizable biography. Names and events recur irregularly; sometimes Columba is dead and sometimes he is alive; the action often unfolds in Iona, but sometimes we are in Ireland, or among the Picts, or watching the Loch Ness monster attack. We are constantly transported across marine expanses without transitional signals, taken back to Iona without warning, in movements that draw together distant geotemporalities without synthesizing them into a homogenous whole.

The western Middle Ages as expanse of diverse conceptual isles means existence in intimate, unexpected connection through the swirl of manifold currents, through swiftly changing movements which rapidly commix flows of peoples, goods, ideas, armies, languages, architectures, books, genes, religions, affects, animals, technologies. Scatterings of lands gathered in their mutual relations, gathered with the currents that animate but do not totalize them, a medieval meta-archipelago would lack fixed boundaries and contain multiple centers. European cultures, communities, nations become relational and provisional imaginings rather than ontological, self-possessed wholes. Think, for example, of Custance in Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, inscribing a colonial trajectory at once provincially English and transnationally Christian upon a world that includes Syria, Rome, Northumberland. A meta-archipelago requires that this cosmos be seen not only through that imperial gaze which frames the narrative, but also through the eyes of the Sultaness, the Northumbrians, Custance herself as a woman caught in a gendered game of cultural, religious, mercantile, bodily exchange. David Nirenberg has demonstrated that violence not only established medieval communities of diversity, but was integral to sustaining them (Communities of Violence). As the Man of Law's Tale also indicates, violence plays an important role in the instigation and maintenance of the flows that forcibly bind one conceptual island in the medieval archipelago to another.

Yet, in a kind of decolonization, the meta-archipelago enables the supposed margins of Europe to lose their status as peripheral geographies, so that Wales, Ireland, Brittany, Iceland, the Midi, Catalonia become centers in their own right, dynamic points of reception and dispersal in an open meshwork of transverse, transformative differences. No circumscribing map could capture the proliferating fullness of such islands, for every time the borders of a homogenous Britannia seem to have been securely delineated, another story begins to circulate of some interior, underground civilization where the people speak a long dead language, have green skin, or give other marks of their fairy alterity, of their inassimilable difference to an island that will never achieve its ambition of becoming a well ordered self-same.

These "figures of secret and unknown origin" (as Gervase of Tilbury called them) inhabited the interiors of mountains and ruled submarinal demesnes. Even the skies were populated by alien navigators of inscrutable intent. In the Otia imperiala, Gervase describes how a congregation leaving church beholds an anchor falling from the sky. In the distant clouds sailors can be heard struggling to pull the device back aboard their ship. Soon one of these mariners shimmies down the rope, hand over hand. He is immediately seized by the crowd, struggles for his life, and drowns because the "moistness of our denser air" is intolerable to his ether-adapted lungs. When "our" previously invisible air becomes weighty enough to function as someone else's sea, then "our" skies become the currents by which the medieval archipelago exuberantly connects difference to sameness in unanticipated ways. In mentioning such fantastic peoples living below the earth, under the waters, and in the clouds along with the real denizens of places like Wales and Ireland -- people who were themselves sometimes represented in just such "magical" and dehumanizing ways in order to exaggerate the challenge which they posed to English hegemony -- my intention is not to take any measure of concrete, lived reality away from any denizen of the medieval archipelago but rather, in sympathy with a medieval impulse, to populate its land, seas, and air with as much life as possible, to restore to this world its vastness, its vitalism, its irreducible heterogeneity.

[PS Here is a bit I found on Gervase's story of the enchurched anchor, including a mocking citation of Seamus Heaney's poem on the subject. And here is the citation itself.]