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

guest posting by COURTNEY RYDEL

[cross-posted at Global Chaucers]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RELATED LINKS:

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

Beyond the Anglophone Inner Circle of Chaucer Studies (Candace Barrington)

a guest post by Candace Barrington

[ITM has been slowly publishing as blog posts some of the presentations from the New Chaucer Society congress session "Are We Dark Enough Yet? Pale Faces 2016." Cord Whitaker offered the first post, here; Wan-Chuan Kao offered the second here. The roundtable in London honored the long wake of Carolyn Dinshaw's 2000 Biennial Chaucer Lecture "Pale Faces: Race, Religion, and Affect in Chaucer's Texts and Their Readers" -- especially because the NCS was returning to that city for the first time since she delivered it there. This collaboratively shaped roundtable pondered the ways in which literary medieval studies has both changed and resisted some profound challenges to its self-identity over the past decade and a half. Returning to the theme of Carolyn Dinshaw's lecture, presenters wondered about diversity among medievalists, the place of the personal, the matter of race, and the decolonization of medieval studies as a discipline.  Please share and add to the discussion! It is our hope to formulate an action plan out of the event and its aftermath. -- JJC]

Beyond the Anglophone Inner Circle of Chaucer Studies

With growing speed, global events are dismantling structures that we took for granted just months ago. This year in Brazil (recently identified with Russia, India, and China as an emerging economic power known as BRIC), the government and economy collapsed, a tragedy televised globally as the country frantically prepared to stage the "summer" Olympics and fought to limit the Zika outbreak. In late June, the Brexit vote began the process of unraveling ties between the UK and the rest of Europe, as well as exposing additional discontent within the European Union. Five days later, a bombing at Istanbul's Atatürk Airport killed 42 travelers. Then, on the last day of the NCS Congress in mid-July, we watched, first, the Turkish military's failed coup d'etat and, next, Erdoğan's more overt efforts to centralize power and strip Turkish citizens of rights that had hitherto been the hallmark of secular Turkey for nearly 100 years.

None of these events are unrelated to our work as Chaucerians. All of us in London for the New Chaucer Society Congress witnessed the destabilizing results of the Brexit vote. The ties between the UK and the rest of Europe once taken for granted seemed to be quickly dissolving. One of the speakers on the Global Chaucers roundtable, José Francisco Botelho, Brazil’s award-winning translator of Chaucer and Shakespeare, had to bow out because Brazil's once enthusiastic support for scholarship dried up. And the Istanbul bombings of made the travel of one roundtable participant an act of stoic heroism; the difficulty of her travel was highlighted when she reached home only hours before the coup shut down international travel, and the difficulty of her position was further highlighted when Turkish educators became Erdoğan's latest target.

I find these developments extraordinarily distressing. Just as we are opening up the field of Chaucer Studies to scholars, authors, and translators outside what can call the Anglophone alignment connecting Australasia, the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, events beyond our control threaten the easy commerce of ideas. The following comments are my contributions to a roundtable organized by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, "Are We Dark Enough Yet? Pale Faces 2016." Drafted in late May when I had little notion of how events would unfold, I now share them with you with greater urgency than they were originally written. Also, because the panelists agreed the roundtable provided an excellent opportunity for developing a strategic plan, I close by sharing some concrete suggestions for including more Chaucerians from outside the Anglophone inner circle, suggestions I’ve gleaned from my conversations with those same Chaucerians.

**********************

The panel’s question, “Are we dark enough yet?” could be reworded “Who can lay claim to Chaucer Studies? And why?” As David Mathews and Stephanie Trigg have shown, this reworded question has never had a stable answer.[1] Nevertheless, one aspect of Chaucer Studies has remained the same for the past 200 years: the circle has gradually expanded from a tight circle of British male antiquarians to include scholars from a broad spectrum of racial, gender, national, and theoretical perspectives. It would seem that the answer to my reframed question is a happy “Anyone!”

This jolly answer, however, is mitigated by a second characteristic joining this fellowship of Chaucer Studies: with few exceptions, membership requires training or positions at universities within what we can call the Anglophone alignment. This unifying characteristic means that our scholarship is not only conducted primarily in English but also conducted according to an accepted set of norms and assumptions. Once we recognize this particular restriction to active participation in Chaucer Studies, then we must answer the panel’s original question—“Are we dark enough yet?”—with “No.” Mindful of that second answer, I argue that we need to broaden the field of Chaucer scholarship to include Chaucerians trained or working outside the Anglophone alignment. In doing so, we can avoid some of the narrow-mindedness of Eurocentrism and recognize that “our” ownership of Chaucer is a cultural and political construction, not a natural inheritance.

I come to these questions and my answers regarding diversity in Chaucer Studies through Global Chaucers, a collaborative project Jonathan Hsy and I initiated in 2012. What began as an effort to collect and study examples of post-1945 non-Anglophone appropriations and translations of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales has transformed into a network of scholars, students, translators, and poets on six continents. (We still await collaborators from Antarctica.) Before Global Chaucers, Chaucerians outside the Anglophone alignment might attend NCS Congresses and some, such as Japanese and Western European scholars, might publish articles and books with mainstream Anglophone journals and presses. There were, however, few organized efforts to tap into the insights of those of the edges of the Anglophone inner circle.

Without planning to, Global Chaucers has begun bringing in a wider range of global Chaucerians. Working together to better understand Chaucer's fourteenth-century texts, this twenty-first-century collective has given us new ways to interpret and appreciate The Canterbury Tales. In addition, this collective can reorient those of us coming to Chaucer and medieval literature from within the academy's Anglophone alignment by reminding of us of two cultural myths. The first myth is our direct connection to the British literary heritage. Though we might study this British heritage in the United States, Canada, and Australia as part of our national heritage, our apparent connection is a tenuous construction left over from nineteenth-century nationalist medievalism. The second myth considers the "Middle Ages" or the "Medieval" a universal phenomenon, a misguided perception that a global perspective quickly dispels.

Global Chaucers helps expose the first myth: that Anglophone cultures are natural offshoots of British culture. For centuries, Chaucer's reception was considered in terms of British poets and authors. Only in the past quarter century have we considered his artistic reception beyond the British Isles—or his popular reception anywhere. As we have learned from these newer studies of Chaucer's reception, the English literary tradition allowed some former colonies—Australasia, Canada, and the United States—to create an Anglophone alignment with the United Kingdom that not only pretended they shared a single cultural heritage but also erased the indigenous cultural legacies. This Anglophone alignment views the British Middle Ages not as alien to their actual, individual indigenous histories but as a seamless prelude to their colonial history. Here, British literary culture has been so acculturated as the natural source of all Anglophone literatures that Chaucer—not indigenous or migrant voices—becomes the father of each former colonial nation's literary culture. What had long been taken for granted as the natural order, we now see as highly cultivated and artificial. Conversely, this linguistic (as well as cultural and political) alignment has allowed us to consider ourselves an inner circle with exclusive rights to safeguard the Anglophone heritage. Though we've smuggled exclusive ownership of the British heritage to our distant shores, we have been less keen on listening to what others might say about Chaucer and his works.

Global Chaucers also helps expose the second myth: that the temporality we call "medieval" is a universal phenomenon. Those of us coming to Chaucer from Anglophone cultures can easily miss how local this temporality is. Thinking about the global reception of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales requires us to ask what it means for those outside western Europe to appropriate a medieval text. Though it's easy for the West (which does include the Anglophone alignment) to adopt the Middle Ages as our own, we cannot assume The Canterbury Tales neatly fits into every culture's sense of what was happening in the late-fourteenth century. Nadia Altschul puts it well with her contention that "the Middle Ages is not a global historical time…but a local European time span."[2] According to this line of reasoning, the term "medieval" refers to people, places, texts, and artifacts associated with the European Middle Ages. Furthermore, “medievalism” or “medieval studies” refers to the reception of those same European Middle Ages. While this limitation might seem to privilege a Eurocentric vantage, in fact it de-centers the European model as the one by which the rest of the world’s cultures are understood. Indeed, by acknowledging that non-western cultures such as China and Persia have temporalities independent of Europe’s, we recognize that European history is not the measure to judge histories and cultures of other geographical regions. That Chaucer's reception in these non-European cultures must negotiate these multiple temporalities helps us recognize the many limitations inherent in the concept "medieval."

Furthermore, at the same time our work with this global project has exposed some limitations in the ways we think about our relationship to him, his texts, and his world, Global Chaucers has also helped us re-orient the ways we read and interpret Chaucerian texts. Already we've begun this process via careful queries of Chaucer's non-Anglophone reception beyond the British Isles. We look outside the Anglophone alignment in order to understand the insights brought to medieval studies by a new breed of Chaucerians—translators who never considered themselves Chaucerians and scholars who have felt themselves shoved to the margins of Chaucerian research.

As I have argued elsewhere, scholars from outside the Anglophone alignment provide perspectives that help reshape our sense of the past and the ways we have used the past to justify ourselves as individuals, as communities, as nations, and as allies. [3] These scholars fortify recent research in medievalism that exposes the misperceptions at the root of nationalist medievalism's much beloved image of a somewhat isolated proto-nation populated by a single people speaking one common vernacular. Now that the image of medieval Europe as a series of isolated states has been replaced with a medieval Europe that is more cosmopolitan—where people were more mobile, more polyglot, and less ethnically pure than has been imagined—global Chaucerians can help us locate “both non-foundational and non-imperial ways for ‘doing medieval studies’ in a post-national, neo-colonial world.”[4]

Not only do translators and scholars with non-European linguistic and cultural heritages provide perspectives and knowledge otherwise unavailable to us, they remind us of the fruitful consequences of collaboration. For instance, none of us can master all the languages necessary to study the global reception of medieval texts and artifacts; however, by creating a network of scholars and translators, we can uncover exciting global exchanges, which will in turn help us understand how the European Middle Ages and their subsequence reception were shaped by a whirling circulation of languages and cultures. Despite their inadequate access to research materials and limited opportunities to participate in larger conversations, we have found these Chaucerians have much to teach us.

If we want this larger, more global understanding of Chaucer’s reception and his texts, then we must be more sensitive to the extreme isolation, both geographical and institutional, under which these Chaucerians work. Because many of them teach English-language literature in small comparative literature or foreign language departments, these scholars are often the only ones at their universities working in medieval studies. Their resources are often minuscule, and they are often unfamiliar with publication practices inside the Anglophone alignment. They receive little mentoring, even less active sponsoring, and as a result can feel unwelcomed at our conferences and excluded from our publications. Not only are these Chaucerians and their contributions often invisible to the larger field of scholars, but, as the events in Turkey have illustrated, these Chaucerians are extremely vulnerable.

At the 2016 NCS Congress, we saw important steps towards bringing these scholars and translators into a larger, more collaborative circle. I counted thirty slots (as either presenters or organizers) filled by members from outside the Anglophone axis. Of those, thirteen hailed from Western Europe (Netherlands, Spain, France, Switzerland, and Germany), four from Scandinavia (Denmark, Iceland, and Norway), and two from Eastern Europe (Poland). Of the remaining twelve, seven work in Asia (Singapore, Japan, and Taiwan), four in the Middle East (Turkey, Israel, and Kuwait), and one in Brazil (who was unable to attend after the Brazilian economy crashed this spring.) I also met additional scholars from Turkey and China who attended the conference but did not participate directly in the program. Each time I listened to them, I learned more about Chaucer and his global reception.

It's time for Chaucerians actively to broaden our circle. I've asked scholars and translators in our Global Chaucers network about the sorts of support they need. Here's what I've heard:

1.     Rethink what we mean by scholarship by recognizing the value of translation and performance.

2.     Offer to share copies of articles and book chapters otherwise unavailable to these Chaucerians.

3.     Explore modes of scholarship more amenable to those with limited resources and different training.

4.     Reinforce the value of reception studies and translation studies in journals and book series that we edit.

5.     Seek scholars and teachers outside the inner-most circles; invite them to collaborate in publication projects and grant opportunities. These scholars and graduate students need more than mentoring—they need active sponsors.

6.     Provide fellowships and other opportunities for scholars outside the inner-circles to study and interact with others.

7.     Develop more open-access resources, such as the Open Access Companion to The Canterbury Tales.

8.     Promote the Chaucer Bibliography, which has become more and more inclusive, thanks to the work of Mark Allen and Stephanie Amsler.

I encourage you to institute and stabilize these and other modes of collaboration and support. Unfolding events have demonstrated the uncertainty of resources and remind us of the value in working together. I suspect the future will only confirm these lessons.

---

[1] David Matthews, The Making of Middle English, 1765-1910, Medieval Cultures (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Stephanie Trigg, Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).

[2] Nadia Altschul, “Transfer,” in Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, ed. Richard Utz and Elizabeth Emery (Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 2014), 239.

[3] Candace Barrington, “Global Medievalism and Translation,” in Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, ed. Louise D’Arcens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 195.

[4] Nadia Altschul, “On the Shores of Nationalism: Latin American Philology, Local Histories and Global Designs,” La Corónica 35, no. 2 (2007): 169.

Animals, Gesture, and Communication Despite it All

by KARL STEEL

It's the week before Kalamazoo, so of course I've just drafted my New Chaucer Society Paper.

Yeah. So, as I'm in Berlin, I'll simply wave fondly at Kalamazoo from a distance, and as I have more stuff to write during what remains of this chunk of my sabbatical -- one thing being a chapter on medieval animals and disability -- I need to get my stuff coherent, and fast! Last week was muteness (and thank you, hugely, everyone who helped me out on twitter and so on with ideas!); this week, it's gesture, which is as new to me as muteness was last week. And next week, well, I'll simply watch what trouble you all get into at the Big Show. And wish all the mentors and mentees a charming, helpful encounter!

And OH MY GOODNESS: as I was writing this, Jonathan Hsy was posting a BABEL events at Kzoo 2016 post. READ THAT. Use it. Mark your calendars. Do that. First.

For those of you who are grading, godspeed; for those of you who are writing your Kalamazoo papers, likewise; for those of you making long-distance moves for a new academic job, congratulations and good luck; and for those of you whom the market ignored, or disdained, for those of you not yet sure what you can do this Fall, all my best for you, and for a better future for the public good of education, one freed from the ugly strictures of Spreadsheet Rationality (read Eileen Joy here, and vote YES for a CUNY Strike Authorization, if you can, and if you haven't done so yet).

British Library Yates Thompson MS 26 44r (detail)

Read on if you like! Or just finish your grading.

Like Modern English, Middle English abounds in metaphors that troped impairment as animality: "blind as a beetle," "deaf as an adder," "mad as a goose." Mainstream medieval philosophy and Christian doctrine regularly glossed the paradigmatic quadrupedal animal body as a material form of irrationality, and likewise held that animals were "mute" not because animals were silent, but because the sound they made was understood as unwritable, as senseless, as mere noise.

Within a disability rights perspective, it certainly not unjustifiable to decry these comparisons, because they reduce impaired humans to a condition of animal degradation. Without - and I hope this understood - denying the importance of human rights, my scholarly habits of critical animal studies encourage me to linger with the animal comparison, to explore what might be done with it. My training means that I can't simply say that humans are better than animals, but neither do I want just to say that animals, of whatever sort, are all subjects of a life, and deserve to have their unique perspectives respected. What I'm doing in this paper is a bit more delicate, and, as befits someone who is new to disability studies, more tentative: I'm proposing that the metaphor of "natural" animal impairment offers up as model of multiple sensory and bodily norms, helping to dislodge the idealized, able-bodied human at least implicitly at the center of so many medieval narratives of human impairment.

In medieval narrative, at least if there's a saint involved, a person who is "blind as a beetle" will leave sighted. I offer the sample of the Patrologia Latina, where the nouns surdus and mutus often travel together, and likewise often travel with stories of miraculous healing. Augustine's Enchiridion promises that the bodies of the holy will be resurrected "sine ullo vitio, sine ulla deformitate," without any fault, without any deformity. However advantageous this may be for the impaired person, in this life or the next, the at least implicit message of these healing stories is that the impairment is an inconvenience, both for the impaired person and the saint. Healing someone's muteness allows the saint and the formally mute person to talk in the language the saint knows best; it allows the saint to replace an inconveniently impaired person with one whose body works the way the saint presumes it should. With this autonomy granted, the healed person goes one way, and the saint goes another. Normalcy has been restored.

This strong medieval narrative tendency towards the miraculous normalization of impairment is simply not as common in stories of saintly encounters with animals, no matter how miraculous. To be sure, these stories of mastery, taming, protection, elimination, and especially communication often require that a saint make himself understood to animals, and sometimes involve the reverse. Nonetheless, a saint who encounters an animal that is as "blind as a bat," because it is a bat, is probably not going to make that blind bat see.

One implication of this observation becomes more obvious if we concentrate on stories where that supposed impairment could have been overcome. These are stories about saints and birds, and, especially for my talk, in the story of Cuthbert's encounter with the penitential ravens.

I am interested in birds because they're an outlier in medieval negative glossings of animality. They're bipedal, for one, and so cannot be so easily classed as beasts confined to merely terrestrial appetites. The high-flying eagle, was commonly honored with tropological admiration for its supposed ability to look directly into the sun. And birds were the animals most typically imagined to have voiced language too. No hero that I know of gains the ability to understand the language of pigs or even dogs; but in the Volsung saga, Siegfried eavesdrops on birds, while the Middle English “Bird of Four Feathers,” or, still closer to home, the Parliament of Fowles, the House of Fame, and the Squire’s and Manciple’s Tales also all furnish ready examples. As birds have a peculiar capacity to erase the supposed impairment of being animal, a saintly encounter with a bird is one where it is very easy to imagine the bird ceasing, at least for a while, to be a "mute beast." 

Knowing that helps us recognize what makes the story of Cuthbert and the penitential ravens so special. The story goes like this: when the saint sees these birds tearing thatch from the roof of his guest house on the island of Farne, he waves them away, and verbally rebukes them. They flee, and then one or more ravens returns, and by way of apology, gives the saint a lump of pig’s lard. Written versions of the story first appear in a late seventh-century anonymous life, written not long after Cuthbert's death; Bede retells it several times in verse and prose; Aelfric gives it a compressed form, and then it appears in two late medieval, Middle English versions, one a couplet attached to choir stall paintings at Carlisle Cathedral, and the other at length in the Cuthbert compilation now known as Egerton 3309.

Of course, penitential fowl are a hagiographical motif of especial popularity with British saints. Saints Columbanus, Illtud, Wereburga, Guthlac, and, on the continent, Amelburga all have their problems with birds, often voracious geese, and often extract an apology from them. But barring the Cuthbert story, all these penitential birds are always only imitating something or someone else. Jonas of Bobbio’s life of Saint Columban has its bird "oblitus ferocitatis,” “forgetful of its wild nature,” splitting the bird’s miraculous behavior from its basic wildness. Illtud’s geese "withdraw…of their own free will..like tame animals," quasi domestica quadrupedia, a strange comparison. The posture of the geese of Amalburga - "submissive wings" with "heads laid on the ground" - is only a "simulacro" of reasonable human behavior. Wereburga’s geese act "acsi captiva pecora," as if they were captive livestock, or contrastingly, in the monk Henry Bradshaw’s 1513 Middle English Life of Werenburga, "as yf they had reason naturall." Words like quasi abound in other Latin accounts of Wereburga's miracle, while Felix describes Guthlac's birds with veluti and velut, for example, "as if conscious of its ill-doing," words that render the animal’s behavior only apparently more than instinctual.

No account of the story of Cuthbert and the penitential ravens that I know of loads its story with qualifications like this. In all of these, the birds are directly penitent, unscreened by metaphor. This is how the first, anonymous life describes them: "and settling above the furrow with outspread wings and drooping head, [they] began to croak loudly, with humble cries asking his pardon and indulgence. And the servant of Christ recognizing their penitence gave them pardon and permission to return." And here's how it looks 700 years later, in the long Middle English version:

Þe crawe spred hir wengys o brade,
And louted to him lawly þat tide
Reufully sho crobbed and cryed,
And schewed takyn expresse
Of praying of forgyfnes.
Cuthbert vndirstode hir dede
And leued hir to fle away gude spede.

Now, not every iota of Cuthbert hagiography tells the story: it's not in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica, nor in Alcuin's Bishops, Kings, and Saints of York, the metrical Cuthbert calendar, or the twelfth-century Cuthbert writings of Symeon and Reginald of Durham. The story's illustrated several times, most famously in Yates Thompson 26, and while these illustrations really do look like birds, they're even slimmer peg to hang an interpretation on than the texts I've offered you. I'll simply say that the story's not quite told everywhere, but it's still common, and where it exists, it is remarkably consistent.

I acknowledge as well that exegetical ravens are thickly symbolic, and I acknowledge that medieval commentators often agree with Dominic Alexander in taking stories like this as a sign of a saintly return to prelapsarian mastery over the animal world. I likewise acknowledge that this unique feature of the Cuthbert lives may be due to the inertia of storytelling or a respect for the integrity of the text: Bede makes some small changes, but mostly he just bookends it with explanations, “look to the ant o sluggard,” and so on. But I'm still struck that the stories that precede it - in Columbanus and in Athanasius's story of Saint Anthony and the hungry donkeys, which Bede himself cites - do not do what the Cuthbert story does, nor do the many avian miracles that follow Cuthbert's. Surely this unusual feature merits some kind of commentary.

Most striking is how much like ravens these ravens are. Paul Cavill emphasized this in his early article on animals and Cuthbert, and so does Susan Crane's superb commentary on the story, which stresses both the encounter's pastoral quality, with its notable combination of hospitality and submission, and what she calls the birds' "own ravenly, ravenous obedience," which is not just "a divine puppet show." 

For that "ravenly, ravenous obedience" to happen, and to happen meaningfully, the story needs translation, between the saint and the birds. Again, there are a number of ways this could happen: Goscelin of St Bertin's Wereburga life has its geese plead their case "as if with a human voice." This page from Tom Peete Cross's Motif-Index of Early Irish Literature neatly demonstrates that if an animal's going to talk, it's probably going to be a bird. The Cuthbert raven encounter could easily enough have been resolved simply by having the birds apologize vocally. Instead, with "humiliata uoce," a humble or abased voice, they begin, in the Middle English, to "ruefully" "crob and cry," or, in the anonymous life, to "crocitare," to croak, a word whose very rarity in medieval Latin marks a real effort to rightly represent this avian communication.

And when the ravens bow and stretch their wings, Cuthbert recognizes what they mean. This communication is in the style of monks, which discouraged or even forbade speaking, and which required a set of bodily movements to communicate the essentials of being a monk, chiefly, obedience and submission to the community. By bowing, the birds are "speaking" in a language that is understandable both to Cuthbert and the monks who produced these stories and among whom they chiefly circulated. Bede says that the raven uses "such signs as it could," or, to put this another, way, such signs as could be understood by a human. They are accommodating the communicative needs of this human monk. And when they furnish him with a chunk of pig lard, which he uses to waterproof his shoes, they are doing what they can to help him thrive in an environment much better accommodated to their capacities than to his.

That formulation is perhaps bizarre and over-clever, yet I am framing it this way to stress that this story strikes me as being about meeting in the middle. By preserving difference, by not likening the ravens' behavior to anything else, by requiring that Cuthbert recognize what the birds are doing - he "vndirstode hir dede" in the Middle English - the story preserves enough difference for translation to be both necessary and possible. The story refuses to simply wave away the difference in capacities and lived bodily experiences of human saint and penitential birds. Without requiring assimilation, it imagines the possibility of the satisfaction of mutual dependencies.

Medieval narrative was willing to imagine communication between humans and nonhumans; and on occasion it imagines these nonhumans making themselves understood not by speaking, but by making gestures suitable to the profession of their audience: kneeling ravens with a monk, or, another example, the outstretched paws, a gesture of homage, from the lion to Yvain, a knight. When we recognize that medieval texts also often trope nonhumans as impaired, and that communication still happens, without that impairment being miraculously "cured," we can take these medieval narratives of interspecies communication as a model for thinking impairment as something other than a condition that must be overcome for the sake of monolithic normativity. For these encounters are stories of multiple nodes of normalization, multiple ways of life: what is good for a raven is not good for a saint, necessarily, and still they can meet, and make themselves understood as they are.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary

Alcuin of York on Cuthbert, Latin.

Amelberga and the Geese, Acta Sanctorum, Julii III. Latin.

Athanasius of Alexandria, Life of Saint Anthony. Translation.

Bradshaw, Henry. The Life of Saint Werburge of Chester, ed. C. A. Horstmann. EETS. N. Trübner, 1887. Also includes Goscelin of Saint Bertin’s Life of Wereburga. Note that her name can be spelled many different ways.

Felix's Life of Saint Guthlac, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge UP, 1985.

Historia de Sancto Cuthberto, ed. and trans. Ted Johnson South. D. S. Brewer, 2002. Summary.

Illtud and the Geese, English. Manuscript image for the Latin. John of Tynemouth Latin, here.

Jonas of Bobbio, Life of Saint Columban. Translation. Latin.

The Life of Saint Cuthbert in English Verse, ed J. T. Fowler. Surtees Society, 1891 (for the Carlisle Couplets and Egerton 3309 (olim Castle Howard Ms)

Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge UP, 1940.

Wereburga in John of Tynemouth, Latin.

Wereburga in William of Malmesbury, Latin.

York Minster Cuthbert Windows.

Secondary

Alexander, Dominic. Saints and Animals in the Middle Ages. Boydell & Brewer, 2008.

Baker, Malcolm. "Medieval Illustrations of Bede's Life of St. Cuthbert." Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 41 (1978): 16-49.

Barrett, Robert W. Against All England: Regional Identity and Cheshire Writing, 1195-1656 University of Notre Dame Press, 2009. [for the politics of Bradshaw and Wereburga!]

Cavill, Paul. "Some Dynamics of Story-Telling: Animals in the Early Lives of St Cuthbert." Nottingham Medieval Studies 43 (1999): 1-20.

Colgrave, Bertram. "The St. Cuthbert Paintings on the Carlisle Cathedral Stalls." The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 73.424 (1938): 17-21.

Crane, Susan. Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.

Cross, Tom Peete. Motif-Index of Early Irish Literature. Indiana University Press, 1952.

Crumplin, Sally. Rewriting History in the Cult of St Cuthbert from the Ninth to the Twelfth Centuries. (PhD Thesis, U of St Andrews, 2004).

Duncan, Sandra. "Signa De Caelo in the Lives of St Cuthbert: The Impact of Biblical Images and Exegesis on Early Medieval Hagiography." The Heythrop Journal 41.4 (2000): 399-412.

Gretsch, Mechthild. Aelfric and the Cult of Saints in Late Anglo-Saxon England. Cambridge University Press, 2006 (Chapter 3, “Cuthbert: from Northumbrian saint to saint of all England)

Letty, Nijhuis Jantje.'Deor and nytenu mid us': Animals in the Works of Ǽelfric (PhD Thesis, U College Cork, 2008).

Newlands, Carole E. "Bede and Images of Saint Cuthbert." Traditio 52 (1997): 73-109.

Taylor, Sunaura. "Beasts of Burden: Disability Studies and Animal Rights." Qui Parle 19.2 (2011): 191-222.

Wakeford, Mark Reginald. The British Church and Anglo-Saxon Expansion: The Evidence of Saints' Cults. (PhD Thesis, U of Durham, 1998) [enormously useful for collecting goose miracles]