Off I go ...

by J J Cohen

I don't love plane flights, mainly because they make even nonclaustrophobic me feel the protagonist of an Edgar Allen Poe short story, but the nighttime flight across the Atlantic is different. No matter how many times I make the journey (five overseas trips this year: York, Siena, Berlin, Copenhagen for papers, and a family trip that brings us from London to Barcelona), it never becomes routine: knowing that beneath the plane the waves of a rough sea tumble, knowing that we are racing towards the sunrise on earth's other side ... an incurable romantic, me.

I'm on my way to York. No doubt I will be using the dark solitude of the flight to rewrite my paper for the conference, just as I did when I presented at Leeds last year. A glass of wine with dinner, then in the dimmed light of the cabin I'll scribble away in monastic selfcircumscription. Yes, if monks flew in airplanes in the Middle Ages and wrote lectures that theorize the affirmative challenge of Jewish neighboring within the textual unconscious ... yup, very like a monk.

Au revoir, and see some of you on the other side.

NEW BOOK OF NOTE: Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World

Figure 1. Natsume Soseki (1867-1916); Japanese author who wrote short stories set in medieval Britain

by EILEEN JOY

I was recently asked to review (for the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History) the new essay volume edited by Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul, Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of the "Middle Ages" Outside Europe (Johns Hopkins, 2009), and while I have only just read the Introduction and skimmed the rest of the contents (my review is due in June), the book is exciting and I thought I would just share with everyone here my initial impression of it (which impression/brief notice will also be posted on the website that Jeffrey shared with us a few weeks ago, Postcolonizing the Medieval Image):

Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul, eds. Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of the “Middle Ages” Outside Europe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. 444 pp. ISBN 0-8018-9320-8.

In a recent review essay in Comparative Literature, “Can the Middle Ages Be Postcolonial?” (CL 61.2 [2009]: 160-176), Simon Gaunt argues that much recent work in medieval literary studies that addresses postcolonialism does so within the context of national literary histories that are too narrowly defined (most typically, European literary traditions, and more often than not, Anglophone). In Gaunt’s mind, postcolonial medieval studies “need to work outside the framework of a single literary tradition” and “across different languages,” and they could also stand to benefit more from the insights of contemporary postcolonial theory regarding how “the medieval history of contact between Europe and Asia or Africa is in fact an important element of the longer history of which colonialism and postcolonialism are part” (p. 172).

The new collection of essays, Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of the “Middle Ages” Outside Europe, edited by Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul, looks extremely promising as regards the sort of comparative approaches Gaunt calls for, while it also situates itself, in a sense, beyond the Middle Ages proper. Thus, as the ‘medievalisms’ of the book’s title indicates, the authors gathered together in this volume are concerned to illustrate the ways in which certain notions and appropriations of the European Middle Ages—as a spatiotemporal concept, more so than as an historical entity—were instrumental in various modern colonial enterprises in non-European countries that did not possess their own “Middle Ages,” per se. This is how the editors themselves frame the collection’s initial guiding question in their Introduction:

As a spatiotemporal concept, “the medieval” is part of a temporal grid that positions it as a delimited historical time—generally understood as the time between c. 410 and c. 1500—and part of a spatial imaginary that identifies it with the territories of European Christendom. . . . It is enlisted as support for the concept of the “West,” as well as national, racial, and religious identities within Europe, and as the negative contrast to the desirable notions of progress and modernity. What happens to the idea of the medieval, we asked ourselves, and what kind of work does it do, when considered from perspectives outside Europe—from places as diverse as Mexico, West Africa, India, the United States, Lebanon, Australia, South Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, or Japan? (p. 1)

Most importantly, this collection promises to call into question this generally accepted periodizing scheme whereby the Middle Ages, supposedly already “full-fledged” by the time of modern colonialism, is “available” to the colonial enterprisers, who had need of an “anterior” period into which to place their colonized subjects (a state of affairs well illustrated already in contemporary postcolonial studies). Provocatively, Davis and Altschul argue that there is a “close relationship between the epistemologies of colonialism and the Middle Ages as a category of European history” and therefore, “the Middle Ages issued from the same colonial imaginary that subsumed territory and time to the sphere of its real and desired control” (p. 2). And what concerns the editors as well are all of the ways in which the supposed “centrality” of Europe gets re-placed, revised, adapted, and contested in differing “colonial” contexts outside of Europe. There can be, then, no one medievalism that could be transported from one place to another; rather, the very term itself denotes a plurality and elasticity of uses and appropriations.

The Middle Ages, then, becomes an important conceptual framework for modernity itself; it cannot be separated, temporally, from the political project(s) of modernity with which it is, in some important sense, contemporaneous. In my mind, this is an invaluable insight, one that Davis has already well illustrated in her book Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Pennsylvania, 2008), and which has also been highlighted in the work of some postcolonial theorists, such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ranajit Guha, and José Rabasa. (It should be noted here as well that the contemporaneity of the Middle Ages and modernity has been explored in various ways and in multiple theoretical and disciplinary contexts in the work of medievalists such as Kathleen Biddick, Glenn Burger, Jeffrey Cohen, Carolyn Dinshaw, Aranye Fradenburg, Patrick Geary, Bruce Holsinger, Paul Strohm, Stephanie Trigg, and other scholars too numerous to mention here.)

To my knowledge, Davis’s and Altschul’s book is also unique in bringing together medievalists with scholars working in contemporary postcolonial studies (such as Chakrabarty and Rabasa), in order to interrogate together the rich plurality of medievalisms (emphasis on the plural) in globalized, non-European contexts, and with the hope that this collaborative enterprise will further enrich these two fields that have always had shared (yet not always acknowledged as such) disciplinary histories. As the “Middle Ages” are still, in the editors’ view, an “operative and volatile domain” in contemporary global politics, the collected essays promise to also provide some important insight into ongoing “national” and “post/colonial” power struggles.

Medievalisms in a Postcolonial World is divided into four thematic sections—“Locations of History and Theory,” “Repositioning Orientalism,” “Nation and Foundations,” and “Geography and Temporality”—and within each of these, there are three essays plus a response essay, which signals an engaged series of critical encounters between the contributors that is often lacking in essay collections of this sort. It is exciting to see medievalists writing on such a rich range of modern, non-European subjects, as well as to witness the hopefully productive cross-fertilization between medieval and contemporary postcolonial studies—one in which both the medievalists and contemporary theorists obviously had to travel beyond their disciplinary comfort zones. More of such collaborative, cross-period engagement is to be hoped for, especially if medieval studies are to continue to demonstrate their “relevance” to pressing issues of contemporary life and thought, regardless of how distasteful some in our field might find the term “relevant.” It remains to be seen whether or not this volume will deliver on its promise to bring into sharper and more critical focus the interrelated histories of medievalism and colonialism (and within comparative contexts often left unattended in medieval postcolonial studies), but I am certainly looking forward to reading this book, the Table of Contents of which I leave you with here:

Introduction: The Idea of the “Middle Ages” Outside Europe
Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul

PART I: LOCATIONS OF HISTORY AND THEORY

Chapter 1 - Decolonizing Medieval Mexico
José Rabasa

Chapter 2 - An Enchanted Mirror for the Capitalist Self: The Germania in British India
Ananya Jahanara Kabir

Chapter 3 - “Most Gentle, Indeed, But Most Virile”: The Medievalist Pacifism of George Arnold Wood
Louise D’Arcens

Response - Historicism and its Supplements: A Note on a Predicament Shared by Medieval and Postcolonial Studies
Dipesh Chakrabarty

PART II: RESPOSITIONING ORIENTALISM

Chapter 4 - “Reconquista” and the “Three Religion Spain” in Latin American Thought
Hernán G.H. Taboada

Chapter 5 - Medievalism—Colonialism—Orientalism: Japan’s Modern Identity in Natsume Soseki’s Mabroroshi no Tate and Kairo-ko
Haruko Momma

Chapter 6 - Crossing History, Dis-Orienting the Orient: Amin Maalouf’s Uses of the “Medieval”
Hamid Bahri and Francesca Canadé Sautman

Response - Working Through Medievalisms
Kathleen Davis

PART III: NATION AND FOUNDATIONS

Chapter 7 – Andrés Bello and the Poem of the Cid: Latin America, Occidentalism, and the Foundations of Spain’s “National Philology”
Nadia Altschul

Chapter 8 – Postcolonial Gothic: The Medievalism of America’s “National” Cathedrals
Elizabeth Emery

Chapter 9 – An American in Paris: Charles Homer Haskins at the Paris Peace Conference
Heather Blurton

Response – Medievalism and the Making of Nations
Michelle R. Warren

PART IV: GEOGRAPHY AND TEMPORALITY

Chapter 10 – African Medievalisms: Caste as a Subtext in Ahmadou Kourouma’s Suns of Independence and Monnew
Sylvie Kandé

Chapter 11 – A Clash of Medieval Cultures: Amerindians and Conquistadors in the Thought of Wilson Harris
Kofi Campbell

Chapter 12 – Medieval Studies and the Voice of Conscience in Twentieth-Century South Africa
Victor Houliston

Response – Africa and the Signs of Medievalism
Simon Gikandi

Henry III Fine Rolls Project

by J J Cohen

ITM readers may be interested to discover this valuable resource for the study of 13th C England: the Henry III Fine Rolls Project. It's an impressive site, making available for free English translations of Latin rolls that have never been published in their entirety. Good searchability, high definition manipulable manuscript images, and hard copy publication are all built into the project (though it seems to me the electronic version is better than any book rendition). With the glimpses they offer into contemporary life, the fine lists offer surprisingly interesting browsing.

The site also includes wonderful "Fine of the Month" essays. Check out the two on "Crucifixion and Conversion: King Henry III and the Jews in 1255" (Part 1, Part II).




h/t Sarah Rees Jones for sending me this link. Thanks, Sarah!

Disability in a Medieval Corporal Commonplace?

by KARL STEEL

ITM fans, a research bleg: you're familiar with the medieval commonplace that the bipedal human form is both evidence of human reason and a reminder to humans to think celestial thoughts, and that the stereotypical animal form, quadrupedal, low to the ground, is evidence of animals' merely terrestrial, alimentary thinking? See for example the early fourteenth-century exempla and doctrinal compendium Ci nous dit:

Les bestes vont à .IIII. piés en senefiant qu’il sunt en leur païz; et nous alons a .II. en senefiant que nous ne sonmes pas ou nostre. . . . Et quiconques met l’amour de son cuer en terre, ainsi se fait il semblans aus bestes; maiz devons avoir tous nous desiriers ou ciel, que pour ce nous a Diex faiz. (Vol I.36-37)

Beasts go on four feet to show that they are in their country; and we go on two to show that we are not in ours. . . . And whoever puts the love of his heart in the world makes himself resemble beasts; but we ought to have all of our desire in heaven, which is what God made us for.

Or Robert of Melun's Sentences commentary, where he writes “Inquantum ex corporea est, cum ceteris animalibus communis naturae habet participationem, sed in formae compositione ab alia animantia differentiam habet” (inasmuch as man is corporeal, he has a participation with the common nature of the other animals, but with regard to the arrangement of his form, he has a difference from other living things). He explains that the animal form is prone, lowered to the ground, “ex quo significatur praeter ea quae terrena sunt ab eis nulla esse appetenda” (86; by which is meant, apart from other things, that they are earthly creatures and that nothing else but earthly things are to be desired by them).

Okay? Good. Do you know of any instances where this tradition--which is everywhere, really, one you start noticing it--considered those humans unable to stand upright without assistance or to see anything at all, let alone the heavens? I'm familiar with William of St. Thierry/Gregory of Nyssa's hypothesis about handless humans becoming beasts (e.g., On the Making of Man VIII.8), but have yet to encounter anything specifically on the tradition challenging itself by considering individual disabled humans. (Note: unless I missed it, there's nothing in Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe.)

What are you reading over spring break?

by J J Cohen

A reporter from the GW Hatchet (our student newspaper) emailed me this morning to ask for recommended reading for students over our upcoming "break" (quotation marks indicate that very few of those of us who teach actually take much of a break). Here's what I wrote back.

For those who don't want to turn their brains off for the entire week, I recommend Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals. The book challenges its readers to rethink the fundamental and largely unexamined question of what we eat and why. It's also a meditation on shared tables and community, and quite literary in parts.

I'm about to start Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, a gift from my colleague Judith Plotz. And for anyone who is feeling really ambitious, you could plug away at Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, which is taking me, um, over a year so far with no end in sight.

What about you? What are you reading over the "break"?

Quote of the Day: A Delightful and Perpetual Swoon

[image credit]

by J J Cohen

The latest issue of Arthuriana (20.1, Spring 2010) has a good cluster of essays on Guenevere that concludes with Amy S. Kaufman's "Guenevere Burning." The issue is worth reading in its entirety, but I'm especially fond of Kaufman's piece, with its challenge to stop deploying universalizing tropes of Otherness to write Guenevere out of agency and desire. 

Kaufman's essay opens with these sentences:

Metacritical endeavors in which scholars explore their own pleasure have coaxed medieval studies into a delightful and perpetual swoon as of late. But pleasure is tricky business for the feminist reader of medieval Arthurian literature, mostly because we are always told that we are not supposed to be having any. Our time period is considered inaccessibly patriarchal, our writers deemed misogynistic, and the characters on whom we focus rendered marginal, artificially constructed, or worse yet, abstracted into the nebulous 'feminine' ... Contemporary discussions of pleasure suffer from the deficit of a notion of feminine desire; not an essentially feminine desire, but desire instigated by a subject positioned as feminine.

The article gives a quick overview of Guenevere's disappearance in contemporary criticism, then reads at greater length her movements -- her svadharma [soul's true calling], love -- in Malory. At the close of the essay Kaufman posits that our critical true calling is not all that different from Guenevere's: "We, too, have embarked on a path of of self-sacrificing, indulgent love, even if our object of devotion is the past."

Bonus: the first footnote cites the BABEL pleasure panels at SEMA and Kalamazoo.

Failing Utopia / Feeling Utopia

by J J Cohen

Yesterday GW MEMSI sponsored its spring symposium "Race?". I'd put the event together rather quickly, mainly because I'd realized that the Institute had inadvertently been dwelling in a temporal ghetto (I use that word deliberately): while the topics we examine are of wide interest, we hadn't made a sufficient effort to include our colleagues and students who specialize in later periods in our conversations. Because my own work on race bears the tangible impress of the time I've spent at GW, I figured that this most vexed of categories -- the contradiction laden nexus of culture and nature -- would provide an entry into a wide-ranging, transhistorical discussion. Fellow GW faculty members Jennifer James, Tony López, Andrew Zimmerman, and Tom Guglielmo joined special guest Ayanna Thompson (about whose excellent work I could fill several blog posts).

I opened the event by projecting one of my favorite images of a racialized other, the Saracens I examined in Medieval Identity Machines who impersonate their own race via masks (you can access the image from the Grandes Chroniques on my personal home page). I wanted to foreground the "thickness" of race-in-motion from the start. Each panelist then gave a brief presentation. Topics ranged from Phyllis Wheatley's poetry of resistance to the early modern stage to Cuba and the "post-racial" to World War II military racial classification schemes and the problems they created. Even though no one had conferred ahead of time, every presentation had much in common: the protean nature of race, conjoined to its ability resist historical change; the violence that race has enacted; the perplexity it has engendered; the centrality of performance to race; its multiple category overlap. Although we spoke briefly about the pleasures racial affiliation can offer, for the most part we focused upon the social injustices that seem, eternally, to go hand in hand with racialization.

The audience of about seventy was engaged, offering excellent questions and guiding us into contemporary debates over what "colorblind" and "post-racial" might signify (especially when right-leaning pundits opine that we are "post-racial" because our current president was actually elected), and how such a declaration might serve to render invisible lasting economic and social disparities. Many who came that afternoon were students in my "Myths of Britain" course, who have a sweet way of following me from place to place like that. About eight of these young men and women are seniors in the nearby School Without Walls, who are allowed to take several college-level courses at GW in a system I helped arrange while I was department chair. Because it's a DC public school, SWW is racially quite diverse. The students are typically very good, and speak up regularly in my class. Yesterday it was one of these students who reminded me of the power of utopia.

This student -- let's call him R. -- has never volunteered in class and isn't doing as well in the course as I would like. I could see that he was becoming agitated during the discussion of the falsity of "post-racial." After I suggested that since we have never been pre-racial, we are never likely to move to that "post," his hand shot up. "When I look around my school," R. said, "I see people who date across the race. I see people who don't think about race. Race doesn't matter." His fellow students nodded their heads; a few then spoke with reverence about the world they inhabit, where everyone has a chance to be the person they desire.

At that moment I knew that I and the panel were being rebuked. I guessed that what R. and classmates were saying was: don't tell me that the world is and always has been so fallen. Don't tell me that my skin color is my unhappy destiny. Don't ruin my utopia. I thought for a long time before I answered. I remembered my student A., who at GW had never felt marked by complexion, but returned from her study in Paris achingly aware that the darkness of her skin declared her an Arab and ineligible for the same treatment that her friends enjoyed. I thought about other stories of hurt I'd collected; I've been a teacher for a long time.

I didn't want to tell these stories to R. I said: "First, I don't think you should ever believe an old person when he tells you how the world works. But now I will, and I hope you'll be skeptical. I've taught at GW long enough to have seen that many young people in their high schools and then at college are able to find a place where the color of their skin is not an everyday problem, and they say things like Race is a nonissue or Young people don't care about race any more. Some come back later in life and say the world has a way of making race matter, of telling them who they are in ways they shouldn't ever have to hear. My hope for you -- my fervent hope -- is that this never happens. I hope you hold on to your utopia, I hope you make your utopia endure."

I don't think he will. There is too much history that suggests otherwise. Utopia is nowhere. But to find a group of young men and women, some with dark skin, some with light , who for a year or two are not feeling the divisions that race imposes ... well, I'm not one to take that away, I'm not going to insist that they are naive, I'm not going to ruin the fragile thing they hold. I fear some day their hearts will be broken; I can guess too easily the hurt to come. For me, though, there is something refreshing, life-giving, and affirmative in the certainty of these 17 year olds that the scholars who were speaking to them about history and hurt are wrong.

Congratulations to Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones ...

by J J Cohen

... for the favorable review of their edited volume Authority and Subjugation in  Writing of Medieval Wales in the January Speculum. I was fortunate to read the volume in MS and blurb it, though my endorsement was overshadowed by a certain Archbishop of Canterbury who elbowed his way onto the back cover.

I especially like that the reviewer, Morgan Thomas Davies, got that Simon Meecham-Jones's essay is a kind of jeremiad that, if taken seriously (and it should be taken very seriously indeed) will fundamentally alter the critical practice of "all scholars of medieval English literature." Contemporary scholarship has a way of re-enacting a partitioning of the island that silently replicates the cultural politics of the period instead of challenging that unnatural boundary.

From José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia

by J J Cohen

Feeling inspired in my own work while rereading these words, and thought I'd share them:

"We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality ... an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness' domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see the future beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now's totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of the moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds ... Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world."

-- Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

Punk'd by a Jew, continued

[image: Geoffrey Cohen. Not me.]

by J J Cohen

Some time back, as I toiled upon my Leeds paper, I provided here at ITM an example of what might be called a yid punk, a young man who critiqued through histrionic excess the beliefs of those to whom he was a minority. My paper for the York 1190 conference picks up on some of those themes. Since I'm examining 'The Future of the Jews of York,' I will likely start with some contemporary re-imaginings of Jewish identity, especially within a youth culture for whom a Yiddish-inflected, immigrant-experience focused Judaism  doesn't hold sufficient allure... and I begin with an example of Jews punking Jews.

-----------------

In January of 2009 a press release bearing the letterhead of the Board of Deputies of British Jews (motto: “The voice of British Jewry since 1760”) circulated via email. The document declared:

The Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council, in consultation with a coalition of prominent organisations in the Anglo-Jewish community, have decided to cancel the planned Israel Solidarity Rally, due to occur on Sunday 11^th of January … The demonstration might be perceived as the community taking one side in the tragic war in Gaza and Israel … The Board calls for an immediate cease fire … in order to allow the Gazan and Israeli people to live together in peace. There is no military solution, only a political one … The Board stands in solidarity with the besieged and injured people of Gaza, as well as the victims of terrorism in Israel, and we oppose all violence as contrary to the tenets of the Jewish religion.

Needless to say, this Sabbath-timed press release caught the Board of Deputies of British Jews quite by surprise. The Board’s official position is that it supports ultimate peace, but not through a ceasefire; its placards for the January event, for example, read “End Hamas Terror.” The Solidarity rally continued as planned, attracting about 15,000 supporters to Trafalgar Square. Small counterdemonstrations were held across the street and included some Jews protesting Israel’s military deployments and tactics. 

On January 14, a second email was disseminated to those who received the first announcing that the BOD press release had been a hoax. This time the email appeared under the name Jewdas, a self-described “rootless cosmopolitan yeshiva” of radical British Jews. Jewdas’ mission is supposed to be derived from the Book of Jewdas, discovered “by the back of a kebab shop in Dalston.” Thousands of years old, written in Jerusalem by “a cabal of radical scribes” in anachronistic Yiddish (“a far older, more authentic language than Hebrew”), the book commands its readers to “mercilessly satirize Anglo Jewry, suggest new and more radical ways of being Jewish, and also throw excellent parties.” As indicated by its embrace of a Stalinist euphemism for Jews (“rootless cosmopolitans,” those who do not and cannot share the national culture), Jewdas turns antisemitic denigration into cheeky possibility, angering many traditionalists. The group often speaks under the nom de plume “Geoffrey Cohen” (no relation). The second email declared:

Well yes, it was us. We sent the Board of Deputies Hoax email. Not some ‘Islamist cell’ or ‘Hamas supporters’ as many of you imagined. Just a group of nice yiddisher boys and girls … We weren’t trying to be malicious … we weren’t even trying to stop people going to the rally … we wanted, in this action, to show another possible reality, to suggest that ‘another Jewish community is possible.’

Those who believed it, even for a moment, were being given a gift, a vision of the Jewish leadership who stood up for peace and justice, rather than standing for mindless ethnic solidarity. These people should not be considered gullible, rather they showed the imagination to see an inspiring, alternative vision. We offered a Midrash on Anglo-Jewish life, a dvar aher (another path), an aggadah for the Talmud of the present.

The hoax’s objective, the email states, was to open a “temporary imaginary zone” in which voices typically silenced might find audition, a zone in which the letter’s receiver might enjoy a “shabbat in accord with the best of Judaism.” The letter then restates the call for an immediate ceasefire and lifting of the economic blockade that appeared in the faked BOD release, “this time under our own name.” These impious, unorthodox pranksters who call themselves Jewdas were in other words foregrounding a non-monolithic Jewish identity in the present, as well as the possibility of a differently imagined Jewish future.

              

Jewdas is not the only subculture coalition of Jews to have formed in the past few years: in the United States, for example, loose counterparts can be found in Jewcy, Jewschool, PunkTorah, and (to highly corporatized degree) Heeb. These loose communities of mostly young Jews incorporate left-leaning politics into their identities. All deploy irreverent humor and provocative satire, often in the hope of social change. Jewdas, however, has a considerably sharper political focus and a keener activist edge (its logo is Che Guevera as an orthodox Jew). All these groups also emphasize Jewish coalition with non-Jews. Jewdas, for example, speaks on its webpage of “the need to widen Judaism beyond the boundaries of those born Jewish, towards an ethic of wider concern, a Judaism that might at times stand in critique of the Jews.” It declares to its readers and potential supporters – many of whom, it acknowledges, will be neither British nor Jewish: “whatever your background if you:  prefer stirring things up to keeping the peace, prefer dreaming of the utopian rather than settling for the prosaic, and think that culture and ethnicity should be springboards for overthrowing the state, then you’re a Jewdaser at heart."

              

A Christian medieval writer would have said Judaizer, but the idea is the same: come too close to the Jew, neighbor the Jewish world without erecting sufficient partition, and both of you may change as a result. Both of you may enter an imaginary space – albeit, perhaps, a temporary one – where what has always been need no longer hold true. This is a long way of saying that we are used to the massacre of 1190 standing as the inevitable future of the Jews of York. We are used to the Expulsion of 1290 as an inexorable rendezvous. The power of such defining moments is that, when hitched to a progress narrative that culminates in catastrophe, they do not allow for those medieval Jews who may have been irreverent punks, who may have considered themselves citizens of York and England as well as rootless cosmopolitans, who may have carried with themselves identities that only at a first and cursory glance seem timeless, set in stone.

The 15th Century Writing on the Wall

by J J Cohen

Via Medieval News, an enhanced image of some writing recently discovered on a Salisbury Cathedral wall. The words are in English, but what they are and what they mean is a mystery. I know what you are thinking: I scribbled it there when I was at Salisbury in 2007 -- you know, when my family dined upon scones with Jude Law. Well it wasn't me: the text is fifteenth century.

What do you think it states? I have a few theories (all hypothetical transcriptions rendered into Modern English):

1. "Hahaha you thought you got rid of us in 1290, we are sneaking through your cathedrals and scoffing scones in your cafés"
2. "PLEASE refrain from carrying baked goods from the refectory into the main cathedral."
3. "Shrine temporarily removed to make way for the Reformation."
4. "I have collected seven manuscripts of an ancient poem about the hero Beowulf and secreted them with three of Chaucer's unpublished works in t---" (rest of text obliterated)

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.

Facebook v Blogger, encore

[illustration: an alchemical hermaphroditic past-future gazing medieval Janus you'd recognize if you were our FB friend]

by J J Cohen

Once or twice I've mentioned here my concern that social media sites,* with their somewhat closed architecture, have supplanted blogs, with their open to serendipity, inherently public feel (and I write "feel" because ITM is moderated: though it can be read by anyone who comes along, comments that advertise pharmaceuticals or gratuitously troll do not get published. We are talking about perhaps .5% of all comments submitted, but still: there is selection). I'm going to stop using martial words like supplant or kill to describe the social media "versus" blog "battle," though, because I don't believe we're seeing succession or replacement so much as integration and supplementation. Our FB ITM page has 254 friends. We place a link to our new blog posts there, and it's been interesting (heartening, really) to see that we get a small flurry of comments, often by readers who do not comment at the blog site. We also post some items on FB that don't make it to the ITM main page, such as: a link to a post by ADM on the job market; a link to an article in the Times that claims a fourth-century York grave belonged to an elite black-skinned Roman; and my wondering if we should change our icon of a Roman Janus coin to something more medieval. All of these have spurred good conversations.

I've also noticed a large number of non-medievalists have found their way to ITM via Karl and my Twitter streams, especially through tweets being retweeted. The job market post was especially well disseminated in this way.

This Sunday morning ITM post, born from the fact that possibly for the first time in our entire history the Cohen family has not a single obligation on our calendar, is just to say: I'm less worried about one mode or sphere taking the place of another than I used to be, and more hopeful about overlap and integration.

*Why do people still say "social media sites" that now that we are down to one absolutely dominant space, FB?

Three points about the academic job market

by J J Cohen

We are all, I think, very much aware of what a terrible year this has been for recent PhDs seeking academic humanities employment. Most of us have friends and colleagues seeking such jobs. Most job seekers, smart and accomplished as they are, did not get positions. OK, all years seem to have been terrible years in academia, at least for the last several decades (back in 1987 I was told I was insane to go to graduate school because unemployment would be my destiny). But 2008 and 2009 have been especially dire. What this means and whether the state will last are uncertain. Most of us are concerned about what the future of advanced humanities study will be: everything seems in peril. I'd like to make three observations, all of which take as a point of departure recent blog posts elsewhere.

(1) Describing the admitting of students into humanities PhD programs as "unethical" in no way advances the conversation. Unethical would be a PhD program tricking students into thinking that they are guaranteed a full time position with tenure and good pay at the end of the road. I have not encountered any would-be graduate students who are quite so easily duped. Those seeking to undertake doctoral study tend to pretty damn smart. They know the risks, and have been frequently reminded of them by those who mentored them as undergraduates, wrote their recommendations, by their incredulous parents and friends. Dean Dad recently wrote “we owe it to the next generation to steer them away from grad school whenever possible. The path is legible, but it doesn’t lead anywhere good.” In general I agree: most students should not go to graduate school, especially if they can find a course of life that will make them just as happy but will provide a more secure future. But I wouldn't presume to choose on behalf of a student. I know I did not appreciate it when my elders tried to do that for me. Read all of Dean's Dad rather paternalistic post, and tell me that he doesn't underestimate the intelligence of those younger than him.

(2) Michael Drout composed a piece partly about the job market by way of reflection upon tenure in the wake of the Amy Bishop murders (thanks, Steve, for calling it to my attention via FB). What I most agree with is Drout's observation that calls to reduce the number of PhDs "come in part from a desire to remove competition from people from humbler backgrounds who want a professorial job." These calls are silently calculated "to have the effect of making certain elites have an even greater advantage than they do now." In other words, I can't tell the difference between the oft-repeated demand that the number of PhD granting institutions be greatly reduced and good old fashioned elitism. Let's face it, when most people declare that there ought to be fewer doctoral programs what they mean is that outside of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Cornell, Brown, Princeton, Columbia no advanced humanities diplomas need be minted. Where I disagree with Drout, though, is his equation of working hundreds of hours (like his dad, an MD) being the equivalent of doing good work, that a dedication to working such manly hours is essential to the tenure process, that most academics are dutiful rather than talented and that this -- combined with some bad luck -- is why they don't get jobs. Please. Spoken with any graduate students or recent PhDs lately? And I mean spoken with, not spoken to.

(3) Recent PhDs don't get jobs because colleges and universities do not hire the full time teaching staffs they in fact require. The demand is there (read Marc Bousquet,* why don't you?), but our profession is being adjuncted to death. Tom Elrod makes this point forcefully in his critique of Drout's post, "Academia is not American Idol." Elrod writes:

The majority of higher ed teaching these days is adjunct teaching. There would, in fact, be enough full-time positions in this country for most Ph.D.s, if all the adjunct positions became full-time jobs with benefits. Most adjuncts are working full-time hours for part-time pay. If they become positions appropriate for people with careers, the huge job gap in academia would shrink ... There is not an oversupply of Ph.D.s as much as there is an undersupply of full-time jobs.

The answer to the horrible market is right there, and it is a simple one: the postsecondary education labor system is broken. Administrators, many of whom are or have been faculty members, choose the cheapest way to staff courses rather than the best (paying someone $2K-$4K and no benefits on a per course basis is so much less costly than hiring someone into a position they might hold for decades, their salary rising -- rising slowly, but rising -- all the while, their health care and their life after the job a university responsibility). The winner in this system: the bottom line. The losers: students, graduate students, faculty, the future of advanced study in the United States.

*E.g. "What’s really happening is restructuring of the labor market from a “market in jobs” to a market in contingent appointments. Throughout the economy, we have substituted student and other temporary labor for faculty and other more secure workers. The name for this restructuring is casualization, the making-temporary (and cheap, and controllable) of work that used to be secure (and more expensive, and more difficult to manage). This restructuring has been in place since 1970, when roughly 3/4 of faculty were tenured or in the tenure stream."

Jews of Stone

by J J Cohen

So I've got this talk coming up at the University of York -- last one of the conference, no pressure: after me there is just tea and the Croxton Play. In my lecture I'm working with William of Newburgh (AKA Billy Newby) since his Historia rerum Anglicarum is the richest account we possess of the York massacre. William is such an energetic, conflicted, and perturbable writer that reading him never becomes stale.

My York project is intimately related to my Leeds piece of last year. That talk followed Hugh of Lincoln across an unexpected threshold, into a Jewish household offering potential amity, into a space where the frozen-in-time theological figure of the Jew of Unbelief might become the human, adaptive, local, limited Jewish neighbor. The Jew of Unbelief is a figure consigned to partitioned, segregated, superceded space-time. The Jewish neighbor is the near-dweller, he whose door may be open to Elijah, but may also be ajar so that the Christian boy across the street can find his way to the kitchen. I did not make an argument for commensality (though I wish I could have), and I allowed for aggression and fantastic violence on both sides. These are the questions I posed:

How do we free medieval Jews from their freezing in typological amber? How do we escape the temporal tyranny practiced against them, and give medieval Jews the possibility of a fully inhabited, living and changing present, as well as an unpredetermined future? How do we restore to medieval Jewishness the same mutability discernible in Christian identity and belief? Can we find places where orthodoxy and orthopraxy break down, can we discover an improvised space of relations where the interactions that unfold within a heterogeneous community might be rather different from officially produced and publicly professed creeds? Can we glimpse in lived praxis a coinhabited space where Christian and Jewish convivencia is not detemporalized but extemporalized, unfolding differently from what orthodox narratives might want or suggest?

These questions, I should say, are those I never cease to ask ... and for me they have taken on a personal saliency as Alex's bar mitzvah looms. And maybe that's why my York paper will be looking more closely at Jewish adaptation to local environments, at Judaism as a moderately flexible, semi-adaptable practice in which acculturation and boundary-crossing are constants, where doors may be open to returning or wayward prophets, to neighborhood kids, to the entrance of local customs, and, well, to modernity itself.

This time, though, rather than follow a boy as he crosses a domestic portal, I'll follow a stone as it tumbles from a tower and crushes a mad hermit.

William of Newburgh's Jewish narrative arc begins in Book 4 of the History with an inauspiciously closed door. Having come to London to witness the coronation of King Richard, the "leading men" among the English Jews are barred from the church at which he is to be crowned, and forbidden to enter the palace for the celebratory feast. Yet once the palace doors do open, the Jews find themselves conveyed inside with an entering mob. They are immediately attacked with clubs and stones. Thus begins for William the English tale of an "unbelieving race," the "enemies of Christ" against whom the Christians have been inspired with "novel confidence."

William states that he records the story to transmit it to the future. It is worth memorialization because it displays "an evident judgment from on high upon a perfidious and blasphemous race" (4.1). William's language is familiar here, because it is borrowed: nothing original about stressing Jewish perfidy, unbelief, racial distinctiveness, impiety. What is striking about the episode, though, is William's recurring stress upon Jewish economic prosperity (the Jews attend Richard's coronation to ensure that they can enjoy the same affluence under him that they experienced under Henry), as well as his insistence that the violence in the Jewish-Christian interactions he records is novel. In fact the economic gains made by the Jews and the newness of their persecution and its attendant violence will be two themes that obsess him throughout his narrative. Thus to comprehend the Jewish choice of self-sacrifice over conversion during those desperate moments in besieged tower, William invokes Josephus and the History of the Jewish War, as if York were Masada and Jewish "madness" and "superstition" eternal (4.11). These twin preoccupations -- economic prosperity, discomforting novelty/lack of historical precedent -- are inter-related: what bothers William about Jewish affluence, for example, is the Jews' ability to mimic newly prosperous Christians by living like them in impressive houses. Instead of lingering among Christians for Christian utility, as eternal reminders of the Passion they enacted upon Jesus, the Jews of England had the audacity to adapt to, participate within, and accelerate the financial system, becoming "happy and famous above the Christians" (4.9) -- but more accurately, becoming prosperous in a way that some Christians likewise had. The Jews gall William because (1) they are more visible as signs of this resortment of wealth; (2) they seem to have integrated themselves not only into the contemporary economy, but into contemporary community, especially through their sometimes opulent housing in the midst of the city.

Both William's preoccupations (Jewish profit within a changed economy; unprecedented Jewish identities) find expression in what might be called William's poetics of stone.

The violence against the Jews begun in London migrates northward to York. The city's Jews find their "castle-like" houses plundered. Jewish families take refuge in the royal tower, where they are besieged for days. A hermit appears and walks about in his white gown, inciting the gathered crowd to violence, urging "Down with the enemies of Christ!" (4.10). As he approaches the tower wall, a large stone tumbles from above and crushes him. William sees in the falling stone a divine judgment: the mad hermit is the only one "of our people" to die at the encounter. The deadly stone is one of several the Jews hurl. Their only weapons, these rocks are said to be "pulled out of the wall in the interior" (I am not fully certain what this means, because the tower was at this time constructed of wood: a stone foundation, perhaps?).

The tumbling stone resonates with the geology of the William's narrative: his Jews can be stone-hearted, according to the Christian hijacking of Ezekiel 36:26; with their law full of the "letter that killeth," the Jews live a kind of petrified life, re-enacting Masada in York because time is incapable of altering their nature, of providing them with anything but the same old script to re-enact; the Jews reside in opulent [stone] houses in the midst of the city.

Just as stone in the Middle Ages is not nearly so inert a substance as it might at first seem, neither will stone stay in its place at any point in William's narrative. To give one example that offers a glimpse of where my paper heads, in the first book of his History William describes this mysterious excavation:

In another quarry, while they were digging very deep for materials for building, there was found a beautiful double stone, that is, a stone composed of two stones, joined with some very adhesive matter. Being shown by the wondering workmen to the bishop, who was at hand, it was ordered to be split, that its mystery (if any) might be developed. In the cavity, a little reptile, called a toad, having a small gold chain around its neck, was discovered. When the bystanders were lost in amazement at such an unusual occurrence, the bishop ordered the stone to be closed again, thrown into the quarry, and covered up with rubbish for ever. (1.28)

What message, may I ask, does a toad on a golden chain, sent into the future within two fused stones and received by an uncomprehending audience, what message does this prodigy convey about the future of the Jews of York?