SNEAK PEEK: Preview of Materiality Sessions at #Kzoo2015

by JONATHAN HSY

Hey medievalists! You can now take a sneak peek of approved sessions for #Kzoo2015 (i.e., the 50th International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, MI, May 14-17, 2015). The sneak preview information is on this page; you can also directly view the sneak preview of sessions as a PDF.

One idea that emerged through some private discussions on Facebook was to think creatively about more dynamic and deliberate "cross-fertilization" across disciplines and subfields. Some of my Facebook friends picked up on a real interest in materiality at the 2014 conference. Through such virtual correspondence it has been noticed (for instance) that musicologists and literary scholars don't actually interact with each other as much as they could (should!) about the intertwined materiality of sound, text, and notation -- so it would be great to put our heads together to think about things like aurality, language, embodied performance, etc. In what other ways can we all move out of our various bailiwicks and "mix things up" in our sessions?

Here's a list of materiality-related sessions for #Kzoo2015. Full contact info is on this PDF.

It's a great slate of sessions. Think creatively! Consider sending in a proposal to a session that is outside your (sub)field or discipline or otherwise allows you to interact with new people! Perhaps a compelling (unofficial) "Materiality" thread can emerge from the conversations that transpire.

Sessions with materiality in title:

Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies (2): Material Iberia I: Devotional Objects, Devoted Bodies; Material Iberia II: Shaping Bodies in Literature and Art

Friends of the Saints (1): Material Engagements with the Friends of God in Post-Roman Europe (panel discussion)

Magistra (1): Mysticism and Materiality (panel)

Material Collective (1): Transgressive Materialities

Medieval Romance Society (3): Romance Materiality I–III: The (Im)materiality of the Book; Romancing the Material; The Material Afterlife

Mid-America Medieval Association [MAMA] (1): Economic and Material Collectivity and Exchange

Musicology at Kalamazoo (1): The Materiality of Music (panel)

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (1): Quantum Medievalisms (roundtable)

Societas Magica (1): Magic and Materiality

Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship [SMFS] (1): Gender and Materiality in the Middle Ages

Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages [SSDMA] (1): Disability and Material Cultures (roundtable)

Special Session: (Im)Materiality in English and Welsh Medieval Culture (1)

Special Session: When Objects Object: Misbehaving Materiality (1)

Sessions otherwise interested in materiality:

George Washington University Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute [GW MEMSI] (1): "Lost" (panel)

Grammar Rabble (1): Unsettled Marks: To #;()@?”:-*! . . . and Beyond! (roundtable)

Ice at #NCS14

Langjökull, which I hiked with my family in 2012

by J J Cohen

The most recent International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo was wonderful in many ways, but also at times reaffirmed my increasing dissatisfaction with traditional conference panels. Three or four loosely connected papers plus a response and then (if there is time, because inevitably someone has gone too long) aleatory questions from the audience that may advance the communal topic or may (if the session chair is not moderating) allow the three people who study liturgy to render the session on postcolonial medieval studies a liturgy session because one paper had a brief reference to liturgical calendars -- well, I don't always get as much as I would like from such gatherings. Blogs and other social media have made these loose sessions less useful than they were in the past, since it is now fairly easy to garner public feedback on ideas and projects without reading an excerpt in front of an audience for fifteen minutes. Such sessions can be productive, especially when the theme is specific, the papers carefully curated by the organizer, and the panel moderated so that the conversation is inclusive and focused. But that does not always happen. I find myself drawn more to sessions with multiple, short presentations and lingering discussion afterwards, to roundtables that approach a single issue from multiple perspectives, and to spaces adjacent to as well as within the conference that are not part of the official program.

I've written here at ITM about para-conference space as a fecund expanse for modes of thinking and doing that official conference sessions disinhibit: see the justification for the GWMEMSI Rogue Session at the last Kalamazoo, as well as my account of what actually unfolded there. For the upcoming BABEL conference in Santa Barbara, a large group of us (13!) crowdsourced and brainstormed a special session on SCALE that includes an outdoor "collaboratory" in the Channel Islands. The day before the conference begins, we will take a boat to Santa Cruz and hike the rocky canyon around Scorpion Bay, hoping something will emerge from this peripatetic and communal cognition that would not have been possible within a conference room. And at the upcoming New Chaucer Society Biennial Congress in Reykjavik, I've arranged two roundtables on "Ice" that will include a group hike of Sólheimajökull, a glacier in the south of the island. If time permits we will also head to Eyjafjallajökull, the ice topped caldera of a nearby extinct volcano. Oddur Sigurðsson of the Icelandic Meteorological Office (and respondent to the Ice roundtables) will lead us, since he knows this glacier intimately through his studies. We've hired a well reputed expedition company to supply us with the necessary equipment and keep us safe. It seems to me that if we are going to gather in Iceland to speak about representations of ice, if we are going to theorize ice and think with it, we also ought to walk across a frozen expanse together.

If you are attending NCS, I hope you'll come to the roundtables on the first day of the conference. Abstracts for the presentations are below.

ICE ROUNDTABLES

WEDNESDAY 16 JULY

GROUP 1: 9:00-10:30

1A Roundtable: Ice (1) Theory (HT 103)

Thread: North: Texts

Organizer: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

Chair: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

1. Timothy S. Miller, University of Notre Dame, “Like Ice / Ice Like: Fluidity, Solidity, and Reading Metaphor Backwards”

Ice famously lies at the foundation of Chaucer's dream poem The House of Fame -- figuratively but not literally, we might be tempted to add, unless we recognize that the poem consistently confuses the figurative and the literal in a way that might enable a new reading of the frozen foundation of the goddess Fame's castle. After all, in Chaucer as elsewhere in medieval and modern literature, ice most often figures fluidity rather than solidity, change rather than stability. Inspired by both recent posthumanist thought and the complex allegorical mechanisms of the poem itself, this paper raises a simple set of questions: first, what can the House of Fame and other medieval narratives that employ ice in the discourse of metaphor and/or allegory tell us about ice in its material ecologies? How do those ecologies differ from the world of metaphor that the substance so frequently inhabits and undergirds? In order to begin answering these questions, this paper willfully adopts an inverted reading strategy: what if we were to read Chaucer's House of Fame as if it were a poem fundamentally "about ice," that is, as if the vagaries of human fame that the poem dramatizes were an extended metaphor for ice and its inherently fluid mutability rather than the other way around? One of most brilliant things that has ever been said about the poem must be Robert W. Hanning's suggestion that we read it backwards, but this paper proposes reading the House of Fame "backwards" in a different way: reading its foundational metaphor backwards, as it were. Furthermore, it is the presence of ice itself -- a subject of endless fascination and commentary in classical and medieval scientific writings on phase change -- that permits this inversion. Although fluid in more ways than one in its transformation from liquid into solid, ice also seems to signal the end of mutability in becoming a substance no longer fluid but fixed. Yet medieval authors who employ ice in metaphor rely on the substance's concealment within itself of the potential for reversal, for melting and reverting to water. In medieval narrative, then, ice so often appears to be a feature of the natural world taken as a given and a known -- "cold as yse" had become a well-worn phrase even in the 14th century -- and then invoked as such to explore the complexities of human relations through reference to something believed simpler and more intelligible. But everywhere that we find ice, we should perhaps take this radical but necessary step to understanding a key ecology of the inhuman: imagining the human world as a metaphor for phase change, especially since the human body cannot itself ever endure such an experience (medieval bodies, too, could only be "frosyn to dead"). But in reversing the ways that ice has been used to explain the human, perhaps we can use the human to travel beyond the human and approach ice itself.

2. Lowell Duckert, West Virginia University, “Icespeak”

“I want to find out what these stones and rocks and pieces of ice are trying to say to me.” (Terje Insungset)

“We heard the world open, express itself, clamor, rumble, call, demand, invade, fear, be moved, forbid. I’m telling the story of the world beginning to tell its story.” (Michel Serres)

Recent ecocritical studies of voice tend to privilege organic sounds (like those of animals). To counteract this tendency, my presentation will amplify the presence of one nonorganic voice around us – ice. The human is never the sole speaking subject in these conversations – a position that the recent collection Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point (2012) unfortunately ignores. Following Tim Ingold’s (2011) call for a more theoretically-rigorous and materially-inflected investigation of soundscapes (or any –scape), and building on Michel Serres’s theories of noise as a creative force that generates multiplicities outside of meaning, I will argue that icescapes are soundlabs that synthesize (“place together”) humans and nonhumans into noisy assemblages. These alliances, or what anthropologist Steven Feld (2003) deems “acoustemologies,” disrupt our ways of knowing and being in the world while, at the same time, create new forms of response, new theories of speaking, and more expressive modes of ontology. To examine the potential that icespeak holds, I will turn to two soundlabs in particular: (1) modern scientists’ obsession with the “song” of icebergs, a frequency emitted by ice at 0.5 Hz and thus inaudible to human ears without additional instruments; (2) the “experimental” compositions of Terje Insungset, whose “icemusic” synthesizes the artist’s body with its material medium. Icespeak’s synthesizing agency never reaches totality; icy noise can signal the unidentifiable or herald an oncoming catastrophe, for example. Yet both soundlabs reconceive ways of synthesizing our shared stories and bodies beyond the “death cries” of calving (a common conception); they redefine listening as an active response to nonorganic speech; they emphasize the improvisation, endless variation, and enchantment that living with/in a noisy, and melting, world entails; and they compel us, finally, to attend to voices not our own, and to tell stories of beginnings rather than of ends with them.

Paul Kos, “The Sound of Ice Melting” (1970)

3. Ethan Knapp, Ohio State University, “Frost”

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow

--         W. Stevens

            This roundtable presentation would have two aims.  First, I'd use the opportunity to offer my own short take on Object Oriented Ontology, coming out of past work with Heidegger and aiming to suggest a place or two where I see OOO coming into particularly fruitful connection with various modes of historicist analysis and critique.  Second, I'd try to use this framework to cast some fresh light on one of the most famous moments of Gower's Confessio Amantis, the beau retret made by Amans at the conclusion of Book 8, when Cupid pulls out the fiery dart that he had thrust into him at the outset of Book 1, leaving Gower suddenly an old man, outside the parade of lovers, baffled by the passions that had driven him as Amans. 

            This new state is described through a seasonal metaphor.  Gower looks in a mirror, sees his new state, and glosses it through an extended description of the passage of months in a year, as Spring yields to Winter.  This metaphor is usually exhausted as a traditional topos linking the passage of human years to the passage of seasons, a meaning certainly important in the context of the Confessio's regular invocation of humanity as microcosmic fulcrum of the broader world.  But I'd like to put some additional pressure on this moment.  Of all the elements that mark the condition of winter in this topos (cold, grief, darkness, barrenness, hunger) it is clearly, and emphatically, cold that most engages Gower here.  The dart whose removal precipitates this scene is described always as "fiery" or "hot"; Venus tends the wound left behind with an ointment "mor cold than eny keie"; and the description of Winter itself begins with "frost, snow, wind and rain" and ends simply with "chill."  Moreover, within this wintry constellation, frost seems the crucial term.  Winter is evoked here to gloss the changes Gower sees in his own face, and these changes all connect to frost – a new pale color, veiny wrinkles and his face 'defaced' as though it were covered from view by a new element.

            So, why frost?  My thoughts are still preliminary at this stage, but I'd like to explore the way in which frost appears here as the mode through which the elemental form of ice comes most directly into contact with the human, in a process of near fusion that leaves both changed.  Frost covers.  It spreads and becomes something like a second skin, rendering the human into another icy object.  The strangeness of this transformation helps explain, I think, the delicately ambiguous tone of the conclusion to the Confessio.  Amans becomes Gower as he is covered by frost, as he enters into a frosty stage of existence.  This is quiescence, of a sort, but it is also Gower presenting himself as author of the scene.  Hence my epigraph – the Gower of this passage is not so much moral satirist as he is an object coming to know itself as object.

            I can add here that I also plan to contextualize this reading by contrasting Gower's metaphoric choice of fire and frost to the more conventional Petrarchan choice of the antonyms fire and ice.  The two pairs are usually taken to be pretty identical oppositions, but I'll aim to tease out the sense of this small, but I think important, alteration in the convention.

           

4. Steve Mentz, St. John’s University, “Hugh Willougby Talks to the Seafarer about Ice”

This talk will tell the story of an imagined conversation about ice between a literary and a historical figure. The literary figure, the narrator of the anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem “The Seafarer,” treats frozen northern waters as a symbol of physical, cultural, and spiritual alienation. The historical figure, Sir Hugh Willoughby, who froze to death on board his ship Bona Esperanza in the winter of 1553-54 while attempting to discover a Northeast Passage, provides less direct testimony, but the surviving documents of his fatal voyage imply that he treated ice as a physical obstacle. My talk juxtaposes these two points of view – the poetic narrator’s alienation and the historical figure’s encumbrance – to argue that ice represents an environmental limit that human culture translates into a cultural symbol. The frozen, “ice-cold waves” (“iscaldne waeg” 19a) the Seafarer endures transform themselves over the course of the poem into a promise of a reward from God in heaven (“Faeder on heofunum” 115a). Willoughby, by contrast, confronts an ice-scape that cannot be transmuted into symbol. I will explore these two points of view in relation to three central experiences of premodern cultures in the frozen north Atlantic – discovery, mystery, and catastrophe – to argue that ice provides an especially clear vision of two related elements in human conceptualizations of their environment: first, that it is difficult and dangerous to transform environmental dangers into symbolic tokens, and second, that doing so is, usually, irresistible. For a modern extension of the dangers, pleasures, and challenges of making alien seascapes into poetry, I’ll conclude with a brief description of Caroline Bergvall’s brilliant new poem Drift, which combines an experimental translation of “The Seafarer” with the historical records about the “Left-to-Die boat” containing Lybian refugees that drifted through the Mediterranean in 2011 under the watchful eyes of NATO planes and ships. Bergvall’s poem combines historical catastrophe with medieval poetic beauty, and she, like me, asks how poetry responds to alien environments.

2B Roundtable: Ice (2) Writing (HT 104)

Thread: North: Texts

Organizer: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

Chair: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

1. Dan Remein, New York University, “Icerune”

How does ice make its mark in what is ostensibly human literary language? This paper will consider this question especially as it concerns the Old Icelandic Greenlander Sagas and their place within a longer literary history of ice in the medieval North Atlantic. Ice, or 'is,' has its own runic character in the “futhork.” The opening pages of Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda refer to a swelling floe of toxic ice in the yawning-void whose melted drops form the first of the mythic frost-giants. Earlier in the medieval period, the Old English Riddles invoked the delicate icing-over of a puddle, a wave transforming from slushy churn into ice, and the noise of an iceberg accelerating into breakup and contact with shore. The Norse Greenland settlements would have been beset by ice: whether at home, on the marginal areas of habitation, or at sea. Fluctuations in coastal ice conditions in the thirteenth century seem to have required altering older routes from Iceland to Greenland. Norse Greenlanders headed to the icy far north of the Davis Strait to hunt walrus, and some may have relied on the u-shaped curve of this ice shelf to direct them across the strait when headed to North America for timber and iron. So why then do the Greenlander Sagas seem relatively uninterested in ice? In this paper, I consider why the fragile and frightening dynamics of ice seem so absent from the thirteenth century literary accounts of the Norse Greenland settlements and explore how ice may have nonetheless less left behind its own markings, however secret or faint. By what non-representational floes, crystallizations, freezes, or thaws can human language register the speed, temperature, age, fragility, durability, sharpness, slipperiness, silence, and noisiness of ice when not directly describing it?

2. Leila K. Norako, Notre Dame de Namur University, “Vanishing Ice and The House of Fame: An Ecocritical Interrogation”

This talk considers the agency of ice in Chaucer’s The House of Fame. In the allegorical dream vision, the House of Fame sits upon a foundation of ice. The narrator, Geoffrey, climbs up a mountain to the base of the castle and describes the glacial foundation at some length. The names of famous persons are etched into its sides, and the narrator notices that at least one side has melted so much that the names are lost forever. The impermanence of these names seems to agitate the narrator, but he instantly reassures himself by observing that the House of Fame’s shadow protects the names on the opposite side of the foundation. Ice by its very nature, however, is liminal, and its liminality likely contributed to Chaucer’s decision to perch his House of Fame upon it. The palace sits, after all, “in myddes of the weye / betwixen” heaven, earth, and the sea — an allusion, perhaps, to the vaporous, solid, and liquid forms that water can take. The melting of the building’s glacial foundation, in all of its inexorability, consistently threatens its existence and the stories preserved in its walls. Like the Mississippi River described by Jeffrey Cohen in Prismatic Ecologies, ice is an “earth artist,” “its projects tak[ing] so long to execute that humans have a difficult time discerning their genius” (xix). I argue in this talk that the narrator Geoffrey struggles with this very limitation in human perception. He tries to comfort himself by seeing at least a portion of the foundation as permanent, but in doing so he fails to see – or perhaps chooses not to see – how much of human invention lies at the mercy of the natural world and its movements.

As such, even though this poem mentions it but briefly, ice remains the primary agential object in The House of Fame. And I argue that reading ice it in this way allows us to examine more accurately the implications of the poem’s persistent enjambment of the human and the non-human. The powerful presence of ice in The House of Fame reminds us that, while the poem concerns itself in vibrant ways with human stories and objects, there exists in tandem to the manmade a force that (however glacial its movements or its meltings) may ultimately get the last word. In order to highlight ice’s agential role in the poem, I will make regular use of images and videos of Icelandic glaciers. These glaciers, and the landscapes carved in their wake, stand as quiet, looming memorials to the power and the impermanence of ice, and my hope is that these images will encourage a reading of this poem that acknowledges the significance of ice in The House of Fame’s interpretive landscape.

3. David Coley, Simon Fraser University, “Ice as Parchment, Ice as Pen”

In his fourteenth-century translation of De proprietatibus rerum, John Trevisa defines cristalle [quartz] as “snowe or ise [that] is ymade harde in space of many ȝeres ... and torned into stoon nouȝt oonlich by vertu and strengþe of colde but more by erþelich vertue.” He further notes, “þis stoon is cleere, and so lettres and oþere þinges þat been ydo þerinne be yseie clereliche ynough.” For Chaucerians, Trevisa’s letters in petrified ice immediately recall The House of Fame’s “roche of yse” inscribed with “famous folkes names,” a “febel fundament” for Fame’s temple and an apt but unstable medium for written language.In the medieval imagination then, ice seems to have operated (at least in part) as a volatile but effective parchment, a site on which the lucidity of the written word strained against the essential impermanence of the text. It was a midpoint between the stone of Belshazzar’s temple and the water of a still pool, between the wall where Daniel once read Babylon’s doom and the ephemeral surface where John Keats would, centuries later, record his own sad end: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

Recently we have come to recognize ice not only as parchment but also, and fundamentally, as stylus, gouging glacial inscriptions into the land like the finger on Belshazzar’s temple wall. In our age of rising carbon levels and glacial retreat, our ability to read such tectonic calligraphy seems ever more urgent. How do we understand the inelegant scrawl of glacial moraine, the sudden puncta of glacial calving, the “rubbe and scrape” of advance and retreat? The glacial recession that Chaucer could never have foreseen in his “ofthowed” ice carves fresh writing into the earth at an ever increasing rate, leaving behind a dazzling calligraphy of stone and water. Are we, like Geffrey atop his ice boulder in The House of Fame, engaged in a new and sometimes bewildering dialogue with a visibly disappearing icescape? Are we belated paleographers of an icy, “roynish” hand? Or, more darkly still, are we more akin to the stunned Babylonians staring at the letters in the temple wall—Mane, Thecel, Phares—struggling to interpret these terrible glacial signs and the unwelcome truths that they may portend?

4. Jeremy DeAngelo, University of Connecticut, “Ice as Social Signifier” 

            Individuals in the Icelandic sagas often have names that overtly reference ice—Jǫkul, for example, or Frosti. However, these names are not distributed randomly among the characters; they invariably occur among figures such as giants, trolls and Sámi—groups which in the sagas are marked by their antisocial tendencies and existence on the margins of society. An association with ice, therefore, indicates a certain type in a medieval Icelandic context, one whose relationship with the colder elements guided the understanding of their character, for good or for ill. For mythological or legendary figures, their names’ invocation of the elements reinforced their chthonic nature. In the pseudohistorical sagas, however, a link to ice reflects the broad reality of the Scandinavian Peninsula, wherein the Sámi generally inhabited the colder, more northerly and internal regions relative to Norse settlement. The sagas often attribute the ability to survive in more extreme conditions to either magic, a bestial nature, or both, and Sámi characters’ chilly demeanors in the literature suggest these qualities. Yet it happens in the literature that these icy figures intermarry with the Norse, and their children inherit both their names and their qualities. These talents serve them well, yet also mark them as separate—hybrid figures whose antisocial tendencies and affinity with ice keep them from fully functioning in proper society. As characters in the literature of a people who themselves draw their identity from ice (Ís-lendingar), these figures indicate how the Icelanders saw themselves relative to the larger Norse world: set apart on account of their frigid environment, tenacious and irascible, yet stronger on account of their hardiness and hard-headedness. Ice, therefore, in medieval Icelandic literature serves as a useful social marker, one which indicates both one’s lineage and the behavior one should expect based upon it.

5. James L. Smith, University of Western Australia, “Touch of Frost”

Burning fire and chilling frost Both bite the body’s senses with a different kind of ‘fang’, As shown by how each makes us feel a different kind of pang.

                                      ~Titus Lucretius Carus, The Nature of Things (London: Penguin, 2007), 430, p. 48

In the thirteenth-century Grænlendinga saga, Leif Eriksson and the members of his expedition were warming to the newly discovered green land, for “there was no frost in winter, and the grass hardly withered.” Here, they imagined, was a home free from the deprivations of life’s inevitable extremes in the chill embrace of the Arctic Circle. In so doing, they generated an imagining redolent of affect and agriculture in equal measure. The medieval Norse explorers dreamt of a place in which, like all life in the cold, the onset of the ice could be survived, could be weathered. And yet, as many a polar explorer of the nineteenth century discovered to their cost, there is no escape from the cool embrace of the ice when human heat-making fails; the cold is an endless reminder of agential limitation. This paper seeks to explore the touch of frost as a subtle play of power and interdependency, non-human entanglement, and the limits of survival. Survival at the onset of winter makes little distinction between inner and outer space, for the confrontational piercing of human life with slow, gentle, violence occurs literally and figuratively.

The modelling of inner space, the interplay of coldness and warmth within the human heart, is a form of chill abstraction. In the Old Testament, Job is able to weather misfortune when “The waters are hardened like a stone, and the surface of the deep is congealed” because his heart does not succumb (Job 38:30). The tree of his spirit is able to survive through hardship until the ice melts and the fountains of fortune flow once more. Medieval frost is dew, the romantic essence of heavenly providence spread with favour across the earth, and yet it is hardened, its fluvial softness transformed to adamant and piercing new shapes. As the Trevisa translation of De Proprietatibus Rerum puts is, “Hore frost is no3t ellis but dewe Ifroren.” It, like life and fortune, has cycles. Regno becomes regnaui, which in turn becomes sum sine regno: a human life becomes chill when broken beneath the wheel of fortune. The heart, like flora in an icy climate, must seek to survive the chill of psychological winter. The parable of the human heart, in an act of synthesis with non-human interactivity, is shaped by the touch of frost.

RESPONDENT: Oddur Sigurðsson, Icelandic Meteorological Office

JJC on Van Helsing

by J J Cohen

Karl has been filling the blog with Deep Thoughts: see here, here, here and here for some substantial fodder for your own rumination.

Meanwhile, if you are interested in something lighter for summer delectation ... here is a short video from the production blog of the Showtime series Penny Dreadful, in which I speak about Professor Abraham Van Helsing. Oddly enough John Logan mentioned Monster Theory in the pitch he made to the cable channel to fund the series, so I will be back when season two begins to speak about that book.
 

Two points: Digital Piers; Marsilius of Padua and the problem of "agency"

Ghada Amer at Cheim + Read

by KARL STEEL

Two quick points:

ONE. First, if you're a medievalist, particularly a digital humanities medievalist, and you're not reading Angie Bennett Segler's Material Piers blog, you're making a terrible mistake.

Piers Plowman doesn't get a lot of love around these parts. I'm not sure any of us here have ever taught it. For that reason, alone, you should be reading Material Piers. You know, to expiate our guilt. Or at least my guilt.

Here's a sample:

At present, it’s relatively established that the Vernon [manuscript] cannot possibly  be dated to prior to 1395. Good, fine. No problem. That’s the fourteenth century. BUT, and for me this is a big “but,” the Vernon is SO MASSIVE that it seems pretty much insane to me to date it to any year.  The majority of the manuscript, along with its almost as large sister the Simeon, was copied by a single scribe!! A.I. Doyle estimates that even moving at his fastest he couldn’t have completed the pair of them in under  FOUR YEARS, and it may well have taken up to eight. On top of that, there is the lavish decoration scheme with borders, initials, gilding and two full cycles of miniatures. The idea that the manuscript was both started and completed in the fourteenth century borders on preposterous.

That, frankly, is why I prefer dating V to “ca. 1400.” Because the “circa” itself implies a possible range of time. And in the case of the Vernon, that range is incredibly important. But more than that, it acknowledges the imprecision in dating manuscripts altogether. “Ca. 1400″ allows us to think about the slipperiness of dating things belonging that far in the past and about the time it takes to hand-make a material-textual object, to bring it into being one folio, one line, one letter, one stroke at a time. So, unless a manuscript is clearly and definitively datable to a certain decade, I prefer to leave it with its ambiguous date.

And here's a chart. which you can understand if you click through to the blog!

Why am I demanding that you read this Material Piers post in particular? Because it offers you the chance to do a bit of digital humanities work yourself. Read the post; lend a hand; and join me in swimming in a Piers-and-everything-else manuscript. I'll be doing that myself this afternoon.

---

TWO. The various so-called "new" materialisms tend to use the word "agency" a lot without doing much to figure out what the word actually means. My second Kalamazoo2014 paper, on spontaneous generation and "automatic" agency, tried to get directly at the problem by arguing, ultimately, that only a random break with mechanical causality can be recognized as truly agential. My solution has the posthuman advantage of moving questions of agency away from rationality and anthropomorphism, thereby avoiding the implicit humanizing at the center of many discussions of agency. It also has the dubious -- and predictable -- advantage of discovering an aporia at the agency's heart.

All this is by way of setting up a passage from Marsilius of Padua's Defensor Pacis:

This term "ownership" is used to refer to the human will or freedom in itself with its organic executive or motive power unimpeded. For it is through these that we are capable of certain acts and their opposites. It is for this reason too that man alone among the animals is said to have ownership or control of his acts; this control belongs to him by nature, it is not acquired through an act of will or choice. (II.12.16, p. 193)

Adhuc dicitur nomen dominii de humana voluntate seu libertate secundum se, cum ipsius executiva seu motiva organica potestate non impedita. Hiis enim possumus in actus aliquos et ipsorum oppositos. Propter quod eciam dicitur homo inter animalium cetera suorum actuum habere dominium; quod siquidem a natura inest homini, non voluntarie seu eleccione quesitum. (MGH 271)

The origin of human agency ("ownership of control of his acts") isn't human agency itself. Rather, it's inherent to humans, unchosen. Agency itself therefore is free from human choice at its root. Still, it's determined, somehow, by "nature." If the power of choice is instinctual, then it's hard to imagine that humans have "complete freedom" ("libertas," I think). This problem of the origin of agency is a problem, especially, for Marsilius, as he's well-known for arguing that "the supreme power resides in the body of the citizens [and not the Church], who make the laws, and choose the form of government, etc [and that t]he prince rules by the authority of the whole body of citizens": what is the origin of the people's will?

But the problem is also general to agency and to human agency especially, perhaps the paragon and model of agency in any discussion of the term. The problem of agency intersects with a host of other problems, of materialism, humanism, racism, and indeed the history of antisemitism.¹ It's a problem whether we're talking about rats or stones or garbage or the tedious Pauline differentiation between Christian spiritual reading and Jewish literal reading or, for that matter, the whole spirit versus matter binary that's inherent to all considerations of agency. For any of these, the power of agency simply doesn't seem to be reducible to any first cause. Otherwise, it wouldn't be agency but rather the beginning of another mechanical chain.

In short, any clear claim to agency strikes me as unwarranted. And the same goes for any scorn of materialisms or posthumanisms because their "discovery" of agency in nonhuman objects.

It's obviously ironic that I should end up so automatically in an identifiably deconstructive aporia. I'm very much back in Derrida's critique of the "auto" of autobiography in, for example, The Animal that Therefore I am, where he does his Derridean thing with the "ipseity, indeed sui-referential egoity, auto-affection and automotion, autokinesis, [and] autonomy" (65) of the presumptive presence of the self-generated automatic I, and with the pretense of "auto-motricity, a spontaneity that is capable of movement, of organizing itself and affecting itself, marking, tracing, and affecting itself with traces of its self" (49). You can imagine what happens to agency when Derrida finishes with it.

Maybe commentators can suggest another way forward?

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1 Or, for that matter, colonialism and its various justifications. See this new post from Corey Robin, on the dangers of presidential boredom, where he recalls Tocqueville's enthusiasm for the Opium War: "So at last the mobility of Europe has come to grips with Chinese immobility!" ^↩

Sovereignty, Biopolitics, the Forest, and the King's Jews: Sketch for a Research Program

Tony Lewis from Whitney Biennial

by KARL STEEL

What the title says. Over the past couple days, I've been reading David Nirenberg's forthcoming Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today, whose fourth chapter makes an old point with atypical neatness:

Medieval kings had expanded their sovereignty (in part) by assigning the Jews to a status outside normative law and claiming exceptional power to decide their fate. Sovereign power was thus (in part) performed through the protection of those who had denied God's sovereignty, his 'enemies' and 'killers.'

Nirenberg argues that kings would later demonstrate their sovereign power not by protecting but by murdering and expelling Jews: the sovereign exception, as we know, can go both ways, towards "mercy" or towards the full, arbitrary exercise of the Law, nothing at its core but the king's whimsy. If not in practice, at least in sovereign fantasy.

Nirenberg brilliantly connects this medieval sovereignty to famous passages in Schmitt and Benjamin ("Sovereign is he who decides the exception" and "The Prince, upon whom the decision over the exception rests, discovers in the best of situations that a decision is impossible for him") and from thence to the "miracle" in Schmitt and Benjamin, and, as expected, to the redemptive rereading of the political miracle in Agamben, Žižek, and Santner. Almost needless to say, Nirenberg isn't on board with the miracle in any form, neither in Schmitt's sovereign version nor the post-Sovereign versions of B, A, Ž, and S.

More about that much later (like, later this year). What strikes me now is the relation of Nirenberg's point to one I'm making in an article, "Biopolitics in the Forest," that will appear in Randy Schiff and Joey Taylor's Politics of Ecology anthology. You've had the chance, often, to see preliminary bits: here, here, here, and here (and even this post from 2006). The article's key argument is that the sovereign exception and biopolitics each sprang up simultaneously in the 12th-century English forest. Biopolitics is not a paradigmatic modern form of governmentality that follows long after sovereignity, but rather coincides with sovereign claims; also coincident with those claims is the way that bodies "naturally" resist biopolitics, a point I'm developing from Cary Wolfe. As Wolfe argues, and me with him, agency and objecthood, the problem of the possibility of "conscious resistance," and other humanist, rationalist concerns start to fall away once we start to think about bodily forces in biopolitics. Thinking like that makes way for thinking about animals in the political community, Wolfe's main point, but it also makes room for thinking more fluidly about dominated humans. Like, for example, the Jews of thirteenth-century England.

Here's how it goes in the article itself:

Husbandry is the scandalous foundation of a biopolitical analysis that has tended to be committed, more or less explicitly, to defending human particularity by trying to keep humans from being treated “like animals.” Foucault observes that “Unlike discipline, which is addressed to bodies, the new nondisciplinary power [of biopolitics] is applied not to man-as-body but to the living man, to man-as-living-being; ultimately, if you like, to man-as-species” and that in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we witness the “development of a medicine whose main function will not be public hygiene, with institutions to coordinate medical care, centralize power, and normalize knowledge.” Esposito writes that in modern biopolitics “life enters into power relations not only on the side of its critical thresholds or its pathological exceptions, but in all its extension, articulation, and duration,” and calls this a “new rationality centered on the question of life.” The obvious modernist and humanist biases of these observations ought to be contested. When Foucault states that “man is to population what the subject of right was to the sovereign,” or Esposito explains that biopolitics aims not only at “obedience but also at the welfare of the governed,” their analysis might have gone even further had they said that biopolitics treats humans like livestock, or, more particularly, like the sovereign’s livestock, which is to say, like venison.

I stand by that argument. But Nirenberg reminds me of something that I missed, which is another 12th/13th-century English (for example) development of both sovereignty and biopolitics. The king called the Jews his Jews, and (so?) they were the victims when the King's subjects rebelled (for example, in the 1260s, against Henry III, and also especially in York in 1190, committed when Richard I was--as was his habit--overseas). Also note this antisemitic 13th-century cartoon, where Isaac of Norwich is represented wearing Henry III's crown (and read the post itself, while avoiding its comments). That's sovereignty, and a set of standard resistances to sovereignty.¹

But there's also biopolitics. Strikingly, a lot of regulation about the Jews in England, first from the church and then from the crown, tries to manage what might be called biological relations between Christians and Jews. The 1219 statutes of William of Blois, Bishop of Worchester, for example, forbid Christians from serving Jews as nurses (see also here). Other statutes, echoing Lateran IV.68, explain that Jews should wear a badge to prevent sexual mixing between Christians and Jews [the same statutes, better edited here, 121, have "quoniam in partibus istis sic inter christianos et iudeos confusio inolevit ut fere nulla differentia discernatur, propter quod nonunquam continigit quod christiani iudeis mulieribus commiscentur"]. That's the church. But then January 1253 Statute of the Jews gives a secular reaffirmation of these and other points. In regards to the Jews, English sovereignty and biopower had now combined.²

Putting aside the question of whether the conciliar decrees were enforced, and the related point of whether the laws were simply mechanical repetitions of older laws (like these or these), we might observe that the laws themselves witness to the fact that bodies are a place for sovereignty to expand its area of concern. Bodies must be managed, not just by violence, but also by nurturing, to maintain the health of populations and to prevent contagion. Bland points like these of course take on a sinister aspect when we remember that we're talking about relations between a dominant Christian majority and a dependent Jewish minority. We know that concern for the health of the body politic or the corpus christianorum could just as well be murderous to those marked as not belonging. It might even turn against members of the community, accused, for example, of "judaizing." That's the model of biopolitics as the extension of sovereignty, and it's what we find especially in Roberto Esposito.

Simple points like these will reshape my considerations of sovereignty and biopolitics in 12th and 13th-century England. The baronial killing of Jews is analogous, mutatis mutandis (!), to poaching the king's deer: that's resistance to sovereignty. The insistence that Christians not eat food rejected by Jews, and that Jews not nurse Christian children and vice versa may be analogous to the necessity of royal management of cervid populations in hunting preserves. That's biopolitics.

And, as with the cervids, we'll probably find that bodies, even under sovereign control, act independently. Here's Cary Wolfe, from Before the Law:

the power of Foucault's analysis is to demonsrate just how unstable and mobile the lines are between political subject and political object--indeed to demonstrate how that entire vocabulary must give way to a new, more nuanced reconceptualization of political effectivity. And equally important is that Foucault's introduction of "life into history"--of the body in the broadest sense of the political equation--does not lead directly and always already to an abjection for which the most predictable tropes of animalization become the vehicle.

Bodies will do what they have to do. This isn't a matter of agency, nor a matter of complete exposure, nor a matter simply of suffering or of being "reduced" to animal, bare life. This isn't the lachrymose biopolitics of Agamben and Esposito, whose only escape is some kind of messianic break. Rather, this is an array of forces, in which subjects do suffer but in which they also inevitably resist, regardless of whether they want to or not.

We know Jews and Christians mixed in medieval England (for example). They probably did eat and drink together from time to time, again, just because a body, infant or adult, has to eat. Since that bodily need can't be stopped, since it will find its own solutions, independent of biopolitical control, things will inevitably go awry. Note this: thirteenth-century English laws that compelled Christians to refuse meat that the Jews had themselves rejected ended up requiring Christians, in effect, to keep kosher, and this during some of the worst persecutions of Jews in England's history. The imperative, then, is to follow up on points like these to find moments where bodily control in an antisemitic biopolitical regime behaved, well, oddly, to trouble our sedimented, humanist notions of agency, political control, and "active" rebellion.

One last irony, as a repulsive epilogue: the ritual murder charge -- dating from the mid 12th century and probably originating with an English monk -- often accused Jews of anthropophagy. The Jews, supposed to want to kidnap and torment Christian children to enact their contempt for Christ, were often supposed to want to eat them too. See especially the "Adam of Bristol" story, where Samuel, the murder’s chief architect, promises, “I will rotate him” so that “this body of the God of the Christians will be roasted by the fire just like a fat chicken" [“ego regirabo”; “assabitur corpus dei christianorum, iuxta ignem sicut gallina crassa"].³

Now, of course, this charge could not be a more obvious example of psychoanalytic projection, since the Christians were the "real" anthropophages; they, not the Jews, ate their god.

And sometimes Christians ate their own martyrs. In the late eighteenth century, Dean Kaye and Sir Joseph Banks opened the tomb of young Hugh of Lincoln, murdered by Jews, as the (false!) story goes, stuffed in a well, and then retrieved to be buried as a martyr. Inside the tomb, they found a child's body wrapped "in a leaden cere cloth, in a kind of pickle (which Sir Joseph is said to have tasted), but whether so perfect as to show the marks of crucifixion we are not told."

Which Sir Joseph is said to have tasted. Bodies go awry.

Meanwhile, during the period of Hugh's supposed murder, the English Christians were, in fact, dumping the bodies of Jews, including children, in wells, no doubt poisoning their own drinking water. And so the rebellion against sovereignty leads us, also, to biopolitical failure.

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1 Robert C. Stacey “Anti-Semitism and the Medieval English State,” in J. R. Maddicott and D. M. Palliser, eds, The Medieval State: Essays Presented to James Campbell (London, 2000): 171-72 [163-77]^↩
2 John Edwards, “The Church and the Jews in Medieval England,” in The Jews in Medieval Britain, ed. Patricia Skinner (Boydell & Brewer, 2003), 91 [85-96]; See also J. A. Watt, “The English Episcopate, the State and the Jews: the Evidence of the Thirteenth-Century Conciliar Decrees,” in Thirteenth Century England II. ed. P. R. Coss and S. D. Lloyd. Proceedings of the Newcastle Upon Tyne Conference 1987. Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell P, 1988, 137-147^↩
3 Christoph Cluse, "‘Fabula Ineptissima’: Die Ritualmordlegende um Adam von Bristol nach der Handschrift London, British Library, Harley 957" Aschkenas 5 (1995): 293-330^↩

THE HORDE (2012): before before Orientalism, the new (?) medievalism

by KARL STEEL

FIRST, celebrate the new issue of postmedieval, below.

A few nights ago, I made the mistake of watching The Horde, a 2012 film produced by the Orthodox Encyclopedia, (!), that combines the story of the fourteenth-century collapse of the Mongol empire with a hagiographical yarn of the miraculous Saint Alexius, Metropolitan of Moscow, and the blindness of Taidula, Queen Mother of the Mongols. The film earned its controversy:

[Vadim Rudakov, labeled a Golden Horde expert] came away from the first meeting feeling enthusiastic that Russia would "finally" have an accurate depiction of life under its Mongol forbearers, who are widely credited with establishing regional government, a postal system, census-taking, and military organization.

But once the script was developed, Rudakov was crestfallen. Most of his suggestions about historical accuracy had been ignored, he told RFE/RL. And the depiction of the Mongols, he said, was deeply degrading.

"Some of them were given human qualities, but the overall impression is of brutal, bloodthirsty, evil-minded, greedy people. Even the jokes they told were flat and stupid," Rudakov says. "It was all of the worst traditions of the old Soviet films about Tatar Mongols and nomads.

Reactions to this debate have been predictable: films, we’re told, can change what they like to be entertaining (or, if Google translate can be trusted, it’s actually quite accurate); authentic Russians should celebrate breaking the Mongol yoke; Russians should be proud of Russia; and something to do with whether the Ukraine as such ever existed (in comments) and whatever the comment at September 21, 2012 08:48 could possibly mean (“CIS nations are not 'Indians' as Russian Neanderthals saying, Their nations emerged Caucasians long before came Varaga. Varaga were Neanderthals, only since fifth Century BC mixing With Sam-Gad corsed tribes”).

Nuts, Turnips, Water, Blood, Bread, Watermelon

I’m particularly interested in how The Horde uses food to delineate human from subhuman. In it, the ‘good guys’, i.e., the Christians, don’t eat meat: they eat turnips, bread, and nuts and drink only water; the ‘bad guys,’ i.e., the Mongols, eat roasted meat, drink strong liquor and horseblood, and, at one point, scarf a watermelon, whose red dripping ‘flesh’ surely is meant to resemble meat. 

Early on, Jani Beg (Джанибек), just on the verge of becoming Khan, mimes taking a bite out of his dinner mate. Then he strangles his brother and declares himself Khan. Later, his mother, Taidula, convinces him to decapitate some captured Russians to save having to feed them, as otherwise they’ll have “to eat people again.” Jani Beg agrees: “it’s bad to eat people; the demon steals into your soul” a line whose initial blandness charges it with extra horror: “It’s bad to shoplift; it’s bad to jaywalk; also, while you’re at it, don’t eat people.”

click to ENLARGE

Of course, the Mongols have already eaten people; so they are, of course, a people possessed, more beast than human.

Food divisions like these would be perfectly expected had this film been written in 1240 by, say, Matthew Paris. “Thirsting after and drinking blood, and tearing the flesh of dogs and human beings,” the Mongols swarm “like locusts,” writes Matthew, joining with the 1238 Chronicle of Novgorod, whose Mongols “eat the flesh of the strong, and drink the blood of the Boyars,” and Yvo (or "Ivo") of Narbonne in 1243, where the Mongols eat their victims “like bread.” I quote all this from Kim M. Phillips’s Before Orientalism, 91, but I just as well might have plucked it from Shirin Khanmohamadi’s In Light of Another's Word: European Ethnography in the Middle Ages, 60.

Phillips observes that since no one else accused the Mongols of anthropophagy, it’s unlikely that they ate people with any regularity. Rather, as both Khanmohamadi and Phillips observe, these accusations are just elements of the “barbarian topos,” common since at least the classical era (key examples, here and here), the same fevered depictions of the other we’re likely to encounter anywhere (trigger alert).

Notably, the records of Mongol eating change as Christian missionaries produced better and better ethnography. When William of Rubruck writes that the Mongols have many “little creatures...which are good to eat, and which they are quite able to tell apart,” he may be a bit disgusted, but he at least has to admit they have a cuisine. And during his time among the Mongols, he himself comes to like kumis, a slightly boozy potable made from fermented mare’s milk.

Using these and other, similar texts, Khanmohamadi and Phillips each argue that the ethnography of 13th and early 14th-century Latin Christendom, at least for Central and East Asia, can’t be typified as “orientalist.” Their argument doesn’t snipe at Said; rather, as they argue, the colonial conditions Said studied simply don’t apply to this period and the relationships between these regions. Latin Christians couldn’t colonize or conquer Central Asia (as for East Asia, it was almost literally off the map). Instead, the Latin Christian writers Khanmohamadi and Phillips treat feared Mongol conquest (or hoped to convert the Mongols to ally against a common Islamic foe); they correctly thought China superior in nearly every way, in matters of culture, artistic skill, in the glory of their cities and the virtue of their women, in just about everything -- stupidly -- but food.

None of the Christian travelers in Khanmohamadi and Phillips would have produced anything like The Horde. They probably wouldn’t have portrayed Queen Taidula as the film did, as a dragon lady mastering her childish son: medieval misogyny has its own, probably less racist features. Furthermore, none would thought so highly of their own eating: none thought that Christians in general ate like the legendary Brahmans, on only roots (like turnips), nuts, and water.

For all that, the film still contains what may be the seed of a small critique of Khanmohamadi and Phillips. The film misconstrues both Mongol culture and what I know (which isn’t much) about the “contact zone” of Christian and Mongol (“Russian” and Mongol?) encounters and interchange in the 14th century. The film chooses the worst over the best medieval ethnography to portray the Mongols as lawless, uncivilized, cruel to animals, and somehow even more fleshy than Christians, because they eat little but flesh. 

Yet this portrayal isn’t quite Orientalized either. After all, the Christians in The Horde could hardly be more ignorant about the Mongols; they barely speak the language; they can only guess at Mongol history; there’s no certainty that the Mongols represent the living past of Christianity (that position, rather, was mostly reserved for the Jews, “living letters of the law”): there’s no Foucauldian Power/Knowledge at work here. What the Christians feel, primarily, is threatened by a lawless and violent enemy of civilization.

What they feel, in other words, is what “the West” feels in what may now be a post-Orientalist time, when the West longs melancholically and guiltily for its former dominance over “the East” and everywhere else, and when the West knows the East only as an implacable and incomprehensible enemy. The Horde must be read in light of Chechnya. Or at least as a kind of anti-foundation myth, where Russia, as such, emerges only when its illegitimate rulers finally collapse.

“Westerners” have come out the other side of Orientalism, not into the future it might have hoped for, but rather into the prehistory of the time before Orientalism Khanmohamadi and Phillips study. The trick for reading this present moment, perhaps, may not lie with Said, but rather with rereading, critically, Matthew Paris and his heirs, and likewise rereading texts about Gog and Magog and the “red Jews.” The heirs of medieval Christendom feel an eschatological threat again. They feel themselves embattled in their own presumed superiority without any real hope of escape, even delighting in being trapped, since, as the theological story goes, worldly suffering is the clearest evidence of who God really loves.EDIT: READ THIS FOOTNOTE FOR UPDATES¹

For more on the Mongols at this site, see this 2011 post here. See also this 2006 (!) post on meat-eating and masculinity. Elsewhere, see this superb recent post on veganism and hospitality, by Rebekah Sinclair at An und für sich; and enjoy this picture of Mongols eating, here. And for the food aversion and modern racism, see, for example, this.

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1 Noreen Giffney has written well both on the need for an engagement with the Mongols informed by theory (see here, especially) and, here, on how discourses of monstrosity and apocalypticism play out with thirteenth-century Christian depictions of the Mongols, particularly with Matthew Paris, Thomas of Spalato, The Chronicle of Novgorod, and Ivo of Narbonnes. Thanks to Michael O'Rourke for the reminder. And for a far more detailed and expert engagement with the Mongols than I can provide, listen to 2013 UCLA Conference on "The Mongols from the Margins: New Perspectives on Central Asians in World History," particularly Christopher Halperin's "No One Knew Who They Were: Russian Interaction with the Mongols." Thanks to Sharon Kinoshita for alerting me to the conference records.^↩