Les Simpsons de Bayeux

Last Sunday's episode of the Simpsons opened with an epic battle involving a stolen couch, conveyed via an updated version of the Bayeux Tapestry -- let's call it the Springfield Rug. Just like the events of 1066, here we witnessed savagery, invasion, gore, and cartoonish fun involving people with yellowish skin. Follow this link for some images. I am proud to say that my son recognized what was being parodied ... though I should also admit that we have an authentic reproduction of a segment of the tapestry hanging by the TV in our family room.

(I'd been searching since Sunday for the images, and finally got them via a link from Dr Nokes)

Quote of the Day: Mock Medieval

From Marcus Bull, Thinking Medieval: An Introduction to the Study of the Middle Ages:

What lies under the surface of Mock [the pseudo-medieval speech beloved of films and Medieval Times dinner theatre and Renaissance Fairs], the thing that makes it sound all right even though only a moment's reflection exposes its ludicrous conceit, is the unspoken sense that medieval people were very odd and they knew it. Mock has the effect of casting medieval men and women as the dimly self-aware spokespersons of a sense of difference and detachment that in reality, of course, only exists in our modern perception of them, not in their contemporary awareness. They probably could not quite put their finger on it, so Mock implies, but they somehow sensed that they were primitive, crude, or whatever stereotype one wants to apply, and that better times, progress, lay somewhere in the future. Mock, in other words, makes medieval people sound like actors in their own costume drama. (138)

Why post such a quote, other than its inherent interest and fun use of the word Mock? Well, I'm halfway through a book that argues medieval people were in fact perfectly capable of grasping the ridiculousness of their own performance of the self:

For example, at what point if ever might it have occurred to twelfth-century French courtiers that a room decked out in rugs, silks and other finery might look less like an affirmation of the prestige of that milieu than evidence of medieval vernacular cultures as aquisitive, shoulder-chipped wannabes in relation to the wealth and sophistication of of their Byzantine and Islamic neighbours? The question that then arises is how self-conscious that appropriation was, how alive or occluded the strangeness internal to the senses of self they constructed were as well as how evolved was the reflection on how troubling or useful different sources of strangeness could be. (15)

That quote is from this book by James R. Simpson. More anon.

Kerfuffle Wading: On Liberal Fascism's sadly missing chapter

I probably shouldn't wade into the kerfuffle with Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism (well treated at Sadly No, here and here. EDIT More seriously, see here), but here I go with a medievalist intervention, deferring responsibility for doing what I should not do by saying, with Dietrich, that I can't help it.

I quote the following from a recent interview between Goldberg and Theodore Beale

Beale: You know, Guerri says the reason the Fascist regime was less dramatic than the German and Soviet regimes was because Italians were weak Catholics. So when they replaced their religion with the secular religion, they became weak Fascists as well.

Goldberg: I think that's right. Michael Ledeen has many detractors when it comes to contemporary politics, but he was a very serious scholar of Italian Fascism in his previous career. One of the things that first got me interested in this topic was over ten years ago when Ledeen gave a talk at AEI. It was very interesting and at the end, a buddy of mine turned to me and said: “I think what he is saying is that Nazism was really bad because they had the Black Forest and terrible weather, and Italian Fascism wasn't that bad because the Italians are a bunch of nice people.” That's a really grotesque way to put it, and yet there's a certain truth there. These sorts of isms are going to bring out the character of a people. No idea so sets fire to the minds of men that it erases their culture, their background, or their fundamental psychological understanding of the world. Certainly not on a mass scale.

Beale: It's very Eddie Izzard: “We are all Fascists now.... ciao!”

Goldberg: There's a story that Ledeen tells about a restaurant. One of the things that Mussolini did in this very Jamesian way was to declare all of these domestic policy wars, these moral equivalents of war. There was the Battle of the Grains and the Battle of the Births, and one of them was the Battle of the Flies, because there was so much disease going around Italy back then. Anyhow, this guy goes into a restaurant and sees there's flies all over the place, so he asks what's going on with the war against them. The waiter says “well, the flies won.” That's a very Italian perspective. One of the things I learned while writing the book is that there's this glib association of fascism with anti-semitism, and while one can't say that the Italians were completely blameless in that regard, at the end of the day, anti-semitism was just completely contrary to Italian history and culture. Italy was polyglot, multi-ethnic and Catholic, so whatever anti-semitism was there was theological, not biological; the Catholic Church's position was that Jews could be saved, not that they should be eradicated like vermin. I wanted to do an entire chapter on this but it was just too far afield. The heroism and decency of thousands upon thousands of Italians when it came to the Jews is one of the incredibly untold stories of that era. Anti-semitism and Italian Fascism are just not kindred phenomena.

There's too much to deal with here. For instance: Italy, being a Catholic country (or people? I suppose in this case one means the other, except for the "multi-ethnic" part), did not practice a virulently antisemitic fascism because of Catholicism's policy on Jews (rooted in Augustine's commentary on Psalms 58:12); Italians did not become serious fascists because they were weak Catholics. So, did Catholicism guide them in its strength or its weakness? Or both?

As for polyglot, multi-ethnic, Catholic countries and their tolerance towards Jews...well, there's medieval London, which would fit the criteria, were it not for the pogrom during Richard I's coronation, and/or twentieth-century France, except for its complicity in the Holocaust. Even with his conceptual mistakes, Goldberg can still wonder why antisemitism didn't take root as intensely in Italy as it did in Northern Europe. He might have started his wondering by reading Gavin Langmuir's “L’absence d’accusation de meurtre ritual à l’ouest du Rhône” (in Juifs et judaisme de Languedoc. Cahiers de Fanjeaux 12. Toulouse, 1977, 235-49) and perhaps he would wondered whether to be convinced by the several possibilities Langmuir offers (perhaps, to cite my notes, the earlier development of credit and commerce in Southern Europe made Jews less distinct, or religious belief played a different role in these societies that were more Romanized, or there's some kind an inverse relationship between clerical activity and popular hostility, or perhaps heretics were the real bogeymen in S. Europe).

I do wish, however, that Goldberg had written the chapter he claims was "too far afield." Perhaps he would have ran across some information of use on medieval Italian Jews and how they helped form the Italian national character (more on that below). He could have started with Ariel Toaff's Love, Work, and Death: Jewish Life in Medieval Umbria (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1996). He might have discovered the racism used against Pope Anacletus II (discussed in Mary Stroll's The Jewish Pope: Ideology and Politics in the Papal Schism of 1130, 1987), and perhaps have found something similar to his own racist noise against Obama.

Had he done his research (not really his habit), he would have discovered in any number of sources that in fact it generally was better to be Jewish in Rome than in Cologne, Rouen, London, or York, that is, so long as one wasn't being compelled to race during Carnival and be stoned by Christians (see Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetry 53). Or so long as one wasn't an old man rolled down a hill in a spiked barrel (I found reference to this tradition in Claudine Fabre-Vassas The Singular Beast: Jews, Christians, and the Pig, Carol Volk trans., Columbia UP, 162, and, in my effort to confirm it just now, in the online Medici Archive Project:

The "palio degli ebrei" or "race of the Jews" in the Corso had a long and peculiar history of its own predating the Counter Reformation by several centuries. At one point, Christian "jockeys" in the race rode Jews instead of horses. Another festive "game" of the season was to roll a Jew in a nailed barrel down the Testaccio Hill. By the mid-sixteenth century, there are accounts of the Pope personally watching "races of barbarians, buffaloes, donkeys and Jews," from the balcony of Palazzo Venezia (where four centuries later Mussolini made his most famous public appearances.) By the 1580s, the Jews are known to have run the race naked; later, they evidently began to assume elaborate costumes, thereby reversing the originally humiliating intention of the event. In 1668, Pope Clement IX Rospigliosi abolished the "palio degli ebrei", substituting an annual tax of 300 scudi for the festive decoration of the street and a stylized ceremony of homage to the Pope on the Capitoline Hill.

(for the transmutation of the old Jew to pig, see here)). Goldberg might also have run across information on the expulsion of Jews from various parts of Italy in the Middle Ages and afterwards: Sicily (depending on my notes) in either 1492 or 1493 and Naples in 1541, and the forced conversions in Southern Italy in 1290. Perhaps he would have found something on the Jewish ghetto of Venice (and how Napoleon ended it). This is all pretty lugubrious stuff (especially when one needs a murderous tyrant to break down the gates), but all to the point on the so-called national character of Italians.

Or "Italians." I put the nation in the quotation marks in hope of responses to my invitation. Let my readers and co-bloggers, if they have anything handy, provide something less woeful about Italian Jews, something that might point us towards a discovering of intermingling, interdependent Jewish and Christian culture in Italy, medieval or otherwise, perhaps something like this, perhaps something less hostile even. And perhaps if we can come up with some thought on that we can help, at least in our fantasies, to lead Goldberg away from the poisonous invocation of "biology."

In the Middle Receives Cliopatria Award for Best Group Blog

The Cliopatria Awards for 2007 have been announced, and In the Middle is very pleased to have won Best Group Blog. Here is the award citation:

The Cliopatria Awards 2007

Best Group Blog: In the Middle

In the Middle is a medievalist blog, written by J. J. Cohen, Mary Kate Hurley, Eileen Joy, and Karl Steel. We were impressed by the blog's interdisciplinary approach, its consistently intelligent prose, its effective blend of wit and genuine scholarship, and its ability to follow the medieval wherever it might lead—from popular culture to high theory. In recent months, posts have ranged from Beowulf at the movies to the significance of animals in the middle ages. As one committee member remarked, this is, in many ways, a "model group blog."

Our gratitude to everyone who made this honor possible: our students, our teachers, our beloved readers, our families and friends and pets and hangers on ... and we especially thank the judges: Ancarett, Timothy Burke, Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, Rebecca Goetz, Paul Harvey, Sharon Howard, Elizabeth Klaczynski, Adam Roberts, and John Carter Wood. Merci mille fois Cliopatria!

Daniel T. Kline to guest post at ITM

We are honored to have Daniel Kline of the University of Alaska joining us for a short series on a recent tragedy in Anchorage. The shooting took the life of a student in Dan's graduate seminar on the binding of Isaac. Many readers will know Dan already from his fantastic book on Medieval Literature for Children. He also authored this essay, one of the most beautiful I have ever read.

Look for Dan's first guest post on Monday, January 14.

Welcome Inside Higher Ed Readers

Thanks, Scott Jaschik, for featuring Karl's recent letter to US News in your article ABC Thinks You’re Rich; ‘U.S. News’ Says Your Job Is Cushy.

I now have to run off and sweep up the large denomination bills that have been toppling from my pocket. My kids need some spending money for the day. Oh wait, to retain the cushiness of my job I think I'll call some graduate students and have them perform the labor. It's six in the morning, they'll be up...

Welcome History Carnival #60 readers

Thanks, Victorian Peeper, for including this post.

Today's Letter of Complaint: The Profession

US News and World report published a list of the best professions for 2008, ranging from clergy to hairstylist to fundraiser (!) to, yes, professor. Go ahead and read the short treatments of the job, here and here. You done? Does it sound right to you? Not to (irrepressible) me. I wrote a letter to Mr. Marty Nemko, which you can read below the fold.

Dear Marty Nemko:

I'm writing regarding your "executive summary" of being a professor. A professor at a 4-year institution probably teaches three courses a semester; he or she may well teach 4 courses. Let's say it's usually 10 1/2 hours in the classroom every week, assuming 85-minute courses meeting twice a week. Then there's another 3 hours of sitting in my office--okay, it's me I'm describing (I'm a new assistant professor at Brooklyn College in the English Department)--so, sure, that's 13 1/2 hours. Once a month, there's a couple of hours of departmental meetings. Then there are various smaller committees and meetings to which I owe my service, which gives me another, let's say, hour a week on average.

Not bad, right? And summers are off?

Except you left out two things: preparation time and grading. It takes me on average three hours to prepare for each class (some classes it's 6 hours, some it's only a half hour, if that). So that's another 18 hours a week. Then, being an English professor, I may have 2- or 3-page papers from each of my students to grade. There are between 20 and 30 students in each of my classes. This small deluge doesn't happen every week, but it happens often enough. At the end of the semester, I get around 800 pages to grade, bang, as I get research papers from all of my students. Some of them are good writers, so the grading's easy. Most of them need, well, to be educated, which means writing about 600 words of comments on each to help ensure that they don't make the same mistakes again. Any of them could be cheating, so I have to check that. There are also finals to grade, and believe me, I don't have a grad assistant. At Christmas, when I wasn't with family, I was grading.

So you see where your hours are off? On top of that: I'm returning page proofs today on a 25-page article I wrote, I have 3,000 words due in February on a topic I know very little about, I have two more articles, plus two conference papers, coming up in the next 8 months, and then there's the dissertation I have to get published as a book in the next seven years. Every so often I write a grant application, because it looks good if I can bring in some money. So: let's call it 50-60 hours a week, because that's what it's been for me, and that's what it's seemed to be for every professor I know in the humanities. Important professors do more: they deliver keynote addresses, serve as outside advisors for tenure cases, edit journals, write many, many letters of recommendation, and often chair their departments.

Finally: the pay range is way off. Some of the jobs I applied for paid $40k. This was in Idaho, sure, but still. My starting pay is in the low 50s, and this when I started getting my first master's in 1997 and finished my PhD ten years later (average time to completion for a literature PhD is around 9 years). When I hit associate professor, I may hit the 70s and 80s. When I finally hit full professor, maybe 12 years from now, I'll be making whatever counts as the 90s. One day maybe I'll crack six figures (the ceiling is about 120K in the CUNY system).

That said, I love my job. I get to hang out with really smart people--my colleagues and students included--I get to work on stuff that's interesting to me (it's not a job at the DMV, that's for sure), the dinner parties are never dull, mostly I set my own hours, I get rewarded for being smart, and, eventually, I will have excellent job security in a field concerned with something more than the bottom line, a field that values me *as a person.* That's important.

All best,
Karl Steel
ksteel@brooklyn.cuny.edu

(PS: on political leanings: the people who complain are mainly non academics. David Horowitz, chiefly, and so far as I know they're unable to provide any substantial facts about the relationship between politics and hiring. And certain departments--law, economics, some sciences--do trend conservative, you know.)

Festive Friday: Your Worst Gift Ever

Dr. Nokes recently posted pictures of a medieval-themed childhood birthday present that brought back some memories for me -- mainly, simmering resentment with a patina of vengefulness. After all, isn't that what Fisher Price toys are all about?

As I related in the comments at Unlocked Wordhoard, I had always wanted that big plastic castle, with its trap door and dungeon and working drawbridge. Yet it was my brother who received its pseudo-medieval finery. When I explained my deep hurt to my parents, I was rewarded on my own birthday with the most disappointing present I'd ever received: the Fisher Price House. What a misreading of my desires! This dinky domicile didn't come with a dragon or a queen or a portcullis. It did, however, feature a bed, a stove, a table and a tiny garage. What was I supposed to do with that thing, pretend I was a cast member of the Brady Bunch?

Eventually I did learn that the Fisher Price House made a great set for the staging of natural disasters. Its little plastic cocoon of domestic bliss was under siege by earthquakes, hurricanes, and (most fatally) a mudslide. After the latter, the Parental Authorities declared the house would remain an outdoor toy. I predict that future archaeologists will someday disinter it from the Cohen backyard and declare it a miniature temple with small, peg-like idols for convenient worship.

So what about you? What was the worst gift you ever received? (And please don't say "A copy of Medieval Identity Machines.")

(photo credit: no, that cute tyke isn't me. Cameras hadn't been culturally constructed yet when I was a kid. I found the picture -- with the very house in question -- here).

Some thoughts on Chaucer, history and Englishness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something Else

I had meant to post on Quick Study back in September, when a good piece appeared called Desiring Machine. Where did the autumn go? Related to this recent post at ITM, here is a short quote from Quick Study on blogs versus other publishing fora. Scott McLemee observes during the course of his letter to a harsh critic:

A blog is something else. I am not paid to blog. A blog is someplace to let off steam, or jot down a stray thought, or make a recommendation or indulge in a remark or rant. Should a topic interest me enough to write about it in an essay for a magazine or newspaper, then doing so is certainly an option. It involves more time and attention than these blog posts do. But even that is not the decisive distinction. The main thing about the blog is that it's a casual format, and utterly subject to my discretion, not to say whim.

A blog is indeed something else, and that else is what attracted me to the form. I suspect that I've begun to lose sight of else during the two years ITM has breathed air. My new year's blog resolution is to embrace blogdom's casual format better, to embrace the else, and therefore to experiment more with ITM.

And, since we're talking New Year, my colleague Margaret Soltan offers a New Year's Eve rumination over at University Diaries. She takes as her point of departure some lines from Philip Larkin's "Aubade" and offers:

Life is about fighting your way clear to an independent identity and to as much purity of soul as you can sustain under the weight of wrong beginnings and shitty middles.

May In the Middle never become "Shitty Middles." All hail the purity of soul that beckons from the else.

Felix sit annus novus

In the Middle wishes all of its readers a very happy 2008.

Thanks for reading us, conversing with us, challenging us, transforming us. We look forward to spending the year ahead with you. Check out the list of past favorites below, and please let us know if there is anything you would like to see more or less of in the future. This blog is a living organism, and you, dear readers, are its raison d'être.

Memorable Posts of 2007

As another year trickles to its close, I offer a roundup of some of the posts that have stayed with me. It's an idiosyncratic group, based solely on the criterion of "Posts that have burned themselves into my neurons sufficiently that I remember them at the moment I am typing this."

I'm sure I've overlooked some gems, so I'd be interested to hear what my cobloggers and our readers think.


JJC
Are Bioluminescent Bunnies Queer?
No Future: Terminus
Frontpaging the Future
Who mourns for Lindow Man?
For Eileen: A Shark in Formaldehyde
At the Holocaust Museum
Augustine, a Giant's Tooth, and Particles of Alterity
At Avebury
Infinite Realms

Eileen
The Terrible Beauty of Monsters
Not Knowing in Advance What Forms our Humanness Will Take
The Last One to Die, Please Turn Out the Light
Forks in the Rift of Time
In Praise of Surfing and Epicureanism
Art Reveals More of Life than Life Does
The Loving Hope of Working Groups
Medieval Studies, Unsettled Subjectivities
The Weight of History

Karl
Another Nature
The Child Gives Himself to the Wolf
What Does Caninophilia Matter?
Mute Beasts
Is it Wrong to Spurn the Gifts of Nature?
How About Them Fightin' Binaries?
Gay Wizards
The Disavowed Pleasures of Guthlac
The Bible Swoops Out

MKH
Only Connect
Endangered Languages, Dying Wor(l)ds
"But History Has Already Written That Story"
Dissertation Fragments
Ruins and Poetry
Dissertation Fragments II
Dissertation Fragments III

Michael O'Rourke
History's Tears
Fisting and Other Gifts for Graduate Students

Group
The ITMBC4DSoMA series

Geoffrey Chaucer
Chaucer Speaks

Dissertation Fragments III: The Prospectus

For those who remember the first and second posts in this little series, I present the "final" installment of my dissertation fragments (just in time for the new year). The first post, "Two False Starts and an Abstract" saw me attempting to think through the idea of horizons as a way for me to make connections between texts and humans. The second post, "Horizons of History" was the opening to the lecture I gave at Wake Forest in late November. Now, I present you all with the fruits of my long labor: The Dissertation Prospectus.

I've felt reluctant to post it over the past few days -- it was provisionally approved (with necessary modifications) the day before Christmas, so I'm only just now re-reading it. Part of my reluctance to post it was, I think, my own discomfort with the prospectus genre. First of all, it is a genre that is made to be changed, so to speak -- everyone I've spoken to has said that their prospectus differed wildly from their final product. I would imagine the same will hold for me (particularly given how little I know Saints Lives at present), and there's a small part of me that would rather this early ambition-filled version of what I want to do gather dust silently, rather than continue to speak when its successor is a work in its own right. Further, it's hardly a perfected document. I think the major flaw in it is the terribly detached tone: then again, the prospectus seems a quite artificial writing project, if a necessary one. What I feel I've accomplished in this version is a coherent narration of my project -- in the end, I suppose, what one ought to have accomplished by writing it. I also think I've been forced to clarify my thinking, fit it into specific work that's going on in the field right now, and make it my own enough to hold weight. That said, there are a few flaws going in.

First of all -- there is no extended bibliography. I am working on that -- though I have one, it's not exactly typed up at present. Hopefully I'll get there, and when I do, I'll post it here. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly: I feel like I've lost a lot of the dialogue I was trying to establish with Latour, Deleuze and Guattari, etc. I think that's necessary -- I need to explore the texts in a way that allows them to speak first and fully, even if I have a critical or theoretical "hunch" that involves Latour, etc. In short: I have to let the Anglo-Saxon texts dictate the way in which I use theory, and not vice-versa. That seems obvious, and indeed it IS obvious. However, I wanted to articulate it here: most importantly, because it's something I struggle with in my work, in no small part due to my penchant for the philosophical and the conceptual. Thirdly -- and this one is the really important bit -- I'm missing an entire chapter or so. It's the one I'm going to write on Beowulf, which will engage the questions I began raising in the second of the Fragments posts. The reason I did not write it up as a chapter yet -- and the reason I'm still not sure it will be a proper "chapter" -- is that I think I want Beowulf to perform a kind of a linking function. That is to say, I want Beowulf to be present in my dissertation in each of the chapters. I don't know that that will work -- which is, of course, why I need to write up the summary as a nominal "Chapter V" to the dissertation and let it go at that.

At any rate, here it is: The Horizons of History: Writing (and Rewriting) Anglo-Saxon Collectivities in the Middle Ages. Thoughts, questions, comments, bibliographical additions are all welcome and indeed sorely needed.

The Horizons of History: Writing (and Rewriting) Anglo-Saxon Collectivities in the Middle Ages

In the wake of the theories of narrative expounded upon in the 1980s by Hayden White and Paul Ricoeur, the approach taken by medieval studies vis a vis the study of early “historical texts” has benefited greatly from the new ways of thinking through the relationship between narrative convention and the functions of history in society.[1] Monika Otter, for example, has used the relationship between fiction and history in the twelfth century to explore what she (following Ricoeur) has termed the referentiality of medieval Latin historical texts, or to put it plainly, the degree to which “fictionality, while not embraced as it is in vernacular romance, becomes a playful and (and sometimes alarming) possibility in Latin historical writing.”[2] In the introduction to their 2006 edited volume entitled Narrative and History in the Early Medieval West, Elizabeth Tyler and Ross Balzaretti draw on the narrative theory of White to argue for literary practice not as a way “to look through form to facts” but rather as a way “in which the form of the text itself becomes a way into our understanding the past,” and thus enable “literary and historical methodologies [to] meet as equal partners.”[3] The result of an interest in the ways in which form and content merge in the historical texts of the medieval past raises a number of questions, not least of which is “if early medieval historical writings were representations of the past made for present purposes,” how were these representations made, who made them, and what effect or influence did they have in the formation of early medieval identity?[4] Further: By whom were they used, and to what purpose?

Simultaneously, postcolonial thinking about the status of the nation in the formation of “modernity” has begun to question the conventions with which we approach the medieval past. Although some early theorists of the “nation” place its inception in the eighteenth or nineteenth century,[5] more recent critics have argued for an earlier date for the beginnings of nation-building, with the most far-reaching of these looking to Anglo-Saxon England for the beginnings, in protonationalism, of what would become the modern English nation-state. Adrian Hastings’ assertion of vernacularity as a key component in the beginnings of nationalist sentiment has found eager adherents in Anglo-Saxon studies, which, we are often reminded, boasts the first vernacular translation of the Bible.[6] Kathleen Davis’ influential work on the preface to the Pastoral Care emphasizes the rhetorical strategies of the text, which far from describing the world “as it truly was” was engaging in its own “nation-building” technique, attempting to set up a relationship between past and present which would allow for the continued growth of the political influence of the Angelcynn.[7]

My dissertation will explore the ways in which historical literature, broadly defined to include chronicles, world-histories and saints’ lives, functions in the construction of collective identities in the Anglo-Saxon period. My specific interest is in texts that were inherited from – or passed on to – cultures outside Anglo-Saxon England. By examining texts that were initially written by cultures predating the Anglo-Saxons, as well as texts which originated in Anglo-Saxon England but were passed on to later cultures, I will explore the ways in which these texts not only provided materials and models on which the Anglo-Saxons could base their own literary culture, but were themselves altered in the process of translation and transmittal. The texts I will examine are intricately linked to the process of nation building outlined by Davis, and though I am not as invested in the identification of protonationalistic tendencies in the texts, I will be focusing on the ways in which the nation-building process left its mark on the texts which were used as instruments for the imagining of ethnic and national identity.

Further, I will use both texts that were translated into Old English as well as texts which were generated in the period in order to explore the ways in which Anglo-Saxon culture interacted with texts more generally, not only altering them for their contemporaries (i.e., to be legible at the time of their reworking or composition) but also to present a certain textually based vision of the place of Anglo-Saxon England in the wider world. By examining these texts, which span a time period from the probable composition of the Old English Orosius, translated in the 900s slightly after the reign of King Alfred to the Matthew Paris translation of the Life of Edward the Confessor in the thirteenth century, I will examine the ways in which “Anglo-Saxon” culture was made both in and after the period traditionally assigned to Anglo-Saxon England, emphasizing the role played by the texts in question in thinking through what it means to be “Anglo-Saxon.”



I. Alfredian Temporalities: Time and Translation in the Old English Orosius

[The first chapter will examine the Old English Orosius, and the temporalities which intersect both in textual translation as well as the re-appropriation of generic convention across historical time, positing “the nation” as a network in which texts, peoples and generic forms play a role in the creation of identity.]

The “Alfredian Translation Program” in Anglo-Saxon England offers a particularly complicated view of translation as it relates to the issues of narrative history, national history, and time. Instituted during the reign of Alfred the Great in the late ninth century, the series of translations includes Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care and Dialogues, Boethius’ The Consolations of Philosophy, Saint Augustine’s Soliloquies, the Venerable Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, a prose version of the Psalms, and – my interest in this paper – a translation of Paulus Orosius’ Historiarum Adversum Paganos Libri VII. Despite the sustained critical consideration of the prefaces to the Alfredian translations, however, the texts themselves – books described in the preface to the Pastoral Care as ‏‏ða ðe niebeðearfosta sien eallum monnum to wiotonne (“those which are most needful for all men to know”) are rarely the subject of much critical scrutiny, except where they diverge from their source texts in culturally significant ways.[8] That the prefaces – the locus of “originality” in the works in the sense of forming a clear boundary between the Latin and the Old English – have undergone such sustained critical inquiry to the neglect of the works they come before is significant to the study of the Alfredian program.

In this chapter of my dissertation, I examine the Old English version of Orosius’ Historiarum Adversum Paganos Libri VII. I argue that a more sustained reading of the text, incorporating not only the “original” additions of the Old English translator but also the interests and execution of the text as a whole allow a more nuanced understanding of the multiplicity of temporalities that exist in the space of the text. This is not to say that the “original” parts of the Old English Orosius are not important. The additions to the geographical preface are instructive as to the scope and imagination of Anglo-Saxon England concerning both the northern geography and the peoples who inhabited it. The alterations to other portions of the text are instructive as the extent to which classical mythologies were known, and important to the cultural imagination, in Anglo-Saxon England. However, as a text in translation, the Old English Orosius is itself home to competing temporalities that are, I argue, instructive as to the ways in which that translation functions in terms of time. The Old English Orosius, in its translation and transformation of the Latin text of the Historiarum Adversum Paganos Libri VII becomes a kind of hybrid space in which different temporalities interact and compete. These temporalities inhere in the problem of voice within the text. The hybrid space of the text – part Latin source material, part Old English invention, but with no specific delineations between the two (geographical preface excepted)--plays host to a variety of tensions and difficulties resulting from the anachronistic aspect of the text as what Malcolm Godden has described as a “monument to a fallen world.”[9] By reading the contexts of the two works, I will provide a sense of the tensions between the two texts in terms of the situation in history into which each falls. In the examination of a specific phrase—the cwæð Orosius (“Orosius said”)—I will position the time of Latinity and the representation of Orosius as indicators of a connection being made across times, as it were. In my reading, the Latin Historiarum Adversum Paganos and the culture which generated it become active participants in the shaping of an Old English identity through the text of the Old English Orosius. Drawing on Latour to argue for the Orosius as part of a collectivity formed in and by the different cultures and times represented in the various texts of the Alfredian corpus of translations, in this chapter I will raise questions about the status of this text “most needful for all men to know” vis a vis Jakobson’s formulation of translation in “Some Linguistic Aspects of Translation: as “translator of what messages? betrayer of what values?”[10]

II. The “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle”: Narratives in the Winchester, Canterbury, and Peterborough MSs

[Chapter two will examine the Winchester, Canterbury and Peterborough manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in order to explore the ways in which group identity changes across time and textual traditions, and will more specifically address the alliance of different genres in the creation of collectivities in the singular “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.”]

In her recent work on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Alice Sheppard notes the specifically pedagogical aims of the texts, making the assertion that “they teach their readers what ‘makes’ and Anglo-Saxon and what defines Anglo-Saxon kings and kingdoms.”[11] In thinking through the ramifications of this kind of a “writing of an Anglo-Saxon identity and the creation of a people who are known as the Angelcynn,” Sheppard’s main interest is in the narratives of kingship which are found throughout the various MSs, and for the most part, she limits her considerations to specific narratives in each MS. My interest, in choosing the Winchester, Canterbury and Peterborough MSs is to examine the ways in which narrative as a whole changes across the period during which the greater “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle” was being composed. The motion forward in time from the early Winchester MS to the post-Conquest Peterborough MS suggests what Hayden White has identified as a major difference between annalists and chroniclers, in which “annals represent historical reality as if real events did not display the form of a story, [while] the chronicler represents it as if real events appeared to human consciousness in the form of unfinished stories.”[12] Working with ideas of narrativity, I wish to demonstrate that the alliances (over time) of different generic materials (including Saints Lives and later chronicle literature) had a profound effect on the composition of the later MSs of the Chronicle, suggesting that in the presentation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as we see it in the most recent edition (by Swanton) is perhaps more telling than we think. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle itself forms a collectivity of materials that differ in not merely their genre but also their composition, in that the representation of the Angelcynn that the work as a whole gives is very much influenced by the composite structure in which it is articulated.

III. Saints and Soil: Inscribing English Sanctity in Ælfric’s Lives

In writing his Lives of the Saints, Ælfric translates a number of hagiographic texts out of Latin, emphasizing in his preface not only his fidelity to the original but also issuing a warning that any copyists are not to alter the texts in question when they are further copied down. Among his chosen saints are not only traditional saints of Late Antique origin, but saints of England: both the saints and the cults of their veneration originated in the British isles. In the Anglo-Saxon tradition of the cult of certain saints, the ground on which the saints died (usually through their martyrdom) maintains a certain connection with their holiness: it often is capable of curing illness or disability. Examples of this from the Latin tradition include that of Saint Maur, and Saint Martin, among others. Most often this is through the presence of their relics, and churches or shrines are built in the place at which the saint perished. In the case of Saint Æðeldryð, the body of saint itself becomes the conduit and locus of miracles—further, the fact of its incorruptibility becomes a point of connection for religious belief through time, a proof preserved from before the time Bede wrote of it, git oð ‏þisne dæg (yet until this day). Saint Alban, too, becomes a point of gathering for pre- and post-persecution Christianity in the area of England: the place of his interment connects Christians across time, both before and after the reign of Diocletian (the emperor whom Ælfric cites as the perpetrator of the persecutions) as well as after the re-institution of Christianity by Augustine after it had once again fallen away.

Æðeldryð and Alban suggest a connection of faith across time which inheres in the body of the saint. Saint Swiðun, the last of the trio of Anglo-Saxon saints I will examine, represents a kind of special case. Although his body is interred in the cathedral at Winchester, his vita proper is forgotten by the time of its inscription into Ælfric’s work and there is no body featured in the text. The fact of Swiðun’s existence is known only in miracles, and it appears throughout the text that there is a certain degree to which Swiðun’s sanctity is constituted not by the preservation of his earthly body, but by the works done through him in the world. Swiðun, termed in the text se‏þe nu niwan com (he who newly came), breaks down traditional ways of understanding the sanctity of saints in England, and in so doing, suggests a different model for connection with them. By looking at these three saints of England, I will argue that the community formed through them extends in time not only in their stories and in Anglo-Saxon England, but moreover with the stories of other saints in Ælfric’s Lives.

IV. A King’s Life: Pre and Post Conquest Narratives of Edward the Confessor

Edward the Confessor, the last king of the line of Cerdic and so of the “Anglo-Saxons” proper (succeeded only by the Harald Godwinson before the “Norman” conquest), occupies a distinctive role in the history of Anglo-Saxon England. A “holy” king (not unlike the earlier King Alfred, whose vita was written by Asser in the tenth century), Edward’s function as regards “England” – both pre and post conquest – changed considerably through time. In her 1988 dissertation (unpublished), Martha Blalock focuses on what she calls the “legend” of Edward – literally, a reading of his life. She separates the historical materials from the hagiographic materials in so doing – classifying such works as the “Anglo-Saxon” Chronicles and the chronicles of Florence of Worcester in the former category and the various Latin and vernacular lives of Edward in the latter. In her analysis of the lives she suggests that “his legend can best be understood as a body of “accurate” or “inaccurate” historical facts which has been made to conform to saintly models” 13; thus, in assessing the hagiographical material, Blalock finds that the later, vernacular works show the influence of the “new historicity” she argues characterize the twelfth century renaissance, as opposed to the Latin lives, which are more traditional in form.

In re-examining the lives of Edward the Confessor, I will argue that in order to understand the interaction between genres in the lives which are composed about him, scholars must turn to earlier models of “saintly” kings, and open the scholarship to the possibility that hagiography also – and at an earlier date – influenced the recording of history in Anglo-Saxon England, most particularly in the portrayals of Kings Alfred, Oswald, Edmund and Edgar. The saintly life of Edward the Confessor might then be best understood as a reading of the historical text already molded into the traditions of hagiography at the time of its inscription; the result is a composite image of a king whose power waxes and wanes with his holiness.

footnotes

[1] Hayden White, The Content of the Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (vols. 1 & 3) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

[2] Monika Otter, Inventiones (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996) 19.

[3] Elizabeth Tyler and Ross Balzaretti, eds. Narrative and History in the Early Medieval West, (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006) 7.

[4] Yitzhak Hen and Matthew Innes, eds. The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 1.

[5] Cf. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991); Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

[6] Cf. Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Hastings’ (extremely western) examination of nationalism places a great deal of emphasis on the translation of the Bible as a step on the (all too teleological notion of) the road to nationhood.

[7] Kathleen Davis, “National Writing in the Ninth Century: A Reminder for Postcolonial Thinking about the Nation,” JMEMS 28.3 (Fall 1998)

[8] e.g., Davis. See also Nicole Discenza, The King’s English: Strategies of Translation in the Old English Boethius (New York: SUNY Press, 2005). Culturally significant divergences in the Old English Orosius include not only the geographical preface, which adds entire sections on the Northern geography related (purportedly) to King Alfred himself, but also certain extensions of mythological stories that would not have been familiar to Anglo-Saxon England.

[9] Godden, "The Anglo-Saxons and the Goths: Rewriting the Sack of Rome," Anglo-Saxon England 31 (2002) 61.

[10] Roman Jakobson, “Some Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, ed. Schulte and Biguenet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) 151.

[11] Alice Sheppard, Families of the King, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004) 11-12

[12] Hayden White, The Content of Form, 5.

[13] Martha Graham Blalock, The Vita Sancti Edwardi Regis et Confessoris and the Vernacular Lives of Edward the Confessor (unpublished dissertation), 108.

cross posted at Old English in New York

Two seasonal stories involving worms

I.

That the play is the tragedy, "Man,"
And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.

So ends the famous poem by Edgar Allan Poe. For the holidays I gave my ten year old son a book of Poe short stories and poems. "Conqueror Worm" turned out to be one of his favorites. A review of the verses in his words follows:

"It was about an insignificant worm that conquers life. Life is like a show at a theater, but at the end it's over and it is a sad and tragic ending. The one thing that benefits from the tragedy is the Worm, which has conquered more than Julius Caesar, Attila the Hun, Alexander the Great, and Genghis Khan. The poem is good for anyone who is Goth."

Personally I was too nerdy to be Goth as a teen, but I was certainly addicted to Poe. I've been to his grave in Baltimore a few times, and once toasted him with absinthe. I also have a former student who has done some good work on Poe. And apparently I've turned my son Goth via Poe magic.

II.
Below, a story being told this season by my daughter, age three and a half. I have no idea why she has been telling it or where she got it from, but Santa Worm has already entered the Cohen family vocabulary.

"Santa Worm brings presents to his nice friends, all of them. He likes to give worm presents to worms. He wears a small red hat. He looks like Santa but he's different. He has a Santa Worm sleigh with worm reindeer and a Rudolph worm. There are no pictures of him because he is too small to take pictures. That's it."