Hugh Despenser's body may have been discovered

Sir Hugh Despenser the Younger's mutilated corpse may have been unearthed at Hulton Abbey, according to the Telegraph: Abbey body identified as gay lover of Edward II.

From the article:

The decapitated remains, buried at Hulton Abbey, Staffs, have intrigued experts since they were uncovered during the 1970s and now Mary Lewis, an anthropologist, says she has uncovered compelling evidence of their true identity. The manner of execution, carbon-dating of the bones, and the absence of several parts of the body all point towards Sir Hugh being the victim, she said. "If the remains are those of Sir Hugh Despenser the Younger, then this is the first time such an execution victim has been identified," she added.

Sir Hugh insinuated himself into the king's favour by backing him in his battles with the barons. Through a series of ruthless deals, he consolidated a huge fortune, winning himself a legion of enemies in the process, including Edward's wife, Queen Isabella.

His downfall came when the queen and her ally, Roger Mortimer, deposed the king in 1326. Sir Hugh was judged a traitor and a thief. He was hanged and, still conscious, castrated, disembowelled and then quartered before his head was displayed on London Bridge.

The Other Middle Ages, A Place to Believe In, and the Fluidity of Frontiers

“. . . to take the figure of the stranger as simply present is to overlook and forget the very relationships of social antagonism that produce the stranger as a figure in the first place. Such a fetishization of the stranger, indeed, such an ontology of the stranger as given in and to the world, conceals how ‘the stranger’ comes into being through the marking out of habitable places, bodies, and terrains of knowledge. To talk of the migrant as stranger is not sufficient. It cannot deal with the complexities of the histories, not only of the displacement of peoples, but the demarcation of places and spaces of belonging.”—Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality

I am just back from Wake Forest University [Mary Kate’s alma mater, I might add], where I was graciously invited by Gillian Overing to talk to the students enrolled in an honors seminar she is co-teaching with Ulrike Weithaus, titled “The Other Middle Ages.” The students had been discussing Beowulf just before my visit, so it was decided I would focus on that, and since alterity is one of the primary focuses of the course, I had to think about what I might do with that in relation to Beowulf. Although I think everyone knows that I have written about Beowulf quite a bit, more recently my attention has wandered to the issue of “unsettled” and “migrant” inter-subjectivity in the Saint Guthlac narratives [Felix’s eighth-century Vita as well as the Old English poems Guthlac A and B; go here for some of my initial ruminations on that], and I decided to bring in some of the reading and thinking I have been doing recently, relative to that project, on the subject of the relation of frontiers [geographical, cultural, and otherwise] and Otherness, especially as discussed by François Hartog in The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History (trans. Janet Lloyd; Berkeley, 1988).

More specifically, I wanted to share with the students Hartog’s commentary on Herodotus’s commentary on the Scythians’ supposed “extreme hatred of all foreign customs, particularly those in use among the Greeks” [Histories, Book IV], by way of the examples of two Scythians, Anacharsis and Scyles, who, in different ways, go “Greek” and pay with their lives as a result. The relevance of Herodotus’s narratives to Beowulf is not as remote as you might imagine, since the Scythians are also the nomadic Getae, a “giant” and warrior race famed in the classical period for their fierce resistance to the Greeks [and also classified as the Greek empire’s “barbarian” and “wandering” Other], and who, in the medieval world, as John Niles has written, by way of the work of Jane Acomb Leake’s The Geats of Beowulf: A Study in the Geographical Mythology of the Middle Ages [Wisconsin, 1967], “were regarded as common ancestors of the Jutes, Danes, Goths, and Gautar. They stood in relation to these tribes as an Ur-Germanic people of remarkable size and prowess. Their homeland was a great place for dragons, among other such marvelous inhabitants as the Amazons, cynocephali, anthrophagi, and sea-serpents who are described in the Marvels of the East” [“Locating Beowulf in Literary History,” Exemplaria 5.1 (March 1993), p. 101]. Further, and more pointedly, “the Hygelac who, in Beowulf, rules over the Geatas and dies at the mouth of the Rhine, appears in the Liber Monstrorum under the name of Higlacus; and there (contrary to Gregory of Tours, who calls him a Dane) he is said to have ruled over the Getae” [Niles, p. 100]. In this sense, I would tentatively offer, the Beowulf who crosses from Geatland to Daneland in the poem would have carried with him, for an Anglo-Saxon readership, certain connotations of a primevally strange, if genealogically familiar, Otherness. He would be, however subtly or uncannily, related to the Getae of Herodotus’s Histories, who are said to be such fierce warriors that they use the skulls of their slain enemies as drinking cups and also the skins flayed from the right arms of those same enemies, with the shape of their fingers intact, as quivers for their arrows. How, then, to separate in one’s mind the terror of the genealogy of a Beowulf from the anthrophagy of a Grendel, or to ultimately differentiate a Scythian from a Geat from a Dane from a misshapen child of Cain? From where, in other words, does Beowulf really come, not only for the Danes, but for his more modern readers in Anglo-Saxon England? How would the distance be measured [geographically and culturally] from Geatland to Daneland, in relation to the distance that could be measured from Grendel’s mere to Hrothgar’s Heorot, and why might that matter? Who, in Daneland, is the ultimate stranger, the ultimate foreigner, and is that “foreignness” or “strangeness” measured by miles traveled, or by the contours and gait of one’s body, the forms of one’s language and habits of living, the architecture of one’s “home,” the landscape in which that home is situated? What does it mean to be out of place, as opposed to in place, in the world of the poem?

Of course, the language of the poet is such that, in terms of shared customs and histories and cultural values and language, the Geats and Danes are entirely similar to each other (and perhaps, also, to an ancestral model the Anglo-Saxons might have imagined for themselves), while Grendel appears to come, as Hrothgar says at one point, from “I know not where” [ic ne wat hwæder, l. 1331], bearing, as Beowulf points out, an “unknown violence” [uncuðne nið, l. 276]. But somehow, the only person who can match, or out-match, this violence, is Beowulf himself, who travels the furthest distances in the poem—both geographically and culturally—and is the ultimate border-crosser, the ultimate migrant, whereas Grendel and his mother can almost be viewed as something more aboriginal, more in place, something very old and ancient that is always re-arriving [or re-stirring from below] to disturb the “newness” of Heorot and its vertical “purchase” upon the landscape. And the poem would seem to be interested, especially in its language (which, after all, marks Beowulf and Grendel and Grendel’s mother and the dragon as aglæcan, or those who “violate a natural or moral law”), in what Homi Bhaba has characterized as a predominant feature of modernity: “the emergence of the interstices—the overlap and displacement of domains of difference—. . . [in which] the intersubjective and collective experience of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated. How are subjects formed ‘in-between,’ or in excess of the sum of the ‘parts’ of difference” [The Location of Culture, p. 2]?

Speaking of the “in-between,” we can return to Herodotus and his account of the stories of the two Scythians, Anacharis and Scyles, which can be summarized as follows: Anacharsis was a philosopher [which already marks him, in a sense, as ‘Greek’] who, after having spent a good deal of his life traveling all over the world, was on his way home to Scythia [the ‘hinterland’ of the Greek colonies on the Black Sea coast—today, parts of northern Bulgaria and southern Romania], when he touched down in Cyzicus [now part of Turkey], where “he found the inhabitants celebrating with much pomp and magnificence a festival to the Mother of the Gods, and was himself induced to make a vow to the goddess, whereby he engaged, if he got back safe and sound to his home, that he would give her a festival and a night-procession in all respects like those which he had seen in Cyzicus.” When Anacharsis arrives back in Scythia, he immediately takes himself to Hylaia [‘the woodland’] “and there went through all the sacred rites with the tabour in his hand, and the images tied to him.” By complete chance, another Scythian sees him engaged in these rites and reports the occurrence to the king Saulinus [Anacharsis’s brother, actually], who shoots and kills him with an arrow while he is still in the throes of his worship of the goddess.

The story of Scyles is a bit more complex: we are told that he is the son of a Scythian king and a Greek [or, Istrian] mother, through whom he learned the Greek language and Greek literature. When his father died, he became king and inherited one of his father’s wives, but because “he disliked the Scythic mode of life,” whenever he was in the colony of the Borysthenites, Olbia, he would “make it his habit” to leave his army outside the gates of the town, “and, having entered the walls by himself, and carefully closed the gates, to exchange his Scythian dress for Grecian garments, and in this attire walk about the forum, without guards or retinue.” Scyles lives exactly as the Greeks, offering sacrifices to their gods, eventually even building a house there and taking a “native” wife. Although he was very secretive about this “other” life, what finally undoes [or, discloses] him, according to Herodotus, is his desire to participate in the Bacchic mysteries, for which the Scythians hold much scorn. As soon as Scyles participates in one of these “raves,” one of the Borysthenites runs to the Scythians to say, “You Scyths laugh at us because we rave when the god seizes us. But now our god has seized upon your king, who raves like us, and is maddened by the influence.” In short, Scyles is discovered in the throes of a bacchic ritual and is ultimately beheaded by the Scythians.

Hartog raises several interesting questions and ideas regarding the stories of Anacharsis and Scyles:

“How do Anacharsis and Scyles move from one place to another? What spaces do they cross? In the case of Scyles, the schema is quite simple: he moves to and fro between the ēthea of the Scythians (the word denotes an animal’s lair, one’s habitual domicile) and the town of the Borysthenites, namely, Olbia. He leaves the Scythian space, a space more animal than human, where he feels ill at ease (he detests the Scythian lifestyle) and sets off for the town, but the narrative specifies that he leaves his train on the outskirts . . . in that intermediary zone outside the domain of the ēthea but not yet in that of the astu [urban area]. It is as if it were impossible for the Scythians to progress any further, for they are not bilingual.” [pp. 145–46].

“[In the case of Anacharsis]: (1) Is the Hylaia a completely Scythian space or is it a particular, even marginal, part of that space? (2) What is the position of the town of Cyzicus in relation to the ‘Greek’ space? Is it a particular part of that space? These are questions that cannot be answered simply by examining the journeys from a geographical point of view. . . . What is Hylaia? In the Greek the word means ‘wooded’ but also ‘wild’; as is to be expected, the forest belongs to the border spaces and thus to wildness. . . . Just as, once its doors are closed, Olbia offers Scyles shelter to do things that the Scythians must not behold, similarly the Hylaia, into which Anacharsis plunges . . . provides him with a hidden space where he can celebrate a cult the Scythians refuse to recognize. . . . Through the metapor of looking, the narrative conveys the spatial ambiguity of the Hylaia and Oblia: even when you are screened by the forest or the fortifications, a look, whether a chance one or one with intent to harm, may at any time discover you.” [pp. 146, 147, 148]

“Cyzicus and Olbia are situated on the very edges of Greek space. Might we postulate a homology here and suggest that the same might be said of the Mother of the Gods and Dionysus? . . . . If the Mother of the Gods does seem a truly marginal figure, the process of Dionysus, in contrast, is (apparently) known everywhere, throughout the non-Greek space as well as the Greek one. But the interesting question that the text now raises is the manner in which Dionysus and the Mother of the Gods operated as criteria of Greekness not only for the Scythians and Greeks but also for the actual addressees of this discourse, Herodotus’s audience.” [pp. 151, 152]

“. . . so that their radical rejection (on the part of the Scythians) may be as meaningful as possible to Herodotus’s addressee, perhaps these two powers, the Mother and Dionysus, should be seen as both Greek and, at the same time, as close to the Scythians. The fact is that they must be perceived to be Greek by the addressee if the behavior of the Scythians is to make sense and in order to illustrate the general rule put forward by the narrative. But they must also be recognized to be close to the Scythians not only geographically but culturally, if their rejection is to astonish and take on its full meaning. These are deities that it ought to be possible for them to accommodate easily (by reason of their origin, the rituals they entail, their ‘barbaric’ aspect); yet these are the very deities that they utterly reject (as Greek). In this way, the explicit moral of the story is further reinforced: truth lies on this side of the frontier, error beyond it.” [p. 156]

[I would note here, too, that if you are familiar with your Herodotus, you may recall his account of Darius’s attempted “invasion” of Scythia, in which he built a bridge over the Ister River and futilely chased the Scythian army without ever laying eyes on them—in this sense, there is a “frontier,” the river itself, which can be crossed, but there is also no frontier, because there is ultimately no way to get into Scythia, such that the Scythians could be captured; as Hartog puts it, the “aporia” of the Scythians is “unaffected” by Darius’s crossing over into their so-called “territory,” and they are everywhere and nowhere at once.]

How this all might relate to Beowulf [or to “unsettled” inter-subjectivities in the Guthlac narratives], I leave aside for the moment [or rather—well, I’m still thinking about that!], but I want to end by plugging here the really excellent essay collection edited by Clare Lees and Gillian Overing, A Place to Believe In: Locating Medieval Landscapes [Pennsylvania State, 2006], in which, late in the evening before my meeting with the students at Wake Forest, I stumbled, oh so happily, across the essay by Kelly Wickham-Crowley, “Living on the Ecg: The Mutable Boundaries of the Land and Water in Anglo-Saxon Contexts,” and which I believe may provide a suturing point between Hartog, Bhaba, and Beowulf. Of her essay’s intentions, Wickham-Crowley writes,

“I want to look at what I have called ‘mutable boundaries,’ to consider how water—especially through Alfred’s time and that of the Viking incursions—was an integral part of the Anglo-Saxon perception of ‘landscape.’ The mutability of the ‘edge’ between land and water, as recorded in Anglo-Saxon texts and archaeology, fits with a way of thinking that considered land/water insersections as a habit of perception or vision, coloring and marking more than the physical environment. . . . if change is paradoxically taken as a constant [because water and land in a sea island environment are always in flux with each other], as a habit of vision, can we track how that view influences a culture defining or negotiating identities in a new place?” [pp. 85, 86]

Wickham-Crowley surveys a wide array of “negotiations” of fluid “sites,” inherent in the influence of rising and sinking sea levels in early medieval British agriculture and settlement, the tidal culture/liminal ecg spaces in the Cuthbert and Guthlac narratives [which set up saintly persons as impermeable enclosures in fluid environments], the elevated pagan burial sites that persisted into the ninth century, the “wandering villages” of early Anglo-Saxon settlement, the role of water in Old English elegy and in Danish-Viking experience, and the temporally-culturally multilayered archaeology of Whitby (which itself possessed gender fluidity]. Ultimately, Wickham-Crowley concludes that,

“Where does all this negotiating of edges and boundaries lead us in considering traces of Anglo-Saxon attitudes? Boundaries distinguish differences on either side, yet have identities and characters of their own. Introducing water into landscape considerations gives us a variable that suggests permeable, dynamic boundaries; in some circumstances, such as the siting of religious foundations, their inherent uncertainty and ambiguity may be cultivated. Use of the environment demonstrates habits of mind, of attitudes, influences, and choices. . . . Is the ‘haunting’ of fens in sources such as Guthlac’s Life, or the siting of places in areas known to have importance to pre-Christian believers, a symptom of the return of the oppressed or repressed? That Alfred cultivates the ‘betweenness’ of fens to salvage England by retreating to Athelney is perhaps more resonant than we realized. The very mutability of the fens, their resistance to clear paths and boundaries, allows him to resist, negotiate, and reestablish the boundary of being Anglo-Saxon figuratively and literally in his treaty with the Danes, in his recording of travelers’ voyages, and in his vision and re-envisioning of English history and languages.” [pp. 106–7]

If Wickham-Crowley is right, and the “very mutability” and “betweenness” of the fens and other "watery" sites is cultivated, not just by Alfred, but by many who dwelled and moved through early medieval Britain, in order to establish and reestablish the “boundaries” of “being Anglo-Saxon” or “being English,” how does this bring us back to the struggles being played out in a poem like Beowulf, which both privileges the exile who continually moves back and forth through deep seas, wild moors, and bloody lakes, and also condemns the exile who makes of the deepest waters his home [and also doesn’t know how to stay put]? We might say that one fluid power [Christian, northwestern-centric, proto-national] simply usurps another [chthonic-demonic, Eastern, stateless], and thereby establishes what, today, we call “order," or what we call "human." But that is only a beginning.

For your Sunday amusement

Middle English air guitar (via Matt at Golempoem)

Two Short Posts of Interest (to me, and I hope you too)

Stephanie Trigg examines her appalled reaction to John Howard's joining the Order of the Garter. What happens when one's grotesque political contemporaries intrude upon one's field of study?

Dr. Virago on Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, mourning, and the recent mass murder at Northern Illinois University.

And now, off to the airport, and then, ultimately, to a weekend in Texas, where I'll spend some time with my brother, the Air Force cardiologist, before he's deployed to the (relative safety of a) large base in Iraq. Safe flying to all of us!

Oliver Sacks on Migraines, Pattterns, and Universal Art

In an interesting essay in the NYT, Sacks wonders about the patterns he has witnessed since childhood while gripped by migraine and the cross-cultural ardor for repetitive design:

I started to wonder whether what I had taken to be a personal experience and resonance might in fact be part of a larger whole, whether certain basic forms of geometric art, going back for tens of thousands of years, might also reflect the external expression of universal experiences. Migraine-like patterns, so to speak, are seen not only in Islamic art, but in classical and medieval motifs, in Zapotec architecture, in the bark paintings of Aboriginal artists in Australia, in Acoma pottery, in Swazi basketry — in virtually every culture. There seems to have been, throughout human history, a need to externalize, to make art from, these internal experiences, from the decorative motifs of prehistoric cave paintings to the psychedelic art of the 1960s. Do the arabesques in our own minds, built into our own brain organization, provide us with our first intimations of geometry, of formal beauty?

Fragments Shattered by History

So on Saturday, as I've mentioned here, I will be responding to this paper by Aaron Hostetter , a colleague of mine from Princeton. This will all take place as a part of the fourth annual ASSC Graduate Student Conference.

So here, for your Valentine's Day evening perusal, is my remark/question for our discussion. Any critiques or questions would be quite helpful -- this was the first time I've read Andreas. Though I find it quite fascinating, it's also insanely complex. One day that characteristic of Old English poetry will stop surprising me. With a little luck though, I'll never lose that complexity's delight.

So: Go read Aaron's paper, "A Tasty Turn of Phrase: Cannibal Poetics in Andreas". Then, refresh your memory of the story with any one of these posts on Heather Blurton's Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature from the ITMBC4DSoMA event this summer. I should note that in my haste I've not had the time to read through all of the entries, though I certainly hope to do so by Saturday's session. Then, return here to read my entry in this ongoing discussion of Anthropophagy. My bibliographical notes are not terribly precise, as I'm mostly going on what I've read from Aaron's paper: however, I'll have to add it in tomorrow morning, when I have time to figure out what I was drawing on! My title could also use a lift -- any ideas would be appreciated!

Fragments Shattered by History


Aaron argues that as a poem, the Andreas makes a comment on the relationship between the past and the present: most specifically, that fragments of a past identity inhabit the present construction of self – more importantly, they inhabit the text’s present construction of cultural identity. Using the poetic borrowings of Andreas, and making clear their poetic effect, the argument culminates in the assertion that, in the case of the “sad anthropophagites” of the Anglo-Saxon corpus:

the act of devoration leaves the eater with a raw sense of the self in time, of ones utter dependence on the presence of the past with which to construct a present, and a lingering sense of absolute difference from the apparent integrity of those pasts.

In some senses, his argument squares with the recent work on the poem done by Heather Blurton: in her dissertation, and its rendering in book form, Blurton argues that we might productively read the poem not merely for its conversion narrative, but for its “cannibal narrative” – a narrative that tells a story of invasion and conquest and the subsequent, postcolonial hybridity that results. Andreas, she argues, deliberately depicts the Mermedonians in ways which echo the descriptions of Anglo-Saxon warriors in other poems. Clearly, Blurton picks up on the same tendency which Aaron highlights: the citation of other Anglo-Saxon poems is used to an effect in Andreas, and to read the poem in any other light flattens a nuanced reading – performed by the poem – of those texts, and the culture which produced them.

As an opening provocation to discussion, I would like to reframe the question which Aaron is asking us to consider. In doing so, I want to engage with the idea of this solitary “self-in-time” – to ask, directly, the question of what the Mermedonians are doing in Anglo-Saxon England. If the self is related to the other in Andreas through a metaphoric act of consumption, devoration, or put in the slightly more post-colonial term favored by Blurton, incorporation – the question raised becomes more than simply one of “self” and “other” per se. The intermingling performed by the act of anthropophagy, and the intersection of the past and present that occurs in the building of cultural identity, suggests that the time of this “meal” is, to borrow a phrase, “out of joint.”

The question this raises about Andreas is the way in which the pasts upon which the present feasts are only apparently integral: the ways in which their narrative wholeness is shattered by the onset of a different kind of history. In Augustine’s conception of history, the human interpretation of history’s narrative is fundamentally altered by the intersection of the divine with the human: Christ’s advent necessarily rewrites the linear narrative of human history, and the truly integral events (his birth, death, resurrection and final judgment) shape the interpretation of any other narrative (though, and importantly, it doesn't annihilate the presence of all other narratives, which could be said to haunt it). My question then, is this: if we were to let the conversion narrative shape the cannibal narrative of the text, might we understand this story of sylfætan as an interpretation of the non-Christian digestion of history. Fundamentally incomplete, the past can only disappoint those who wish to use its narrative to shape the future from its fragments: those stories need interpretation, direction, a space to develop into that does not return to the same, human story. Rather, human history needs a divine supplement – otherwise, how could anyone seeking to feed on its remnants find adequate nourishment?


cross posted at OEinNY

Happy Valentine's Day

We at ITM wish all of our readers a happy Valentine's day -- the only holiday invented by Chaucer.

Geoffrey of Monmouth, Race, and Women

Yesterday in my Myths of Britain class I taught the segment of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain that begins with the birth of Brutus and ends with the discovery of demon-born Merlin -- quite a chunk. We take a special interest in this course in those whose stories are alluded to but not fully narrated within the larger histories that feature them: Beowulf through the eyes of Grendel, or his mom, or Wealtheow, or Hondscio. With Geoffrey we spoke about his interest in some strong female characters.

Below is a section of my book Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain relevant to the topic. It was fun to revisit the subject with eighty interlocutors.

--------------
(parts of this have appeared at ITM previously. Please see the book version for proper footnotes and references)
No matter what else the text might be, the History of the Kings of Britain is a foundation myth. As the twelfth-century Welsh who found in its narrative the promise of glory to come would attest, the History gives solidity and continuity to a dispersed people. It could legitimate the promulgation of a communal identity based upon shared history. By projecting a Norman mode of kingship and conquest into the past, it also implicitly buttresses the Norman conquest, and reinforces the distinctiveness of both the Normans and the Britons from the English. Perhaps this desire to keep the insular peoples distinct explains why the text recurrently envalues purity of blood.

When a womanless band of Picts arrive from Scythia and ask the Britons for wives, they firmly refuse to intermarry with such an inferior race (4.17). Once the fiercely expansionist leader Maximianus subdues Gaul, he imports a population of Britons for the area. Conanus Meriadocus, left in charge of this "second Britain," strives "to prevent any mixture of blood" between colonists and indigenes. Conanus therefore has seventy-one thousand women imported from the homeland (5.15). The misplaced passion of Brennius for a Danish princess almost causes Britain's ruin (3.2). Part of the great evil of Vortigern, the tyrant who improvidently invites the Saxons into Britain as mercenaries, is his refusal to respect the separation of peoples. He allows "pagans to mingle with the local population" (8.2), degenerating his kingdom to the point at which "no one could tell who was a pagan and who was a Christian, for the pagans were associating with [British] daughters and female relations" (6.13). Vortigern himself marries Renwein, daughter of the Saxon leader Hengest (6.12). Vortimer, Vortigern's pure-blooded son by a previous wife, rises against his father in an attempt to take Britain back for the Britons; he is poisoned by his treacherous stepmother (6.14). Perhaps a certain magical pool described to a wide-eyed Arthur says it all. Naturally fashioned in the shape of a perfect square, the pool harbors four types of fish, and "the fish of any one corner were never found in any of the others" (9.7). Substitute Britons, Picts, Scots and Saxons for the allegorical fish and Britain suddenly becomes perfectly unmixed, impossibly pure.

Square pools do not exist in nature, nor do fish self-segregate; that is why the pool is a marvel. In Geoffrey's British history, despite the fact that the purity of collective identities is so often declared paramount, peoples nonetheless intermingle. Just like the Norman-English and Norman-Welsh unions of Geoffrey's day, these couplings produce children who carry in their blood a compound heritage. At first glance, it seems that such mixed blood progeny cannot fare well. Assaracus, son of a Trojan mother and Greek father, agrees to help the exiled Brutus because of his anger at having been disinherited by a brother of undiluted blood. Brutus is happy to employ the man so long as he is useful, but the Trojan's subsequent talk of preserving the "purity of noble blood" suggests what he really thinks of his mongrel ally (1.4). Habren, the daughter of king Locrinus by a German concubine, is hurled into a river by his angry wife (2.5). Bassianus, the son of a Roman puppet ruler through a British woman, finds himself raised to the insular throne because his people prefer him over his brother of pure Roman descent (5.2). His reign is quite short, however, because a man named Carausius, humbly born but of untainted British ancestry, rallies the Britons to "massacre the Romans and wipe them out of existence and so free the whole island of that foreign race." The half-blood Bassianus soon lies dead on the battlefield (5.3).

Yet Constantine, the son of a Roman named Constantius and the Briton Helen, becomes not only the king of the whole island but emperor of Rome, "overlord of the whole world" (5.8). The founding father of the Britons, Brutus himself, takes the Greek princess Ignoge for his wife, mixing his genealogical line with that of an inveterate enemy. It could perhaps be argued that only the race of the father counts in a patriarchal society, overwriting or overcoding the blood of the mother. Such a model seems almost Aristotelian. The mother contributes inert matter to the child, the father gives identity and life. Thus Earl Morcar, an English rebel against the Conqueror, had a sister named Ealdgyth. She bore a daughter to her first husband, Gruffudd ap Llewelyn, upon whom was bestowed the resonantly Welsh name of Nest. Ealdgyth also had a son by her second spouse, King Harold II of England. This Ulf carried an Anglo-Scandinavian appellation that well embodied his royal father 's own heritage. In both cases the descent of the father determines the child's name. Perhaps, then, the children of Brutus are just as Trojan, and therefore just as British, as he.

Yet carrying the blood of two peoples in the History of the Kings of Britain seldom allows a singular or stable identity to be embraced, or for a dual ancestry to be forgotten. Despite the bias in favor of the separateness of the insular peoples throughout the History, in the actual unfolding of historical events Geoffrey demonstrates the impossibility – and sometimes even the sheer destructiveness – of rejecting out of hand hybridity and difficult middles. Attempts to maintain purity of blood invariably fail. Contrary to the British prohibition against taking their women as wives, the Picts do just that, "intermarrying more and more with the Britons" (5.3). These marriages are enabled by Carausius, the pure-blooded Briton who rallied his people to commit genocide against the Romans to keep the island free of foreigners. The intermingling of Saxons with Britons enabled by Vortigern cannot simply be undone, for in the wake of widespread intermarriage pagans and the Christians become indistinguishable (6.13). The desire of Conanus Meriadocus to prevent his soldiers from mixing with the Gauls spectacularly backfires when he sends to Britain for suitable wives. Of the 71,000 women shipped across the channel to meet his demand, the luckiest drown when their ships founder. The remainder is blown so far off course that randy barbarians either slay or enslave them (5.16). Conanus Meriadocus and his men, we must assume, were forced to take their brides from Gaul after all. Even Cadwallo, Geoffrey's reinvented and newly heroic leader of the Britons against the treacherous Saxons, is said to take a sister of Peanda of Mercia as his wife. Their son, Cadwallader, presides over the final loss of British hegemony on the island.

As Peggy McCracken has written in her penetrating analysis of the role of women's blood in medieval literature, descent might be claimed from the father, but the mother's contribution to her offspring's identity can never be completely effaced. Blood, especially when it comes from a woman, tends to be multivalent. A similar observation might be advanced more generally about women's roles in twelfth century historiography, especially in their relation to collective identity. Although from time to time a powerful female figure will emerge (Hild, Æthelflæd, Cordelia), the chronicles of the past written at this time are for the most part accounts of the deeds of men. Geoffrey is no exception, imagining a vigorously martial world in which most of the great leaders are male. Women are seldom eligible to have their stories told. There are, of course, vivid exceptions: Gwendolen, Estrildis, Cordelia, Tonuuenna, Genvissa, Judon, Renwein, Ygerna, Guenevere, Helena. Even women not given a name by the text can sometimes have moving stories narrated about them. Take, for example, the 71,000 women assembled in London to provide wives for the Britons in Gaul. They do not know that they are doomed to perish at sea, be slaughtered by enemies, or become slaves, yet few want to abandon home and family for unknown shores. "They all had their personal wishes in the matter" Geoffrey observes (5.16). When it is acknowledged that the desires of these women are not consonant with maintaining the purity of the Briton bloodline, we realize that the community being built with them is predicated upon a coercive harmonization.

No woman's story in Geoffrey's text resonates more lastingly than that of Ignoge, the Greek princess forced to become bride to Brutus. Geoffrey of Monmouth ordinarily composes his narrative with sangfroid: little human feeling animates its accounts of battles, wonders, political intrigue, strife. He is not given to moments of aching identification such as William of Malmesbury's wrenching account of the sinking of the White Ship (Deeds 5.419). Ignoge has little presence in Geoffrey's text, but as she sets sail with a husband she never chose for a future that is wholly uncertain, we are given a lingering depiction of her last vision of her native land. The episode is at once so evocative and so moving that, as Robert Hanning observes, it "interrupts the flow" of the narrative, so that "for a moment the issues of national birth and freedom are forgotten; history itself is forgotten." Here is Geoffrey's vivid portrayal of the fading shores of home as glimpsed through bereft Ignoge's eyes:

The Trojans sailed away ... Ignoge stood on the high poop and from time to time fell fainting in the arms of Brutus. She wept and sobbed at being forced to leave her relations and her homeland; and as long as the shore lay there before her eyes, she would not turn her gaze away from it. Brutus soothed and caressed her, putting his arms round her and kissing her gently. He did not cease his efforts until, worn out with crying, she fell asleep (1.11)

As Ignoge's home slowly recedes, lost are the possibilities for any life she might have desired for herself, for any history she might have dreamed. Destined to become an appendage of Brutus, the source of his progeny, we next see Ignoge in what appears to be an afterthought, legitimating the birth of three sons (2.1). She is not mentioned again. Her children divide the land and carry on their father's work. It never occurs to them that in their bodies the blood of Troy mingles with that of Greece, that they possess hybrid blood in which two enemies have uneasily been conjoined. The sons of Brutus assume that they are simply Britons, as their father christened his people. They never dwell upon the complexities of history and descent.

Ignoge's gaze opens up the possibility of another story. An alien among strangers, suspended between cultures and no longer able to be of one or the other, Ignoge embodies everything her children so easily forget. Yearning for a home that can never be hers, this princess conveyed to an unfamiliar place suggests the difficulties faced by those who carry an identity full of difference, ambivalence, conflict. Ignoge inhabits that middle space where conqueror meets conquered, where a war unfolds between loathing and desire. She looks back to a receding homeland and forward to the impossible bind of mixed progeny on an island increasingly dominated by a single people. Ignoge is Greek, her husband Trojan, her children Britons, but her tears prevent such easy separations.

Geoffrey of Monmouth dreamed of a world where at first glance history and descent keep insular peoples solitary. As his textual world unfolds in all its intricacy, however, the peoples that populate Britain mingle and become -- despite their own fervent belief to the contrary -- impure. Geoffrey's ambivalent entwining of purity with hybridity is rather like William of Malmesbury's. Both writers posited clean separations but undercut them with anxious, medial spaces: one through marvels, the other through blood. The separateness of the island's peoples might be an impossible dream, but that did not stop this dream from being passionately embraced, much to the sorrow of those who carried blood that could never seem untainted. For these impure beings history was filled with heartache, and the present never ceased to hurt.

Honor, reflection, communal futures

Two good posts by Stephanie Trigg on the recent apologies to the Indigenous people of Australia: here and here.

Semiotics of the Department Chair's Office

Close scrutiny of the image at left reveals the following:

1. A skeleton, which for a while we had sitting outside the chair's door clutching a sign saying 'Please have a seat. We will be with you soon.'
2. A tiny shriner.
3. A memento mori.
4. A laminated emergency procedures card. (Little known fact: the original emergency plan submitted by the department read "(1) Exit office and scream 'We are going to die, we are going to die! (2) Die." It was returned as insufficient, and this query was appended: 'What if faculty do not in fact die? Will bats be handed out to staff to finish them off?')
5. An ornate tea box from India and a hand carved gazelle from Kenya, both gifts from faculty whose travel requests I approved.
6. A very ugly mug that was given in lieu of a holiday bonus.
7. A Mike Wazowski figurine.
   
8. A package of dry erase markers that I take with me to my technology up the wazoo super deluxe classroom. They are in fact the only technology that works predictably there.
   
9. Two children dragged to their dad's office because the presidential primaries had closed their schools. Each took turns sitting at our office's front desk impersonating a work-study student. One told visitors to "Vote for Hilary because she has golden hair!" The other told visitors that Obama was the only candidate for real change.
   

"Better to just jump into a crack in Mount Doom and be done with it."

That provocative statement is made and a host of Middle Earthian puns deployed in this blog post on the legal troubles besetting the Lord of the Rings films. Composed, of course, by my punny bro.

Chaucerian Chromophobia? Beige Hengwrts and Bawdy Ellesmeres

I thank Michael Moon's "Do You Smoke? Or, Is There Life? After Sex?" in After Sex? On Writing since Queer Theory (SAQ Summer 2007) for its reference to David Batchelor's Chromophobia, a work that argues that:

The love of bright hues is an affliction as well as an alleged moral failing that has been routinely ascribed throughout the modern period to “orientals,” sensuous women, children, and “primitives” of “all stripes”...(Moon, 540)

I haven't (yet?) read Chromophobia, but I like what I know about it (e.g., his observations on the privilege of drawing over coloring in), and in my gleanings from here and there, I've been happy to turn up gemlike prejudices from our foundational thinkers. Aristotle called color a "pharmakon" (31), Isaiah 1:18 aligns color with sin and whiteness with purity, and Goethe observed

that savage nations, uneducated people, and children have a great predilection for vivid colours; that animals are excited to rage by certain colours; that people of refinement avoid vivid colours in their dress and the objects that are about them, and seem inclined to banish them altogether from their presence (qtd 112).

I now have that feeling that I contract from some of my favorites works, suspicion coalesced into a master thesis. Call it paranoid desublimation. With Batchelor lodged in my brain, I compare the dangerous passion of the Big Orange Splot to the rational, calm, beige futurity of Swedish design (see the interiors in Scenes from a Marriage, or, if you're an Ikeatiste, just look around).

I also consider the preference for the Hengwrt manuscript over the Ellesmere. At this point, and perhaps at all future points, I've only a hunch, a hunch, moreover, that's not been validated by sprints through (only) three articles (the Linne Mooney Adam Pinkhurst piece in the Jan 2007 Speculum, Michael C. Seymour's “Hypothesis, Hyperbole, and the Hengwrt Manuscript of the Canterbury Tales,” English Studies 68 (1987): 214-19, and Ralph Hanna's "The Hengwrt Manuscript and the Canon of the Canterbury Tales"), a hunch that has been validated, if we can call it that, only by a highly suspicious reading of Peter G. Beidler's characterization of the differences between Hengwrt and Ellesmere ("...the Hengwrt manuscript, the oldest and most authentic" vs. "the lovely Ellesmere manuscript" (29)), by the predilection for the adjective "lavish" when describing Ellesmere, and by ill-remembered, misconstrued, or invented conversations and gestures from conferences, seminars, and, probably, clambakes.

Nevertheless: is it possible that the preference for Hengwrt over Ellesmere, even when expressed with hierophantic jargon of the codicologist, is fundamentally a preference for cool reason over vivid pleasures, pure judgment of the Aesopian body of one manuscript over the all too obvious lavish enticements of another? Are leading questions a valid substitute for research into critical discourse? By all means, no, but if I can't offer my suspicions on a blog, how can I get them out of my head?

Thanks for the image, from here.

Two posts for your weekend reading

(1) Dr Virago, on the work of being a professor

(2) Phil Paine, on dictators and the vanished of history (via Steve Muhlberger)

Quote of the Early AM, or, Friday Night was Theoretical...

The Spring Semester of 2008 is officially in full swing here in New York, and nothing says "It has begun" as clearly as the opening events of the The Anglo-Saxon Studies Colloquium. My week's end brought a trip to Rutgers University for a fascinating lecture and extremely helpful manuscript workshop by Andy Orchard of the University of Toronto -- however, as with all events with the ASSC, the "official" event formed only a part of the scholarly experience while there.
I met and spoke with Mark Amodio (Vassar) -- the great scholar of oral formulaic theory (the theory which accounts for and studies the markers of oral composition in Old English) -- for the first time. A conversation with Richard Abels (a historian from the US Naval Academy, currently at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton) helped me to formulate more coherently the reason Beowulf belongs in my dissertation -- without having to deal too deeply with that pesky "when was it written" question. And yet another blogging connection was made when I made the acquaintance of Rachel K, a commenter on ITM.

The community of Anglo-Saxonists around NYC and New Jersey has been very fruitful for me as a graduate student -- and not always in the ways I've imagined. The opportunity to really speak in depth with other scholars in my field, who've done studies of the same works I'm hoping to write about -- and to feel as though I was actually participating constructively in those conversations -- proves to me part of what I think is most useful about being an active participant in something like the ASSC. I wonder if part of "professionalization" (that long, unwieldy, and frightening term!) is precisely that -- helping students learn to become scholars in a community of other scholars, less than simply attending conferences and writing articles...

And of course, the train ride home this afternoon offered ample time for reading, and that's the inspiration for this "quote of the day" post. However, before I give the blog post over to Bruno Latour, I would like to say a word about an event coming up soon: the fourth annual ASSC grad conference, taking place this Saturday, February 16th, at Yale University! Of course, there's an element of pride involved -- this is my fourth year participating in the conference, and my first year functioning as a respondent. My interlocutor? Princeton University Grad Student Aaron Hostetter, whose blog on Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry is providing a really interesting look at a scholar who's currently grappling with the Andreas. I'll be responding to Aaron's paper, "A Tasty Turn of Phrase: Cannibal Poetics in Andreas". (Paging Dr. Steel! Paging Dr. Steel!) We're hoping to get the conversation going a bit early (and to open it out to a wider audience) -- I will almost certainly post some of my thoughts and notes here before I try them out at the conference. Something tells me Heather Blurton's book (of which we have spoken often) will be very, very important.

As a side note: I was assigned to the paper rather than choosing it, and though I'm thrilled to get to be a part of this conversation, I've never actually read the Andreas. Clearly that will be changing soon. Also: I realized yesterday evening that, when I agreed to be a respondent for the event, I was in essence agreeing to read in front of not one but two very eminent Anglo-Saxonists, a paper I will have had one week to write. On a poem I will have known for about a week. Fools rush in...

So, finally, on to the quote of the Friday Evening: From Bruno Latour (who will be speaking at Columbia in about two weeks!), Pandora's Hope (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999), p. 96-97. Latour is speaking about the relationships between humans, language, and "the world" -- the relationship, in essence, between discourse and "things in themselves". I thought this passage was particularly resonant for me, what with the theme of translation and connection that runs throughout. Appropriately, I find it quite hopeful...

What seemed shocking at first in this new paradigm was that it did not rely on the myth of a heroic break away from society, convention, and discourse, a mythical break that would let the solitary scientist discover the world as it is. To be sure, we no longer portray scientists as those who abandon the realm of signs, politics, passions and feelings in order to discover the world of cold ad inhuman things in themselves, "out there." But that does not mean we portray them as talking to humans only, because those they address in their research are not exactly humans but strange hybrids with long tails, trails, tentacles, filaments tying words to things which are, so to speak, behind them, accessible only through highly indirect and immensely complex mediations of different series of instruments. The truth of what scientists say no longer comes from their breaking away from society, convention, mediations, connections, but from the safety provided by the circulating references that cascade thought a great number of transformations and translations, modifying and constraining the speech acts of many humans over which no one has nay durable control. Instead of abandoning the base world of rhetoric, argumentation, calculation--much like the religious hermits of the past--scientists began to speak in truth because they plunge even more deeply into the secular world of words, signs, passions, materials, and mediations, and extend themselves even further in the intimate connections with the nonhumans they have learned to bring to bear on their discussions.

cross posted to Old English in New York

Utter solitude

First, the admission of a guilty pleasure: the Cohen family watches that parade of histrionics known as American Idol. Think of it as part of our program of studying human culture in order to better blend among this planet's indigenous population. Last night's episode ended with a young man who had left school and family a year earlier and was living in a car. I was surprised how touched my son was by this fact ("Do you think it's possible that his mom and dad didn't love him?" he asked us), and how it saddened him to realize that there could be someone like him living so alone: no friends, no family, just an automobile that serves as bed, kitchen and transportation. That kind of solitude struck him as unbearable.

As, in a way, it does me. There were lonely times during graduate school when I vanished into books and writing. I once went nearly twenty-four hours without speaking ... then again, that is the longest I've ever gone with mouth shut. A well known medievalist with whom I've collaborated has just emerged from three months of silent seclusion in a Buddhist monastery. That kind of unbroken quiet is not something I could ever want ... yet I do sometimes dream of such removal from the world and from social relations, probably because it is the exact opposite of anything I can actually endure.

Why do I bring all this up? Well, not just due to viewing melodramatic reality shows on the Fox network. A conversation that unfolded yesterday in my office has stuck with me. GW is fortunate in currently having as writer in residence Nadeem Aslam, a novelist whose work I have praised here before. His book Maps for Lost Lovers is so good that I stayed awake deep into every night in our London flat last summer devouring its pages. Nadeem stopped by yesterday to say a quick hello. I announced that I blamed him for two weeks of English insomnia. He sat down, and more than an hour later we emerged from the office after having had a conversation that ranged from nuclear warning devices to Obamamania to texts and memory to the place of artists in contemporary society. Aslam is exactly the kind of quirky person for whom I always feel an immediate affection: someone who continually surprises you with insight and originality, but who also does not seem to be of this earth in the way as, say, people who watch or participate in American Idol.

Maps for Lost Lovers is gorgeously written and emotionally wrenching, eliciting a combination of affects that we've seen here at ITM in Dan's recent posts. The main characters of the book, a Pakistani family living in a version of London, evidently love each other ... but are incapable of expressing this warmth without utterly shattering the person to whom they wish to connect. This propensity to wound through miscalculated gestures especially haunts Kaukab, a mother who adores her children but who destroys them all the same. The scene that broke me is the following, in which Kaukab -- having worked for days on a feast that she hopes will unite her grieving family in the sharing of food, a repast which might make them for once forget the sins they have practiced against each other -- instead presides over a fraught and taciturn dinner table. As December coldness wraps itself around the house, the tension in the quiet room becomes unbearable: "The house, as it floated through time, has arrived at an iceberg, and no one is sure it will ever move away from it, leaving it behind." Kaukab excuses herself from this cold tableau that again defeats her inexpressible yearning for a family in which her love doesn't ruin lives:

When she goes upstairs to the bathroom immediately after Charag [her son] has been there to wash his face, she notices that the linoleum is warm where he had been standing just now, and she has to steady her heart with joyful fingers -- her cold house is full of her children again. There's warmth in unexpected places.

Except, there isn't. The very best for which Kaukab can ever hope is that small spot of warmth lingering on the linoleum in the absence of its bearer, a connection invisible to the person in whose "touch" she exults. Kaukab has already ensured that her children will never know that she has a heart capable of affection, or fingers that can tremble with joy. Charag, especially, is filled with vitriol for a mother he believes has hurt him beyond remedy.

I told Nadeem that it was the small detail of human heat imprinted on cold flooring that made the scene for me, and broke me emotionally: it so well condenses the unsolvable predicament of Kaukab. He looked at me very seriously, and then said, "You have made me realize that I was writing about my own chosen loneliness. As I finished the book -- a book that took eleven years to compose! -- I isolated myself from the world. For six months I had no phone, no email, I didn't really even speak. At some point in this intense period my little brother came to visit me. I remember that I went to the loo after he did, and when I stood on the floor where he had just been standing to pee, I realized from the heat what it is like to have someone in your house, and in your life, and yet not to have them at all."

I asked Nadeem if he ever regretted the sacrifices he had made to compose Maps For Lost Lovers. He told me that the minute I labeled them sacrifices I showed that I misunderstood: art demanded his time and his life, and it was his honor (he used that word) to be able to give both. That's not nearly as vainglorious as statement as it seems: Nadeem is quite modest, and very much aware that he would not have been able to compose the work without a strong social system behind him (friends willing to buy him dinners or lend a coach to crash on, the dole, small arts grants). Still, he has at times embraced a solitude beyond anything I can imagine.

I would have made a terrible anchorite.

[PS For one of my student's experience of Nadeem Aslam, see this]