A rapper's view of NCS Swansea

by J J Cohen

And I thought we were discussing dead authors.

[h/t srj: thanks!]

NCS Swansea, fin

by J J Cohen

Go here, here, and here for other posts in this series.

In no particular order, I offer some final thoughts on the conference. NCS was quite an event, so please excuse the sheer number of pieces I've composed on the topic.

• I was disappointed in the number of papers that did not seem well rehearsed, a problem evident especially at the panel at which I presented. One scholar was several times surprised by what she beheld on her page. An inauspicious moment came early, when she had trouble getting through a long excerpt from Augustine. She announced that she was going to read the Latin aloud for a while to assist her with the English.
  
• Nearly every paper in the six paper panels was far too long, a big problem when there are that many presenters. Betsy McCormick's, in the same panel as me, was a model: beautifully performed, lucid, just the right amount of argument for the right amount of time. A graduate student named Brooke Hunter, in a 3 person session on "Haunted Chaucer," also presented a perfect paper: 18 minutes, well articulated points, compelling delivery.
  
• The typical NCS performance began by announcing a change in title. The speaker would then make reference to the very long version of the paper from which this tiny and insufficient piece was being extracted. He or she would last apologize for not having a sufficient number of handouts.
  
• I began my own presentation by reassuring the audience that I keep a 500 page version of my paper -- with over a thuosand footnotes! -- in a glass case at home. I also declared that I had changed my paper's title from "Forgotten Realms" to "Similes and Metaphors in Grettir's Saga." Everyone stared at me in speechless fear; I had to add "Kidding!" before some laughter erupted. The joke I didn't use (because I wasn't in Swansea to do stand up, you know) was to say that I had brought only one handout, so I was keeping it for myself.
• Very often during this NCS I found myself thinking back to my first, NCS Dublin in 1994. It was a difficult time in my life, with many big transitions (including, among other things, a relocation to DC). I arrived at the conference out of sorts, and was surprised at the formality of the proceedings. Two acts of kindness stand out for me: (1) Carolyn Dinshaw chatting with me, a person she did not know, as we awaited cabs in a Trinity College courtyard; her interest in my project renewed my flagging confidence. And (2) Glenn Burger inviting me out to dinner at an Indian restaurant and supporting me in the crazy thinking that I wanted to start. More than that, he provided me with a model of how to do challenging, affirmative work.
• So fourteen years have gone by, and that is a long time (exactly two scholarly generations, in fact). I hope that I was able to share some of the good karma that I received in 1994 with some young-in-the-field scholars in Swansea. I feel like if I don't keep giving it back, then I've somehow failed a major obligation.
• The intellectual high of listening to some intriguing work at the conference is taking a while to wear off. Presentations by Valerie Allen, Christopher Baswell, Carolyn Dinshaw, Stephanie Trigg, Patty Ingham, Larry Scanlon, Ruth Evans, and Anthony Bale have really stayed with me.
• Speaking of Anthony Bale, I sought him out, introduced myself, and apologized to him. I still feel badly about the draft review I placed on this blog of The Jew in the Medieval Book, an excellent work of scholarship that I did not treat in a way that satisfies me. The first draft read like it was written by someone else: there were moments when the tone is so condescending that I am perplexed as to what my frame of mind must have been at the time. The same with the comments I made when Karl gave me some very good feedback. The good thing about this blog is that conversations with those whose work we discuss happen: thus Peter Haidu showed up in anger after my words over a book he wrote (those are words I stand behind), and Anthony found the review after someone pointed it out to him (I stand only behind the version that will appear in SAC). The long and short: I'm very happy I blogged the review, because that gave me the chance to rethink what I wanted to appear as the review's final form.
• Every conference needs field trips. The day out to the castles was good beyond words, and allowed all of us some space together when we were not dissecting papers or sitting as audience members. Likewise pub time: those social moments are in some ways more important than the dissemination of scholarship at panels, because that's where the conversations had the leisure they needed to unfold.
  
• These are some of the people who made the conference truly enjoyable: Betsy McCormick, Myra Seaman, Justin Brent, George Edmondson, Bob Stein, Carolyn Dinshaw, Stephanie Trigg, Tom Prendergast, Debra Strickland, Dan Kline, Gerry Heng, Theresa Coletti, Christine Chism, Ethan Knapp, Patricia DeMarco, John Ganim, Miriamne Krummel, Sylvia Tomasch, Tom Hahn, Christina Fitzgerald, Jonathan Hsy, Glenn Burger, and Steve Kruger. Thanks to all of them ... and to anyone I've unintentionally omitted from the list. The conviviality of the conference will -- like the backache from my dorm's mattress -- stay with me for a long time to come.
  

You Know It's Summer When You Have Dinshaw and The Gossip Girl On Your Mind: ITMBC4DSoMA Deux

by EILEEN JOY

When you find that Carolyn Dinshaw's Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern and The Gossip Girl and pomengranate martinis are on your mind, it must be almost August, and almost time for In The Middle's Book Club for Discerning Scholars of the Middle Ages, or ITMBC4SoMA-palooza, or something like that. So get out the cocktail shaker, decide how you feel about the "is she or isn't she naked?" Blair Waldorf ad scandal, and crack [or re-crack] open your copy of Dinshaw. Because sometime soon, at an In The Middle outlet near you, we'll be discussing this book [re-visiting it, as it were], and yes, also watching The Gossip Girl [well some of us, I mean Eileen, will be].

In the meantime, please read Mary Kate's "This I Believe" post and Jeffrey's two posts on the New Chaucer Society meeting here and here.

Believing the Wanderer

by Mary Kate Hurley

One of my best friends, Emily, wrote to me a few months ago asking me to write an essay for a CD she wants to put together. It consists in "This I Believe" style essays from a number of people she's close to, and her rationale for putting it together is that eventually she'll lose all our voices -- to death, or to time, or to distance -- and she wants to preserve them now, what we believe, who we are (at least, this is my interpretation of what she told me). And so I found myself, at long last, returning to a theme of mine. My first attempt, written for my final University Writing class this year, is available at OENY. My current attempt can be found under the "read more" cut below.

I've written on the Wanderer many times before. An honors thesis, a Masters thesis, various translations. This is the first time I've tried to articulate the poem's meaning to me in a spoken format. Moreover, it is the first time I've tried to articulate my first meeting with this poem, and more importantly, what it means to me personally -- and so I wanted to share it, not just with Emily (whom I met in the same Old English in which I met the Wanderer), but with other medievalist interlocutors. I realized, while writing it, that I really can pinpoint the moment medieval studies changed my life. It was imperceptible at the time, but this figure became central to my world for years. I wonder if others have found texts that have touched them in an academic way -- generating a passion for the medieval, or another field -- but also touched them in a profoundly life-altering, personal way. And I wonder if some of you might share those here, in the comments (I'm very interactive this week!).

So, this I believe, the Old English Edition.

Even voices from the distant past can change your life. Here is a voice I first met in a poem—first in its original Old English, then in translation:

Oft ic sceolde ana uhtna gehwylce
mine ceare cwiþan. Nis nu cwicra nan
þe ic him modsefan minne durre
sweotule asecgan.

Often, alone
I have spoken my cares in the hours before dawn.
No one now lives to whom I could tell
my heart’s secrets.

When I first encountered this character—this voice—from an eighth-century Old English poem, he was alone. He, the so-called “wanderer,” was bereft. He had fought loyally for his lord, but his lord had died, and now he was left in exile. In those times, a warrior depended on his lord for housing, legitimacy, and protection. His world had changed forever, and he could not change with it.

At nineteen I could understand that feeling. It was February, 2002: the year my life had—like his-- changed irreparably. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon five months before had exposed the prejudices of my peers, as the world became an uncertain, violent place. My personal losses were no less life-altering: I had recently buried a friend who hadn’t yet turned 15, and was mourning a cousin who never saw his eleventh birthday. The Wanderer’s losses felt very familiar.

As a college sophomore, I enrolled in a class in Old English language and literature. It was there that I first met the Wanderer, and that meeting would change my life. Like friends who met their future life partners in college, I met the person—the voice— who would alter my life in a poem on that course syllabus. His words changed me, even though he spoke a language that hadn’t been spoken in a thousand years.

The Wanderer—exiled and alone—was traveling over the wintery waters, trying to find a place in which he could belong. He sleeps and dreams of his people, and, awakening to sea-birds, mistakes them for his companions. They swim away, leaving him to ponder his loneliness, and the empty ruins which remain from other civilizations that have been destroyed by time – the old work of giants, now empty.

The poem offers no homecoming for this exile. The tagged-on, four-line Christian ending brings the poem to a neat, Heavenly close, but it is not clear whose voice it is that speaks of Christian comfort. So when my literature professor asked us to imagine what it would be like to live in this Wanderer’s exile, in this place without certainty of a future, or hope for a better world, I immediately identified with the existential angst of his plight. How all life vanishes under night’s shade, as if it never were!

Time vanishes, with all the works of human beings. But the lesson I learned from the Wanderer wasn’t about loss. Rather, I learned that the words of others could cross time to touch the present day from a past so distant that its language had to be learned. If “communication” is what makes us human, then it is, in fact, the words of others which matter most. Voices from the past can still speak to a present world, and with them bear an important lesson. To live in this world, we must learn to love one another. To love one another, we must learn to hear. To hear, I believe we must start with a respect for the words of others.

I believe that medieval voices speak powerfully to a modern soul from a time long past. I believe we must let that past touch us, and through it, learn to hear the Other voices of our own time.

cross posted to OENY.

Post NCS II, or Wonderwall

by J J Cohen

Yesterday I posted some thoughts on the recent New Chaucer Society conference in Swansea, focusing upon professional and scholarly impacts. Then to lighten the mood I offered a slideshow of Welsh castles, including a lesser-known fortress called "Kilvey." Today I offer a vignette more vagrant and more personal in its trajectories.

When I think back on the event, I am certain that a gun and a speeding car were involved -- but for the life of me I can provide no real evidence of either bullets or excessive speed.

With a herd of fellow medievalists I was crossing the Stalinist dystopia of the University of Swansea campus. We were headed towards a bus, about to be transported to the Gower peninsula and a much-needed infusion of scenicness. A VW Passat screeched to a stop in front of me, narrowly missing a dawdling philologist. Stephanie Trigg flung upon open the passenger-side door. She was clutching an impressive firearm of some sort -- at least she was in this, my dream reconstruction of an event that in reality started with significantly less drama.

"Get inside!" she snarled from the car. (Yes, she snarled. You wouldn't think it from all her sweetness and light at Humanities Researcher, but she actually snarled). Her voice snarl offered no hope for negotiation or pleading. Yet I did hesitate, and I muttered something about scenicness, the Gower peninsula, the promised land. She stared at me coldly and flatly declared "We'll take you somewhere much more picturesque."

What choice did I have? I got inside the Passat. There I beheld her accomplices in the abduction: Tom Prendergast and George Edmondson. They were smiling serenely, as if guns and kidnappings and speeding off from the conference happen all the time at NCS.

And now the part of the sequence that needs no dream for enhancement. We headed to Langland, where we found a pub built where the rocks of the shore meet the sand of the beach. The sun was low, the tide was approaching, dogs and their owners strolled the water's verge. Each of us sat with a pint of something cold on the table in front of us. We smiled at the air's briny scent and the ocean's looping timbre. We laughed at each other's bad jokes. We had the welcome chance to know each other well.

Our eyes were drawn, inevitably, to the beach. We watched children, dark wetsuits against the water's chill, build a circular fortress of sand, an affront to the path of the oncoming tide. The walls of their fortification mounted as the waves neared. The children knew that the labor of their hands was useless, that the sea was going to breach their walls and wash away their work. Yet they toiled at the castle, immuring themselves in a steep ring of sand, the dust that ages of water smashes from rocks. Their laughter seemed the declaration that what they had fashioned might stand against the verging tide, that somehow if they only built high enough and thick enough and fancifully enough -- that if they willed their work's permanence with enough desire -- then the ocean's ebb would falter, its assault halt at the rebuke of their artifice.

The water breached their walls. The ditch vanished beneath a sudden surge, the palisade dissolved, the bailey was wiped from the beach like a memory past edge of recollection. The children screamed with delight. The fortress had been shored not against ruin, but for ruin alone. Its art was in its undoing. In the memory of the architecture, in the memory of the pleasures shared and the fleeting community formed, in the hope of future castles and future unions of friends, sea, and sand: that was the vision that we saw on the beach, we four medievalists who were dreaming our pasts yet to come.

[photo of Mumbles by author]

Jenna Mead on Premodern Places

by J J Cohen

Here is a bit from Jenna Mead's eloquent review of David Wallace's Premodern Places. Although it appeared two years ago in Parergon, I only just discovered it. I'm sharing a portion because I think Mead well articulates the achievement of the book. My own belief is that Premodern Places is one of the most important interventions into medieval studies in a long time. I've been surprised not to hear more from other medievalists about the book; that's one of the reasons I invited Kofi Campbell to blog about Wallace's work. I was happy to hear Premodern Places cited and discussed at NCS Swansea, though -- and was reminded once again of the time lag between a book's publication and the appearance of noticeable effects of its scholarly impact.

David Wallace’s Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn begins as ficto-criticism; a genre that inserts autobiographical self-realization into theoretically-conscious critical scholarship. Alice Kaplan’s, French Lesson: a Memoir (1993), Stephen Muecke’s No road (bitumen all the way) (1997) and Ross Gibson’s Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (2002) are exemplary instances. Wallace’s readers may be more familiar with its iconic version in Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Energy in Renaissance England (1989) where his opening claim – ‘I began with the desire to speak with the dead’ – is coeval with a sub-genre known as ‘confessional criticism.’ While it is by now a well-sanctioned rhetorical move, the opportunity to insert an authorial subjectivity into what is a scholarly and interpretive project is an indicator of Wallace’s commitment to rethinking the generic and thus intellectual boundaries of canonical criticism in which... he has a significant stake.

Premodern Places takes the form of a looping, fragmentary itinerary: Calais Gate, ‘Flaundres’ – the location of Chaucer’s ‘Pardoner’s Tale’ – Somerset, Genoa, the Canaries or Fortunate Islands and Surinam. In each place – neither a starting point nor a destination but rather a pause – Wallace identifies, to use Roland Barthes’s term, a punctum: ‘a sign or detail in a visual field provoking some deep – yet highly subjective – sense of connectedness with people in the past’ (p. 2). For Wallace, in each place, there is a detail that provokes in him a sense of such connectedness ...

Wallace’s alter ego on his journey through these premodern places is Geoffrey Chaucer. The autobiographical narrative of the ‘Introduction’ – ‘I grew up in England, but now live mostly in Philadelphia’ – ripples the texture of scholarship in the dedication, in photograph credits, an unnamed figure in a picture, the intermittent use of the first person in singular and plural, in scattered touristic details and an occasional chauvinism. or Wallace, this moment is not so much a punctum as one of enfremden (‘the process of estranging, alienating, or rendering foreign’ 139) because the same ‘reviving classicism’ that enables Chaucer to ‘articulate a new poetic identity coincides with, meshes with, and ... decisively sustains the westward movement of slaving across the Mediterranean’ (p. 183). The sublimity of the Trecento that is central to traditional conceptions of Chaucer as poet, English as ‘pure,’ turns upon ‘the binomial most fundamental to classical consciousness ... : liberty and servitude’ (p. 192) materialized in Genoa’s thriving slave trade to which Chaucer is to be imagined as some kind of witness.

This, I think, is Wallace at his most risky, speculative and, paradoxically, suasive. Somewhere near the deep heart of Premodern Places is an attempt to meditate upon ‘the English-thinking imaginary’ (p. 239) for which both places and texts must be made visible and thus readable. Hence, perhaps, those aspects of this book which readers may find surprising and unnerving: the eclectic selection of materials and atemporal sequences, a set of quirky connections and an eddying movement of prose both anecdotal and formal, hints of an unresolved frisson of sexual desire and masculinity, the scholar as restless subject combined with an unashamedly subjective scholarship. Whatever the frustrations of an Englishman (not quite) at home in the land of the free, readers will be grateful for the Dutch (or is it Flemish?) courage it took to write this provocative and challenging book.

The whole review is worth reading in Parergon 23.1 (2006) 230-34.

Nota Bene

by J J Cohen

• Carnivalesque XLI has arrived at xoom
• Elvis was alive in late antiquity, and he left a stone effigy to prove it
• The Chaucer Blog has been replaced by "GEOFFREY CHAUCER HATH AN EXTREME BLOG: GO ENGLAND! IT YS RAD!" Favorite line: "Go to Canterburye and light yowerself a clue candle."
• Titans are clashing at Humanities Researcher (a post that gets at the human feelings that we often forget about when we compose our "disembodied" reviews and critiques)
  
• Dr Virago gives her version of the incident of the purloined credit card. It is rather different from the kleptomania I recall
• This monstrous CFP (MEARCSTAPA sessions for Kzoo 2009) will interest many readers.
  
• Leeds 2009 has its CFP up; proposals due by August 31
• Had I been able to spend a little longer in London, I would have gone to the British Museum's Hadrian exhibit, which opens today. I'm also sorry to have missed this one at the Wellcome Collection, on the skeletons beneath the city.
  

My NCS Wales Pictures

by J J Cohen

For a serious account of the conference, see this.

And now, because everyone loves pictures of castles...

post NCS post

[photo: my house just outside of DC the ruins of Carreg Cennen Castle in Dyfed, Wales. I snapped the photo during an NCS-sponsored field trip]

by Jeffrey J. Cohen

So I called the accommodations at Swansea a gulag. I regret that now, just as I regret the Devil's Island joke I made at my paper, because in all honesty our local hosts worked diligently to ensure that the conference went well. And it did. Revitalizing Stalinist architecture and placing mints upon our evening pillows were not in their purview.

Yet, like a malcontent exiled to a remote work camp for his reprogramming, I did return from Wales newly oriented, my desires changed -- which is to say, I am sorry that I had to leave the conference on Monday and that I missed the last day of sessions. I regret also that I did not take the Tuesday trip to see the Hengwrt manuscript and to enjoy what friends in taunting text messages have described as a spectacular day out. And yes, I would have spent two more slumberless nights on a wafer-thin pillow and a mattress with the imprint of a much smaller person's body upon its springs in order to do so.

The New Chaucer Society conference held in Swansea was -- despite the histrionics of your high maintenance reporter -- an excellent gathering. I made the acquaintance of many new people, reconnected with friends, attended some superlative sessions and plenaries, enjoyed an expedition to some castles, ate and drank well. Below I offer, in no particular order, some scattershot commentary on the experience, concentrating on the professional aspects of the conference and the contribution it made to current Chaucer and medieval studies. In the future I hope to add some more personal thoughts.

I invite readers who also attended to add their observations in the comments. I'm especially eager to hear about Monday's events, such as John Ganim's remarks, and how the conference closed.

Though called the 'New Chaucer Society,' very few of the presentations I attended had much to do with that author. My hunch is that the polyglot, multiethnic Britain that we as a community seem moving towards in our scholarship means that a single-author focus is increasingly difficult to maintain. This movement from England towards a capacious Britain is especially complicated in Chaucer's case, mainly because he was far less interested in the non-English portions of the island he inhabited than he was in Spain, Italy and France. NCS was founded when the idea of a "Great English Author" was tenable for Chaucer. Not all that long ago we viewed Chaucer through an inherited, fifteenth-century lens: the founding father of English poetry. Now, though, he is generally seen not as a writer who broke with francophilia and internationalism to establish a distinctly English tradition, but as an author in a thoroughly globalized milieu. Ardis Butterfield's Biennial Lecture emphasized this point, as did Jocelyn Wogan-Browne's plenary. Neither exactly offered new information on this reorientation, but they together affirmed that a transnational and somewhat diminished Chaucer is the one with whom we now live. When a multilingual medieval literary studies is no longer imagined to culminate in Chaucer or even in English -- instead stressing the diversity that existed long before, during, and for a a great deal of time after Chaucer's life -- then some dimming of that author's radiance is inevitable.

The decline in Chaucer's star has been accompanied by a rise in Gower's. Thus many NCS attendees arrived on a bus from a Gower conference in London. An author with a trilingual surviving oeuvre, Gower offers the "island writing" that can be difficult to discern in Chaucer. Gower also has more to say about England and Englishness than his revered contemporary. After Clare Lees delivered a plenary on the Man of Law's Tale and Chaucer's "Anglo-Saxon" England, David Wallace had a great line about how to Chaucer the northern coast of Spain would have been more familiar than Northumbria.

The danger of this reconfigured conference landscape, though, is that NCS might become just another medieval confab, a smaller and more anglocentric Leeds or Kalamazoo, focused upon the texts composed in England during the 14th and 15th centuries. I say danger because -- without really being able to say why, at least in more than the most tentative of ways -- there does seem to me something different about Chaucer as compared to most medieval (and modern) writers. With many of the texts I teach regularly I arrive at a certain comfortable point and feel that I know them. Chaucer is an author who consistently seems new to me every time I teach my "Canterbury Tales" course, and I've been doing that for 13 years now. Some day I'll post more on this, and it would be great to have such a topic at NCS in 2010 as well.

NCS Swansea will someday be looked back upon as the great moment of arrival among medievalists for disability studies. Chris Baswell delivered a plenary on eccentric and odd bodies so eloquent that it cannot help but to be marked as the announcement of a possible future for the field. Though he refused to use the word "disabled," preserving the Middle Ages as the time before such a label, such temporal separation was immediately -- and quite movingly -- undercut by his passionate self-identification with these eccentric bodies.

Chris's talk reminded me in many ways of Carolyn Dinshaw's announcement of the arrival of a postcolonial Middle Ages in her Biennial Lecture in London, NCS 2000. She was not the first to be mixing the medieval with the postcolonial. The Postcolonial Middle Ages had been published earlier in the year, scholars like Patty Ingham, Geraldine Heng and Michelle Warren were already visible practitioners. It was more that after this big public event the landscape changed, and much of the uncertainty that medievalists had about this kind of work began at last to dissipate. Likewise, ITM readers know very well that disability studies is already thriving within medieval studies, but now it seems that this field's time for prominence has arrived.

Along these same lines, it was strange not to have Carolyn Dinshaw's lecture cited within Ardis Butterfield's, especially because the two had so much in common. Butterfield spoke of a familial experience of Anglo-India, and cited Dipesh Chakrabarty (who I am convinced has displaced Homi Bhabha as the medievalist's favorite postcolonialist) to frame her argument -- two things done, eight years ago, by Dinshaw. Of course we at ITM have been worried for some time about the nonappearance of Dinshaw's work within some of the scholarship that she enabled, and that is why we'll be reading Getting Medieval in our blog book club in August.

Another field that made a compelling appearance is what early modernists often call, somewhat tongue in cheek, "Thing Studies." Presaged by an excellent talk Kellie Robertson gave at NCS in 2006, objects as more than their materiality figured brilliantly in Valerie Allen's plenary "Gems Pearls of Literature" (about the interrelation of mollusk-derived and lyric-derived pearls) and Patty Ingham's "Chaucer's Spectral Objects" (likewise examining the interplay of the lyrical and the material, and truly spectral in that Patty was not there to read it).

The necessity of studying medievalism was made amply evident in a brilliant paper by Stephanie Trigg, whose notion of the medieval as performative is as true for the conference itself as it is for the Order of the Garter (and is made even truer as bloggers report the conference as a kind of fan-based dissemination of the activity: I personally think that blogs have served to make conferences far more important than they were a few years ago, because now accounts of the research disseminated there are broadcast quickly and widely. ITM, for example, has a readership that approximately equals the total number of people attending the NCS conference, and that far surpasses the number present at most of the sessions on which I'm reporting). Many more papers on medievalism followed, including a great panel on the topic that included David Matthews, Erin Labbie, Larry Scanlon, and Ruth Evans. Carolyn Dinshaw's thoroughly entertaining piece on the cult British film A Canterbury Tale furthered such discussion in the "Queer Temporalities" session (the very title of which nicely encapsulates exactly what the challenge of medievalism is: to think time differently).

Surprisingly, no one disagreed with the assertion (made several times) that medieval studies is a form of medievalism, though as Stephanie predicted at her paper critics who are happy to state such things still tend to cling to high culture artifacts and comfortable methodologies (Matthews offered a series of taxonomies of medievalism [we medievalists do love our taxonomies]; beautiful readings of poems by Larkin and Lowell also featured in the same panel) and not be comfortable at all with, say, A Knight's Tale, which poses the exact same provocations.

So much for the arrival of important new critical tools. A critical methodology barely present at this conference was psychoanalysis, even in the panel on "Medieval Pathologies." I have a hard time accounting for that vanishing. Since Aranye Fradenburg is the rumored choice for the next Biennial Lecture, that may well change at NCS Sienna in 2010.

Jet lag is catching up with me and this has been a lot of typing at once. I hope to share more about the conference in the days ahead, but for the time being invite anyone else who went to add their reflections. And if you haven't read them already, check out the accounts of NCS at Quod She, Miglior Acque and Humanities Researcher.

Merry Medieval Monday: Unexpectedly Confronting the Past

by Mary Kate Hurley
(image: unexpected Medieval Italian Greyhound, from the Cloisters museum, that looks surprisingly like my own dog, Allegra)

Today was a beautiful day for working on my dissertation. This was especially true because I got to have tea with my undergraduate adviser, Gillian Overing, and there are very few meetings that I look forward to more. So of course, on this particular Monday, there was no doubt that there would be much conversation about the Anglo-Saxon past, and of course about the work being done that will orient the future of our studies. This certitude of medieval-ly oriented conversations is not what I wish to speak about today.

In an alliterative analogue to Festive Fridays, I thought Merry Medieval Mondays might be a adequate appelation for this post, and my topic is the unexpected encounters we have in which our medieval knowledge is useful. My story comes to you from this weekend, during which my immediate family congregated to move my younger sister to Raleigh. At a post-move run to the grocery store, I was picking up a few things and found myself behind a woman who was talking about "old words" and how nice they are, and the question of why they aren't used more frequently. Imagine my surprise when the next "old word" she chose to talk about was "troubadour." Imagine my even further surprise when this same woman decided to ask the entire line of customers if anyone knew what a troubadour was.

"Well, uh -- actually -- I do!" was my startled response. I was so shocked to be using my admittedly rusty knowledge of Old Provencal lyric that I didn't even do a very good job explaining what troubadours were.

So as the Merry Medieval Monday Question: When did you find yourself employing your knowledge of the medieval in an unexpected time or place?

Greetings from the Gulag ... er, I mean Swansea

by J J Cohen


So the deluxe accommodations they promised never appeared: no room service, no mini bar, no goose down bed covers or widescreen plasma TV, no mint on the pillow each night (actually the pillow is so thin that a mint would be an improved sleeping device). Imagine the dorms at Kalamazoo, and then subtract the charm, and you can envision Swansea.

OK, that's an exaggeration. You know what makes up for the spartan living? The conviviality of the conference. And the Pub on the Pond, in easy walking distance.

My paper is today, and I will now commence to obsess upon it ... but before I do, I wanted to say, dear readers: I wish you were here.

Because then the dorms would have been overbooked, and they would have paid to put me up at a charming nearby B&B. Yes, I am certain of that.

Briefly Noted: Fratello Metallo

by Karl Steel

Some of you might not know that some time ago my colleague Nicola talked me into being in a metal band with him. Although we've not played any shows (yet), we have had the fun of condensing Paul Freedman's Images of the Medieval Peasant into one hard-hitting song that just might prove to be our hit (the title? "Peasant.").

Whatever we might be, we'll never equal what you're about to witness.

Jul. 17 - A Capuchin monk is a convincing lead singer in an Italian heavy metal rock band.

62-year old Friar Cesare Bonizzi describes himself as a "preacher-singer".

He's been singing for over a decade, and last month wowed heavy metal fans at Italy's "Gods of Metal" festival, where he performed with his band Fratello Metallo (Metal Brother) alongside groups such as Iron Maiden.

Bonizzi has released his second album "Misteri" or mysteries, inspired by a group of southern Italian women who sang about Jesus' mother Mary.

A heavy metal version of the song features on the album, but Bonizzi also sings about how alcohol can warm the heart, but then damage the liver if drank in excess as well as how important sex is to man.

Two questions: since the Capuchins are a post-medieval order, I'm uncertain of where to find the right answer. Is it technically correct to call a Capuchin a monk?

Second: anyone who gets me a Fratello Metallo t-shirt (medium please) will have my eternal gratitude, 4 delicious beers, or a song dedication: whichever you prefer.

Next stop: Swansea

by J J Cohen

This evening I depart for Wales, and the New Chaucer Society Congress, where I will be presenting a paper in a "Politics of Memory" panel and hobnobbing with the Chaucerians. I have separation anxiety already, because while I am gone my son Alex departs for two weeks of sleepaway camp in the wilds of West Virginia. The minute I return, my wife leaves for a business meeting in Colorado Springs. The only Cohen staying in place over the next few weeks is poor, neglected Katherine, who will now be made to sleep in the attic and will be issued a small broom with which to sweep up after the rest of us.

The Tiny Shriner is NOT coming with me on this jaunt because I just cannot imagine a transatlantic flight with that guy -- even if some doctor would prescribe tiny Ambien for him.

Queering the Non/Human Bookcover

by J J Cohen

Is this book cover not a thing of beauty? The image is Axolotl by Karl Grimes. Squint and you also might see my blurb.

Queering the Non/Human will be published by Ashgate at month's end, and contains as its "Afterword" a short piece inspired by a conversation that unfolded on this blog. Indeed, in an attempt not to do the scholarly-essay-as-usual thing -- and in an attempt to make visible the ways in which scholarship can be a communal rather than a solitary project, especially in these days of electronic conversations -- the afterword includes pieces of that unfolding interchange in its main body, rather than banished to the footnotes.

Take it from me: the book will be of wide interest to ITM readers. Congratulations Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird on the publication of the volume.

Thanks are due ...

by J J Cohen

... to Ralph Luker of Cliopatria (a blog at the History News Network site) for including In the Middle in his list of eighty blogs without which "history education on the internet would be seriously impoverished." He writes that "there is a group of history blogs that seem to me to be central to history blogging" -- and how great is it that a history-sensitive blog composed by those trained in literary studies made the list?

Now read Eileen's terrific post and see why.