History Has Many Skins: Enduring Preoccupations

by EILEEN JOY

When we were having lunch at the Circle Bistro in D.C. this past week, just before the "Touching the Past" symposium at George Washington University, and in between some silly discussions having to do with the 1976 movie Logan's Run, valium, and turning into oranges [thanks Julian Yates!], the conversation turned to whether or not we believed that there are certain things [certain subjects, certain objects, certain frames of mind, landscapes, places, weather, etc.] that have always preoccupied each one of us and continue to do so, such that, even if we peer into our childhood, long before we were medievalists, or into our earlier non-medievalist careers [for Karl, his stint in a punk band, for Jeffrey, his flirtation with biology, for me, my life as a gardener and fiction writer and general ne'er-do-well hedonist--oh, and that applies to Karl, too, circa 1980s and, for me anyway, into the mid-1990s], we might notice, with a sudden surprise, that we were *always* thinking about history, or we were always obsessed with animals [Karl], or with time [all of us], or with injustice [me], or with bodies [Jeffrey], etc. It is my own firm belief [although Karl demurred a bit] that there really are certain dispositions and orientations [desires, leanings] and habits of mind that we possess very early on, and almost unawares, these dispositions and preoccupations creep into everything we do, they won't let go of us, but we don't always readily admit this [or maybe don't always see it]. Are we formed so early on in our orientations to the world that, as Sara Ahmed has argued in Queer Phenomenology, some things appear in view to us, while other things, although present, remain out of view to us?

For me, I can only say that, yes, I really think this is so. Unlike a lot of other people, I came to medieval studies very, very late, only finishing my Ph.D. just before I turned 40, and after quite a few stints as anything but a medievalist: bookkeeper, garden designer, fiction writer, travel accountant, filmmaker, business entrepreneur/capitalist whore, photographer's assistant, interior designer's assistant, payroll manager, secretary/receptionist, etc. But throughout all of this I was, for the most part, surrounded by artists [chiefly writers, painters, sculptors, filmmakers, musicians] and I was always, in one way or another, working on my own art [my fiction], and when I reflected on that at the Circle Bistro last Friday, it occurred to me, with something almost like a shock [because I had not really thought about it before], that pretty much all of my stories [and my one novella] are absolutely all about history [about the past and its hold on the present], and also about resurrections of the various dead [and isn't this why I also love the paintings of Stanley Spencer?], and of course, they are all, in some fashion, love stories--albeit, rather queer love stories, not meaning they are about same-sex relationships, but rather that they are about queer couplings of all sorts: between Pablo Neruda and Marie Curie, who I paired up in one story, "I Have Kept My Heart Yellow," between Emma Bovary and a baker of blackbird pies, in "A Sweet, Crunchy Tart," between Edmund from Lewis's Narnia and a dharmic colony of ants, in "About the Author," between Lot and his daughters, in "Lot's Wife," between a male stripper and a Volvo that could fly, in "Volvo in the Sky" [these are just my published stories]. But speaking of the more conventional denotation of "queer," at least in our current critical parlance, I was always turning certain historical figures into lesbians: Marie Curie, Emma Bovary, etc. This, embarrassingly, has to be admitted.

It seems to me that we have to have created what might be called a "petit"-body of work, not with any particular forethought, just following our creative whims, and then some time passes, and we look back on what always seemed pell mell, and a certain beautiful order emerges--something strange and yet so familiar because it was what we always wanted, or were trying to say, all along. We love certain things so much, have such affection and loyalty to them that, even when we don't notice their presence, they are always emerging within us and flowing into our work. We have dispositions, in other words, and we should embrace them, maybe even give them more room to really, as it were, ravish us. Because I would like to think that the things I love in this world could not only be taken, but could take me in return. And wouldn't this also be an/other way of thinking about history and about writing history? We could have histories of dispositions, habits, preoccupations, orientations, or we could write our own medieval devotional manuals.

And so I'm also wondering: what is your disposition? Can you look at the work you've done in medieval studies, for example [your theses and dissertations, your essays and articles and books, your courses, etc.] and then, while also considering your former selves, your child self, do you see that you have certain subjects and objects and landscapes that preoccupy you, concern you, obsess you, inhabit you? And what are they? I would love to know.

And although Jeffrey asked me to share here on ITM one of my short stories, I'm not sure I feel entirely comfortable with that [they can be found, in any case, here and there in various journals and books such as Black Warrior Review and The Sun and Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction], but I will share here just the beginning of one story, published in 1992, "A Sweet, Crunchy Tart," told from the point of the view of the blackbird pie maker who lives on the imaginary island of Merula, and which got me thinking about all of this to begin with [and I will admit here, as I did to Jeffrey, that the first lines of this story came to me one afternoon [in their entirety] in 1991, in the midst of a hellishly hot summer when I was living in Virginia in a house without air conditioning and I would spend almost every single day lying in one of those antique, claw-footed tubs, where it was cool, and staring out the window, and just waiting, I guess, for anything to happen]:

History has many skins, layer upon layer of fragile papyrus, a thick apocrypha of facts and fictions, strands of white hair, cups full of brown teeth and jewelry gone green with rust. If our skin becomes dust and dust persists through all of our calamities, then I'm as eternal as air, sitting on the prow of the ship that sails to Byzantium, a twinkle in my eye. My bones might rot on the hull of the earth, but I hope there is a part of me that will settle on the wing of a gull and I will survive, yes, I will survive in spite of everything. It is love, the star in my palm, that will get me through, shake me out of time, make me like the seed shaken out of the poppy, small and hard, tasteless, eternal.

Radical Acts of Anachronistic, Contemporaneous Combustion: Notes Toward an Historical Poethics

Figure 1. Stanley Spencer, Love Letters (1950)

by EILEEN JOY

[Be sure to note below the call for submissions from Cary Howie for the special issue of L'Esprit Créateur on "sanctity"]

Let's gather firewood. We'll light a fire on the mountain.
--Pablo Neruda, from "Love Sonnet LXXVIII"

As promised, I am going to share here my talk from the GWU Symposium on "Touching the Past," and I want to thank everyone who was there for such a stimulating set of conversations just after the papers were presented and beyond, well into the evening. I also want to thank the other presenters--Peggy McCracken, Julian Yates, and Carolyn Dinshaw--for their beautiful and thought-provoking papers. I found it almost frightening how much our four papers collectively paced and fretted around certain subjects: the inter-penetration of bodies and times, the pastoral (English landscapes, especially), affective/ghostly presences, the animal and animality, queer loves/affections, anachronistic "after"-lives, and resurrections. I never really got to the "poethics" part of my presentation (not enough time to if I didn't want to shirk my attention to the images of the paintings of Stanley Spencer, and I didn't), and so I have included it here in the more full version of my paper. My conclusion draws upon some of Joan Retallack's ideas in her book The Poethical Wager, but also upon the various manifestos written by the members of Oulipo, a literary collective formed in Paris in 1960 (and still going); members have included such figures as Italo Calvino and Raymond Queneau, and I'm wondering if any of our poet-medievalists are familiar with their work (I am thankful to the wonderful R.D. Morgan for giving me as a gift their "primer of potential literature"). If you want to understand the title of this post, you will find it in the paper itself (in which I have also included the images of Spencer's paintings):

The Faded Silvery Imprints of the Bare Feet of Angels: Notes Toward an Historical Poethics

NOTE: And it goes without saying, I hope, that any constructive questions that might be lobbed my way would be considered most useful by me since this forms part of the Introduction to a book that I am trying to complete this coming semester, when I will be on a leave from teaching (and that also means "hint hint Dan and Mary Kate: can you re-articulate here some of the questions and elaborations you had for me in DC?).

CFP: Sanctity

by J J Cohen

Posted on behalf of favorite ITM love object Cary Howie.

Call for Submissions
L'Esprit Créateur
Special Issue: Sanctity

From Eulalie to Derrida, sanctity performs a series of crucial and complicated functions for French literature and philosophy. This special issue will address the figure of the saint as it gets deployed in contexts sacred and profane, and as it embodies ongoing concerns with materiality and transcendence, exclusion and belonging. The "communion of saints" should be understood, in this way, as widely as possible: as a name for the kinds of sharing or belonging that sanctity at once names and enables; as the ensemble of gestures, liturgical and otherwise, through which these kinds of sharing take place; as the barest thinking of material togetherness. Radically heterogeneous and radically constitutive of communities, in this world and beyond this world, saints condense especially powerful wishes and anxieties about where we’re going—and who "we" are, in the first place and the last.

Deadline for submissions: 1 July 2009. Maximum length: 6000 words. Please address all inquiries to Cary Howie, csh34@cornell.edu.

At the Holy Sepulchre

by J J Cohen

Re: this, there is also this. Brawling over ownership of the church? Even Mandeville realized the religious rivalries unfolding within the architecture that encloses the tomb of Jesus ... but he offered a vision of fairly pacific coexistence, not kung-fu monks.

Of course, he was imagining the space rather than inhabiting it ... and didn't seem all that concerned that a Muslim sultan would be its caretaker.

Of Haptic Pasts and Lampshade Fezes

by J J Cohen

Given that the single objective of the recent Touching the Past symposium at GW was to convince Carolyn Dinshaw that a small, burgundy colored lampshade was in fact a fez, and then to photograph said medievalist with said "fez" atop her head, I can without hesitation declare that Touching the Past was a resounding success.

Some highlights:

• More than fifty people participated, filling the room.
  
• Though most of our audience was local (GW, AU and UMD were especially well represented), a hefty contingent came from out of town and spent the night -- gratifying, considering that this hadn't been conceptualized as a "destination" gathering.
  
• Among those arriving from semi-distant parts was a van full of undergraduates from Richard Stockton College in New Jersey. They were a cool, friendly bunch. I also got to meet Ken Tompkins. I wish I'd had more time with him, but could say only a fast hello while dashing between cookie plates and audience herding.
• In fact I wish I had had more time with many people. The problem with running an event like this is the, well, running. I spent so much time on the move that I wasn't able to hear most of the Q&A (I am told it was quite lively, and would love it if someone present would post about the conversation here at ITM). I also didn't get to chat and/or catch up with several people I would have liked to converse with. If I snubbed you, I apologize.
  
• I was so proud of my GW students, former and current. They are the best ... and most of them stayed with the group right up to the end of festivities at 2 AM.
• Among those who came: the polymath Michael Wenthe, the affable Theresa Coletti, the charming Gail Gibson, the ardent Anna Klosowska, the mocking Liza Blake, the Heaney-hating Dan Remein, the splendid Myra Seaman, the elegant Madhavi Menon (the only person in the world who can eat more sweets than me) ...
• Peggy McCracken, Julian Yates, Carolyn Dinshaw, and Eileen Joy have so much in common that they probably formed a secret club together as kids. Hearing how well the four presentations fit together confirmed this suspicion of mine. Many attendees of the symposium asked me if the papers had been shared beforehand among the presenters. They had not. It's just that we had four people interested in the past, touch, pastoral, the early twentieth century, images, bodies.
  
• Possessing more than bare-bones funding for the institute means that we were able to invite as many graduate students as faculty to dinner with us. Twenty-eight of us devoured a vegetarian thali at Nirvana, the kind owners of which even selected two decent Indian wines to accompany the meal. GW MEMSI is trying to foster a community that also lives and breathes outside of the conventional space and formalized interchanges. No better spur to continued connversation exists than good company over good food and good drink.
• Maybe that is why we stayed out until 2 AM at the Orientalist splendor of the Venetian Room (where Anna Klosowska gave us languishing lessons on the opulent divans), and then in the patio of a nearby college dive bar.
• All the ITMers made the pilgrimage to my office to see the Tiny Shriner in his native habitat (a window ledge where he currently stands with a gazelle and a miniature boomerang). If you squint at the picture, above, taken by Karl, you can see the ghostly presence of two ITM commentators and favorite people, who were in attendance at the conference.
• Eileen's paper on the English painter Stanley Spencer condensed all her obsessions into a moving meditation on time, mortality, and letters. Karl gave perfect introductions to Julian and Carolyn, finding resonant fragments of their work. Mary Kate was her usual insightful self in the conversations that followed ... conversations that were errant and energizing.
  
• If you are reading this and you attended the Touching the Past symposium, THANK YOU. I cannot imagine a better inaugural event for the GW Medieval and Early Modern Institute. The convivial philosophizing that took place over that afternoon that stretched into the wee hours of the morning remind me -- again, and again -- of how fortunate I feel to be a part of the field right now.

Although perhaps it goes without saying, still I must say: the symposium would not have been possible without my wonderful GW colleagues Holly Dugan, Jonathan Hsy, Marcy Norton, Jehangir Malegam. Lowell Duckert undertook much of the labor that made the event possible, and Mike Smith and Beth Lattin pitched in at key moments to save the day.

Today is the day

by J J Cohen

I feel touched already.

Secretly we're all hoping the new president-elect will stop in and finger the Tiny Shriner for his cabinet (Secretary of Education and Festive Fezwear, anyone?)

How to See All 4 ITM Bloggers in the Same Room at the Same Time

[click on the image to make it readable]

Quote of the Day: Barack Obama

by J J Cohen

OK, everyone else is blogging it, so I will join in. My favorite line from Obama's eloquent acceptance speech is the following -- not for its rhetorical beauty, but simply because of who is mentioned, without fanfare:

It's the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen, by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different, that their voices could be that difference. It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled. Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states.

The understated inclusiveness of that second sentence and its utter lack of hesitation speak volumes.

Yes, I know: things will fall apart. They always do. The reality never matches the vision. Yet for the time being, I am so pleased for the vision.

Ok, back to Mandeville.

Bodies in Motion 2: Three Tombs

by J J Cohen

[Part II of my Mandeville "Bodies in Motion" piece. For part I, look here. This southern oriented image of the world, drawn by by the Moroccan cartographer al-Idrisi for King Roger of Sicily in 1154 can be found here. It doesn't have all that much to do directly with Mandeville, but its cultural hybridity and reorganization of space speak to the Book's ambitions.]

We immure bodies within or beneath stone because we possess no weightier material: lithic heaviness keeps the corpse in its place, marks the hope that some trace will there endure even as the dead are lost to us. Christ rose because he could not be kept by such stone; death could not still his divine body. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is in Jerusalem, not Satalia – Satalia, that suddenly subterranean metropolis where a mysterious and unnamed “yong man” loved so ardently that he opened the marble tomb withholding the body to which he was devoted. Nine months later a voice commanded “Go to the tumbe of that womman and opene the tumbe and byhold what thow hast gyte on here” (30-31). The young man unseals the stone for a second time, and a flying head swoops out, restless progeny of a corpse not surrendered to mortuary immobility. The airborne head circles his habitation, and “anoon the cité sanke adoun”: the earth swallows Satalia in its entirety. The marble grave here was not empty but too full: with a body not yielded to stillness, with forbidden pleasure, with the monstrous product of a passion that transgressed the limit of death.

Compare a tomb that comes just a bit earlier in the text, that of Saint John the Evangelist at Ephesus (29). We are told two irreconcilable stories about this apostle’s resting place: either John’s body was translated to heaven and the grave filled with manna; or that he entered the tomb while still alive, where he still remains, awaiting the Day of Judgment. “Men may se,” asserts Mandeville, “the erthe of the tumbe many tymes stire and meve, as ther were a quyk thing ther under” (29). What has the unholy passion of the young man at Satalia to say to this tomb of restless occupant? Or to the narrative of the Passion (capital P) in the Book of Mark, where the three women coming to anoint the body of Jesus find that the great rock sealing his tomb has been rolled away [et respicientes vident revolutum lapidem erat quippe magnus valde, Mark 16:4]. A mysterious young man [iuvenem] has already entered the tomb, and he decrees the vacancy of the place: “Be not affrighted; you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified: he is risen, he is not here, behold the place where they laid him” (Mark 16:6). The Holy Sepulchre is empty, and the message of the untenanted tomb is that death itself has perished. Necrophiliac Satalia sinks to the underground; Jerusalem, a place to which every approach is (in Mandeville’s account) uphill, remains the earth’s pinnacle. Could the contrast be more stark? Three tombs, three possibilities: revelation, mystification, boundary-crossing exploration. The tomb of Jesus enjoins the pilgrim who has reached the earth’s omphalos to return home, the trajectory of a conventional itinerarium. Who can blame the tourist who wants to chip a piece off the grave to remember its revelations? But the Sultan who regulates the church no longer allows its rocks to be transported.

The tombs at Satalay and Ephesus, tombs that interrupt the journey to the Holy Land, hint at perilous routes and dangerous dalliances. They suggest in advance that Mandeville will not be content to turn back after reaching Jerusalem. Mandeville’s movement beyond the city does not necessarily take away from its centrality: I don’t think that we witness here, as Stephen Greenblatt argued, “the abandonment of the dream of a sacred center.” As Iain Macleod Higgins has shown, the Mandeville-author stresses Jerusalem’s middleness more than any other medieval writer, a literal as well as symbolic placement that permeates the Book. This world orientation and its consequences are not going to be abandoned by leaving Jerusalem behind – and indeed, the Book will return to the city’s status as center much later, when Mandeville details the sphericity of the earth. Yet at that point of return, as Mandeville describes the potential circumnavigability of the globe, Jerusalem seems to be the top of the world rather than its center. The flatness of a mappamundi possesses a middle: Jerusalem, source-city of history, can be emplaced like the umbilicus of the body of Christ. Yet the Book of John Mandeville repeats, obsessively, that the world is not a disc but a globe: the people of the Isles of Prester John walk beneath English feet (“they ar under the erthe to us” 92), but so far away that their patter is impossible to discern. A dedicated and God-protected traveler could, by always moving forward, “come right too the same countrees that he wer come of and come fro, and so go aboute the erthe” (92).

Spheres do not, of course, possess physical middles. The best to which a globe can aspire would be a conceptual middle, but that is not quite the same thing. If Jerusalem is the world’s center, then that fixed point exists only on maps and timelines that cannot capture the fullness of the world, cannot capture the perpetual curve that gives to lands and waters their unattainable horizons.

Lapidary Mandeville
The errant trajectory of the Book of John Mandeville was suggested early on, when the narratives of Hippocrates’ dragon-encased daughter and the monstrous flying head of Satalay erupted into a pilgrimage narrative (an account based upon a source that contains neither story: these are the Mandeville-author’s additions). The Book gains so much velocity in its narration that it escapes the theology-saturated landscapes of the Holy Land to boomerang through heterodox India, Egypt, Africa, China, Sumatra, Hungary, Amazonia, a multiverse of archipelagos that in their proliferation trade sacred histories for secular multiplicities. Mandeville’s travels are in fact the motions of a body transported by reading, encountering its other worlds in books and fashioning new realms from dynamic textual convergence. The Book of John Mandeville is a literary pastiche, an alchemical experiment concocted of perhaps three dozen sources, from encyclopedias and itineraria to religious tracts, traveler’s tales, and histories. “John Mandeville” seems to have been a fiction, no more likely to have existed than Merlin in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. The Book of John Mandeville never intended to give us the best routes or the most dogma-soused accounts of sacred sites. An energetic meditation upon the exotic, upon the genre of travel narrative, upon the nature of the world we inhabit, the Book of John Mandeville (in all of its multifarious manifestations) is constitutionally incapable of offering anything but a cosmos where change and movement are constants, and geographies where bodies are caught in perpetual motion, where even the inanimate stirs with a kind of desire-soaked life.

The Book opens by providing those anchoring bits of biography that have propelled readers to locate a real person as the text’s narrator. Born in Saint Albans, John Mandeville is possessed of a nonchalant Englishness, seen most often as he quietly interprets the world from an anglocentric point of view. A knight who “travelide aboute in the world” (21), Sir John possesses a thorn from the crown placed on Jesus at the Passion; served in the Sultan’s army and was offered a wife; drank from the fountain of youth; hates Jews; is a specialist in exotic alphabets; knows good wine and balm and diamonds from bad. These attributes act as truth-effects, attaching the story to what seems a historical personage with lived experience, attaching the narrative to a bulwark, a seeming veridicality. The text sutures itself at the same time to a specific chronology: Mandeville’s year of departure is in the Defective Version 1332; his year of return 1366; his circuit through the world the accomplishment of 34 years in total.

Mandeville’s attachment to home serves as an effective brake upon his nomadism, the guarantee that despite not having turned back after attaining Palestine, he will nonetheless eventually reappear at his point of departure. And indeed it is upon native soil (“my contré,” 95), that we last glimpse him, worn out perhaps by travel, composing the book we now read. An enduring pull within Mandeville’s identity strives to keep him bound in place, to keep him attached to specific designation. This adhesiveness can go under many names, but I think its best designation is Englishness. Whether the lost ur-text of the Book was composed by an author who would have self-identified as English or French is not only impossible to decide, it is ultimately not all that relevant (the supremely English Remains of the Day was written by Kazuo Ishiguro). No matter who the actual author, no matter what collective identity that author would in life have embraced, the Book of John Mandeville is strewn with allusions to its narrator’s nationality, affixing him in history and to place. Some references are trivial, giving the Mandeville-persona a patina of casual Englishness: thus in detailing the Saracen alphabet, he writes that just as they have “extra” letters in their alphabet, so do “we” English possess thorn and yogh (58). Like most medieval English writers, Mandeville glibly conflates “England” and “Britain,” as if the Welsh and Scots did not share the island (Constantine is called “kyng of Ingelond that was that tyme called the Greet Brytayne” 25). The knight’s birthplace is Saint Albans, not far from London; his name is by the fourteenth century sufficiently anglophone … and given the polyglot nature of his contemporary homeland, his Englishness is in no way attenuated when his words sound like this: “ieo Johan Maundeuille, chiualer … neez et norriz Dengleterre de la ville Seint Alban, qi y passay la meer.”

The English Mandeville is a smaller circle within the wider compass drawn by the pilgrim Mandeville whose initial destination is Jerusalem. Just as within the Christian compass, a Jewish presence inheres within the English circle as well: most famously in Mandeville’s fantasy that that a large population of Jews has been immured behind remote hills, ready to mingle with their brethren when freed in the time of Antichrist. Mandeville asserts that Jews living among contemporary Christians study Hebrew so as to welcome in their ancient tongue these enclosed people when they are freed. They will join with them “for to destruye men of Cristendom” (83). Just the opposite configuration of space is closer to the truth: having expelled its Jewish population in 1290, England inhabits an island rather like the enclosed regions where these distant Jews supposedly dwell. Late medieval Englishness is a national identity precipitated through the exclusion of Jewishness. A tiny minority at best, pre-Expulsion Jews in England had been under frequent threat from both their neighbors and from the nation. Their wholesale removal from the island did nothing to reduce English anti-Semitic fantasies. Just the opposite: once gone, they loomed as more of an imagined danger than ever. The Book of John Mandeville is widely regarded for its extensive tolerance, a generosity extended even to the Muslims who hold the Holy Land. Ian Higgins observes:

No other religious community … is so badly served in The Book as the Jews, who inhabit only the past and the future, and are depicted with a hostility bordering on paranoia. (Writing East 42)

Rather than a puzzling lapse in an otherwise tolerant persona, this paranoia may be no more than yet another signifier of Mandeville’s recalcitrant, immobilizing Englishness – an Englishness that cannot be wholly immured from the Jewishness it has abjected.
In The Jew in the Medieval Book, Anthony Bale maps the narrative turbulence coursing through Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale, intermixing Christian and Jewish identities. This is flux and instability are counteracted by a “lapidary vocabulary” of tombs and gems, metaphorical petrifications that strive to impede the text’s roiling. Like the description of the litel clergeon as a jewel,
the ‘tombe of marbul stones’ into which the boy’s body is placed (VII:680) is an attempt to contain the expansive landscape and soundscape envisioned in the tale, a reassertion of the Christian community’s faith in the fixity of signs … The tomb stands for morbid permanence and closure … The solid stone tomb repudiates the bodily rupture with which the Prioress is fascinated (85).

In a story filled with blood, tears, songs in constant and boundary-smashing movement, the marble tomb strives to demarcate, contain, and immobilize. The monument of stone fails, however, to still what it contains. The closing stanzas of the tale transport the scene to Lincoln and conflate ancient Syrian Jews with more recent English ones. “The little boy,” Bale writes, “wanders out of his distant Asian tomb into the Prioress’s England and the pilgrimage group” (86).

Of the three tombs we’ve seen in Mandeville, one has been emptied of the body that once occupied it, while the other two are too full: a restless apostle in fitful slumber, awaiting a distant future; the monstrous progeny of illicit union. Given his fascination with such bodies that remain filled with uncanny life even in the grave, shouldn’t John Mandeville be able to escape lapidary capture?

The best birthday ever

by J J Cohen

I have never received so many text messages, emails, Facebook wallposts, e-cards, Hallmark cards, cookies, high fives, hugs, and iPhone photos as I have today. I do believe that this hoopla has less to do with me than with another big event, but I'm happy for coat tails all the same. Thanks, everyone!

[illustration: the best birthday card my bro ever sent me, noon today]

Cliopatria Awards 2008

by J J Cohen

ADM reminds us that it is time again: nominate your favorite history blog and bloggers for the Cliopatria Awards.

We at ITM still take ours down from the shelf and shine it every day. Even Tiny Shriner doesn't get that kind of treatment: you should see how filthy his fez is at the moment.

A Public Service Message from 12th-Century England

by Karl Steel

Try to keep your celebrations in line tomorrow night or the ghost of Bartholomew of Exeter might rise up to punish you. He warns:

De Balationibus. Si quis balationes ante ecclesias sanctorum fecerit, seu qui faciem suam transmutauerit in habitu mulierbri, et mulier in habitu uiri, emendatione pollicita tribus annis peniteat

Amateur Theatrics.* Whoever does amateur theatrics in front of churches--either a man cross-dressing as a woman or a woman cross-dressing as a man--should do penance for 3 years.

I can only assume that Bartholomew meant "until the next election season." So, ladies, men, if you're tempted to dress up as McCain and Palin to put on a show tomorrow night, or even if you just want to bust out in some Shakespearean comedy, find an appropriate venue. Keep it from the houses of the holy.

Thanks.

(from here, but can find the same thing here in an injunction against people who make "balationes" and change their form)

* Okay, I tried. What's your best shot at "ballatio"? I don't think "dance" is sufficient. By the way, the OED etymology takes me to this hilarious conclusion: [a. OF. baler. (since 16th c. baller) to dance (= Pr. balar, It. ballare, Sp., Pg. bailar): late L. (Isidore) ballare to dance. Some think the L. formed from Gr. to dance, some f. balla BALL n.1, on the alleged ground that, in the Middle Ages, tennis was accompanied with dancing and song]

Around the web

by J J Cohen

Ephemeral lithic sculpture (remember?) ... the Mabinogion video game (h/t BLB) ... Derrida and the abstruse ... I don't know why I find this so existential ... a smashing new book series .. welcome to November ... Oh and this little event is coming up, enabling all four ITMers to be in DC on Friday.

Why I Don't Worry About Nov. 4, or, My Shallow Politics

by J J Cohen

So you may have noticed that I don't mention United States politics very much here. In part that absence is due to this blog's focus upon all things medieval ... but then again, our recurring thesis is that the past isn't easily separable from the present -- and indeed that the separation itself says more about the desires of an interpreter than it does about how history and temporality work. This palimpsestic notion of time is one reason medievalism hold such promise for medieval studies.

But I'm not a Bruce Holsinger or a Michael Moore. My politics are probably, I admit, too visceral and too shallow. I'm a caricature of a liberal academic, only I'm a living and breathing one, rather than a fellow from one of those university-focused exposés that were so popular in the 1980s. My destiny, I plead, was set by the circumstances of my birth.

You see, I was born on election day in 1964. My mother cast her vote for Lyndon Johnson and went immediately into labor. I imagine that she pulled the lever and the contractions began, but she denies that it happened quite that swiftly. Can I help that I have been a lifetime democrat ever since? (The one exception was a mayoral election in DC, when I voted socialist to avoid voting Marion Barry back into office). I should also admit that the blueness of my blood might owe something to having come into the world at Mount Auburn hospital in Cambridge, MA ... an, um, slightly liberal city. And did I mention that Ted Kennedy and Barney Frank were my political heroes growing up?

So I haven't much to say about politics, since liberal is one of those words I never ceded, even after Mike Dukakis did. But I will point out the following: on November 4 2008 I will turn 44 years old. I am fairly certain that Destiny will be giving me my best birthday present ever, a democrat in the White House. So to all you Barack supporters I say: stop worrying. My mom set everything into motion nearly forty-four years ago, and now we can enjoy the outcome at last.

Some good news: Richard Stockton College seeking a medievalist

by J J Cohen

Remember this discussion? Behold tidings of some joy.

Medieval Literature, Assistant Professor Tenure Track
The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey seeks applicants for a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Medieval Literature to start September 2009. Ph.D. from a literature department or appropriate area studies program required for this position. Successful candidate will teach a wide range of courses in medieval literature, which may include Chaucer and the History of the English Language, as well as core courses in support of the Literature curriculum. Candidates with experience or interest in developing innovative and interdisciplinary courses and curricula are desired. Teaching load is six four-hour courses per year, which includes two self-designed courses in Stockton’s interdisciplinary General Studies program. Candidates who can enhance the Literature Program’s commitment to diversity through teaching, scholarship and service are encouraged to apply. Academic experiences with culturally diverse populations desired. Salaries competitive, $50,843-$58,471; excellent benefits.
Apply: Send letter of application, CV, statement of teaching philosophy, and three letters of recommendation by November 14, 2008, to Dr. Robert Gregg, Dean of Arts and Humanities, Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, AA118, P.O. Box 195,Pomona, NJ 08240-0195. On-line applications can be sent to ARHU@stockton.edu Screening will continue until position is filled. Stockton is an equal opportunity institution. Screening Begins: Immediately. Screening Ends: November 14, 2008. Bargaining Unit: AFT