Dying on a Hill: Martial Metaphors for Medieval Studies

by J J Cohen

I hope the following does not come out wrong. I do not know Michael Drout personally or follow his blog. I have read some of his work, but not much. I realize that by focusing on a single blog post I may be taking his words out of their widest context.

Drout recently published a rousing blog post on "Laying Down Markers." Drout writes of a colleague who suggested hiring a contemporary-focused scholar rather than a medievalist for a vacant position:

I decided not to let this go, as I'm sure everyone wanted me to. Instead, I laid down a marker: we are not going to make this decision without a debate about this idea on the merits of the argument and its philosophical structure. It will be a long, difficult, drawn-out debate, because I know my arguments very well and am happy to make them (and if they're not careful, I'll use rhetoric, I will...). But I am not going to do the typical thing, the medievalist thing (I'm sad to say), and make one gesture and then roll over. Instead, I'm going to be willing, as one of my colleagues put it in another circumstance "to die on this hill."

Drout promises to be henceforth unrelenting in his defense of the Middle Ages, whether at faculty meetings or at the Faculty Club: "Every single time people try to discount, denigrate or ignore the field, I am going to make them engage in a long debate from first principles."

Several in the blogosphere have cheered the post. I could have more enthusiasm for Drout's endeavor if he were offering the possibility of true debate -- that is, if both sides could be open to having their positions modified and their minds changed, if both sides could acknowledge in advance that what they learn might alter how they conduct their scholarship and the ways in which they conceptualize their fields. Drout writes, though, that the debate he has in mind is more of weapon than catalyst, foisted to erode the will of auditors: "Eventually, for many people, it will just be easier to take the study of the Middle Ages seriously so as not to have to lose 2/3 of a meeting on a long, tedious but impassioned rant from / debate with Drout." Content matters less than strategy, for here words do not persuade so much as bludgeon: the threat is that these words will be unleashed unremittingly ... and without the expressed possibility of an audible reply.

What if we medievalists had conversations with our colleagues rather than debates? What if we formed alliances rather than took last stands on lofty mounds?

I've been in academia long enough to predict that reluctance to trigger a predictable "rant/debate" from a colleague leads not to an increased respect for his or her values and seriousness, but to an increased marginalization of the would-be debater. Does anyone listen to the self-appointed gadfly? Do deployers of well practiced rants ever actually obtain what they desire? Do they ever die, like bloodied Roland upon his angel-touched hill? Or do they slowly fade and diminish within an isolation they have brought upon themselves?

I spend a great deal of time pondering how to ensure that medieval studies forms alliances that can enrich understanding of the past and complicate conversations about the present and future. I'd like to think that my colleagues who work in the contemporary Caribbean or in nineteenth-century America can learn as much from me as I from them, and that we can mean it when we say that we belong to the same intellectual community. I've been reading Michel Serres recently, and he has some interesting quotes about how debate drove him from academia: "I have never understood why one must be at odds with those who do not share one's point of view." "Since war is the most common thing in the world, it causes indefinite repetition of the same gestures and same ideas." "I'm not convinced that debate ever advances thinking." Conversation, Serres will allow, can refine and clarify, but for the most part Serres chooses the monk's cell over colloquia. He is so weary of the martial game of knowledge that he writes as if he were Saint Anthony in the desert.

I would not make Serres' choice. I am no good at solitude, crave it as I sometimes do. My own credo? Provisional alliance. Communities built upon interests regardless of time period. An absence of resentment. An exploration of scholarship that moves outside inherited or pregiven boundaries. Invention and creation. The downside: some people will declare that you are not a real medievalist (because to some scholars, real medievalists are those who do what they themselves do, a terribly small world to find oneself trapped within). The upside: conversation and alliance-building work. In the three years I've been chairing English at GW we've had an influx of very good graduate students in early modern and medieval subjects, founded a new institute devoted to early Europe, we've added a new medievalist to our TT faculty, and we've grown our enrollments in every early course. These achievements happened with the assistance and through the good will of my colleagues, not because I drew a line or offered to perish on a hill.

Reading Beowulf in the Rubble of Grozny

by EILEEN JOY

Relative to my recent post on the collapse last week of the national archives in Cologne, Germany, I thought I would share with everyone here the abstract of my keynote address for Blackwell Compass's first-ever Interdisciplinary Virtual Conference ["Breaking Down Barriers"], to be held online from October 19-30, 2009:

Reading Beowulf in the Rubble of Grozny: Pre/modern, Post/human, and the Question of Being-Together

I finished the abstract yesterday and am currently working on a more detailed outline and slide presentation; the full paper is due by the end of April, so any and all comments are most definitely welcome!

Weekend Fun? Reading Alla's Britoun Book

by Karl Steel

Last week, I read the Man of Law's Tale (hereafter MLT) for the second time (I think) and taught it for the first (I should say: I tried to teach it, since my students refused to leave the prologue alone: they love the Host, and they love the horizontal optative affiliations of the pilgrimage as a countermodel to the 'natural' English hierarchical communities of city or kingdom). Because I can't leave well enough alone, and just because I'm hung up, I'm throwing myself into the breach again next Wednesday before moving us onto the Wife of Bath's Prologue.

I'm hung up on the "Britoun book" of MLT 666. Some background: our heroine, Pauline Custance, after having escaped Syria by washing ashore in Northumbria, is now wrongly accused of murdering Hermengyld, one of her (newly) Christian Northumbrian protectors. The actual murderer is of course a lascivious knight outraged by Custance's virtue. In the relevant stanzas, Custance is on the verge of execution, when King Alla of Northumbria--astonishingly without feminine assistance--tries to find an out:

This Alla kyng hath swich compassioun,
As gentil herte is fulfild of pitee,
That from his eyen ran the water doun.
"Now hastily do fecche a book," quod he,
"And if this knyght wol sweren how that she
This womman slow, yet wol we us avyse
Whom that we wole that shal been oure justise."

A britoun book, written with evaungiles,
Was fet, and on this book he swoor anoon
She gilty was, and in the meene whiles
An hand hym smoot upon the nekke-boon,
That doun he fil atones as a stoon,
And bothe his eyen broste out of his face
In sighte of every body in that place. (II.659-672)

Now, I'm not a Chaucerian, and, once again, I'm new to MLT, and I haven't read all that Kathy Lavezzo has to say on it, and for the life of me I can't recall the substance of Mary Kate's Kzoo 2007 paper on MLT and Bede (that right?), so take the following claims cum grano salis: the Chaucer Bibliography Online doesn't suggest that there's a lot on the Britoun Book, and neither do searches on Google Books and eBrary (which includes JJC's Medieval Identity Machines and Heng's Empire of Magic): there's a bit on it in Elizabeth Robertson's essay on "Nonviolent Christianity" here and in Patricia Clare Ingham on "Contrapunctal Histories" here and a fair amount of attention on it in Don-John Dugas's "The Legitimization of Royal Power in Chaucer’s ’Man of Law’s Tale’" (Modern Philology 95 (1997): 27-43). Despite the onrush of postcolonial criticism on MLT (by Dinshaw, Susan Schibanoff, Kathryn Lynch, &c.), it seems that the "Britoun book" hasn't been gummed to death yet by Chaucerians.

Let's commence gumming, then. Here are the peculiarities: if you don't know MLT, Custance had been sent to Syria by her father, the Emperor of Rome, to marry its Sultan; to secure the marriage, the Sultan converts from Islam to Christianity, and is promptly martyred (with all his allies) by his vengeful and pious mother. Thus Custance arrives in Northumbria from a (very temporarily) Christian East. Northumbria itself is largely pagan, although pockets of Christians survive here and there in "privetee" (II.548), but especially in Wales (II.544). Alla himself converts to Christianity only after the miracle in II.668-72. As Lavezzo (and I'm sure others) have observed, Alla's name necessarily recalls Allah. How can we read this scene of Christianity and conversion and swearing? How should we understand the "Britoun book," which might remind you of another "certain very ancient book written in the British language" as much as it reminds you of a certain Biblical story?

I have tentatively proposed understanding the book as an element in a systematic (and all too obvious) effacement of the Eastern origins of Christianity.

• Bear in mind that the Man of Law complains that the stars "hurlest al from est til occident / that naturelly wolde holde another way" (II.297-8), which contradicts not only Ptolemy (who says stars move East to West) but also a gloss in Hengwrt and Ellesmere that reads "semper ab Oriente in Occidentem" (cited in Lynch "Storytelling, Exchange, and Constancy : East and West in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale." Chaucer Review 33: 409-22, at 416): faced with evidence that light routinely comes out of the East, the ML distorts the scientific evidence, and is called out on it by the glosses themselves!
• What Christianity there had been in the East appears only to be almost immediately extirpated at its root; later, the Roman Christians massacre the remaining Syrians (II.960-967), as if salting the Earth from which Christianity sprung;
• Alla should also be heard as Allah: I'm not sure what to make of this except to suggest that it relocates "Allah" from the East to West, converts him to Christianity, and shows him in possession of a Gospel book written in...Welsh?
• the roots of English Christianity either come directly from Rome (in the form of Custance) or go even deeper, back into Wales, the site of Britain's primordial past, the place (and the place of the language) that signals its earliest days

Admittedly, this is not much to go on, but it's the beginning of a reading I hope to push a bit further in class on Wednesday.

What have you done with these stanzas? What has been done that I'm missing? And, if you've picked up anything from this discussion, what would you do with them now? Edit: And, if it strikes you, how could I engage such a reading with gender?

A City Without a Memory: Cologne Archives Collapse

by EILEEN JOY

Some time yesterday afternoon, the six-story Cologne Archives, housing documents dating as far back as the tenth century, as well as the private papers of writers such as Karl Marx, Hegel, and Heinrich Böll, and also all of the minutes taken at Cologne town council meetings since 1376, collapsed as if hit by a missile, only there was no missile, but rather, some sort of structural flaw that caused the building to start cracking and tumbling down. Most visitors, plus some construction workers on the roof, were able to get out in time, although two or three persons may be buried underneath the rubble. Ironically, the Archives contained many documents that had been recuperated from library buildings destroyed by Allied bombing during the Second World War, and a small nuclear bomb-proof room that had been constructed in the basement to house the most rare materials was, at the time of the building's collapse, only being used to store cleaning materials [you can read more about the story in the UK Times Online here].

Given that medievalists already always work with archives and records that are partial, damaged, and full of contextual aporia [the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, published by Columbia University Press in the early decades of the 20th century, could never be a complete record of the poetry of Anglo-Saxon England--indeed, it is quite spotty--and so many non-poetic documents that could have shed light on the social, cultural, and other circumstances of the writing of this poetry are also lost to us], the sudden disappearance, as it were, of the Cologne Archives only adds to what is already an immense loss. But what, also, of the two or three missing persons, who were likely readers in the archives that day and who lie somewhere, crushed, underneath the fractured concrete and steel and thousands and thousands of pulverized pages? One day, they were in the Archives, concerned with the frail, textual remains of the past, and in an instant, they joined those remains and even disappeared with them.

This question--or rather, this sort of question--has been much on my mind of late as I find myself lodged in a kind of hellish crevice between my struggles to finish two writing projects: one, a review essay on the status of the human for GLQ: A Journal of Gay & Lesbian Studies, in the course of which I have learned that human beings may be nothing more than the dreams and hosts of bacteria and bacterial sex [pace books by Luciani Parisi and Myra J. Hird], and yet, at the same time, if there is any hope for humanism or human rights, it will be through the recognition of shared modes of dispossession occasioned by vulnerability and grief [pace Judith Butler's Precarious Life], and the other, an abstract and detailed outline for my keynote address for Blackwell Compass's Interdisciplinary Virtual Conference in October, "Reading Beowulf in the Rubble of Grozny: Pre/modern, Post/human, and the Question of Being-Together," where, just yesterday, I was re-reading portions of the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya's book about the wars in Chechnya from 1994 through 2000 and their aftermath, A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya [Politkovskaya was shot to death in her apartment building's elevator in Moscow in October 2006, likely by killers hired by the Russian government, but no one has or likely will be convicted of her murder]. More specifically, I was thinking of the city of Grozny and how, after several massive air and ground bombing campaigns by the Russians in the mid-1990s and again in 1999, the city just kind of disappeared:

Ever since about 1999, when I first discovered what had been going in Chechnya, I have been kind of obsessed with the city of Grozny and its "disappearance," so to speak, as well as with the ways in which Grozny's destruction has not registered as more than a "blip" on the consciousness of the international media [ask most people, even educated people, if they know what happened in Grozny and they will look at you, like, huh?; show them the photographs, especially the ones in black and white, and ask them to guess where they are, and most answer "Dresden"], and I have returned often to this site as one way of thinking through certain questions that have to do with ruins, traumatic history, and memory. The Russian government purposefully refused to re-build the city for almost a decade as a "lesson" to the Chechen rebels and yet many Chechens [not counting the 500,000 or so displaced by the bombings who chose to migrate elsewhere, such as Georgia] continued living there in pretty much post-apocalyptic living conditions [a perfect breeding ground, too, for the suicide terrorism that soon flourished there]. More recently, Russia has rebuilt the city but at such lightning speed that the whole place looks like one of those towns that spring up overnight near Disney World in Florida:

Whether as belated doppelganger of Dresden or as postmodern manufactured metropolis-out-of-a-box, the problem of historical memory obtains, especially as lodged in all those materials objects [including buildings and sculptures, documents and corpses, human and nonhuman] buried somewhere underneath this glittering faux-topia, which nevertheless, in my mind has impressed upon it the image of its former, smashed buildings and piles of broken concrete. The question is also raised as to whose needs have more pressing precedence in such a scenario: the living, who want to get on with their lives, and in surroundings that do not beg them to mourn continually, but allow them to start over? Or the dead, once huddled together in basements during the winter siege of 1999, who left so suddenly and with no chance to leave behind the papers that would dictate their remembrance? Can human rights ever really be possible as a site of interventionist address for the living [such that, those huddled, freezing, in basements, will not be bombed], or is it only ever a form of philosophy, or history, that always arrives belatedly [much like Butler's writing on 9/11 and its immediate political aftermath], and works in the rubble? And this recalls me as well to these lines of Bruno Schulz:

"Ordinary facts are arranged within time, strung along its length as on a thread. There they have their antecedents and their consequences, which crowd tightly together and press hard one upon the other without any pause. This has its importance for any narrative, of which continuity and successiveness are the soul. Yet what is to be done with events that have no place of their own in time; events that have occurred too late, after the whole of time has been distributed, divided, allotted; events that have been left in the cold, unregistered, hanging in the air, homeless and errant? Could it be that time is too narrow for all events?" [Sanitorium Under the Sign of the Hourlgass]

What Slouches Toward Kalamazoo: Feeling, Affect, Ethics, Temporality

Figure 1. Julee Holcombe, "Babel Revisited"

by EILEEN JOY

In the midst of the rich discussion following my last post, "Not Yet Living at the Same Time With the Others: Prendergast, Trigg, and Dinshaw on Medievalization and the Supernatural," Jeffrey commented that he often feels "stuck" in his "inability to wrap my mind around what people mean when they use the word ethics. It gets even worse when ethics and affect hold close company." Further, he cited Heather Love's citing of Lauren Berlant's essay "The Subject of True Feeling," where Berlant writes,

"What does it mean for the struggle to shape collective life when a politics of true feeling organizes analysis, discussion, fantasy, and power? When feeling, the most subjective thing, the thing that makes persons public and marks their location, takes the temperature of power; mediates personhood, experience, and history; takes over the space of ethics and truth?"

And then Jeffrey wrote [and asked],

That second question is the one that gets to me, especially because so much of the discussion here has yielded provocative glimpses of (true) feeling -- in gravestones washing by, in the admission of vulnerability when someone discusses your work, in the multiple assertions that though we have six or a million other things we are doing at the moment, we are still compelled to add more to this dilating conversation.

Feeling-affect-ethics-temporality. How do these align?

One of my initial reactions to this question was to simply claim that it was too big, too difficult to respond to in this forum [but: who am I kidding, really? because we talk about the alignment of these subjects all the time here, but, um . . . do we ever actually get anywhere? does it matter?]. I do not plan to try [again] to answer this question here [at this moment, in other words], but it did suddenly occur to me, this morning, as I was perusing the program for the Kalamazoo Congress this coming May, that BABEL's two roundtable panels were partly designed to bring the question of affect [more specifically: pleasure, happiness, enjoyment] into contact with the question of ethics vis-a-vis medieval studies and historicism more broadly.

Here is how I [attempted] to describe both panels last spring when I was gathering participants [and thanks to Karl, by the way, who hit upon the initial ideas for these panels when we are lounging about at the Kalamazoo Radisson last May]:

"Are We Serious Enough Yet? The Place of Ethics in Medieval Scholarship"

Ever since Michael Calabrese published his article, "Performing the Prioress: Conscience and Responsibility in Studies of Chaucer's Prioress's Tale," where he argued against what he called a "politically driven medieval literary criticism" and for an "Arnoldian disinterestedness," the question is raised [again] as to whether or not medieval scholarship is or should be a site for politically- and ethically-inflected interpretive approaches. This debate raises the very provocative questions of whether or not historical scholarship can ever be disinterested or unaffected by the sometimes very painful and traumatic episodes it investigates [such as anti-Semitic pogroms or the Crusades or slavery], and whether or not literature can be separated and investigated outside of history, and if so, in what ways? This panel will bring together scholars who have written and published what might be called ethically driven medieval scholarship alongside those arguing for the possible perils of such an approach, or for the pleasures [and even the ethical pleasures] of a different approach altogether. It is hoped, also, that this session will intersect with BABEL's other panel, "Are We Enjoying Ourselves? The Place of Pleasure in Medieval Schlarship," for we plan to ask all discussants on both panels to also consider the possible pleasure of ethics as well as the ethics of pleasure in scholarship.

"Are We Enjoying Ourselves? The Place of Pleasure in Medieval Scholarship"

For several years now, there has been a growing body of work, both in medieval queer studies but also in queer studies more generally [in all fields] on the practice of historical scholarship as a form of affective "touching" and "cruising" of the past and on "addressing history in an idiom of pleasure" [e.g. the work of Carolyn Dinshaw and Elizabeth Freeman]; more currently, new work is emerging, by non-medievalists and medievalists alike, on the pleasures [but also the ethics] of affective forms of scholarship and also on new temporalities that are opened by queer historiographies and queer reading practices [i.e., work by medievalists such as Glenn Burger, Karma Lochrie, Cary Howie, Anna Klosowska, and again, Carolyn Dinshaw], and by non-medievalists such as Judith Halberstam, Elizabeth Freeman, Jose Esteban Munoz, Jonathan Goldberg, Carla Freccero, etc.]. It is our intention to use this panel to highlight the voices of the medievalists who have been thinking and writing about affective scholarship, and to also bring medieval queer studies into contact with those working in queer studies who are not medievalists.

Our line-up for each panel is as follows:

Session #253: Are We Serious Enough Yet? The Place of Ethics in Medieval Scholarship (Roundtable)

Friday, May 8th @ 10:00 am [Sangren 2502]

Eileen A. Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville), Organizer and Presider

* Stephanie Trigg (University of Melbourne) and Tom Prendergast (College of Wooster), "The Ethics of Trans-Pacific Collaboration"
* Hannah R. Johnson (University of Pittsburgh), "What Do We Mean By a Historicist Ethics? Some Reflections on Jewish-Christian Relations and Other Dilemmas of (Medieval) Historiography"
* Susan Signe Morrison (Texas Tech. University-San Marcos), "The Pleasures of Fecopoet(h)ics"
* Sol Neely (Purdue University), "Chaucer as Religious Seducer: Toward an Existential Postsecular Literary Theory"
* Daniel T. Kline (University of Alaska-Anchorage), "Before the Text"
* Carolyn Anderson (University of Wyoming), "Queering Ethics for Cowboys and Rodeo Queens"

Session #316: Are We Enjoying Ourselves? The Place of Pleasure in Medieval Scholarship (Roundtable)

Friday, May 8th @ 10:30 am [Sangren 2502]

Eileen A. Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville), Organizer

Dan Remein (New York University), Presider

* Cary Howie (Cornell University), "Pleasure and Praise"
* Peggy McCracken (University of Michigan-Ann Arbor), "Happy Babel"
* Carolyn Dinshaw (New York University), "Pleasure and Hope"
* Anna Klosowska (Miami University of Ohio), "Like You Need It"
* Nicola Masciandaro (Brooklyn College, CUNY), "Grave Levitations: Being Scholarly"
* Elizabeth Freeman (University of California-Davis), "Response: Affecting the Scholarly Life"

So, just consider thus a shameless plug for the BABEL panels at Kalamazoo and for the rich conversations that will hopefully follow in relation to Jeffrey's crazy-tough question as to how, finally [or in any configuration, then, now, or later] feeling-affect-ethics-temporality might, or might not, "line up." A lot of great panels have been organized for this year's Kalamazoo, and over at the BABEL website, I have put together a page listing the details of the BABEL panels as well as panels I have designated as "BABEL-y": go here for that.

Also, mark you calendars for Thursday, May 7th, from 9:00 pm to 1:00 am, when BABEL will be hosting its annual party at Cityscape in the Kalamazoo City Centre, and where we can continue to argue about this while listening to the mixtapes of Karl the Angry Medievalist. Or we can just drink, be silly, and write bad time-traveling poetry together. Cheers.

Against False Snow Gods

[illustration: Winter Scene. Shriner with Gazelle. March 2 2009 @ 7:54 AM]
by J J Cohen

I have come to believe that the weather deities are false gods. Or at least perverse ones. Appease and implore them how you may: pray earnestly, wear your pajamas inside out, dance naked under a holly shrub, sacrifice small children. They will give you every indication that they are favorably inclined, with apocalyptic weather reports ("FIVE INCHES OF SNOW!!! WE WILL BE BURIED UNTIL MEMORIAL DAY!!!") and colorful radar omens. They may even answer the invocations of others (my kids don't have school today). But you, they will screw you over -- just to prove that they are whimsical and at times malign.

GW opens two hours late today, at 10 AM. All classes before that hour are canceled.

I, of course, teach at 11:10.

Curse you, false deities of the snow. Never shall I be found 'neath the holly shrub engaged in your rites again.

From the Laptop of Hæleð Wulfgar

My Dearest One,

greetings from East Anglia, which you may know as Anglo-Saxon England. I am a most esteemed warrior and owner of wide tracts of fenland and I am looking for someone I can trust to accept into their checking account a large sum of silver pieces, roughly in the neighborhood of 5,000,000 silver pieces, or in your economy, a gadjillion dollars. I am so sad to report that my liege-lord died of a terrible spear wound in a battle with some filthy, godless heathens and we have been weeping and crying over this because now there is no one to give us rings, but we also have all these silver pieces from selling fen plots and we have no more forever a great hall to put them in: cattle die and kinsmen die, thyself too soon must die [or, in your language, where is the horse and the rider, where is the horn that was blowing, they have passed like rain on the mountains, etc.]--you get the picture. For the sake of our lives we have been hiding out in a deserted barrow in Crowland, going out every now and then to do a little raping and pillaging, but mainly we are very depressed and we do not have the divine boon of your pharmaceuticals. While we are making do with beer we are worrying so much about what will happen to us and are hoping that you, our esteemed friend and lovely dear, will help us and become our partner in a glorious investment.

Just before he died, our liege-lord asked us to send all of our treasure to the future, but to bury the cattle and slaves with him [that's why "cattle die," etc.], so we don't need your help with the cattle or slaves [which we really wish we had right now because we're starving and there's no one to bring the hot towels after the massages], but more importantly, your ability to put the said funds into circulation wisely for our joint interest and relocating us is a major considerable factor regarding our request as our knowledge on financial matters is not enough to handle an amount of money above a gadjillion U.S. dollars.

On your personal advice, we are also considering the below options as areas relative to our interest to put the said funds working:

1) hospitality industry
2) farming and acquisition of fenlands
3) slanket manufacturing
4) microbrewery
5) post-hole digging

In view of this, if you are touched to work with us in sincerity, by standing as our late liege-lord's foreign representative to receive the said deposit on our behalf, we shall embrace you as our new found lord/kinsman and will compensate you accordingly. As you indicate interest, please be fast to contact us at this email address (wulfgar@eastanglia.uk) to enable us to give you further information relative to the presence/position of the silver pieces and the steps we shall take to finalize on the project.

Do not hesitate to include your personal telephone/fax numbers as this will facilitate communication between you and us. Thanking you in advance for your kind and urgent response, more so for keeping our proposal to yourself.

Sincerely, Wulfgar

Note Worthy

by J J Cohen

I have come to believe that I am incredibly old fashioned when it comes to note taking for research projects. Typically I scribble upon xeroxes and book margins, letting my notes remain lost in the things themselves. Sometimes I annotate and sort web items via Zotero, a handy Firefox add-on. Sometimes this blog serves the same purpose. I had also been using a Microsoft Word "Notebook" but really that's just a bare bones outlining tool and I don't like it very much. Right now I am test driving Circus Ponies' NoteBook, and although initially I have found it a little confusing all in all it is a visually smart organizational tool ... though again I am not so sure I want such a flat kind of outlining device in the longterm. Maybe NoteBook is nothing more than an electronic simulacrum of its paper predecessors, and I need to make a more radical break. I mentioned Tinderbox here before but haven't tried it -- not just because it is so expensive, but also because I might be too old fashioned to make the cognitive jump the program seems to demand.

So I wonder: how do you take notes when you are engaged in research? Have you found electronic organizational tools that are worth investigation?

Notes from the Underground

[illustration: Cohen child looks dubiously at Vesuvius. National Gallery, Washington DC]
by J J Cohen

A few weeks ago the Cohens finally wandered to the National Gallery to see the Pompeii exhibit.

A reconstruction of villa life in the resorts frequented by wealthy Romans, Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples is quite a treat: a mixture of artifacts and reconstructions, with plenty of space to wander and just enough signage to inform the masses while keeping them moving. Bacchanals and hermaphrodites aplenty please the adults, while cutesy items are there for the kids (e.g. the famous cave canem mosaic "doormat" had been recreated, and you had to step over it to enter a reconstructed villa).

I enjoyed the multiple histories evoked by the exhibit, the last third or so of which focuses on the rediscovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum during the 18th century. Just when the value of a classical education was at a high point, classical Greece and Rome (the societies upon which contemporary Europe considered itself built) began sending messages up from deep below that foundation, up from the depths of the distant past, validating and feeding the Graeco-romanaphilia of a latter day. The excavation of Pompeii was so spectacular that the site quickly became a required stop on the Grand Tour. Here, after all, was a little slice of the classical past, seemingly unmediated by intervening centuries, a direct experience of temps perdu (though in actuality as much a reconstruction as the Pompeii exhibit at the National Gallery: still, the objects of everyday life were there to be glimpsed as if time istelf had preserved them tenderly).

My family will be in Rome for a week this summer, so expect a blog post on Pompeii itself as a tourist destination. To get ready for the experience, I have been reading the National Gallery exhibit catalogue (which is excellent) and The Last Days of Pompeii by Sir Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, which is not so great (too! many! exclamation points!! and way too melodramtic) ... but which stoked an obsession with secrets proffered by the earth that resonates very well with my current research project.

Theseus is no fraud, or, Thank You Paul Auster!

by KARL STEEL

There was a pattern in my students' papers on The Knight's Tale. Those who had read the Mark Sherman chapter, "Chivalry," in the Oxford Chaucer Guide accused the whole chivalric class of fraud. Pretending to be the embodiments of high culture, pretending to be motivated by love, they were instead only bloodthirsty warriors; the Temple of Mars and the malignance of Saturn are the truth of knighthood; and so forth. I'm sympathetic to this view, and, because of my teaching, even responsible: my tribe, being suspicious of political power, is necessarily suspicious of Theseus, and loves to call him out as much for his mistaken reverence for the ineffectual Jupiter (I.2442) as for the tyranny of an Athenian parliament (I.2970) where Theseus does all the talking. I try, perhaps not very well, to tell them that my criticism is a phase, like any other phase, and that they may want to dip in other critical waters, or--to extend the metaphor--open a new canel. Perhaps it is time for we beautiful souls (plural of "yafeh nefesh" please?) to subject Theseus to a Chávezista or neocon interpretation, one suitable for our decade?

I've said only a bit of this in class; instead, I argued for the inextricability of chivalric culture from chivalric violence, and I thought, secretly (but perhaps not so secretly now), that the accusations of cultural fraud against knights is simultaneously cynical--"oh, those knights. they were really just stinky, illiterate, nasty types" (I think I have the right Pinkwater here)--and deeply sentimental ("true culture is elsewhere, with us beautiful souls, who don't kill anyone"). I'd like to push matters a little bit further, so, with that in mind, tomorrow night, I will distribute to them a photocopy of Paul Auster's stunning new translation of Bertran de Born's most famous poem, which appears in the March 9, 2009 issue of The Nation. If you subscribe, great! But since the entire poem is accessible only to subscribers, I think I'd be violating something by quoting it in full. Our nonsubscribing academic readers, however, should have online access to it through their libraries; as for the others, my apologies: perhaps write to Auster directly. Here's what The Nation provides for free:

I love the jubilance of springtime
When leaves and flowers burgeon forth,
And I exult in the mirth of bird songs
Resounding through the woods;
And I relish seeing the meadows
Adorned with tents and pavilions;
And great is my happiness
When the fields are packed
With armored knights and horses.

And I thrill at the sight of scouts
Forcing men and women to flee with their belongings;
And gladness fills me when they are chased
By a dense throng of armed men;
And my heart soars
When I behold mighty castles under siege
As their ramparts crumble and collapse
With troops massed at the edge of the moat
And strong, solid barriers
Hemming in the target on all sides.

And, skipping a big chunk, here are the last two stanzas:

I tell you that eating, drinking, and sleeping
Give me less pleasure than hearing the shout
Of "Charge!" from both sides, and hearing
Cries of "Help! Help!," and seeing
The great and the ungreat fall together
On the grass and in the ditches, and seeing
Corpses with the tips of broken, streamered lances
Jutting from their sides.

Barons, better to pawn
Your castles, towns, and cities
Than to give up making war.

Now, this whole post is essentially an excuse to direct your attention to what strikes me as a supurb, timely translation. For my students, I trust they'll understand, after reading this, that chivalric culture is--for better or worse--no fraud.

Not Yet Living at the Same Time With the Others: Prendergast, Trigg, and Dinshaw on Medievalization and the Supernatural

by EILEEN JOY

Not all people exist in the same Now. They do so only externally, through the fact that they can be seen today. But they are thereby not yet living at the same time with the others.
—Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times

And so I say to you yes you: / everyone’s a fugitive. Everyone.
—Spencer Reece, “Tonight”

Some might recall a post I wrote this past summer relative to the Leeds Medieval Congress in July, "I'm A Pleasure Seeker, Looking for the Real Thing: We're All Presentists Now," in which I discussed a paper presented by Stephanie Trigg [co-authored with Tom Prendergast], “When Is the Medieval? Medievalism as a Critique of Periodization”—in which paper Stephanie made the provocative statement that all medieval studies, on some level, are also a form of medievalism, or medievalization, and where she also drew attention to the problematic dichotomy we often want to draw between a certain kind of historicist medieval studies as “serious” and studies in medievalism as “not serious enough.” The newest volume of New Medieval Literatures [no. 9; 2007] was just published online this past October [excellent journal, I might add], and it includes a “symposium” based on a panel from the 2006 meeting of the New Chaucer Society, “What Is Happening to the Middle Ages?”, which includes two essays: Tom Prendergast and Stephanie Trigg, “What Is Happening to the Middle Ages?” and a response by Carolyn Dinshaw, “Are We Having Fun Yet?” Having just read these essays as part of my own desire recently to better acquaint myself with both the history of and the theoretical frameworks animating studies in medievalism [or, medievalism studies], I thought I would share summaries of these two articles here as well as some interesting questions they collectively raise for our consideration of what we believe the temporal boundaries of “medieval studies” to be.

In “What Is Happening to the Middle Ages?” Prendergast and Trigg return us to Umberto Eco’s famous distinction of “ten little middle ages” and his exhortation to us to spend some time determining which ‘middle ages” we are devoted to [with the understanding that our decision has political implications]. As compelling as some of Eco’s distinctions were, for Prendergast and Trigg, his list had a “stultifying effect on the study of the Middle Ages both because it has encouraged the field of medievalism to engage in a kind of criticism that is largely taxonomic and because it has perpetuated the split between understandings of medieval and medievalism,” and also because Eco “assumes that the Middle Ages themselves are stable, while different variable and partial elements of medieval culture are emphasized by different groups of game players, fiction writers, filmmakers, and so on.” Further, the medievalism of these groups is always subject to academic critique “on the grounds of historical accuracy” [p. 216]. What Prendergast and Trigg would like to do is focus less on how a particular representation of the Middle Ages does or does not match up with a so-called historical reality, and more on “the broader conceptualization of the medieval in its relation to any given present.” More pointedly, they ask,

How do we still recognize and produce the medieval? What are the discursive, institutional and political effects of these various acts of medievalization, whenever they take place and to whatever end, whether scholarly, imaginative, or strategic? [p. 216]

Whether something is described as “medieval” or is set “firmly in the past in a regressive or abject relationship to the past,” what ultimately happens is that the “medieval” [whatever that might mean] only really comes into relief “at the moment of its own supercession”—things only really “become medieval” when they are left behind [p. 219]. There is no middle ground, as it were, in this scenario between the supposedly real Middle Ages one can always go back to and discover in its historical authenticity and the more unreal Middle Ages that “returns” in the guise of the idealized romance [Arthur] or as “the abjected dark other” to modernity [think: the image of the gothic torture dungeon].

Prendergast and Trigg worry [and I would say, usefully so] about the easy acceptance [by some in our field] of the Middle Ages as a space of hard-edged alterity, for it is a short step from that stance to “dismiss the ‘medieval’ as the opposite of all that is useful to a modern university, a library, or a nation, on the simple grounds that the medieval has no place in modernity” and medieval studies thereby becomes an easy target as “the weakest link, the least modern, the least useful, the least relevant part of the humanities clamouring for government funding” [p. 218]. Nevertheless, to argue for the Middle Ages as some kind of “origin point” for modernity would be equally simplistic and short-sighted. I would note here that, while I agree with Tom and Stephanie on this point, I also believe in a kind of toolkit of the widest possible variety of guerilla tactics for convincing university administrators, grant institutions, and the like of the “relevance” of medieval studies; in other words, in the short term, we make whatever arguments are expedient in certain given contexts—if someone will be persuaded by the argument that the Middle Ages represents the “origin” of a certain kind of modern subjectivity or modern notion of legal “rights” or of certain literary modes, then I’ll make that argument if it gets me what I need in the short term [certain curricular changes, the establishment of a faculty line, funding for a research project, etc.]—and for the longer-term health of our field, we continue to work collaboratively and in vigorous fashion to delineate the more complicated inter-relationships between medieval, modern, and post-modern in such a fashion that, say, cultural studies becomes a discipline that cannot even imagine not having a “deep” historical component, and then, even more importantly, this more historically-minded cultural studies begins to form alliances with developing fields of inquiry in other disciplines, such as sociology or the cognitive sciences or new media studies. On this note, I would plug here a roundtable session scheduled for this coming July’s Medieval Congress at Leeds on “Complexity Science and the Humanities” which is described this way [and of course I’ll be in the audience with notebook in hand]:

Recent work on networks in theoretical physics has proved applicable in a number of different contexts including cultural dynamics and religion. Some of these findings provide intriguing insights for scholars concerned with population dynamics, the percolation of the spread of ideas, tipping points for altering the consensus of society and how individuals’ opinions and allegiances change over time. Medievalists have a wealth of qualitative and quantitative data on these subjects and are familiar with dealing with long-term change. This round-table discussion seeks both to explain some of these ideas in non-technical language and to bring together medievalists with economists and physicists for the discussion of possible collaboration in this fast-developing and well-funded area of research.

It occurs to me, too, that medieval studies would be well served to have a position similar to the one the biologist Richard Dawkins has occupied since 1995 at Oxford, the Charles Simonyi Chair of Public Understanding of Science. I think a really progressive university should create a Chair of Public Understanding of Medieval Studies and then appoint someone to that Chair who would devote their career to the advocacy of the relevance of medieval studies to contemporary issues and problems—cultural, social, political, and otherwise. [Well, a girl can dream, can’t she?]

Prendergast and Trigg also worry about the ways in which medieval studies has, in a sense, policed its own temporal borders [never mind how university or grant administrators have cordoned off medieval studies from everything else], such that the term “medievalism” itself “separates and abjects the academic study of medievalism in order to retain the ‘purity’ of medieval studies” [p. 220]. Because so much labor has been invested in our field in order to transform what we perceive was once “uncriticial amateurism” into a “scientific profession,” such that we could be “legitimate” as a discipline, “popular recuperations of the medieval necessarily became misunderstandings—a kind of afterbirth which maintained only an attenuated relationship to the real work of medieval studies” [p. 221]. Ultimately, the “split between labour and pleasure is at the heart of the medieval/medievalism split” and contemporary medievalism is “tarred by the same brush that in conservative circles continues to dismiss cultural studies as mere chat about television, cinema, and the Internet” [p. 224]. By way of the “cases,” as it were, of the sometimes incredulous reception, in the Middle Ages itself, of saints’ relics and the legend of Arthur [as well as of his supposed relics, such as the Round Table at Winchester], Prendergast and Trigg show that, in all times and places, it is “difficult to unravel the connection of the medieval and the medievalistic,” and “even if the historical veracity of the thing being proved is accepted as true, the relics that point back to the veracious thing are themselves false—even if they were created as a kind of medievalistic simulacrum” [p. 228]. It will be important, then, in moving forward with our discipline, to “engage in a systematic investigation of the genealogy” of the categories of and divisions between past, present, and future “medievalisms,” and to “recollect along the way that the remains of the medieval always have a contemporary plot” [p. 229]. The “medieval,” in other words, can never really be separated from any particular “present” in which it is being invoked, appropriated, investigated, [supposedly objectively] described, refashioned, etc.

I find Prendergast’s and Trigg’s arguments especially useful for thinking about, not only the historicity of all the ways in which, in different times and places, we both remember and forget the past, but also how we might envision a more interventionist medieval studies—one that would take on contemporary appropriations of the medieval in the global social, political, legal, and other spheres, such as Bruce Holsinger has done in his chaplet book Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror, or as Steve Guthrie recently did in an article on the popular uses of the Middle Ages within the context of the war in Iraq [Medieval Perspectives, vol. 19], or as Kathleen Davis has done in her recent book Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time, where she writes in her Epilogue [apropos to Prendergast’s and Trigg’s essay]:

The political currency of feudalism and secularization returns us to the question “Where is the Now?” which, I have suggested, is the appropriate question to be asked about medieval/modern periodization. The assumption that “the Middle Ages” actually existed as a meaningful entity, and that it was “religious” and “feudal,” bulwarks the persistent determination to ignore the historicity of fundamental political categories. The problem with the “grand narrative” of the West is not simply one of linearity and the myth of “progress.” More crucially, it is a problem of the formation of concepts in conjunction with periodization, a process that retroactively reifies categories and erases their histories. If the future is to be open, rather than already determined, then periodization must come undone. [p. 134]

Davis’s book is especially significant in this interventionist vein, in my mind, because it joins with a growing body of work by scholars in other fields, such as Talal Asad, who are challenging, in important ways, the religious/secular, West/non-West, and modern/medieval binaries [see, for example, Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity].

In her response to Prendergast’s and Trigg’s essay, “Are We Having Fun Yet?”, Dinshaw considers the “temporal weirdness” of Washington Irving’s short story “Rip Van Winkle,” which was originally published in Irving’s Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, the fictionalized compendium of a fictionalized antiquarian interested in medieval re-enactments, among other literary and historical matters. In Dinshaw’s mind, a close reading of Irving’s story can “animate” for us “the temporal principles informing Prendergast and Trigg’s article” [p. 233]. Rip is a perfect figure for consideration because, thanks to his twenty-year sleep, during which he continues to physically age, Rip is both in and out of his time: while his body registers the passage of time, he has no mental recollection of that passage nor does he even know that there was a Revolution, and it barely seems to matter [he can still sit at his favorite tavern and drink beer like the bachelor he used to wish he was], while at the same time, Rip does experience some confusion as to where and when, exactly, he is, partly because, to everyone else in the village, he is somehow out of place, a peculiar throwback to another era. In Dinshaw’s view,

In Rip’s befuddlement and panic we get a sense of how it feels to be medievalized: in this case it feels very, very wrong, eventually threatening Rip’s very being: ‘I’m not myself—I’m somebody else […] I can’t tell what’s my name, or who I am!’ But medievalization is just part of the story in this village: Rip himself feels continuity, not rupture, and his experiential continuities render the ‘historical ruptures’ of revolution and ‘modernity’ nugatory . . . . As every historian knows and as ‘Rip van Winkle’ works out in narrative, a revolution does not necessarily or evenly across a population produce a rupture in experience. Moreover, Prendergast and Trigg’s analysis opens up the intriguing prospect that something or someone being medievalized can resist or push back against that process of medievalization. [p. 235]

Very much in line with Dinshaw’s work elsewhere, she asks us to consider what Rip’s story tells us about time “as a lived phenomenon” and how a medieval studies attuned to this might “accommodate, indeed explore, the fact that chronology, the timeline of events, clock time, do not tell us everything—or in many cases, even very much—about lived experience.” In this scenario, time is not only “not a smooth stream, but it is also not the same for everyone” [p. 235]. And I would add here that, in some sense, each of us is out of step in some respect with time—we always have to be recalled to it and to our supposed place in “official” time, while at the same time, in order to discover what is meaningful and unique about our own existence and experience, we have to become fugitives from chrono-teleological time, or in another scenario, we are all always already fugitives in or out of time [hence my epigraph above from Spencer Reese’s poem “Tonight” which is addressed to a newly-born infant—I am thinking here also of the multiple semantic meanings of ‘fugitive,’ from lost/straying to fleeting/ephemeral to passing to elusive].

Medieval studies, Dinshaw argues, “must be capacious enough to encourage us to reckon thoroughly with such heterogeneities of temporal apprehension and the implications (historical, disciplinary) thereof—the felt experience of time, be it the time of medieval merchants, clerics, or labourers . . . or mystics, or scholars, or members of the Society for Creative Anachronism” [p. 236]. If Prendergast and Trigg worry about a certain range of cultural productions [that fall under the label of “popular medievalisms”] being ignored by medievalists who wish to maintain clean lines between their study of the past and the present, Dinshaw worries about another realm that causes medievalists discomfort: “the realm of the spiritual, of belief, of faith.” In Dinshaw’s view, temporal heterogeneity “is in fact a hallmark of Christianity . . . and a temporally expansive medieval studies needs to take faith, and more broadly the supernatural, to be taken seriously.” More pointedly, Dinshaw asserts, following James Simpson, that “faith of a kind” is “in fact the ground of all interpretation,” and interpretation “is like religion . . . in that it ‘demands’ an ‘exercise of faith’ in order to begin” [p. 236; see James Simpson, “Faith and Hermeneutics: Pragmatism versus Pragmatism,” JMEMS 33 (2003): 215-39]. Furthermore, the act of interpretation is always temporally asynchronous:

when I read Margery Kempe’s Book, I encounter her words in a hermeneutical Now in which medieval past meets twenty-first-century present. The peculiar temporality of interpretation—the time of hermeneutic contact—is out of linear time. In view of such inevitable hermeneutic conditions, medieval studies is not—as we must not pretend that it is—so entirely separate from the spiritual phenomena it discusses. [p. 236]

Dinshaw’s essay goes on to make several other important points, but I want to stop here with her provocative argument that interpretation is like a religion, and that medieval studies is not as objectively removed [as it often thinks it is] “from the spiritual phenomena it discusses.” Of course, we have to be careful and remind ourselves of how important it has been in recent years for our field to distance itself from the kind of allegorical criticism that merely recapitulated Christianized, hegemonic readings of medieval texts [all assumed to be Christian in one measure or another, as if that world-view so thoroughly dominated the mental airwaves of the Middle Ages that nothing else got through, and we could discern nothing else]. And having cleared that troubling admission out of the way, we can ask with Dinshaw, more searchingly, how interpretation is an act of faith, one dependent on the very heterogeneous and asynchronous temporalities that fuel, as it were, medieval Christian mentalities. And let's ask, too: faith in what, exactly?

Does anyone else see, as I do, the little bomb that Dinshaw has thrown into this conversation? So many considerations crowd my mind—first of all, poetics. For if interpretation is a “kind of faith,” it requires, not a rationalistic, fully objectified discourse [nor what Ricouer termed a “hermeneutics of suspicion” or what Eve Sedgwick, more recently, has described as “paranoid readings”], but rather, a poetics in the sense that John Caputo gives to that term: “an evocative discourse that articulates the event,” as opposed to a logic, which is “a normative discourse governing entities (real or possible), which can or do instantiate its propositions” [The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event, p. 103]. Further [and here I am thinking specifically of Margery Kempe, as well as of Dinshaw writing on Kempe], a poetics “describes a desire beyond reason and beyond what is reasonably possible, a desire to know what we cannot know, or to love what we dare not love” [The Weakness of God, p. 104]. I am thinking here, too, of Joan Retallack’s poethical wager, in which a certain “poetics of desire . . . moves us toward a responsive and pleasurable connection to the world by means of informed sensualities of language” [The Poethical Wager, p. 5], and where we stake our faith on a certain meaningfulness [which doesn’t have to have anything to do with God or gods], despite all epistemological evidence to the contrary. But this will also mean acknowledging that, on some level, there has to be a there there—as Dinshaw puts it a little further on in her response to Prendergast and Trigg, the past always retains in some fashion its otherness and what we might “understand as the past’s own intransigence makes an ethical relation to it possible” [p. 240]. There is a certain palpable materiality to the past—no matter how silent or inaccessible or covered over with layers and layers of self- and appropriative representations—that begs some acknowledgment of obdurate difference and even of an alter will to have said what we would never say ourselves, or even want to hear. But in any case, we traffic in ghosts, which is to say: we believe in them. Or do we? What do we believe in, again? If interpretation is an act of faith, faith in what, or who? You tell me.

Multilingualism in the Middle Ages

by J J Cohen

Just want to bring your attention to this site, which Annika Farber kindly brought to mine: Multilingualism in the Middle Ages. Faculty from the universities of Bergen, Bristol, Leeds, Madison-Wisconsin, Manchester, Oslo, Penn State, Utrecht, and York are working with academic publisher Brepols to create a site bringing together resources, e-collaborations, and the electronic residue of seminars and conferences (bibliographies, PowerPoint files, and so on). Quite a rich site.

Festive Friday: Spout a Gnome

by J J Cohen

It's Friday. Your neurons are not firing with the precision they possessed earlier in the week. Your "To Do" list hovers at the same number of items that clogged Monday. That essay which is two weeks past deadline is moving towards three. Your fez needs cleaning.

We know how you feel. But we also want to say: snap out of it! Stop loving yourself so much! Why is it always about you, you, you?

For this Festive Friday, we invite you to spout a gnome. No, not "a legendary creature resembling a tiny old man." Keep that kind of gnome to yourself. By gnome we mean "a short pithy saying expressing a general truth": we're talking wise, not wizened. A kind of Old English-y gnome. Given that aphorisms tend to be highly conventional, we propose the following rule for its articulation: your gnostic utterance must follow the formula "Medieval Studies needs less X and more Y." Example: "Medieval Studies needs less Charlotte Allen and more Tiny Shriner."* You may then follow up with another maxim that is sillier. Mine: "A Tiny Shriner belongs on a bar stool, old and proud of his martini." Got it? And bonus points if you can identify the actual medieval proverb that I warped to create that last one.

Oh, and you are not allowed to think too much before you spout your gnomes. They must spout quickly or they must not spout at all.

*a scholar of proverbial utterances would know that this formulation equates to "Medieval Studies needs less delight in policing its enjoyments, and more creativity in its enjoyment."

Vagrant Subjects

Figure 1. Victims of Hurricane Katrina

by EILEEN JOY

The subject lies at the intersection with external, relational forces. It is about assemblages. Encountering them is almost a matter for geography, because it is a question of orientations, points of entry and exit, a constant unfolding. . . . The sensibility to and availability for changes or transformation are directly proportional to the subject's ability to sustain the shifts without cracking.
—Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics

The new issue [no. 7] of Early Modern Culture: An Electronic Seminar is out, edited by Linda Woodbridge and Craig Dionne, and the theme is "Vagrant Subjects." You might recall that Jeffrey plugged this online journal once before, for Issue no. 6, devoted to "Timely Meditations," which featured a really interesting essay by Linda Charnes on wormholes and micro-periods from the future, and to which Jeffrey's colleague Jonathan Gil Harris contributed a response. Ever since Jeffrey initially told us about this journal I have been really enamored of it, especially for the way each issue incorporates multiple responses to the main essays and even responses to the responses and sometimes responses to the responses to the responses [hence, I believe, the moniker of "seminar" for the journal]! God knows, this must be time-consuming for all involved but what a great benefit for the rest of us, since the scholarly voices in each issue are always in productive flux and tension with each other and no critical issue is ever really "closed" or "settled" as a result--provocative questions are raised and re-raised in such a manner that invites further ruminations [and one would imagine, another set of essays somewhere else in time and place, and then another set, and so on and so forth]. it contributes, moreover, to an the "explcitly collaborative praxis," one that is never finished, that Jeffrey talks about here.

Craig Dionne, as some may recall, is the editor, with Steve Mentz, of Rogues and Early Modern English Culture [Michigan, 2004] and is also the Editor of the Journal of Narrative Theory, which devoted a special issue to BABEL's humanisms project. Craig is also a contributor to BABEL's new volume of essays [in progress], Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism. On a more personal level, ever since I met Craig [through Marty Shichtman] a few years ago at the annual meeting of the Midwest Conference on British Studies [at Notre Dame], he has become a great friend and an important interlocutor for me, and he has profoundly influenced my thinking on a number of subjects. It was because of his suggestion about a year ago to read Patricia Fumerton's Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England, that I became interested in exploring whether or not not it might be possible to theorize certain structures of vagrancy, itinerant mobility, unsettled aesthetics, and "low" subjectivity in certain Old English texts, such as Guthlac A and B [go here for some of my initial musings on that].

The new issue of Early Modern Culture: An Electronic Seminar centers on the subjects of vagrancy, low subjectivity, and unsettled aesthetics in the early modern period and actually begins with an essay by Patricia Fumerton, "Mocking Aristocratic Place: The Perspective of the Streets," but not before Linda Woodbridge poses these provocative questions in her Introduction to the issue,

This issue of Early Modern Culture treats a constellation of themes -- poverty, vagrancy, mobility, idleness, work, crime, rogue literature, class disparities. I'll close with a question: is it a good idea to treat this spectrum of topics alongside each other, all as aspects of the topic "vagrant subjects"? All of us who have worked in this area have done this, yes; but is it a good idea? My recurrent fear is that in doing so do we buy into a Renaissance mind set that couldn't hear about poverty without thinking about vagrancy, roguery, crime -- as if they were a seamless whole. I thought about this recently when invited to contribute several pieces to an encyclopedia, and was asked which of them should be cross-referenced to the others. What would it say, I wondered, if one cross-referenced "poverty" to "vagrancy," "rogue pamphlets," "thievery," "beggary," or "the Elizabethan underworld"? As Sandra Logan subtly argues with regard to degrading punishments and the degraded living conditions of the poor, such confluences of category can influence our thinking subliminally. Ultimately I cannot think it was not a good idea to find occasion to bring together four such stimulating essays; but the issue merits thought. Let us work hard at this.

For those interested in exploring the connections between poverty, working conditions, mobility, and aesthetics [both high and low] in any period, I recommend this issue highly.

Drawing a Dissertation

by Mary Kate Hurley

Readers at ITM and Old English in New York may remember that the topic of my first chapter is the Old English Orosius. You may remember, way back in November, when I revising my chapter on the Orosius, I was having a bit of trouble straightening out the terms with which I spoke of the various voices in the text.

I'm working, again, on revising that same old text. You can see a small snippet of what I've been doing with it here. However, in the past few weeks or so I've been trying to tap into my formerly quite creative side, which sometimes gets sublimated by both a lack of time and a lack of interest. I don't have time to draw anymore, for example. But in the past couple weeks, I've taken to literally sketching out some of my arguments in the chapter, to help me keep straight the number of elements, levels, or names that appear in the essay.

The fruits of today's labor? The following diagram. Please note that, should it make it to the final copy of my dissertation chapter, I'll redraw it and make it a bit cleaner:

The "legend," if you will, is the following.

ASE = Anglo-Saxon England

Rep of HAP = Representation of the Historiarum Adversum Paganos in the Old English Orosius.

Cwæð = The "cwæð Orosius" construction in the Old English Orosius.

Essentially, I'm trying to represent, albeit somewhat simplistically, the levels of interaction of the Latin and Old English texts. So they intersect where Latin historical texts are present in Anglo-Saxon England. The first level of that intersection is the Latin versions of the Historiarum present in Anglo-Saxon England at the time of the translation. At that point, the attribution of the text can still be to Paulus Orosius, as these are texts in the original language, copies. The next level, then, is the Old English translation. The "voice of authority" is no longer Paulus Orosius himself -- if such a thing is possible to think of, to borrow the Derridean line, and in light of having *just* taught Death of the Author to my undergraduates -- so I'm calling that level of narration/authority the "Translator/Narrator."

This next level is where things get a bit messy. For various reasons, in order to understand the way the source text (the Historiarum Adversum Paganos, by Paulus Orosius) interacts with the translation, the Old English Orosius, I find it useful to suggest a distinction between the parts of the Old English text which are specifically meant to represent the Latin text and those which can only be departures that are the results of an explicit choice on the part of the translator. The majority of the text falls into the first category. Certain sections of the text, like the part in the geographical preface which relates the travels of Ohthere and Wulfstand, fall into the second. These are clear departures from the Historiarum. To express the identification between the translator and the voice of Orosius, I've chosen Orosius-translator. This category is distinct from the explicit, reported speech citations of Paulus Orosius that occur where the text inserts the first person or, more explicitly, the cwæð Orosius (a phrase which occurs fifty times in the text, and means "Orosius said"). To mark the distinction, I'm using Orosius-narrator.

That's a lot of information, particularly for folks who perhaps aren't as familiar with the Orosius. However, the question I have for you today dear readers, is about the use of diagrams in dissertations. Are they a good thing, where they help lay out your thought process in a way that makes your prose that much clearer? Or are they a crutch I should dispense with, and use merely in the draft stages, to help my mind keep track of the many "facts" of the text? Has anyone out there written a book/dissertation/article that makes extensive use of diagrams? Or that uses diagrams at all? How did that work?

cross posted to OENY