York 1190 in 2010

by J J Cohen

Just wanted to point out the postconference website, which already has several posts, including one on Jewish blindness.

Thoughts on the York 1190 conference

by J J Cohen

Some adjectives for describing the York 1190 conference: intimate, convivial, challenging, warm, perturbing, filled with hope. 

We spent three days intensely together. In sessions and at meals and over drinks, we dissected the narratives of what unfolded in 1190 from both Christian and Jewish points of view, we spoke of related events (antecedent violence against the Anglo-Jewry; the ritual murder accusations; the expulsion of 1290; Longbeard’s uprising; the archae and Exchequer; the ethics of contemporary historiography). No matter what the subject, though, and despite spending a great deal of time indoors (at CMS, at the Hospitium), a sense of place suffused the proceedings. 

Clifford’s Tower looms at city’s edge, as beautiful as it is ominous. I walked by the structure as I made my way from the train station to the hotel, and overheard an elderly couple remark their joy at the daffodils just blossoming around the motte. Later that evening, I cut through the parking area at its base to find a shortcut into the town center, and watched the darkening sky take the light from the stonework. No matter that this architecture is not the wooden tower in which the Jews of the city were trapped. No matter that we’re not even sure if that tower of 1190 was located on the mound where its stone replacement looms. Something about the tower, something about being in York to discuss a massacre that had taken many lives within that very city, was palpable in the proceedings.

I did not attend every paper. One morning I lingered in my hotel room, drinking the instant coffee and eating the biscuits that English hotels always seem to provide, rewriting and then reading aloud my lecture. The delay provided an excuse to wander slowly into town, picking up treasure at the Jorvik Gift Store for my kids, thinking a lot about the temporalities that accretions of stone holds along the way. Another time, halfway through a panel, the call of the city’s wall was too potent, and I walked the crenellated way to the Sainsbury carpark that has paved the medieval Jewish cemetery. I wish I hadn’t missed anything, though, as what I did experience was so good.

The event was the first academic conference dedicated to the events of 1190. It was, therefore, a long time coming … and would not ever have ever arrived without the labors of Sarah Rees Jones and Sethina Watson, whom I’d like to thank here for having brought something so important into being. I’ll be putting my closing plenary up at ITM in due course, hopeful for your feedback as I refine the work. You can also look forward to the proceedings being published as an edited collection.

In the meantime, though, I thought I’d share some of what I found to be the conference highlights. They are, given that I am idiosyncratic, idiosyncratic.

• Joe Hillaby’s presentation to Barrie Dobson of a compendium of his essays on medieval Jews. Since Dobson’s work opened the way to examining York in 1190 for most of us, the event was a fitting instigation for the conference. Dobson called the gathering an event that helps to redeem York for what happened there, and for the silence to which it was long consigned.
• Paul Hyams described the “punctuated equilibrium” that existed within social relations (and especially relationships of trust, for which he foregrounded faith) between Christians and Jews. Crusading and the advent of Easter could be spurs to violence, but “normal” relations did tend to return.
• Hugh Doherty stressed the York focus of the surviving evidence. When Benedict of York was baptized in the riots following Richard’s coronation, it was at the hands of the prior of the church of Saint Mary at York (Heather Blurton made the brilliant observation to me that we might glimpse a Christian-Jewish friendship here: the baptism may have been offered by a cleric who knew him, in order to prevent his death at the hands of a mob who did not). Hugh traced the intricacies surrounding the offices of sheriff and constable, wondering if 1190 could have unfolded as it did if these officers had not been so recently replaced.
• Alan Cooper built on his previous work suggesting that William fitz Osbert (AKA Longbeard) returned from crusade traumatized by the suffering he witnessed at Acre. William became a spokesman for the poor and critic of the king’s officials. Alan wondered if one of the threads that connects the unrest of 1190 to that of 1196 isn't the dissatisfaction of the lower classes we can just glimpse in each – people whom the new, lucrative international economy was leaving out.
• Emily Rose spoke about her forthcoming book on Thomas of Monmouth, arguing that he gives us a fairly accurate portrait of Norwich life in 1170. In both the paper and the book she looks to the immediate legal circumstances surrounding a prosecution of a knight to find the origin of the ritual murder accusation (which she describes as a conventional rather than novel narrative, reasoned and effective; she sees little of anyone but the upper classes in it).
• Carlee Bradbury gave a lecture on a Jew who had the bad fortune to be hanging on to the coffin of the dead Virgin Mary just as she is assumed into heaven. She then showed a monkey-based version of the same scene.
• Heather Blurton gave a powerful paper arguing that whereas the Passion underwrites narratives of ritual murder, the frame of William of Newburgh’s narrative shifts to exodus. She also had a riveting suggestion that John of Stamford, a plunderer of Jewish homes who was briefly venerated popularly, may have been a ritual murder case.
• Ruthe Nisse explicated the Josephus behind William of Newburgh's narrative. Christians and Jews possessed different versions of Josephus: the Christian one featured an interpolation that declares Jesus the messiah. Quite a problem that this passage seemed to be struck out of the Jewish versions…
• Anna Abulafia described the royal support of Jewish moneylending as having a built-in time bomb: while allowing Jews to become affluent, the king could ruthlessly pursue debts, ensuring that outrage against them was inherent. She asked how Jews view the Christians they were supposed to serve, and emphasized that “theory and practice are very, very different things”: despite so many prohibitions, Jews and Christians interacted at almost every level, including domestic. She argued that from the crown’s point of view, their Expulsion was their required last service.
• Sarah Rees Jones emphasized the Norman reconfiguration of York and royal interest in the city. She noted the attention Geoffrey of Monmouth paid to the place, and the patrons his work found there, emphasizing the antagonism between local landholders and the king. 1190, she argued, was an intensification of hostility among all ethnic groups, the result of preceding royally-triggered turbulence in the city. She then quite movingly described the ways in which citizens might express desires for communal solidarity, for tranquility, for domesticity, in ways that could confederate Christians and Jews.
• Kathy Lavezzo gave a breathtaking architectural reading of Thomas of Monmouth’s “city text,” demonstrating how the Christian minster and the Jewish house become intertwined spaces. She emphasized the competing interests that keep the Christians from unity, and read closely the ambivalence Thomas holds towards crowds (they can be like the Jewish minority: united, violent).
• Anthony Bale provided a glimpse of his soon to appear work on the aesthetics of persecution. He began by asking the difficult question “How can we remember pain?” then linked textuality to the production of experiences like fear and terror. Anthony described the well developed medieval culture of gentleness that in fact depended on pain, and spoke of the delightful, precious uses to which horror could be put within that culture. He shifted to the Jewish side of things and a close reading of some Hebrew writing, arguing that Jews had agency in the production of texts that helped them to feel persecuted, remember pain: Kiddush haShem not just as a practice, but a memory and a collection of remembering, performative texts.
• Hannah Johnson examined how the contemporary practice of understanding and describing Jewish martyrdom has changed, moving away from memorializing modes to what she called an ethics of contingency that stresses ambivalence, the unpredictable, and complicated local relations. She used ethics to describe the specific attitude of engagement, the orientation of writer towards scholarship, the relations that one’s scholarship enacts … and in a very nice contextualizing gesture then framed the interpreters, observing how Israel Yuval (for example) creates his narratives within contemporary Israel and within a transnational world, both of which leave their imprint.

That's a quick summation of some of the the things that stayed in my mind and that I jotted down on the plane flight home. There's much I haven't mentioned, like what a food lover's city York has become, and how I had the best Old Fashioned of my life with some disreputable local graduate students, as well as several other adventures. More to follow...

Dispatch from the Medieval Academy Meeting @ Yale: The Toronto Feminists

Figure 1. Bracha Ettinger, "Matrix-Family Album," series, n. 3

by EILEEN JOY

I was not able to attend the annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, held at Yale University this past weekend [18-20 March], but Kathleen Biddick has graciously agreed to let us post here the comments she made on a roundtable organized by Nancy Partner, The Toronto Feminists: How Did We Get Here from There? And Where is "Here"? The panel featured Kathleen Biddick, Dyan Elliott, Judith Bennett, and Maryanne Kowaleski, all of whom prepared remarks in response to questions posed by Nancy Partner beforehand. As is to be expected, Kathleen Biddick's remarks are richly provocative [especially her formulation, via the radical psychoanalytic thinking of Bracha Ettinger, to transmedieval transubjectivities, and her call for blasphemy at the end], and they also provide a rare insight into Biddick's own academic autobiography:

March 20, 2010
MEDIEVAL ACADEMY MEETING
Yale University, New Haven
PANEL: The Toronto Feminists: How did we get Here from There? And where is “Here”?
Organizer: Nancy Partner
Panelists: Judith Bennett, Kathleen Biddick, Dyan Elliott, Maryanne Kowaleski

Response: Kathleen Biddick, Dept. of History, Temple University (Kathleen.biddick@temple.edu)

Question 1 In grad school, what did the category terms “woman/women” seem to mean, if and when they ever occurred at all? When can you remember “sex” being mentioned in connection with historical research? And when do you think you first learned the word “gender”?

Thank you, Nancy Partner, for organizing this panel. Your invitations have always productively provoked my thinking. The chance to participate in your 1993 Speculum special issue on Studying Medieval Women: Sex, Gender, Feminism gave me the opportunity to explore what Joan Scott has called the “psychodynamics of critique”—in her words “the critical refusal to accept the rules (the terms of identity) set by someone (or some group) I nevertheless care deeply about, indeed whose aims I share and whose approval and affection I also seek” (“Finding Critical History,” in Becoming Historians, ed. James M. Banner and John R Gillis [Univ. of Chicago, 2009], p. 41).

My critical contributions today, as then, are offered in such a spirit.

Let me open with a conjuring.

How many feminists ghosts can fit on our podium? MANY—so please let me conjure just one: Nellie Neilson, one of 8 women to have received an American doctorate in history before 1900, at age 53 (1926) first elected female fellow the Medieval Academy, and at age 70 (1943) first ever elected female president of the American Historical Association. Neilson has always inspired me. Her work embodied precociously the productive tensions of critical history: in her loving attention to language, she cultivated a Maitlandian sensitivity to philology (Frederick Maitland being her English mentor) and at the same time she attended to the particularity of the archive. She channeled her archival studies of the estate of Ramsey Abbey to Ambrose Raftis (Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies), the dissertation supervisor of Judith, Maryanne, and myself. In his own dedication to critical history, I now conjure Raftis (alas now, too, a ghost) to our podium as an honorary feminist.

Let me now move on to your questions: when did we encounter the categories women, sex, and gender?

My short answer: Blame it on Barnard College Class of 1971. I dedicated my first book, The Other Economy: Pastoral Economy on a Medieval Estate (1989) to my medieval mentors at Barnard College: Suzanne Fonay Wemple and Maristella Lorch and the company of Barnard women, 1967-71. As early as 1966, Barnard professor Annette Baxter was already precociously offering a course on the History of American Women. I learned about sex and gender when I studied with the internationally famous and deeply dashing sociologist, Mira Komaravosky, a pioneering expert on gender, especially on masculinities. Our class studied her then recently published and now famous book on BLUE COLLAR MARRIAGE. Given my class background, it seemed to me that I was learning more than I wanted to know about masculinity, femininity and gender. I can remember vividly a rather tearful interview with Prof. K. in which we discussed my discomfort over the painful closeness of her book to my background. Her deeply intelligent response: you are not your identity; your identity is not you. Komarovsky instilled in me a profound insight into the discursive process, an insight which stuck with me in my graduate studies and subsequent research. You are not your identity she told me; your identity is not you (Wow, thank you, Mira Komarovsky)!

And not to be forgotten, my Barnard course in Greek tragedy with the recently arrived assistant (and also beautiful) professor of classics, HELENE FOLEY, who went on to become an elected fellow of the American Academy for her feminist scholarship of Greek tragedy. Her brilliant course planted in me the seed of thinking deeply about Antigone. One of my favorite undergraduate courses, “Antigone and the Limits of Sovereignty,” took root at Barnard.

But there is more to say about how Barnard, untimely in those times, shaped my desire for knowledge. There is the one professor with whom I did not get to study, a young professor who arrived at Barnard around 1968 or 1969. To the student body, she was simply thrilling; in other words, she created a buzz. This was the young Catherine Stimpson, who would contribute so much to feminist and queer scholarship and to making the academy a more livable space. Somehow, back then, we understood that she embodied what Homi Bhabha has called something new entering the world. Epistemological embodiments still thrill me.

So when I arrived in Toronto to commence my graduate studies in 1973, you could say by the standards of the master’s discourse, I was deeply deluded. I expected nothing less than the powerful and beautiful intellects of Judith, Maryanne, Dyan. And I expected Ambrose Raftis to support my work in the epistemological spaces inbetween history, philosophy, literature. And so he did! Around 1973, I had yet to discover the brutality of the disciplinarity of history—more about that traumatic fall from grace as the panel unfolds.

Question 2 …..This is my career. It consists of sitting in rooms filled with men. When did this change? And when it changed, what changed? Things feel different now, but different doesn’t feel as different as I thought it should….

The work of feminist theory is not finished yet. And it won’t be finished as long as the discourse of the master, what Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Zizkek have called University discourse, prevails hegemonically. According to Lacan and Zizek, University discourse is the discourse of the master who “disavows [his] performative dimension, presenting what effectively amounts to a political decision based on power as a simple insight into the factual state of things” (Zizek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle [Verso, 2005], p. 139). By disavowing the gap between the subject position of enunciation and enunciated content, university discourse disavows fantasy.

In one of my all-time favorite books of medieval scholarship, The Master and Minerva: Disputing Women in French Medieval Culture (1995), fellow Torontonian medievalist, Helen Solterer, brilliantly elucidates how medieval scholastic protocols of dispute inscribed a female figure at their center. That feminine symbolic is what the University discourse repetitiously produces (even in the so-called days of postgender) as the disavowed foreign body at its very heart. Symptoms of such phallic thinking riddle the series of essays published recently in the December 2008 American Historical Review Forum on Revisiting “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis”.

I think that fantasy can undo University discourse from within. One of the most exciting recent examples of this is the work of Bracha L. Ettinger, artist, psychoanalyst, feminist theorist and professor of psychoanalysis and aesthetics at the University of Leeds. Ettinger is reworking Lacan’s late work and Freud’s theory of the uncanny in order to rethink feminist theory beyond masculine-feminine difference (see her book The Matrixial Borderspace [Univ. of Minnesota, 2006]). To do so, Lacan warned, is to court psychosis. Ettinger breaks this taboo. In breathtaking moves she replaces the phallic structure of difference with a transubjective theory of co-emergence. She materializes her theory of these thresholds of identity and memory in her painting. Does Ettinger’s rethinking of psychoanalysis beyond the sadistic-aggressive structure of separation and radical alterity signified by the Phallus and Castration “without displacing or rejecting either “ (p.17) have any relevance for medieval scholarship?

For my work, it is her notion of transcryptum that I find most productive. Ettinger defines transcryptum as the “artobject or artevent, artoperation or artprocedure, which incarnates transcription of trauma and cross-inscriptions of its traces, in which case the artwork’s working-through of the amnesia of the world into memory is a transcryptomnesia: the lifting of the world’s hidden memory from its outside with-in-side” (p. 167).

New undertakings, such as the journal postmedieval, are exploring such transmedieval attunements. Likewise, the recently published collection of essays by Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul, Medievalisms in the PostColonial World: The Idea of the Middle Ages Outside Europe (Johns Hopkins, 2009) transcrypts. In my current project, entitled Dead Neighbors: Sovereignty and the Archive, I am attempting my own transcryptum. This project vibrates between the discourse on miracles to be found in contemporary debates over sovereignty (Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Carl Schmitt, Eric Santner) and an interrupted reading of Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies. My project stages the archive and the artevent (whether it be the Bury Cross and governmentality, the optics of Shakespeare’s play, King Richard II, and the medieval Eucharistic debate, engravings of the Turk, the name given to automata that wowed the salons of late 18th century Europe which made its way into Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History) as tuning forks that vibrate in the encounter with the corporeal, that is those dead neighbors, Jews and Muslim, out of which, I argue, medieval and early modern sovereignty fashioned its second immortal body.

But medievalists, please handle transmedieval transubjectivies with care. The University discourse resists. For example, take the fate of my NEH fellowship proposal for my project Dead Neighbors. The review panel awarded it a ranking of “no merit,” because (as the comments stated) it was not “in the spirit of the mission of the NEH.” It is labor to bring new things into the world.

Question 3 Setting: Late 90s at the American Historical Association meeting….Joan Scott and Natalie Davis walk into the crowded conference room….I could see a “wave-effect” ….I thought I was seeing that some big sea change had really happened in the profession. Right?

What vibrates in such a wave is not Scott and Davis as subjects, but rather the critique they practice. Critique is not dead yet, in spite of ferocious efforts to silence it. Critique endures in its slow, patient, focused interrogation of the “grounds of the system’s possibility.” When, for instance, King's College London recently decided to drop its longstanding faculty position in medieval paleography (a recent event to which the Medieval Academy responded) and one which, I think, needs to be heard as the canary in the mineshaft, deconstructive critique can come to our aid—in the words of Joan Scott: “what we need now is a reassertion of the value of critique, a defense of its scholarly integrity, and an articulation of its philosophical presuppositions” (“Against Eclecticism,” differences 16.3 [2005]: p. 127).

The productive question to pose to King's College London is not one about preserving tradition, or the perils of presentism, or the pragmatics of practicality (as important as such interrogations might be); instead, I think, we need to grasp fully the discursive strategies whereby the corporatized Anglo-American University is increasingly reorganizing itself around sameness both in the classroom and in the research carrel. This process is already quite advanced and it has taken its toll on junior scholars in premodern studies who are especially vulnerable, I think, to the drive for sameness. Thus, many of them have to closet their passion for critique. So critique needs to ask, what are the conditions of possibility for “sameness” in the University discourse of power today?

I think we could begin a conversation about this by looking again at the set of essays recently published in the American Historical Review Forum (December 2008) on Revisiting “Gender as a Category of Historical Analysis”. What seemed to have dropped out between 1986 and 2008 is critique. What is left is the becoming-orthodox of women’s studies, gender studies, queer studies.

So perhaps the time has come to plan another retrospective, this one on a famous feminist manifesto published in 1985 (Socialist Review): Donna Haraway’s cyborg manifesto. In the opening of that essay, Haraway meditates on blasphemy: “blasphemy always seems to require taking things seriously. Blasphemy is not apostasy.”

Off I go ...

by J J Cohen

I don't love plane flights, mainly because they make even nonclaustrophobic me feel the protagonist of an Edgar Allen Poe short story, but the nighttime flight across the Atlantic is different. No matter how many times I make the journey (five overseas trips this year: York, Siena, Berlin, Copenhagen for papers, and a family trip that brings us from London to Barcelona), it never becomes routine: knowing that beneath the plane the waves of a rough sea tumble, knowing that we are racing towards the sunrise on earth's other side ... an incurable romantic, me.

I'm on my way to York. No doubt I will be using the dark solitude of the flight to rewrite my paper for the conference, just as I did when I presented at Leeds last year. A glass of wine with dinner, then in the dimmed light of the cabin I'll scribble away in monastic selfcircumscription. Yes, if monks flew in airplanes in the Middle Ages and wrote lectures that theorize the affirmative challenge of Jewish neighboring within the textual unconscious ... yup, very like a monk.

Au revoir, and see some of you on the other side.

NEW BOOK OF NOTE: Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World

Figure 1. Natsume Soseki (1867-1916); Japanese author who wrote short stories set in medieval Britain

by EILEEN JOY

I was recently asked to review (for the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History) the new essay volume edited by Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul, Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of the "Middle Ages" Outside Europe (Johns Hopkins, 2009), and while I have only just read the Introduction and skimmed the rest of the contents (my review is due in June), the book is exciting and I thought I would just share with everyone here my initial impression of it (which impression/brief notice will also be posted on the website that Jeffrey shared with us a few weeks ago, Postcolonizing the Medieval Image):

Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul, eds. Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of the “Middle Ages” Outside Europe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. 444 pp. ISBN 0-8018-9320-8.

In a recent review essay in Comparative Literature, “Can the Middle Ages Be Postcolonial?” (CL 61.2 [2009]: 160-176), Simon Gaunt argues that much recent work in medieval literary studies that addresses postcolonialism does so within the context of national literary histories that are too narrowly defined (most typically, European literary traditions, and more often than not, Anglophone). In Gaunt’s mind, postcolonial medieval studies “need to work outside the framework of a single literary tradition” and “across different languages,” and they could also stand to benefit more from the insights of contemporary postcolonial theory regarding how “the medieval history of contact between Europe and Asia or Africa is in fact an important element of the longer history of which colonialism and postcolonialism are part” (p. 172).

The new collection of essays, Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of the “Middle Ages” Outside Europe, edited by Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul, looks extremely promising as regards the sort of comparative approaches Gaunt calls for, while it also situates itself, in a sense, beyond the Middle Ages proper. Thus, as the ‘medievalisms’ of the book’s title indicates, the authors gathered together in this volume are concerned to illustrate the ways in which certain notions and appropriations of the European Middle Ages—as a spatiotemporal concept, more so than as an historical entity—were instrumental in various modern colonial enterprises in non-European countries that did not possess their own “Middle Ages,” per se. This is how the editors themselves frame the collection’s initial guiding question in their Introduction:

As a spatiotemporal concept, “the medieval” is part of a temporal grid that positions it as a delimited historical time—generally understood as the time between c. 410 and c. 1500—and part of a spatial imaginary that identifies it with the territories of European Christendom. . . . It is enlisted as support for the concept of the “West,” as well as national, racial, and religious identities within Europe, and as the negative contrast to the desirable notions of progress and modernity. What happens to the idea of the medieval, we asked ourselves, and what kind of work does it do, when considered from perspectives outside Europe—from places as diverse as Mexico, West Africa, India, the United States, Lebanon, Australia, South Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, or Japan? (p. 1)

Most importantly, this collection promises to call into question this generally accepted periodizing scheme whereby the Middle Ages, supposedly already “full-fledged” by the time of modern colonialism, is “available” to the colonial enterprisers, who had need of an “anterior” period into which to place their colonized subjects (a state of affairs well illustrated already in contemporary postcolonial studies). Provocatively, Davis and Altschul argue that there is a “close relationship between the epistemologies of colonialism and the Middle Ages as a category of European history” and therefore, “the Middle Ages issued from the same colonial imaginary that subsumed territory and time to the sphere of its real and desired control” (p. 2). And what concerns the editors as well are all of the ways in which the supposed “centrality” of Europe gets re-placed, revised, adapted, and contested in differing “colonial” contexts outside of Europe. There can be, then, no one medievalism that could be transported from one place to another; rather, the very term itself denotes a plurality and elasticity of uses and appropriations.

The Middle Ages, then, becomes an important conceptual framework for modernity itself; it cannot be separated, temporally, from the political project(s) of modernity with which it is, in some important sense, contemporaneous. In my mind, this is an invaluable insight, one that Davis has already well illustrated in her book Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Pennsylvania, 2008), and which has also been highlighted in the work of some postcolonial theorists, such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ranajit Guha, and José Rabasa. (It should be noted here as well that the contemporaneity of the Middle Ages and modernity has been explored in various ways and in multiple theoretical and disciplinary contexts in the work of medievalists such as Kathleen Biddick, Glenn Burger, Jeffrey Cohen, Carolyn Dinshaw, Aranye Fradenburg, Patrick Geary, Bruce Holsinger, Paul Strohm, Stephanie Trigg, and other scholars too numerous to mention here.)

To my knowledge, Davis’s and Altschul’s book is also unique in bringing together medievalists with scholars working in contemporary postcolonial studies (such as Chakrabarty and Rabasa), in order to interrogate together the rich plurality of medievalisms (emphasis on the plural) in globalized, non-European contexts, and with the hope that this collaborative enterprise will further enrich these two fields that have always had shared (yet not always acknowledged as such) disciplinary histories. As the “Middle Ages” are still, in the editors’ view, an “operative and volatile domain” in contemporary global politics, the collected essays promise to also provide some important insight into ongoing “national” and “post/colonial” power struggles.

Medievalisms in a Postcolonial World is divided into four thematic sections—“Locations of History and Theory,” “Repositioning Orientalism,” “Nation and Foundations,” and “Geography and Temporality”—and within each of these, there are three essays plus a response essay, which signals an engaged series of critical encounters between the contributors that is often lacking in essay collections of this sort. It is exciting to see medievalists writing on such a rich range of modern, non-European subjects, as well as to witness the hopefully productive cross-fertilization between medieval and contemporary postcolonial studies—one in which both the medievalists and contemporary theorists obviously had to travel beyond their disciplinary comfort zones. More of such collaborative, cross-period engagement is to be hoped for, especially if medieval studies are to continue to demonstrate their “relevance” to pressing issues of contemporary life and thought, regardless of how distasteful some in our field might find the term “relevant.” It remains to be seen whether or not this volume will deliver on its promise to bring into sharper and more critical focus the interrelated histories of medievalism and colonialism (and within comparative contexts often left unattended in medieval postcolonial studies), but I am certainly looking forward to reading this book, the Table of Contents of which I leave you with here:

Introduction: The Idea of the “Middle Ages” Outside Europe
Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul

PART I: LOCATIONS OF HISTORY AND THEORY

Chapter 1 - Decolonizing Medieval Mexico
José Rabasa

Chapter 2 - An Enchanted Mirror for the Capitalist Self: The Germania in British India
Ananya Jahanara Kabir

Chapter 3 - “Most Gentle, Indeed, But Most Virile”: The Medievalist Pacifism of George Arnold Wood
Louise D’Arcens

Response - Historicism and its Supplements: A Note on a Predicament Shared by Medieval and Postcolonial Studies
Dipesh Chakrabarty

PART II: RESPOSITIONING ORIENTALISM

Chapter 4 - “Reconquista” and the “Three Religion Spain” in Latin American Thought
Hernán G.H. Taboada

Chapter 5 - Medievalism—Colonialism—Orientalism: Japan’s Modern Identity in Natsume Soseki’s Mabroroshi no Tate and Kairo-ko
Haruko Momma

Chapter 6 - Crossing History, Dis-Orienting the Orient: Amin Maalouf’s Uses of the “Medieval”
Hamid Bahri and Francesca Canadé Sautman

Response - Working Through Medievalisms
Kathleen Davis

PART III: NATION AND FOUNDATIONS

Chapter 7 – Andrés Bello and the Poem of the Cid: Latin America, Occidentalism, and the Foundations of Spain’s “National Philology”
Nadia Altschul

Chapter 8 – Postcolonial Gothic: The Medievalism of America’s “National” Cathedrals
Elizabeth Emery

Chapter 9 – An American in Paris: Charles Homer Haskins at the Paris Peace Conference
Heather Blurton

Response – Medievalism and the Making of Nations
Michelle R. Warren

PART IV: GEOGRAPHY AND TEMPORALITY

Chapter 10 – African Medievalisms: Caste as a Subtext in Ahmadou Kourouma’s Suns of Independence and Monnew
Sylvie Kandé

Chapter 11 – A Clash of Medieval Cultures: Amerindians and Conquistadors in the Thought of Wilson Harris
Kofi Campbell

Chapter 12 – Medieval Studies and the Voice of Conscience in Twentieth-Century South Africa
Victor Houliston

Response – Africa and the Signs of Medievalism
Simon Gikandi

Henry III Fine Rolls Project

by J J Cohen

ITM readers may be interested to discover this valuable resource for the study of 13th C England: the Henry III Fine Rolls Project. It's an impressive site, making available for free English translations of Latin rolls that have never been published in their entirety. Good searchability, high definition manipulable manuscript images, and hard copy publication are all built into the project (though it seems to me the electronic version is better than any book rendition). With the glimpses they offer into contemporary life, the fine lists offer surprisingly interesting browsing.

The site also includes wonderful "Fine of the Month" essays. Check out the two on "Crucifixion and Conversion: King Henry III and the Jews in 1255" (Part 1, Part II).




h/t Sarah Rees Jones for sending me this link. Thanks, Sarah!

Disability in a Medieval Corporal Commonplace?

by KARL STEEL

ITM fans, a research bleg: you're familiar with the medieval commonplace that the bipedal human form is both evidence of human reason and a reminder to humans to think celestial thoughts, and that the stereotypical animal form, quadrupedal, low to the ground, is evidence of animals' merely terrestrial, alimentary thinking? See for example the early fourteenth-century exempla and doctrinal compendium Ci nous dit:

Les bestes vont à .IIII. piés en senefiant qu’il sunt en leur païz; et nous alons a .II. en senefiant que nous ne sonmes pas ou nostre. . . . Et quiconques met l’amour de son cuer en terre, ainsi se fait il semblans aus bestes; maiz devons avoir tous nous desiriers ou ciel, que pour ce nous a Diex faiz. (Vol I.36-37)

Beasts go on four feet to show that they are in their country; and we go on two to show that we are not in ours. . . . And whoever puts the love of his heart in the world makes himself resemble beasts; but we ought to have all of our desire in heaven, which is what God made us for.

Or Robert of Melun's Sentences commentary, where he writes “Inquantum ex corporea est, cum ceteris animalibus communis naturae habet participationem, sed in formae compositione ab alia animantia differentiam habet” (inasmuch as man is corporeal, he has a participation with the common nature of the other animals, but with regard to the arrangement of his form, he has a difference from other living things). He explains that the animal form is prone, lowered to the ground, “ex quo significatur praeter ea quae terrena sunt ab eis nulla esse appetenda” (86; by which is meant, apart from other things, that they are earthly creatures and that nothing else but earthly things are to be desired by them).

Okay? Good. Do you know of any instances where this tradition--which is everywhere, really, one you start noticing it--considered those humans unable to stand upright without assistance or to see anything at all, let alone the heavens? I'm familiar with William of St. Thierry/Gregory of Nyssa's hypothesis about handless humans becoming beasts (e.g., On the Making of Man VIII.8), but have yet to encounter anything specifically on the tradition challenging itself by considering individual disabled humans. (Note: unless I missed it, there's nothing in Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe.)

What are you reading over spring break?

by J J Cohen

A reporter from the GW Hatchet (our student newspaper) emailed me this morning to ask for recommended reading for students over our upcoming "break" (quotation marks indicate that very few of those of us who teach actually take much of a break). Here's what I wrote back.

For those who don't want to turn their brains off for the entire week, I recommend Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals. The book challenges its readers to rethink the fundamental and largely unexamined question of what we eat and why. It's also a meditation on shared tables and community, and quite literary in parts.

I'm about to start Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, a gift from my colleague Judith Plotz. And for anyone who is feeling really ambitious, you could plug away at Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, which is taking me, um, over a year so far with no end in sight.

What about you? What are you reading over the "break"?

Quote of the Day: A Delightful and Perpetual Swoon

[image credit]

by J J Cohen

The latest issue of Arthuriana (20.1, Spring 2010) has a good cluster of essays on Guenevere that concludes with Amy S. Kaufman's "Guenevere Burning." The issue is worth reading in its entirety, but I'm especially fond of Kaufman's piece, with its challenge to stop deploying universalizing tropes of Otherness to write Guenevere out of agency and desire. 

Kaufman's essay opens with these sentences:

Metacritical endeavors in which scholars explore their own pleasure have coaxed medieval studies into a delightful and perpetual swoon as of late. But pleasure is tricky business for the feminist reader of medieval Arthurian literature, mostly because we are always told that we are not supposed to be having any. Our time period is considered inaccessibly patriarchal, our writers deemed misogynistic, and the characters on whom we focus rendered marginal, artificially constructed, or worse yet, abstracted into the nebulous 'feminine' ... Contemporary discussions of pleasure suffer from the deficit of a notion of feminine desire; not an essentially feminine desire, but desire instigated by a subject positioned as feminine.

The article gives a quick overview of Guenevere's disappearance in contemporary criticism, then reads at greater length her movements -- her svadharma [soul's true calling], love -- in Malory. At the close of the essay Kaufman posits that our critical true calling is not all that different from Guenevere's: "We, too, have embarked on a path of of self-sacrificing, indulgent love, even if our object of devotion is the past."

Bonus: the first footnote cites the BABEL pleasure panels at SEMA and Kalamazoo.

Failing Utopia / Feeling Utopia

by J J Cohen

Yesterday GW MEMSI sponsored its spring symposium "Race?". I'd put the event together rather quickly, mainly because I'd realized that the Institute had inadvertently been dwelling in a temporal ghetto (I use that word deliberately): while the topics we examine are of wide interest, we hadn't made a sufficient effort to include our colleagues and students who specialize in later periods in our conversations. Because my own work on race bears the tangible impress of the time I've spent at GW, I figured that this most vexed of categories -- the contradiction laden nexus of culture and nature -- would provide an entry into a wide-ranging, transhistorical discussion. Fellow GW faculty members Jennifer James, Tony López, Andrew Zimmerman, and Tom Guglielmo joined special guest Ayanna Thompson (about whose excellent work I could fill several blog posts).

I opened the event by projecting one of my favorite images of a racialized other, the Saracens I examined in Medieval Identity Machines who impersonate their own race via masks (you can access the image from the Grandes Chroniques on my personal home page). I wanted to foreground the "thickness" of race-in-motion from the start. Each panelist then gave a brief presentation. Topics ranged from Phyllis Wheatley's poetry of resistance to the early modern stage to Cuba and the "post-racial" to World War II military racial classification schemes and the problems they created. Even though no one had conferred ahead of time, every presentation had much in common: the protean nature of race, conjoined to its ability resist historical change; the violence that race has enacted; the perplexity it has engendered; the centrality of performance to race; its multiple category overlap. Although we spoke briefly about the pleasures racial affiliation can offer, for the most part we focused upon the social injustices that seem, eternally, to go hand in hand with racialization.

The audience of about seventy was engaged, offering excellent questions and guiding us into contemporary debates over what "colorblind" and "post-racial" might signify (especially when right-leaning pundits opine that we are "post-racial" because our current president was actually elected), and how such a declaration might serve to render invisible lasting economic and social disparities. Many who came that afternoon were students in my "Myths of Britain" course, who have a sweet way of following me from place to place like that. About eight of these young men and women are seniors in the nearby School Without Walls, who are allowed to take several college-level courses at GW in a system I helped arrange while I was department chair. Because it's a DC public school, SWW is racially quite diverse. The students are typically very good, and speak up regularly in my class. Yesterday it was one of these students who reminded me of the power of utopia.

This student -- let's call him R. -- has never volunteered in class and isn't doing as well in the course as I would like. I could see that he was becoming agitated during the discussion of the falsity of "post-racial." After I suggested that since we have never been pre-racial, we are never likely to move to that "post," his hand shot up. "When I look around my school," R. said, "I see people who date across the race. I see people who don't think about race. Race doesn't matter." His fellow students nodded their heads; a few then spoke with reverence about the world they inhabit, where everyone has a chance to be the person they desire.

At that moment I knew that I and the panel were being rebuked. I guessed that what R. and classmates were saying was: don't tell me that the world is and always has been so fallen. Don't tell me that my skin color is my unhappy destiny. Don't ruin my utopia. I thought for a long time before I answered. I remembered my student A., who at GW had never felt marked by complexion, but returned from her study in Paris achingly aware that the darkness of her skin declared her an Arab and ineligible for the same treatment that her friends enjoyed. I thought about other stories of hurt I'd collected; I've been a teacher for a long time.

I didn't want to tell these stories to R. I said: "First, I don't think you should ever believe an old person when he tells you how the world works. But now I will, and I hope you'll be skeptical. I've taught at GW long enough to have seen that many young people in their high schools and then at college are able to find a place where the color of their skin is not an everyday problem, and they say things like Race is a nonissue or Young people don't care about race any more. Some come back later in life and say the world has a way of making race matter, of telling them who they are in ways they shouldn't ever have to hear. My hope for you -- my fervent hope -- is that this never happens. I hope you hold on to your utopia, I hope you make your utopia endure."

I don't think he will. There is too much history that suggests otherwise. Utopia is nowhere. But to find a group of young men and women, some with dark skin, some with light , who for a year or two are not feeling the divisions that race imposes ... well, I'm not one to take that away, I'm not going to insist that they are naive, I'm not going to ruin the fragile thing they hold. I fear some day their hearts will be broken; I can guess too easily the hurt to come. For me, though, there is something refreshing, life-giving, and affirmative in the certainty of these 17 year olds that the scholars who were speaking to them about history and hurt are wrong.

Congratulations to Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones ...

by J J Cohen

... for the favorable review of their edited volume Authority and Subjugation in  Writing of Medieval Wales in the January Speculum. I was fortunate to read the volume in MS and blurb it, though my endorsement was overshadowed by a certain Archbishop of Canterbury who elbowed his way onto the back cover.

I especially like that the reviewer, Morgan Thomas Davies, got that Simon Meecham-Jones's essay is a kind of jeremiad that, if taken seriously (and it should be taken very seriously indeed) will fundamentally alter the critical practice of "all scholars of medieval English literature." Contemporary scholarship has a way of re-enacting a partitioning of the island that silently replicates the cultural politics of the period instead of challenging that unnatural boundary.

From José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia

by J J Cohen

Feeling inspired in my own work while rereading these words, and thought I'd share them:

"We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality ... an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness' domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see the future beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now's totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of the moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds ... Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world."

-- Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

Punk'd by a Jew, continued

[image: Geoffrey Cohen. Not me.]

by J J Cohen

Some time back, as I toiled upon my Leeds paper, I provided here at ITM an example of what might be called a yid punk, a young man who critiqued through histrionic excess the beliefs of those to whom he was a minority. My paper for the York 1190 conference picks up on some of those themes. Since I'm examining 'The Future of the Jews of York,' I will likely start with some contemporary re-imaginings of Jewish identity, especially within a youth culture for whom a Yiddish-inflected, immigrant-experience focused Judaism  doesn't hold sufficient allure... and I begin with an example of Jews punking Jews.

-----------------

In January of 2009 a press release bearing the letterhead of the Board of Deputies of British Jews (motto: “The voice of British Jewry since 1760”) circulated via email. The document declared:

The Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council, in consultation with a coalition of prominent organisations in the Anglo-Jewish community, have decided to cancel the planned Israel Solidarity Rally, due to occur on Sunday 11^th of January … The demonstration might be perceived as the community taking one side in the tragic war in Gaza and Israel … The Board calls for an immediate cease fire … in order to allow the Gazan and Israeli people to live together in peace. There is no military solution, only a political one … The Board stands in solidarity with the besieged and injured people of Gaza, as well as the victims of terrorism in Israel, and we oppose all violence as contrary to the tenets of the Jewish religion.

Needless to say, this Sabbath-timed press release caught the Board of Deputies of British Jews quite by surprise. The Board’s official position is that it supports ultimate peace, but not through a ceasefire; its placards for the January event, for example, read “End Hamas Terror.” The Solidarity rally continued as planned, attracting about 15,000 supporters to Trafalgar Square. Small counterdemonstrations were held across the street and included some Jews protesting Israel’s military deployments and tactics. 

On January 14, a second email was disseminated to those who received the first announcing that the BOD press release had been a hoax. This time the email appeared under the name Jewdas, a self-described “rootless cosmopolitan yeshiva” of radical British Jews. Jewdas’ mission is supposed to be derived from the Book of Jewdas, discovered “by the back of a kebab shop in Dalston.” Thousands of years old, written in Jerusalem by “a cabal of radical scribes” in anachronistic Yiddish (“a far older, more authentic language than Hebrew”), the book commands its readers to “mercilessly satirize Anglo Jewry, suggest new and more radical ways of being Jewish, and also throw excellent parties.” As indicated by its embrace of a Stalinist euphemism for Jews (“rootless cosmopolitans,” those who do not and cannot share the national culture), Jewdas turns antisemitic denigration into cheeky possibility, angering many traditionalists. The group often speaks under the nom de plume “Geoffrey Cohen” (no relation). The second email declared:

Well yes, it was us. We sent the Board of Deputies Hoax email. Not some ‘Islamist cell’ or ‘Hamas supporters’ as many of you imagined. Just a group of nice yiddisher boys and girls … We weren’t trying to be malicious … we weren’t even trying to stop people going to the rally … we wanted, in this action, to show another possible reality, to suggest that ‘another Jewish community is possible.’

Those who believed it, even for a moment, were being given a gift, a vision of the Jewish leadership who stood up for peace and justice, rather than standing for mindless ethnic solidarity. These people should not be considered gullible, rather they showed the imagination to see an inspiring, alternative vision. We offered a Midrash on Anglo-Jewish life, a dvar aher (another path), an aggadah for the Talmud of the present.

The hoax’s objective, the email states, was to open a “temporary imaginary zone” in which voices typically silenced might find audition, a zone in which the letter’s receiver might enjoy a “shabbat in accord with the best of Judaism.” The letter then restates the call for an immediate ceasefire and lifting of the economic blockade that appeared in the faked BOD release, “this time under our own name.” These impious, unorthodox pranksters who call themselves Jewdas were in other words foregrounding a non-monolithic Jewish identity in the present, as well as the possibility of a differently imagined Jewish future.

              

Jewdas is not the only subculture coalition of Jews to have formed in the past few years: in the United States, for example, loose counterparts can be found in Jewcy, Jewschool, PunkTorah, and (to highly corporatized degree) Heeb. These loose communities of mostly young Jews incorporate left-leaning politics into their identities. All deploy irreverent humor and provocative satire, often in the hope of social change. Jewdas, however, has a considerably sharper political focus and a keener activist edge (its logo is Che Guevera as an orthodox Jew). All these groups also emphasize Jewish coalition with non-Jews. Jewdas, for example, speaks on its webpage of “the need to widen Judaism beyond the boundaries of those born Jewish, towards an ethic of wider concern, a Judaism that might at times stand in critique of the Jews.” It declares to its readers and potential supporters – many of whom, it acknowledges, will be neither British nor Jewish: “whatever your background if you:  prefer stirring things up to keeping the peace, prefer dreaming of the utopian rather than settling for the prosaic, and think that culture and ethnicity should be springboards for overthrowing the state, then you’re a Jewdaser at heart."

              

A Christian medieval writer would have said Judaizer, but the idea is the same: come too close to the Jew, neighbor the Jewish world without erecting sufficient partition, and both of you may change as a result. Both of you may enter an imaginary space – albeit, perhaps, a temporary one – where what has always been need no longer hold true. This is a long way of saying that we are used to the massacre of 1190 standing as the inevitable future of the Jews of York. We are used to the Expulsion of 1290 as an inexorable rendezvous. The power of such defining moments is that, when hitched to a progress narrative that culminates in catastrophe, they do not allow for those medieval Jews who may have been irreverent punks, who may have considered themselves citizens of York and England as well as rootless cosmopolitans, who may have carried with themselves identities that only at a first and cursory glance seem timeless, set in stone.

The 15th Century Writing on the Wall

by J J Cohen

Via Medieval News, an enhanced image of some writing recently discovered on a Salisbury Cathedral wall. The words are in English, but what they are and what they mean is a mystery. I know what you are thinking: I scribbled it there when I was at Salisbury in 2007 -- you know, when my family dined upon scones with Jude Law. Well it wasn't me: the text is fifteenth century.

What do you think it states? I have a few theories (all hypothetical transcriptions rendered into Modern English):

1. "Hahaha you thought you got rid of us in 1290, we are sneaking through your cathedrals and scoffing scones in your cafés"
2. "PLEASE refrain from carrying baked goods from the refectory into the main cathedral."
3. "Shrine temporarily removed to make way for the Reformation."
4. "I have collected seven manuscripts of an ancient poem about the hero Beowulf and secreted them with three of Chaucer's unpublished works in t---" (rest of text obliterated)

Postcolonising the Medieval Image

by J J Cohen

A new website dedicated to postcolonial approaches to medieval visual materials is now live. Supported through an AHRC grant, the site was founded by Eva Frojmovic and Catherine Karkov of Leeds University. "Postcolonising the Medieval Image" offers a growing collection of resources including conference announcements, a library of abstracts, and lists of news and events.

Bookmark this one.