Briefly Noted: Rossellini on Fra' Ginepro and the Pig's Foot

by KARL STEEL

I expect you're familiar with the story of Brother Juniper and the Pig (Latin is here, paragraphs 2-9, Italian here, and modern English translation here). Briefly: Juniper is the fool of fools among Saint Francis's band, no doubt narratively necessary because the original fool, Francis, had become an the administrator of his flock. The first act of Juniper's holy foolishness: to satisfy a sick brother's craving for a pig's foot. Juniper heads out to the forest, finds a herd of pigs, captures one and cuts off its foot, and voila! He heals his brother. But then an enraged and nearly implacable swineherd shows up. Finally calmed by Juniper's innocence, the swineherd bestows on the friars the remainder the now 3-footed pig. Francis declares, "Fratres mei, fratres mei; utinam ego haberem de talibus iuniperis unam silvam" [My Brothers, my brothers: would that I had a forest of such Junipers!"] The end.

Roberto Rossellini's Francesco, giullare di Dio [Francis, God's Jester, distributed in English as "The Flowers of St. Francis"] treats the episode a bit differently. Click on the image above for a sense of how the hunt begins. Juniper isn't just hunting down a pig. He piously understands the pig as participating in the community of charity: just as the film's Juniper keeps giving his habit away to the poor, so too will the pig give away its foot. Soon enough Juniper finds a herd of 5 or so pigs, and addresses them: "Brother pigs, the Lord has placed you on my path to help me. Listen to me. Brother pig, listen to me, please. Most handsome pig, with your succulent foot, would you grant my sick brother's wish? I promise I won't hurt you. The Lord will help us in need. Think, brother, of the few opportunities we have to do good." With this, Juniper and his knife disappear behind a bush, which shivers while an unseen pig screams. And keeps screaming. Horribly.

Juniper prays, "Thank you, Lord, for the good that that pig and I will do with this foot." He returns, the pig's scream following him through the valley, and he declares, "Listen, he's thanking the Lord too." The pig screams for a while more, then stops.

The swineherd, as in the original, appears, but remains implacable: "You call this doing good? One of your friars cut off my pig's foot!" He leaves, and then here, too, returns with the carcass, but Rossellini (or Fellini (!), or perhaps his other screenwriters) simply has the swineherd throw down a gutted carcass, shouting, "Here, you vagrants, eat!," and then stomp away. What he offers them may be less a charitable donation than an all-too vividly rendered carcass, made inedible by its own coagulated blood. So much for Brother Pig.

Though Rossellini's film ends with Francis sending his friars out into the world to preach peace, though through the film the friars, particularly Juniper, bring peace wherever they go, or at least suffer meekly for Christ's sake, through Rossellini gives us the illusion of immediate access to peace by casting actual monks to play his friars, he nonetheless assaults us with the cinematic equivalent of the Turkish March in the Ode to Joy, as glossed by Žižek. Forgive the long quote:

In the middle of the movement, after we hear the main melody (the Joy theme) in three orchestral and three vocal variations, something unexpected happens at this first climax, which has bothered critics since its first performance 180 years ago. At bar 331, the tone changes totally and, instead of the solemn hymnic progression, the same “Joy” theme is repeated in the marcia Turca (“Turkish march”) style. Borrowed from the military music for wind and percussion instruments that 18th century European armies adopted from the Turkish Janissaries, the mode becomes that of a carnivalesque popular parade, a mocking spectacle. Some critics have even compared the “absurd grunts” of the bassoons and bass drum that accompany the beginning of the marcia Turca to farts. And after this point, everything goes wrong, the simple solemn dignity of the first part of the movement is never recovered.

However, what if things do not go wrong only at bar 331, with the entrance of the marcia Turca? What if, instead, something was wrong from the very beginning? We should accept that there is something insipidly fake about the Ode to Joy, so that the chaos that enters after the bar 331 is a kind of the “return of the repressed,” a symptom of what was wrong from the very beginning. We should thus shift the entire perspective and perceive the marcia as a return to everyday normality that cuts short the display of preposterous portentousness and brings us back to earth, as if saying “you want the celebrate the brotherhood of men? Here they are, the real humanity.”

And does the same not hold for Europe today? After inviting all mankind to embrace the celebration of ecstasy, the second strophe of Schiller’s poem that is set to the music of “Ode to Joy” ominously ends: “But he who cannot rejoice, let him steal weeping away from our circle.”

He who cannot accept our peace, our charity, let him steal weeping, footless and pigless, away from our circle. Let his screams be heard as joining our prayer. To his credit, Rossellini has not made what the "The Decent Film Guide" calls a "beautifully simple little film," nor has he made a film that offers "a compelling vision of life that rejects materialism and violence." He has done that, that is true, but that's not all. Only a third of the way through Francesco giullare di Dio, Rossellini shows us the true, shattering violence of revolution, that the inclusiveness of community and of dreams of peace cannot help but leave behind the equivalent of a bereft swineherd and mutilated pig, each dragooned into someone else's simple and naive dreams of a pure charity.

So much from Brother Pig. So much for Brother Pig.

NEW in The Heroic Age: Mary Kate Hurley's "Beowulf and Bethlehem Steel"

by EILEEN JOY

I am proud to announce that the third entry in The Heroic Age's "babelisms" column [Issue 13] is the essay "The Ruins of the Past: Beowulf and Bethlehem Steel" by our very own Mary Kate Hurley! Follow the link through the title just cited to read the essay and take a look HERE at the entire issue's Table of Contents, which looks really interesting.

Let me also announce here that The Heroic Age and postmedieval are embarking on an experimental joint adventure for Heroic Age's Issue 14 and postmedieval's Issue 2 [vol. 1: 2010]. We are "co-producing" together, across the two issues, a cluster of essays on "The State(s) of Early English Studies," featuring contributions from Elaine Treharne, Carol Braun Pasternack, Kathleen Davis, Mary Dockray-Miller, Gillian Overing, Clare Lees, Jacqueline Stodnick, Renee Trilling, and Lisa Weston. Part of the cluster will appear in Heroic Age and part in postmedieval, but the entire cluster will be available free online for part of November 2010, when both issues go "live." Go HERE for more details on that cluster.

2 book notes involving medieval Jews

by J J Cohen

1. A work of interest, now in process: The York Massacre of 1190 in Context: Reassessing Relations between Jews and Others in Medieval England. Table of contents here. 
2. At lunch today I was reading aloud the dust cover for my copy of Licoricia of Winchester: Marriage, Motherhood and Murder in the Medieval Anglo-Jewish Community and got to these lines about the author: "Suzanne Bartlett was inspired to write this book by the discovery of part of Winchester's Jewish cemetery just outside her back garden. She liked to think that perhaps Licoricia, after her tumultuous life and tragic death, finally came to rest there." Licoricia died of stab wounds inflicted in her own house. To think that she could find peace beneath the geraniums of an English garden struck me as ... odd, and a bit chilling, though I know the author means well.

Dreaming a Future for the MAA

by J J Cohen

In the comments here, Aunt Pansy observes:

There will be exciting things upcoming [for the MAA]. A new Executive Director in a little less than a year, a new set of by-laws, perhaps some insurance for directors and councilors and officers to prevent them being threatened with the individual financial costs of law-suits for failing to fulfill their fiduciary responsibilities? more supportive attitudes towards grad students? better turn-around for submissions to Speculum?

In the comments to this post, Karl writes:

Things might settle back into the status quo ante, but perhaps not? Not to be too cutesy, but in this confusion and uncertainty, we might be seeing the rumblings of an actual future, an opening into who knows what.

ADM adds:

I'm not sure what it is that the MAA wants to be, or that its members want it to be. It may be a time for redefinition -- or definition? Another thought: the MAA is old. It used to be *the* medievalists' society in America. But so many other societies have grown up in the last 15-20 (or fewer) years, and my impression is that these societies, e.g., those that focus on the Early Middle Ages, were created by people who felt that the MAA meetings and Speculum did not really represent their scholarly interests ... Basically, MAA isn't the 800-lb gorilla anymore, but I think it still sees itself that way. The reality is that people have broader options and less money for memberships and subscriptions. This may be the time for a re-think on how to make the organization more relevant to all of us, or perhaps to specialize to a couple of core groups.

To keep the conversation productive, and future focused, let me piggyback on these important queries and ask: what do you want to see from the MAA in the years ahead? How can the organization remain vital, and where should its communal energies be focused?

What next for the MAA?

by J J Cohen

So the story gets more interesting (and complicated, and depressing) as time goes on.

That the Executive Committee was not behind the recently disseminated CFP makes me wonder who composed and distributed it. Was this CFP an advertisement of the newly added conference topics, or an attempt to get people to submit papers for a potentially moribund conference? Are MAA members voting again, this time through electing not to participate in the Tempe event? How united was the Executive Committee in the decision that the conference be held in AZ after all, and were they the determining voices? Is the resignation of three faculty members from the program committee a sign that local arrangements are in trouble?

My last post about the MAA was optimistic about its eventual future. I am having a harder time holding on to that hopefulness at the moment.

About the updated MAA Call for Papers

by J J Cohen

Yesterday I posted my reaction to the Medieval Academy of America's updated call for papers for the annual meeting to be held (despite the protests of many) in Tempe, Arizona, in April. The CFP was distributed by email on August 10 and can be accessed here.

I want to call your attention to two facts that I did not know when I composed the post:

1. Three members of the program committee planning the conference, faculty members of Arizona State University, had resigned almost two weeks earlier to protest the location of the meeting. You can read their letter here, in which they urge a boycott of the state.
2. The updated call for papers was apparently distributed without the consultation or approval of the MAA Executive Committee. See the comment here.

Green, Newhauser and Voaden: An Open Letter to the Medieval Academy of America

[reprinted with permission of the authors, who have resigned from the Tempe program committee]

An Open Letter to the Medieval Academy of America

On July 26 and 27 the three of us, faculty members of Arizona State University, resigned from the program committee planning the 2011 conference of the Medieval Academy of America in Arizona.  We did so because we could not in good conscience be involved in planning a conference in our own state when our commitment to human rights demands that we support the boycott of Arizona, in protest against its recent immigration law, SB 1070.  There are clear financial, political, but above all ethical reasons for the Medieval Academy to join this protest by moving the venue of the 2011 conference to another state or cancelling the meeting next year, but still we struggled with our decision to resign from the program committee, not wishing to desert our colleagues.  While some provisions of the legislation were struck down by a federal judge on July 28, the governor of the state is appealing that decision, and all indications are that this will be a long court battle that may not be resolved before the time of the Academy's meeting in 2011.  We therefore urge the executive committee of the Academy to reconsider its decision to continue planning the 2011 conference for Arizona and we urge the members of the Medieval Academy of America to support the boycott of Arizona until SB 1070 is repealed or confirmed to be unconstitutional.

The most effective way to influence unjust legislation is to exert economic pressure.  This was demonstrated in 1992, when after a number of years of a boycott that resulted in millions of dollars of lost revenue, voters in Arizona finally approved the designation of Martin Luther King Day as a public holiday.  In the case of SB 1070 many events, including academic conferences, have moved to other locations to protest this legislation.  The National Urban League cancelled its 2012 conference in Phoenix, Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity moved its meeting from Phoenix to Las Vegas this year, and the groups who have called for a travel boycott of Arizona include the American Educational Research Association, the Society for Applied Anthropology, and the Presbyterian Church (see for more:  http://www.azcentral.com/business/articles/2010/05/13/20100513immigration-boycotts-list.html).  Boycotts have been proven to be effective, but they take time to work and some sacrifice.  It is understandable that the Academy wishes to avoid the costs involved in cancelling its hotel reservation, especially given that a mere 33% of those responding to a recent poll of the membership were willing to help defray the cost of canceling the meeting in Arizona, whereas 65% said they were unwilling to do so.  But that 33%, to which the three signees of this letter belong, also includes at least one person who has pledged up to $1000 to help the Academy avoid financial loss.  Others are sure to help as well.  If the Academy stands to lose little or nothing by moving the conference to a different state or cancelling this year's conference, and may in fact experience a loss of revenue if the conference is held in Arizona anyway because of those members who will not want to attend a conference here, what compelling reason is there for the Academy not to do what it can to resist injustice?

The appropriateness of making collective political statements might be raised as an objection to having the Academy take at stand on the issue of SB 1070, but the passage of the law itself erases that argument.  Having made the debate on immigration so polemical, the law forces everyone to chose sides:  in such an atmosphere, not opposing the injustice of SB 1070 is almost equivalent to supporting it.  Nor is the issue only a matter of immigration policy, but one more in a series of attempts to use border security as a wedge issue to motivate partisan politics.  As Roll Call reported on July 29, 2010, there are plans to force votes on border security issues this fall at every opportunity (p. 13).  By not supporting the boycott, the Academy has not avoided making a collective political statement; it has tacitly approved one that others have made for it.

And that statement is clearly one of intolerance and injustice.  If all parts of the law are upheld in the appeals process, it will lead to widespread civil rights violations.  It stigmatizes an entire community.  The fact that plans for the Academy's conference now feature keynote speakers and special sessions on immigration and displaced persons is some indication that the membership of the Academy does not support the legislation and is aware of the injustice it will perpetrate.  Yet writing and speaking about injustice in the academic world are no substitutes for acting in the real world.  We feel this all the more intensely because it is in our names, as citizens of Arizona, that the state legislature has said it acted.  Ultimately, our conscience would not allow us to participate in the planning for a conference in Arizona.  We feel that we have no choice but to use every opportunity to protest legislation which violates both civil and human rights.  To this end, not only have we resigned from the program committee, but as long as SB 1070 is the law in Arizona or is in the appeals process we will also find it impossible to attend the meeting of the Medieval Academy in our own backyard.

There are moments when we are all called upon to make moral decisions, no matter how uncomfortable they might be, no matter how much they force us to chose between supporting the groups we work with or supporting our allegiance to the greater community of humankind.  For us, the question of the Academy's unwillingness to oppose the injustice of SB 1070 is just such a moment.  We hope it will prove to be one for you as well.

Respectfully,

Monica Green, Professor, School of Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies, Arizona State University (mhgreen2@cox.net)

Richard Newhauser, Professor, Department of English, Arizona State University (Richard.G.Newhauser@gmail.com)

Rosalynn Voaden, Associate Professor, Department of English, Arizona State University (rosalynn.voaden@gmail.com)

More thoughts about the MAA in AZ, or why I'm not quitting

by J J Cohen

The topic of the Medieval Academy of America holding its annual meeting in Tempe, Arizona, has been well covered here at ITM. You'll also find eloquent pieces about the controversy at Blogenspiel and Quod She. When the decision was announced, I composed as measured a reaction as I could for IHE (but was unable to email it in time for their deadline). It ran simply:

While I am pleased that the MAA deliberated over the possibility of canceling the meeting, I am personally disappointed at both the decision to hold the conference in Arizona and the email that was distributed to announce that decision. Although the email mentioned fiduciary responsibility, membership opinions, and so forth, at no point did it state why a large percentage of the MAA membership is distressed at holding the meeting in Arizona: that the law passed by the legislature is racist and wrong. The MAA email was careful, it was factual, and it lacked moral courage.

Not everyone will agree with me that a professional organization should take a political stand, but for me this is a straightforward question of ethics. I won't cancel my membership in the MAA, because I'd like to see the organization change. But I am embarrassed that the leadership of this association that is supposed to represent me apparently does not feel the outrage that the Arizona situation demands.

Yesterday the MAA emailed an updated call for papers for the Tempe conference. The letter opens with these lines:

As you probably know, the fate of the annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America for 2011, scheduled to be held in Arizona, was in question because of Arizona's recently passed immigration law, SB1070, which many across the country found to be morally and legally deeply flawed.  On August 3, the Executive Committee of the Academy voted to hold the meeting as planned for reasons that the Committee explained in the statement posted on the Academy's website.  Because of this decision, we are extending the deadline for submissions of papers to October 15.  The Executive Committee and the local Program Committee are working to ensure that the program of the meeting reflects and relates to similar issues at stake in Arizona and in medieval society, including such topics as race, ethnicity, immigration, tolerance, treatment of minority groups, protest against governmental policies judged unjust, and standards of judicial and legislative morality. 

I suspect this email did not change any minds among those who are angry with the tone and content of the initial MAA announcement -- an email that, as I pointed out, made no reference to the reason why so many of us do not want the conference held in the state. The CFP does acknowledge those reasons ("immigration law, SB1070, which many across the country found to be morally and legally deeply flawed") while itself remaining noncommittal about the moral and legal status of that law. The email doesn't give wide enough context (many of us also object to the legislature's animus towards ethnic studies, an intolerable intrusion into academic freedom), the CFP doesn't render a judgment, it just states that many people take issue with the legislation.

Would I prefer that the MAA label and condemn racism for what it is? Yes. But I do appreciate that we have in this second email something about the moral flaws of SB1070. I am grateful for the next sentence, stating straightforwardly that "the local Program Committee are working to ensure that the program of the meeting reflects and relates to similar issues at stake in Arizona and in medieval society" and listing the very issues that many of us have been speaking about in relation to the AZ meeting ("race, ethnicity, immigration, tolerance, treatment of minority groups, protest against governmental policies judged unjust, and standards of judicial and legislative morality"). Those last two phrases strike me as apt and well formulated, even if -- again -- they are ultimately noncommittal about what is actually unfolding in the state. There is something here that needs to be acknowledged, evidence that the MAA leadership is in fact listening to the discussion that has unfolded and reacting in a way that makes such audition evident.

No, the CFP email still isn't what I want. Not nearly so. It is tempting to condemn the MAA reaction to the controversy and declare, OK, that is it for the MAA and me. We're through. Yet what has been evident to me throughout this controversy's unfolding is that the Executive Committee is riven, that there has been a decision but not unanimity, that clearly some committee members have no intention of setting foot at the conference itself. In other words, I'm not yet ready to give up on the MAA even if I am profoundly disappointed with some of the choices and statements that have been made.

Don't get me wrong: I am not stating that all is well and that having the MAA in AZ is fine. I believe as strongly as ever that the meeting ought to have been moved to another state in order to protest Arizona's unjust and racist legislative acts. I believe that no person is illegal; that ethnic studies are of great value; that a disgusting amount of xenophobia is patent in the immigration and "who gets to belong" debate.

I'll provide something personal, but I want to emphasize that this issue isn't merely a personal one for me. The demonizing of Hispanic peoples reminds me in a chilling way of how my own Jewish and Irish ancestors were spoken of, and why they fled to this country in the last century, and what they experienced once they arrived. Racist contempt must never be made licit. I do not want what is happening in Arizona to be revealed in hindsight to have been our American Kristallnacht (you will say that is over the top, we're not there yet, the challenges are too deep and passionate; I want it to always seem that way). I want my kids, my students, anyone younger than me to live in a better world than the one we now inhabit. Immigration is not the problem, and dreaming a purified police state is not the solution. The problem is global poverty, and its patent if extraordinarily difficult solution is through alliances and cooperation that reach beyond the pettiness of our own self interests, beyond the mere borders of nations.

So, yes, to me in this case the MAA failed. But they did not fail by wholly closing down and refusing to listen to their membership: I do believe that the open letter was taken seriously, even if the decision to hold the meeting was not in accord with its spirit. To be honest, the letter has been honored quite literally: we who signed it did not demand that Arizona be boycotted, but that moving the conference be seriously considered outside of financial concerns, and that panels focused upon the issues at stake be added to the program no matter where the meeting was held. We got some of what we were looking for. It isn't enough, for me. But I'm not resigning from the MAA.

There's too much work to be done.

Medievalists di moda: Fashionline Siena

by J J Cohen

The Cohen family is back, at least for a week, from their peregrinations round the Atlantic and into the Mediterranean. I hope to post something of some substance about the MAA and AZ when jet lag abates, but meanwhile: for your entertainment, a guest post written by someone who saw you and judged you at NCS Siena. Ah, Italy, land of fashion and elegance. Just look at these two movie star quality medievalists resplendent in the sun of San Gimignano. We can't all be Stephanie Trigg and Myra Seaman, but now don't you wish that your socks had at least matched, that you'd pressed that shirt, that the pasta splotch on your shoulder hadn't been quite so visible? I know I do.

I've sworn to keep our guest poster anonymous due to fear of reprisal, but before you start believing that it was me let me point out my numerous faux pas in Siena, including the wearing of a plaid shirt (albeit a crisp purple one) and a T shirt (albeit one with an alchemical equation upon it). Also my wearing of shorts was an attempt to instigate a Sexy Legged Medievalist Contest, not a symptom of the heat.

Without further ado ...

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

Fashionline Siena
by Gloria Lechelle

NCS Siena, 15-20 July 2010, was possibly the most stylish conference for medievalists in recent memory. (Lamentably, putting “stylish” and “medievalist” in the same sentence has been an oxymoron of late.) The exquisite Italian setting, fabulous cuisine, and enticing shops were unparalleled. Medievalists arrived in droves each evening on Il Campo, in places like the Palio Bar, where people-watching (and being watched) became a spectator sport. As the nights lingered on, more and more of the Sienese came out to enjoy the cool temperatures. Their footwear, among other features of their attire, made the confusion between natives and i turisti absolutely impossible. But against this background, it soon became unavoidable to notice the more stylish, more fashionably savvy members of the NCS—as well as some of our more fashion-challenged colleagues. It is our hope that the Siena conference will set some trends and raise the bar, even, for all medievalists, who appear (from reports from Kalamazoo) to have become too comfortably frumpy in their apparel of late.

 

Here we offer the TOP TEN highlights from NCS Siena in the hopes that future Congresses may see something of a fashion renovatio:

7-10: The baseline of style was kept by a strong showing in crisp linen: George Edmondson, Claire Waters, Jeffrey Cohen, and David Lawton always looked cool, crisp, and un-crumpled, even at the end of the day. Cohen gets extra points too for wearing shorts in a never unprofessional way. Well done.

6: Sarah Kay—we all lamented Sarah’s absence from the closing plenary, where we also missed her neat skirts and fun blouses, a chic French style not to be daunted by the Siense heat.

5: Matthew Goldie—made me reconsider my rule against t-shirts at the closing banquet. A neat, plain black shirt, coupled with pale pink trousers took Villa-banquet style to new places. Points for originality without sacrificing neatness.

4: Ruth Evans—knows how to ACCESORIZE. Famous for her shoes (showcased on her Facebook page), Ruth never lets us forget medievalists have style too. She’d regularly be misrecognized as a Romance language scholar at the MLA Convention. We love her for keeping us on our toes.

3: Cord Whitaker—did anyone miss Cord’s white slip on shoes, his white collared and cuffed shirts or those cuff links sported in Siena? Well, if so, you just weren’t paying attention (and I don’t want to know what you were wearing)! Freshly pressed every day from breakfast to dinner, Cord has set a new style trend for NCS men. One can only hope for imitators.

2: Kellie Robertson—Whether on her own or en famille, Kellie gives classic style a new twist, adding vintage accessories to a plain, neat linen trouser and blouse. Never with a hair out of place, Kellie looked as comfortable on the podium as on Il Campo.

1: As is only fitting, our new NCS President once again shows herself off as an NCS trendsetter. With as many smart dresses as there were days in the sun, Carolyn Dinshaw made her mark as she splashed fashion sense all over the NCS presidency. We can only hope to see the entirety of the next congress in such sophisticated attire. It can only reflect well on our collective self-possession.

Some trends to avoid were also observed. Here are some fashion lessons to take to our next congress:

1. Men certainly have a harder time in the heat. No cute sundress is going to get them through Italy neatly. Matthew Goldie not withstanding, t-shirts were a big no-no. It’s hard to be taken seriously when you are wearing what looks like sleepwear.

2. Plaid is almost universally deadly unless monochromatic (and generally very small), so as not to look like plaid. This is a fashion faux-pas to be avoided at all costs, particularly if it’s crinkly. Never to be worn by women. NEVER.

3. Cargo anything is OUT. It’s hard to look neat, chic, or serious if you are covered in pockets. Worse if anything is actually in those pockets! Neatness gives way to saggy. Best to avoid entirely.

4. Black. Too hot in the heat, too severe for the day, black can be worn only by the young and really, only at night. Lighter colors worked much better, especially against pale skins accustomed to much work in dimly-lit libraries and unaccustomed to the Tuscan sun. And finally, nothing really beats some nice navy linen pants—as Kellie showed. Never underestimate the value of a good blue (or grey) suit.

Speculative Medievalisms: A Laboratory-Atelier @ King's College London: PROGRAM NOW ONLINE

Figure 1. Opicinus de Canistris (1296–ca. 1354), Diagram with Zodiac Symbols, folio 24r, Avignon, France, 1335–50 (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City, Pal. Lat. 1993)

by EILEEN JOY

Enter the speculative metaphysics of the philosophers , Quentin Meillasoux, Graham Harman, and Ray Braisser, and also the speculative turn that a post-human literary history might take, following the passage of things themselves through human discourse, charting the networks or associations that form as things travel from hand to hand, in and out of texts, between and among different spheres of reference, describing a kind of Brownian motion of persons and things, each remaking the other as they are put to use, reanimating aesthetics as a contact zone in which the presence of things is understood to manifest via the installed thoughts and feelings of their human screens.
--Julian Yates, “It's (for) You; or, The Tele-t/r/opical Post-Human,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 1.1/2 (Spring/Summer 2010)

I'm thrilled to announce that the first event in the newly-unveiled SPECULATIVE MEDIEVALISMS project [a co-production of Urbanomic, the BABEL Working Group, and the Petropunk Collective: Nicola Masciandaro, Michael O'Rourke, Anna Klosowska, and Eileen Joy], "Speculative Medievalisms: A Laboratory-Atelier," will be held at the Anatomy Theatre & Museum @ King's College London on Friday, 14 January 2011, and the full program schedule [with links to .pdfs of "specimen" papers] can be found here:

Speculative Medievalisms: A Laboratory-Atelier

The background to and vision statement for the project can be found HERE. And you can follow us on Facebook HERE. We will have a registration page up and running by the end of August for those who are interested in attending the event.

Stay tuned for a second "mirror" event, still to be scheduled in New York City in Fall 2011, and featuring Graham Harman, Kellie Robertson, Jeffrey Cohen, and others.

The Plateau of the Middle and the New Irrationalists: Get Ready for the Confraternity of Neoflagellants

Figure 1. Ewan Sinclair and Emma Tolmie, Modified Knights: Crusaders of the Cosmic Forge (AVALON Exhibit, Edinburgh, 2010)

by EILEEN JOY

Our pasts live in us now; we cannot address the historicity of our present moment without understanding the pastness in that historicity, the deadness in our living, the ineluctable retrospection of our desire, just as "our" past is not ours, but was inevitably also the past of others. . . . No engagement of otherness will preserve either the subject or the other in an identity which should already have been theorized as unstable in the first place; but by that very token, we know, precisely, that the other "has been" encountered. Of this we can be sure; indeed it is a species of arrogance to think otherwise. . . . Insofar as history is always and inevitably retrospectively constituted, insofar as the work of signification is inseparable from memory and desire, insofar as the passional and the technical coincide in the register of our jouissance, we could not, even if we wanted to, stop creating, or more properly re-creating, new prostheses of memory.
--L. Aranye Fradenburg, " 'So That We May Speak of Them': Enjoying the Middle Ages"

Not too long ago, I was contacted by Norman James Hogg [recent M.A. in Visual Culture, Univ. of Edinburgh], Simon O'Sullivan [Senior Lecturer in the Dept. of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, Univ. of London], and Neil Mulholland [Assoc. Head, School of Art, Univ. of Edinburgh], who have recently created a visual artists collective, "The Confraternity of Neoflagellants" [as their own literature puts it: "The Confraternity of Neoflagellants was founded in 2009 by Serjeant-At-Law Norman Hogg and joined by Keeper of the Wardrobe Neil Mulholland. It is a secular and equal opportunities confraternity bound by chirograph."]. They have a dead-serious [and delightfully ludic] set of interests in investigating neomedievalisms and what they call "premodern futures." As Neil puts it on his Academia.edu website:

"The relentless association, from the Renaissance onwards, of the Middle Ages with the ‘hypereconomy’ of the gift, with whatever exceeds calculation or rationality, for good or for ill, has made the Middle Ages a marker of fantasy and excess." The Confraternity of Neoflagellants are lay peoples dedicated to the ascetic application, dissemination and treatment of neomedievalism in contemporary culture. They are attuned to the scent of medieval analogies relating to the (creative) commons, the folkmote/folksonomy, the plateau of middle, post-post-industrialism (Goth, silvercasting, experience economies) and to geopolitical debates in the current era of ‘zombie capitalism’ and the ‘new irrationalism’.

Our premodern futures have particular resonance with what Howard Rheingold once prophesied as ‘the virtual community’. The Confraternity want to make these connections explicit by engaging with online culture both in the content of the work we are examining (which includes ambient technoculture and the ludic spaces of video gaming) and in the form that it manifests itself.

They recently staged an art installation @ Embassy Gallery, Roxy Art House, in Edinburgh, "Avalon," which ran under an epigraph from Aranye Fradenburg [the first sentence/quotation in the two quoted paragraphs above], and you can see images from that installation HERE and HERE [also: click on the poster at left to read the fine print and note the resonances between many subjects dear to ITM and the Confraternity!]. As the Confraternity describes the exhibit:

‘Avalon’ is the first curatorial investigation into premodern futurity by The Confraternity of Neoflagellants – lay peoples dedicated to the ascetic application, dissemination and treatment of neomedievalism in contemporary culture. Borne of the ‘new irrationalism’ of ‘zombie capitalism’, they are attuned to the scent of medieval in the creative commons, in the folkmote, and the plateau of middle in the unbundled territory of post-post-industrialism.

Neomedievalism embraces the spectral traces or ‘uncertain knowledges’ of its historical past as part of an ever-morphing, force-feedback simulation, (or permanent rehearsal) of coming events. The longing for a future assembled from a bricolage of pre-modern components embeds itself deeper with every advance in the technologies of representation. The fantasy must become ever closer to reality.

Now, this weekend, as part of the 2010 Edinburgh Art Festival Expo Commission, they are staging a Zombie Walk and reception, tonight, August 7th:

This involves a mash-up of Robert Burns' Tam O'Shanter, The Party (starring Peter Sellers) (1968), Night of the Living Dead (1985) and The Fall's Live at the Witch Trials (1979). A secret party is being held in the honour of Edinburgh's 'ghosts', the living dead who wear historical costume for their work.

At 11:00pm this Confraternity of Neoflagellants will assemble at the Scott Monument and walk through the City of Edinburgh, arriving at an undisclosed location before the midnight hour. Once there, they will cross the Styx to a wake. The after party will feature music and DJ sets as well as projections by artists currently exhibiting in 'Avalon' at The Embassy gallery in the Roxy Art House, Edinburgh.

On this coming Monday, August 9th, there will be a 1-day symposium on "Investigating Premodern Futures," and Bettina Bildhauer [Univ. of St Andrews] will be there, representing the BABEL Working Group and postmedieval, and presenting on the panel, "Return of the Long Now." You can see the whole program by following the link above. The main event of the day will be a featured talk by Howard Rheingold, the author of Smart Mobs (2002), among many many other publications.

I'll be sending a BABEL/postmedieval "post-card," via podcast, for the symposium, if I can get my act together later today or tomorrow. And here is hoping to a BABEL/postmedieval/Confraternity mash-up in the near future. Cheers to everyone in Edinburgh. Thank you for your playfulness, your provocations, your neomedievalisms, and your artistry!

Nineteenth Century Studies Association Writes Better Letters

by EILEEN JOY

In relation to my recent post "Regarding My Dismay with the Medieval Academy of America," it might interest some to know that the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association [NCSA] also had to recently ponder moving its annual meeting out of Tempe, and they did so [they will be meeting in Sante Fe, NM instead], and not without some of the same deliberative pains undergone by the MAA. In the final analysis, they write a better letter explaining why:

A Message From the President of the NCSA

My thanks to Maria Bachman (Coastal Carolina Univ.), Newsletter Editor for the NCSA and a great friend and colleague, for bringing this to my attention.

Regarding My Dismay with the Medieval Academy of America

by EILEEN JOY

So, somewhat atypically for me, the further away I get from the announcement by the Medieval Academy of America regarding their decision to keep their annual meeting in Tempe, Arizona next spring, the more upset I feel I am becoming. More typically, my initial reaction to particular events, issues, etc. is to overreact, and then I calm down, listen to what other people have to say, and bit my bit, I modify and temper my initial reaction [while hopefully having some principles I don't want to nor will compromise--I do believe there are such things, and every now and then, real bodies and minds are at stake in relation to the principles we are willing to articulate and try to put into material practice, or not].

The more I re-read the MAA letter, the more its [painfully neutral] tone and refusal to address or even acknowledge the actual ethical and political concerns at stake really just . . . saddens me. First, before saying anything else, I want to thank John Sebastian for commenting on the IHE article and explaining how he himself, as one in the 46% majority of MAA members who voted not to move the meeting, made his decision and why he felt actually going to Arizona would do more good than staying out of Arizona. He also wanted us to [I think] not vilify out of hand those MAA members who voted to stay in Arizona nor paint them all with the same ideological brush. Fair enough. But I've given this a lot of thought, and if we hesitate to condemn, or to strongly disagree with, this decision of the MAA's on the principle that there are members of the MAA who are good and decent [and heterogeneously opinionated] people and brilliant, admirable scholars, then we'll all just have to shut up and go home. No one--least of all me--means to impugn the persons of the membership of the MAA in the 46% majority nor in the executive leadership of the organization. But do I condemn the final decision and am I dismayed by the rhetoric and palpable silences of the letter? Yes, I do, and I am. It strikes me as somewhat stunning that the letter itself indicates a certain level of discomfort with the "appropriateness [or lack thereof] of making collective political statements," and then, by democratic default, they made one--and a disappointing one at that--anyway. Because refusing to make a statement is a statement, and I learned that from history.

Second, before continuing, I want to also address Aunt Pansy's comment in the ITM post "Medieval Academy--Yes on Tempe" that "it seems rather churlish to condemn the prose of a committee working by email." I do not think it is churlish to critique and call into question the prose of a committee made up of specialists in literary and historical studies and who communicate via writing and speech for a living. The situation called for a delicate, well-worded [and one could hope, ethically-engaged] response, and we had a right to expect that from our esteemed colleagues, whose work and thought and writing we have long admired. In a situation such as this one, I should not have to guess at the motives--scholarly, political, ethical, or otherwise--behind such a letter. I should be able to expect, and I did expect, a clear, articulate explanation, or rationale, for the final decision that would pay sensitive heed to the ethical qualms involved on the part of the whole MAA membership [pro- and con-staying in Arizona]. I expect the finest writing imaginable from those who teach writing and practice it for a living. I expect as well a deep, humane attention to the very vulnerably human [and even post-human] aspects of the situation in Arizona [to those who are most vulnerable, there and elsewhere] from those who till daily in this field we call the humanities and who pride themselves on their historical erudition. Yes, I expect that.

This morning I awoke with something else in the letter [that I didn't really pay too much attention to yesterday] really nettling me--to whit, that the MAA and the Programming Committee at the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies would work

to ensure that the program of the meeting reflects and relates to similar issues at stake in medieval society, including such topics as race, ethnicity, immigration, tolerance, treatment of minority groups, protest against governmental policies judged unjust, and standards of judicial and legislative morality.

While I know many are and will be pleased that the the program of the MAA meeting in Tempe will work to ensure that its sessions reflect "similar issues at stake," the key phrase here is "in medieval society." I will be accused of churlish nit-picking [and so be it], but it seems that, just as with its laundry list of the "wide range of issues" that the MAA stated affected its final decision, they seem to be at pains here to assert their purview [scholarly, ethical, and otherwise] as being limited to the so-called Middle Ages themselves, or more generally, to "medieval society," and however cautiously phrased, an artificial line separating the past from the present is ever so carefully re-placed. My hope for this meeting, now that it will go forward as planned, is that some of the papers submitted and accepted for presentation will acknowledge and elucidate that there is no neat line [temporal or otherwise] separating the past from the present, and that what is happening in Arizona now, legal proposition- and otherwise [vis-a-vis "illegal" immigration, racial profiling, labor, the so-called drug wars, etc.], is one of many outcomes of all of the ways in which our deepest pasts [medieval and otherwise] continue to structure and haunt the present, and in various, often uncanny ways. As Aranye Fradenburg put it in her recent essay, "(Dis)continuity: A History of Dreaming" [contributed to Elizabeth Scala's and Sylvia Frederico's The Post-Historical Middle Ages], more eloquently than I ever could,

On the whole we seal ourselves off from . . . the modernity of the Middle Ages. Despite the difference Charles Muscatine made, it remained surprisingly hard for us to sustain focus on the prominence of political disturbance during the Middle Ages, at least until Steven Justice took up the baton. This focus is confusing: we fear Whiggish over-identification with our forbears' struggles for freedom. If, however, the Magna Carta people were just a bunch of brutal warlords who didn't want the monarchy messing with them, freedoms were what they wanted, and their signifiers lived on to be taken up again (and again) in later (and different) times. There is also little to console us in a long history of the struggle for social justice. What makes such a history most difficult to enjoy is that we don't want to know how fragile our own achievements in democracy might be. But we can't ignore this fragility, this vulnerability to return, in an age that has launched assault after assault on civil liberties in the pursuit of a new "crusade." A genealogical understanding of our attempts to explore the unknown--our history of seeking, which includes seeking better lives--requires that we renegotiate these splits. [p. 99]

It is to be hoped that the organizers and members of the programming committee of the MAA meeting in Tempe next spring will keep these words of Frandeburg's in mind, and that they will labor to encourage and to accept papers that seek to understand the "issues" and human rights concerns at stake in Arizona as part of longer histories that do not belong only to the medieval period, or only to modernity. It is to be hoped that some of the medievalists who travel to Arizona next spring might do so with a desire to "renegotiate" the "splits" between "then" and "now," across which, like the mis-firing of neuron synapses, ideas rise and fall back and rise again in different, sometimes unrecognizable forms, but with palpable material results nevertheless. One hopes that some of those who travel to Arizona next spring will do so with a desire to better understand what I would call the creatureliness and self-estrangement that defines all historical actors, past and present, and entwines us inexorably with those who, today, are actually scared to be in Arizona, and perhaps, have nowhere else to be. And that this should be the concern of medieval studies is beautifully explained by George Edmondson in his essay "Naked Chaucer" [also contributed to Scala and Frederico's The Post-Historical Middle Ages] , where he writes,

Adapting Auerbach [on the "creatural" aspects of late-medieval art in Mimesis], we might say that modernity's investment in bipolitics has put us back in touch with a late-medieval theory of universalism: the creatural as the sign of "the equality of all men." In other words, we find ourselves aligned with the medieval other at the point where we catch, in the other's creaturely state, an anamorphic glimpse of our own self-estrangement, our own dislocation. [p. 157]

This calls up as well the question of the neighbor and neighborliness--another great medieval theme. In the biopolitical order overseen by a sovereign, which is both the medieval and our own own time, we might use the occasion of the Arizona meeting as a critical site for reflecting upon the subjection of bodies to that order--ours as well as those of the co-called "illegals" who are not so much saved or redeemed by history, but remain intractably subject to it, as are we. I will not go to Arizona and never intended to, even before the MAA's decision. But I believe that wherever medievalists gather, they signify a community, for better or worse, that includes all of us, present or not. I would simply ask that they not consider the current events of Arizona politics outside the purview of our scholarly concerns. If anything, our knowledges and expertise could not be more necessary to the situation and perhaps could even be consoling to those who, at this time, are most in need of consolation. That is my hope.

Inside Higher Ed Reports on MAA Decision to Meet in Arizona

A Medieval War -- Over Arizona

Medieval Academy: Yes on Tempe

by KARL STEEL
Full text of the email sent out to MAA members (I'll provide a link to the message on the MAA page when it gets posted):

On behalf of the Council, the Executive Committee wishes to thank the many members of the Academy and the medieval community for their active engagement with the question of holding the Academy's Annual Meeting next April in Tempe. As you know, the Council asked the Executive Committee to make a final decision concerning this question on 3 August 2010. We are writing to inform you of our decision, and are also posting this message on the Academy's website.

The results of the advisory poll of the membership held by the Council was divided. The poll was sent to 3881 members, of whom 1025 responded. Of the respondents, 431 voted against holding the meeting in Tempe (42%), 477 (46.5%) voted to hold it as planned, and 110 (10.7%) expressed no opinion. Seven responses [<1%] were invalid. Only 32.7% of the respondents said they were prepared to contribute towards offsetting the cost of canceling the meeting, whereas 65 % declared their unwillingness to do so. Of the 477 voting against canceling, 186 included comments; of the 431 voting to cancel, 111 wrote comments; of the 110 expressing no preference, 18 added a message.

In reaching its decision the Executive Committee discussed at great length a wide range of issues, including its fiduciary responsibility for the Academy's endowment, the appropriateness of making collective political statements, the precedents that would be set if the Academy canceled the meeting, the scholarly effects of canceling the annual meeting, the work done by the Arizona programming committee, the difficulty of finding any alternative meeting place, the timing of cancellation, and the possibility of legal challenge to Arizona's legislation (which in fact occurred on 28 July).

After weighing all these issues, the Executive Committee has voted to hold the meeting, as planned, in Tempe. The Committee is working with Robert Bjork and the Progam Committee to ensure that the program of the meeting reflects and relates to similar issues at stake in medieval society, including such topics as race, ethnicity, immigration, tolerance, treatment of minority groups, protest against governmental policies judged unjust, and standards of judicial and legislative morality. We are delighted that the Episcopal bishop of Arizona, Kirk Smith, who has been deeply involved in the immigration legislation debate (and whose doctoral dissertation Brian Tierney directed), has agreed to speak to us.

Elizabeth A.R. Brown, President
Alice-Mary Talbot, First Vice-President
Maryanne Kowaleski, Second Vice-President
Constance Berman
Peggy McCracken
Brian Patrick McGuire
Danuta Shanzer

Comments?