Feeling Stone

by J J Cohen
(read Karl's post first, and then register for Speculative Medievalisms II)

Manja (photo by Harry Wakeling)

After twenty-four hours of travel we are back in DC, where the humidity is making me long for the crisp winds of Melbourne again. All four Cohens awoke at 4 AM this morning, energized and hungry. We agreed at breakfast that we already miss the birds, marsupials, wildflowers, food and -- more than anything -- people of Australia.

The trip to Melbourne and various parts of Victoria was wonderful. Stephanie Trigg was too good to us: picking us up at the airport and giving us (courtesy of Paul) an unforgettable dinner that evening; ensuring that we saw as much of Melbourne as we could; providing us a farewell dinner that was likewise among our most memorable, and included a walk to Ceres to put the chickens to bed (as well as lots of time with the too cute for belief kittens).

You can listen to my public lecture for the "Hearts and Stones" collaboratory here. It includes an image capture of my PowerPoint, a series of simple photographs I've taken over the past year that are intended to comment in a quiet and more personal way on the materials of my talk. The only image not mine is the first one, used to advertise my lecture: the imprint of hands upon rocks created when Aboriginal artists blew ocher from mouths.

I was so taken by this image that I decided we would attempt to see a version while visiting the Grampians, a range of mountains in Victoria. Manja (the Cave of Hands) contains many of these imprints. The state park where this aboriginal shelter is located suffered devastating floods last January. The main road through the park remains closed, obliterated by a landslide. We had made arrangements to stay at the Aquila Eco Lodge located within the bush (up a long dirt road, snuggled at the base of Mount Abrupt, surrounded by sand, eucalyptus, and kangaroos). Though having to get up in the night and place wood in the stove to keep the place warm could have been a nuisance, it never seemed that way -- and staying beneath so many alien stars more than made up for any lost sleep.

The lodges' owners, Harry and Iwona, were incredibly kind in helping me to determine if the road to the hiking trail to the shelter would be accessible in time. As it turns out, the opening occurred just a few days before we arrived. Unfortunately, though, some rather bad rains arrived just before we did. Our red with dirt Prius became stuck in the mud before we could get near enough to hike to Manja, and although we got out, we realized if we pushed on we were likely soon to find ourselves in a quagmire. Turning back was a huge disappointment, but if we'd continued we would have been courting disaster: the road was deteriorating quickly; there was no one else in the park (we did not encounter a single human being the whole time we were in the mountains); the incline was tremendous, so that even if we did get to the trail for the shelter there was a good chance we wouldn't be able to get back through the mud. We were also already many miles from the main road. By consulting our map we were able to find another hiking trail through a burned section of eucalyptus forest that if we had been able to follow far enough would have conveyed us near Manja ... but even though Katherine is an incredibly intrepid hiker for age seven (she completed miles upon miles of sometimes quite challenging hikes during this trip), she is after all only seven and at a certain point it was clear that we were not getting to the shelter at all.

Harry, owner of the Aquila Eco Lodges, Mount Abrupt

The only person more sorrowful about our aborted mission was Harry. An incredibly good natured man, he had mapped our route for us and provided us with all the information we need to reach the site. He showed up at our lodge later that evening with a CD on which he had burned his own pictures of the shelter, along with his laptop. We sat together at the table and he gave us a virtual tour of Manja's art, peppered with personal anecdotes and eccentric observations (he loves modelling the geometry of how various hand prints were made). It was great, as well as typical of the many kindnesses we encountered during our journeys along the ocean and into the bush.

Now I need to figure out how to get back.

Ailbe's Wolf Mother

by KARL STEEL
First, REGISTER, would you, for Speculative Medievalisms II. I just did.

And I know, I know, I owe a couple of responses to my last blog post, AND I promised a treatment The Canarien, one of the strangest chronicles I know (and I know a few, which I mean in the most literal way possible). BUT in revising my feral child paper for the GW MEMSI AVMEO collection (to be published by Oliphaunt Books), I stumbled across a great story from the lives of the Irish saints, too great to keep to myself much longer. It goes like this:

Olenais, who belongs to the household of the chief of Ara Cliach, impregnates Sanclit, one of the chief's serving-maid, and flees, fearing execution. He should have feared for his child. When Sanclit gives birth, the chief tells his servants to kill him, but, inspired (rather poorly I think) by the Holy Spirit, the servants just abandon the boy under a stone; and the stone is honored even today in his name, which is, namely, Albei. Here's the rest in Latin:

Sub petra autem eadem fera lupa habitabat, que sanctum puerum valde admauit, et quasi mater tenera inter suos catulos leniter eum nutriuit.

Quadam autem die cum illa fera bestia ad querendum victum in silius vagasset, quidam vir, nomine Loch'h'anus filius Lugir, naturali bono perfectus, videns sub petra illa puerum inter catulos, extraxit et secum ad domum suam portauit; statimque fera reuertens, et puerum absentem cernens, cum magno anelitu velociter secuta est eum. Cumque Lochanus domui sue appropinquasset, fera tenuit pallium eius, et non dimisit eum donec vidit puerum. Tunc Lochanus ad feram dixit: 'Vade in pace; iste puer nunquam amplius erit inter lupos, set apud me manebit.' Tunc fera illa, lacrimans et rugiens, ad speluncam suam tristis reuersa est.

But a certain wild wolf lived under the stone. She very much loved the holy child, and like a tender mother raised him gently among her whelps.

But on a certain day when this wild beast was wandering the forest seeking prey, a certain man, named Loch'h'anus son of Lugir, by nature excellent and good, saw a boy among the whelps underneath the stone, and removed him and carried him to his home; and the wolf turned back at once, and seeing that the boy was gone, followed after him quickly with great anelitu [help!]. And when she neared the home of Lochanus, she took hold of his cloak, and would not let him go until she saw the boy. Then Lochanus said to her, "Go in peace; this boy will not be among wolves any more but will remain with me." Then this wild beast, crying and moaning, returned to her cave in sadness. [Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae, Vol. I, p. 46, an edition I'm using because the Heist edition isn't available online]

Oh, weeper: wait! There's a happy ending, because they meet again (page 62-63).

Quodam tempore homines illius regionis, id est Arath, cum suo duce venacionem fecerunt, ut lupos a finibus suis repellerent. Vna autem lupa direxit cursum suum ad locum in quo erat Albeus; et, sequentibus eam equitibus, posuit capud suum in sinu sancti Albei. Albei vero dixit ei: “Ne timeas; quia non solum tu liberaberis, set catuli tui venient ad te incolumes." Et ita factum est. Et ait Albeus, "Ego apud vos nutritus sum in infancia; et bene fecisti, quia in senectute mea venisti ad me. Nam ante me cotidie ad mensam panem commedetis, et nemo nocebit vobis” Ita lupi cotidie veniebant ad sanctum Albeum, et commedebant ante eum; et postea reuertebantur ad loca sua. Et nemo nocebat illis; nec ipsi nocebant alicui.

In that time the men of that region, which is Araid, went hunting with their lord, to drive the wolves from their borders. And one wolf directed her course to the place where Albei was; and, with horses chasing her, she put her head in Albei's lap. Albei said to her, "Fear not; for not only will I free you, but your whelps shall return to you unharmed." And so it was done. And Albei said, "I was raised among you as a child; and you did well to come to me in your old age. For you will eat bread with me at my table, and no one will hurt you." And that day the wolves came to Saint Albei, and they ate with him; and afterwards, they went back to their place. And no one hurt them; and they hurt no one.

(For a symbolic approach to these tales, see Dominic Alexander, Saints and Animals in the Middle Ages p. 79 and 78. I'll just note that stories of Irish saints and animals are not at all uncommon, but this one stands out for its nurturing wolf, its mother-love, and its final reciprocity that lends continuity to a life that's otherwise just a jumble of missionary miracles. I wouldn't be so quick to assimilate Ailbe's wolfmother either to vestigial (and very hypothetical) pagan deities [as did Plummer] or to any other reading that erases the singularity of this love, or indeed the singularity of love wherever it happens. Here as elsewhere love's singularity matters more than species)

The connection between this c. 800 story (per Richard Sharpe) and the story of the Wolf Child of Hesse is of course thinner than tenuous. So far as I know, only 3 mss of this vita survive, and I don't know where else Ailbe's story gets told. If I were still a betting man, I'd suggest that the story is further evidence of the well-attested early medieval interconnections between Irish and "German" monasteries. Perhaps some early version of the Wolfdietrich legend made its way to Ireland? Perhaps the Ailbe story made its way to, say, Erfurt or Hesse? A hunt like this is way outside the scope of a paper that's already overflowing its wordcount, but if someone knows off hand where to check, say, a catalog of the medieval library of St Peter of Erfurt...

Coming soonish: a story from Albertus Magnus that sounds VERY much like my Hessian Wolf Child story.

(image from here, via Creative Commons attribution license)

REGISTRATION NOW OPEN: Speculative Medievalisms II @CUNY Graduate Center

by EILEEN JOY

What the Speculative Medievalisms project desires . . . is fruitful dialogue and creative, mutual cross-contamination between medieval ideas of speculatio, the cultural-historical position of the medieval as site of humanistic speculation, and the speculative realists’ “opening up” of “weird worlds” heretofore believed impenetrable by philosophy—as Graham Harman has written, “the specific psychic reality of earthworms, dust, armies, chalk, and stone.” . . . the wonderful (and ironic) thing about speculative realism’s humanistic allure, its attraction to persons who are not so concerned about constructing definitive arguments about the nature of reality, is that speculating about the nature of reality with “the text-centered hermeneutic models of the past” is not a bad description of what “we medievalists” do. In short, there is between medieval studies and speculative realism something like the space of a compelling, magnetized shared blindness that might be realized as love at first sight. The gap concerns the age-old problem of the boundary between poetry and philosophy, meaning and truth—in short, the reality of the image in the mirror of thought. A speculative medievalism, which could proceed from the insight that the desire for a thought that can think beyond itself is precisely the problematic explored in medieval theories of love (whence Andreas Capellanus’s famous definition of love as immoderata cogitatio, immoderate contemplation). In other words, speculation might be a mode of love, which then might also be imagined as comprising forms of intellectual work with medieval texts and objects that would work to (re)awaken the discipline of philosophy to the reality of love (philia).

--The Petropunk Collective,* from the precis for the Speculative Medievalisms project

I am pleased to announce that we now have our final line-up and program for our second Speculative Medievalisms event [check out the first one, held at King's College London last January HERE], to be held at The Segal Theater, The Graduate Center, CUNY on Friday, September 16th, and featuring talks and responses by Graham Harman, Jeffrey Cohen, Kellie Robertson, Julian Yates, Drew Daniel, Ben Woodard, Liza Blake, Anna Klosowska, Allan Mitchell, and Patricia Clough. Details on the program and registering to attend in advance are here:

Speculative Medievalisms II: A Laboratory-Atelier

Pre-registering is quite simple and we're encouraging it, as seats are limited. Basically, as you will see when you follow the link above, you merely send an email, detailing your name, institutional affiliation, and your desire to attend here:

speculativemedievalisms@gmail.com

If you are affiliated with any of the CUNY schools, either as a faculty member or student, attendance is free [but we still need to know in advance if you plan to attend]. We're asking everyone else to make a donation to the BABEL Working Group of $25.00, which helps us to defray the costs of funding the travel of some of the featured speakers. We hope to see you in New York City in September!

*The Petropunk Collective is: Eileen Joy, Anna Klosowska, Nicola Masciandaro, and Michael O'Rourke

Speculum, this mirror to which we find it appropriate to give a Latin name, suggests the multitudinous mirrors in which people of the Middle Ages liked to gaze at themselves and other folk—mirrors of history and doctrine and morals, mirrors of princes and lovers and fools. We intend no conscious follies, but we recognize satire, humor and the joy of life as part of our aim. Art and beauty and poetry are a portion of our medieval heritage. Our contribution to the knowledge of those times must be scholarly, first of all, but scholarship must be arrayed, so far as possible, in a pleasing form.
--E.K. Rand, inaugural issue of Speculum (1926)

Each Moneyer Was His Own Little Mint: An Ode to Numismatics

by EILEEN JOY

It is now Day 5 of the biennial meeting of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists [but only Day 3 of days with sessions], and after the excitement yesterday of the hard-drive on my MacBook crashing [data recovered: whew, but I have to replace the hard-drive which will necessitate staying in Madison, Wisconsin one extra day: darn, that is really hard labor ... NOT], we began today with a special plenary session on numismatics in honor of Mark Blackburn, Keeper of Coins and Medals [best job title EVER] at the Fitzwilliam Museum, featuring talks by Anna Gannon, Rory Naismith, and Philip Shaw. In the spirit of my last report-as-poem from ISAS 2011, I offer the following poetic digest of this session:

Ode to Plenary B: New Approaches to Coin Studies

I. Gannon: This is When I Started Casting My Net

If I can just say, I don't want to dwell on this;
can you all hear me?

We are sure this is King Eadbald of Kent;
in profile, it follows very closely
the Merovingian coinage across the sea.
It does look a little bit like a porcupine,
a deranged bust.

Vine scrolls are so numerous--
please raise your hand if you cannot see this.
I hope you can glimpse the body here,
and here's another one:
bunches of grapes, but also us.

I would like to talk you through images
you have to play with,
with your eyes: the grapes are expressed as rosettes.

How do you know that people could follow
these complex theological messages?
I'm sorry, I should start at the beginning:
this is the Annunciation. It is something you would taste.
I have argued that this is the five senses.

I forgot to put in a picture of the Fuller Brooch:
this is the time of the conversion of England.
It's very interesting to see the experiments.
This is when I started casting my net
beyond Anglo-Saxon things.
As we see in Roman mosaics, and yes,
it is quite three-dimensional:
the hen, even as a hen,
gathereth her chickens under her wing.
There are columns onto which you would have put candles.

II. Naismith: Blowing in the Wind

This one comes from the change-over:
the coin indicates the tremendous flexibility
of the king's style.
This just summarizes the basic chronology.
Saying who was boss was just as important
as showing who was boss.

I hesitate to use the word "portrait":
curly hair like this had a long iconographic history,
blowing in the wind at the moment of heroic apotheosis.

So she loses her rights in 790,
if she even had any.
Serpents occurred on a small but significant number.

Other rulers in the time of Offa
also got in on the action--
one can be in little doubt that the die-cutters
were literate and knew what they were doing.
What circumstances might have produced it?
In effect, each moneyer was his own little mint,
the heart of the system;
there was no unity of design.

III. Shaw: -eth Libretto

We've got quite a lot of his coins;
Æthelheard was a bit of a rebel.

ð is clearly the go-to letter for this sound.

I think what we're seeing here, by and large,
are Kentish beneficiaries.
As we go into the later parts of the century,
we might be getting a mixture.
We also get a Worcester charter in there.
From 785 onward, something dramatic happens:
we know they already have -eth in their repertoire,
and things take off a bit.

Suddenly, everything steepens.

I'm not suggesting there's a royal decree about -eth.

What does this say about Æthelheard?
I probably don't have the time now
to explain the indications
for a dental fricative,
but you can ask me later.

We see resistance.

The ecclesiastical context is important here;
I'll leave you with that.

Stones, sky, mountains, surf, trees (and what lives thereon and therein)

We are currently ensconced in a lodge built into a mountainside overlooking Apollo Bay, far southern Australia. The sun is just rising, and we have our balcony door open to admit the strange chirps of birds we do not recognize, crisp air, and the distant booming of the sea. The kids are still in bed, but Wendy and I have developed a habit of awakening just before the sun crests to drink coffee and watch the world spin from a sky luminous with alien stars to the red and orange of the coming day. That's a long sentence, but its being crammed with nouns and adjectives that link the known of nature with the weirdness of constellations and plumage and a life not ours suggests how difficult it is to narrate our Australian experience so far. I'm estimating that I possess maybe 25 minutes before the kids come out of bed to devour that bag of donuts, pastries and raisin bread that the man at the bakery demanded we take home with us when he saw our sorrow at his shop being closed last night. He would accept no payment for them. You see, that is our travel narrative to date: days so full of stories that to tell one leads to the hundred others.

Given limitations of time and of your patience for my piles of nouns and adjectives, I'll simply offer you a few memories that are with me as I'm listening to a green lorikeet (I can identify that and a magpie due to Stephanie Trigg) noisily demand more bakery bread from me. First, the "Hearts and Stones" symposium went extraordinarily well, with memorable presentations by Tom Prendergast (on the difficulties of extracting history and desire from the London Stone) and Kerryn Goldsworthy (a true ghost story that exactly captured the best of what the symposium was about), among many others. Questions of objects, agency, and human-lithic touch were approached in various ways, all of them mutually illuminating. It was invigorating to be part of a conversation that lasted two full days. The talks were haunted by difficult Australian histories (Aboriginal, penal, modern). The impress of place was strong, as was Stephanie's own warm touch. She is an excellent guiding presence, welcoming and community-creating.

Stephanie has also been extraordinarily kind to my family. She met us at the airport, and was cheerful even as we were in the worst shape imaginable (Katherine developed a stomach issue aboard the long flight from Los Angeles to Melbourne; she vomited throughout the 16 hours of flight, and then for a few hours thereafter). She and her family entertained us that evening and pretended that we were something more than jet lagged lumps. She gave my family excellent suggestions for expeditions as my time was spent in the collaboratory and teaching a seminar on temporality. Then as we departed Melbourne for the southern portion of Victoria, she escorted us to her parents' home outside of Geelong. I'd been corresponding with her dad for about a year (I met him via Stephanie's blog) and he was kind enough to show us around an aboriginal craft center near his home. Both Stephanie's parents were extraordinarily kind to us, providing us with a hearty lunch and an auspicious start to our adventures.

Despite driving on the wrong side of the curviest and steepest roads imaginable, I have done OK with getting us where we need to go. I just close my eyes and drive. It seems to be working, mainly because the other drivers are attentive.

We've spent the last two days just outside Apollo Bay in a lodge that overlooks the sea. It's mostly glass on one side. There is nothing else here but a small restaurant (they are kindly letting me steal their wifi) where we had dinner our first night: some of the best food we've ever eaten, not just because it was fresh and we were tired, but because the small staff were so happy to have us there. We spent yesterday at the Otway Fly, a series of metal platforms that traverse the tree canopy of the nearby mountains. The platforms are narrow and sway in the wind. They rise to 47 meters at their highest point and it is only then that your are actually above the 300 year old trees. Then we took a hike through a rain forest to a magnificent waterfall, the Triplet Falls. We spent a long time looking for platypus and saw none; that was the day's only disappointment. Then it was onwards to the sea and Apollo Bay, where we spent the evening beach combing and watching fishing vessels return.

Today we depart for the Tower Hill Game Reserve, where we will stay in the park in a small cottage. Tower Hill is a dormant volcano, so if you hear of visitors meeting a fiery death when it reawakens, you'll know which medievalist and his family were consumed. After that comes some time in an Eco Lodge in the Grampians, farther inland. Then back to Melbourne.

OK, kids are getting up and the birds are looking like an Australian version of a Hitchcock movie, so I'll say: this trip has changed many things for me and for my rocks project, but how and what I can't yet say. That will be the work of the next year.

Lines Written in the Program for the Biennial Meeting of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists: A Poem in 3 Sessions

Figure 1. Adam naming the animals: Old English Hexateuch, Canterbury, England, first half of the 11th century (BL Cotton MS Claudius B IV, f. 4)

by EILEEN JOY

Currently, I am happily ensconced in Madison, Wisconsin for the biennial meeting of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, a conference I am attending for the first time in my career. So far, Day 1, so good: some wonderful papers, beautiful weather, Wisconsin beer, and a lakeside view from the Pyle Center, where the sessions are taking place. In place of the usual overview of papers heard at the conference, I offer the following poem, with thanks to the authors of the papers, Drew Jones, Andrew Rabin, Robert Upchurch, Alice Jorgensen, Leslie Lockett, Colin Mackenzie, Peter Darby, Rosalind Love, and Mercedes Salvador-Bello [and also to Ælfric, Alfred, Bede, Isidore, Gregory, King Edgar, and other Anglo-Saxon luminaries]:

Lines Written in the Program for the Biennial Meeting of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists: A Poem in Three Sessions

Session 1. Holy Bodies: A Benedictional

Loosely associated with Lent, she was taken up whole from her tomb,
called down for negligence ranging from incontinence to neglect of duties;
the place was dedicated in olden days to honor the holy Peter.

Against the vision articulated here: the pastoral imaginary.

I am sorry to tell you that we will be getting liturgical.
We imagine a seminar of bishops sitting around saying,
"okay, what do we want?"
I recently re-read Gregory's Pastoral Care,
but we arrived too late for coffee and couldn't make the link
between Alfred and Ælfric.

That secular dossier was around since the 940s: I'm trying to suss out
how that works, between the new and the old.
The issue for a male body is not so much that it needs to be enclosed:
I certainly follow your argument, but . . . am I right?
Who do you think the audience for this is, exactly?
(I speak of myself.)

Session 2. Models of Mental Activity: The Handout

I see that the handout has almost reached the back of the room.
It's not immediately clear what we learn when we detect the shame-rage spiral;
a typical sequence would involve a patient
who seems first to view self from the vantage point of the therapist,
and not just in the major rituals of an Australian tribe.

Turning now to the life of St Agatha,
I promised her jewels and golden adornments.

Now, this is an openly aggressive exchange: lines 66 to 68.
I'm using the Acta Sanctorum text here, the 1863 Paris edition.
I said I was being a little speculative: Ælfric has it both ways.

This is item 1A on your handout: the logic of the hydraulic model of the mind--
mental heat: "I must bear in my breast an agitated heart."
This model of the mind is exclusively cardio-centric,
and might become more roomy, as in Judith. This is item 6.
And item 7C: He swelled up in his breast,
a real spatial phenomenon.

This can be characterized as: "mental cooling."

I haven't put this on your handout, but,
what larger conclusions can we draw from this comparison?
Thank you.
Before I begin, so,
the mind is called grain-sheaf;
one should paraphrase it by terming it grain or stone or apple or nut or ball:
number 5 on your handout.
It just doesn't appear to be the case in Old Norse.
It seems reasonable to conclude that there is a definite functional structure,
so, for example:
í óvit óg þa stöðvaðist.

I have a question for Leslie: is there any alternate model?
There are a lot of passages, um . . .
I hate to bring up the stuff you didn't talk about.
In the 13th century, people had "moved on," but,
who is this "we" that sympathizes?
But just to undermine my own argument,
let me ask Colin to answer that question.
[applause]

Interlude. Lunch on Your Own.

Session 3. Enigmata, My Beloved

He will be looking at Bede's orthodoxy and heterodoxy.
The handouts are coming around now.
I was most grateful for your letter in which you have taken care.

To put themselves more firmly
in mind of the Lord's incarnation, Bede addresses a bishop with the epithet,
"my beloved."
It reads like a thinly veiled attack on the iconoclasts of the East, but,
it is fine to make pictures, fine, I tell you.
I cannot help but notice a touch of irony.
Now, this last point is significant: carved into the walls of the temple.

She's going to be talking about the consolation of diversity;
yet, she seemed so ancient in all her cross-eyed majesty.
Nearly 80 manuscripts survive, but what kind of engagement was it?
Not that there were not, however, what we would call "jottings" in this book.

This is a snippet you've got at the bottom of your page:
a teacher, not a pupil.
EXCLAMATIO! (all caps)

A kind of orderliness prevails, yet this also belies the untidiness within.
Who let these theatrical tarts come near this sick man?
Blah, blah, blah: the Pope's bathtub, this is section 3 on your handout.

Lights were poured down on you
at the right time from heaven.

Throughout the years, it has not been easy to convince editors
of my hypothesis.
The headings and the indications of the different sections
are my own.

Are they terrestrial animals? Aerial? Clean? Unclean?
Mouse, weaver, mole, cricket, ant, etc.: Subgroup A.
By way of concluding, in the case of the letter "i,"
all this suggests the enigmata format.
Thank you very much for your attention: you can use the mic
in answering questions.

I was surprised, I don't mean to be so judgmental, sorry, but,
in the case of the C4 manuscript, it isn't the "brains."
I think George is next.
But then they were put into Latin subsequently, but in a sense,
they're ten a penny.

But perhaps, not as far as this.

Just Get Yourself High: Join the BABEL Working Group

by EILEEN JOY

But when we sit together, close . . . we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an insubstantial territory.
--Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Myra Seaman and I are delighted to announce that the BABEL Working Group is launching today a brand-new website, which you can see here:

NEW WEBSITE: The BABEL Working Group

If you are not already a member of BABEL, why don't you join? As we like to say [often], BABEL is a non-hierarchical scholarly collective and post-institutional assemblage with no leaders or followers, no top and no bottom, and only a middle. Membership carries with it no fees, no obligations, and no hassles, and accrues to its members all the symbolic capital they need for whatever meanings they require. Our chief commitment is the cultivation of a more mindful “being-together” with others who work alongside us in the leaning towers of the post-historical university where we roam as a multiplicity, a pack, not of subjects but of singularities without identity or unity, looking for other roaming packs and multiplicities with which to cohabit and build glittering misfit heterotopias.

A little more conventionally, we also like to say that we are a collective and desiring-assemblage of scholars (primarily medievalists, but also including persons working in other temporal periods and fields, such as early modern and Victorian studies, critical and cultural theory, film and women’s studies, critical sexuality studies, and so on) in North America, the U.K., Australia, and beyond who are working to develop new cross-disciplinary alliances among the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and the fine arts in order to formulate and practice new “critical humanisms,” as well as to develop a more present-minded medieval studies and a more historically-minded cultural studies.

To join BABEL [which does provide you with a discounted subscription rate to postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies], simply email me [at: ejoy@siue.edu] and ask to be added to our list-serv, which is a news-only [not a discussion] list-serv, and therefore will not clutter up your email inbox. Every month or so, you will receive email digests of where BABEL is going and what projects and events it has cooking, and also various calls for assistance with our ongoing events and projects, such as [don't forget] our 2nd Biennial Meeting in September 2012 in Boston:

cruising in the ruins: the question of disciplinarity in the post/medieval university

Or our panels for the 2012 International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, Michigan, which you can see HERE [and if you are interested in participating on any of these, please let us know, also at: ejoy@siue.edu]. You can also follow us on Facebook HERE.

If you join BABEL today, you can start bossing us around, and we really like that. Plus, we'll send you a free case of "no regrets." Cheers!

good bye / g'day

From the PP that accompanies my talk: Avebury, 2006

by J J Cohen

So I've barely blogged of late, and do you know why? That evil person at that other medieval blog made me write a lecture, and now she is forcing me to go all the way to Melbourne to deliver it.

So, look, we could all complain about Stephanie Trigg until we turn blue, but that won't change the world, and it won't shorten the 16 hour flight from LAX to Oz. Instead I will say: good-bye. I don't expect to have much internet access for the next few weeks, especially once the Cohens leave Melbourne for our family adventure. We are staying in some rural areas around Victoria, including a cottage on the side of a dormant volcano in a game reserve and a solar-powered Eco-Lodge in the mountains, surrounded by kangaroos and koalas. We'll also be driving the Great Ocean Road -- and, considering my lack of experience steering from the wrong side of the car, we may be turning the Shipwreck Coast into the Autowreck Coast as well.

So, wish us luck. I would say that I am dreading the long flight with the kids but to be honest, they are looking forward to the endless movies and snacks. The only thing they don't really want to do is sit next to me. Apparently I complain from time to time.

And oh yes: I will publicly acknowledge that Stephanie has been wonderful about setting all of this up, and I may have to retract some of my sourness. But as they say in Australia: better a sourpuss than a platypus. Yes, they really say that.

CFP: Active Objects

by J J Cohen

This CFP looks great: two intriguing sessions for the next Kzoo.

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Call for Papers:  Active Objects

Panels sponsored by the International Center of Medieval Art
47th International Congress on Medieval Studies, May 10-13 2012

Active Objects I: Optics and Transparency
Active Objects II: Agency and Phenomenology

Inspired by the recent exhibitions of reliquaries in Cleveland, Baltimore, and London, these sessions invite considerations of how object-centered approaches develop our understanding of reliquaries, vasa sacra, and other instruments of faith. If we conceive of those objects as active agents, and not merely as passive elements in devotional practice, how does that change our perception of their function and their aesthetic nature? How did the vivid nature of these objects -- their mass and texture, their form, their brilliance, their aroma -- shape the way people acted with them, or simply behaved in their presence? Also, is it possible to track the ways in which the agency of a specific object changed over time? Finally, should we, can we, and do we want to consider how the agentic power of medieval objects influences our own relations with them in the present day?

“Active Objects” is organized by the Material Collective, a group of medievalists pursuing collaborative discoveries, humane histories, and the interpretive possibilities of the material. We invite proposals that engage phenomenology, optical theories, relational aesthetics, Actor-Network Theory, Thing Theory, notions of affect, and other object-centered approaches; we seek papers that consider how objects matter in medieval Christian, Islamic, and Jewish traditions, as well as in the interactions of faiths.

Please send paper proposals (abstract of no more than 300 words, and a completed Participant Information Form<http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/Assets/pdf/congress/PIF2012.pdf>) by September 15, 2011 to  Karen Overbey (karen.overbey@tufts.edu) and Ben C. Tilghman (btilghman@gmail.com).

A Fourteenth-Century Ecology: Chaucer's "The Former Age"

by KARL STEEL

“The question of ecological morality is always approached as if it were a matter of authorizing or prohibiting an extension of the moral quality to new beings (animals, rivers, glaciers, or oceans), whereas exactly the opposite is the case. What we should find amazing are the strange operations whereby we have constantly restricted the list of beings to whose appeal we should have been able to respond.”
Émilie Hache and Bruno Latour, “Morality or Moralism: An Exercise in Sensitization.”

Five weeks ago, I had hoped to put Chaucer's "The Former Age" in conversation with the Alexander and Dindimus tradition and with fourteenth-century reactions to the European encounter with the Canary Islanders. 6000 words (my utmost limit) is not enough, and I had to drop the Canary Islands. No worries! Soon I hope to have something to say here about The Canarien, a bizarre early fifteenth-century chronicle of an attempted conquest (briefly: it gilds a vulgar chain of squabbles, failures, and slaving with the glory of chivalry and faith: the effect is grotesque and grimly hilarious, like a drunk senior research analyst in a disheveled clown suit). Meanwhile, here's a portion of the argument that, knock on wood (but gently, gently), will see print sometime next year.

If you don't know "The Former Age," it's structurally and thematically based on Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy Book II, Meter 5 and a handful of other works. It describes a time when people were free of commerce, agriculture, or technology: they do not harvest grain, for example, but rather rub the kernels between their hands (l. 11). They're vegetarian communists who refuse to harm anyone or anything: not each other, not animals, not the earth or the sea, not wounded by the plow (l. 9) or carved by the prow (l. 21).

Criticism of "The Former Age" typically does souce or historical studies, the latter tending to see the poem's pessimism as a symptom of the politics of the late 1380s or early 1390s. That's fine. However, I'm reading the poem as a critique not only of human institutions but of the human itself. In sum, I read it as an antihumanist manifesto in the vein of Émilie Hache and Bruno Latour's wonderful "Morality or Moralism." I do this by attending, especially, to the former agers' unlimited moral sensitivity but also to Chaucer's additions to his sources, and its affinities with a thematically related set of texts, the British witnesses to the encounter between Alexander the Great and the ascetic philosophers of India, the Gymnosophists and Dindimus and the Brahmans. I plan to talk about this Dindimus material in another post.

Chaucer's few additions include a few animal comparisons and his despairing final stanza, which bemoans that the world is now full of lust, deceit, and murder, with no way out. Lines 7 and 37 in effect say that these people eat like pigs: "They eten mast, hawes, and swich pounage"; "noght but mast or apples is therinne." Golden Age people eat acorns: this is a cliché, mocked from Cicero to Petrarch, and sneered at by Lucretius, who says that primordial people traded acorns for sex. The pig-comparison's unusual, though, at least in the Golden Age tradition. In my book, I read this as a humiliating contrapasso against people who don't eat pigs: eat pork or be treated like pork. In medieval Christian texts, this happens to Jews, Muslims, and now to these vegetarians, who, like pigs, eat "mast, hawes, and swich pounage" in the woods rather than enjoying the products of the grange.

The other animal comparison comes in line 50, where Chaucer calls these people lambish. Perhaps not alarming, until you remember that for a dozen years Chaucer oversaw the wool custom and wool subsidy for the Port of London. In this time, few English were more involved in the sheep trade: worthy is the lamb &c. Note too that one of the witnesses of "The Former Age" traveled with Lydgate's "Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep," a poem that the ram wins by arguing, in effect, that English industry commercializes every bit of the sheep, its fleece, meat, horn, hooves, and skin (here I think of Upton Sinclair's "they use everything of the pig except the squeal").

And then there's the despair of the last stanza, Chaucer's longest addition. Taken as a whole, "The Former Age" imagines a time without human domination, a time whose people recognize the constitutive vulnerability of everything as morally significant (see Derrida on the "nonpower at the heart of power" in The Animal that Therefore I am); a time whose people saw the face (in a Levinasian sense) everywhere and acted accordingly. "The Former Age" imagines this time, and admires these people, sure, but it also chooses to think of them as animals, there to be used and traded; and it chooses to imagine this time as irrevocably lost.

But Chaucer's other so-called Boethian poems ("Truth," "Lak of Stedfastnesse," and "Gentilesse") hope for something better. Why not this poem too? I read it as written in a voice unequal to its subject, a voice that cannot give up on human privileges (Nicola Masciandaro and Gillian Rudd have also read the poem's voice suspiciously). I see the failure of the poem's voice as indirectly asking us to do better, to try harder to get past the despair and sad domination of being human. Unlike the poetic voice, we readers, hoping better, can use this supposedly lost past to get at another future (infinite citations here, but Piotr Gwiazda's Former Age article, which uses Ernst Bloch, is more than good enough).

Yet there's another lesson. What would a life without human privileges look like? Without clear distinctions between subject and object, human and animal, nature and culture, vulnerability and breakability? One that took, say, the lessons of Vibrant Matter much further than Jane Bennett was willing to go, that allowed itself to know how enmeshed we are in everything (think Morton), that responded with the utmost sensivity to anything, as Hache and Latour might have us do?

Frankly, it would be kind of awful. These people don't eat half enough (l. 11); their food is scarce and thin (l. 36); and “no doun of fetheres ne no bleched shete / was kid to hem, but in seurtee they slepte” (ll. 45-6): the but sets their safety against their discomfort. Choose one or the other. Here we see what it may mean to open moral consideration to all, to attempt to live without harm, without the certainty of any distinction between subject and object, human and animal, nature and culture, flesh and the earth. It is a world of hungry and vulnerable people, intermeshed with and sympathetic to all. There is a kind of hope here, then, but—or and—it may be a hope that erases the human altogether.

(image from Bodleian Library, MS Douce 195, 59v, via here)

Crowd Review Now LIVE: Becoming-Media Issue [postmedieval]

Figure 1. Reading Room, New York Public Library

by EILEEN JOY

I am excited to announce that the papers for the Crowd Review of postmedieval's special issue on Becoming-Media [slated for publication in March 2012] are now live and available for comment on the Crowd Review's website:

• Seeta Chaganti, "Danse Macabre in the Virtual Churchyard"
• Eddie Christie, "Writing in Wax, Writing in Water"
• Arne Flaten, "Reproducible Media(s) in the Early Fifteenth Century (Mostly Italian)"
• Julia Lupton, "Thinking with Things: Hannah Woolley to Hannah Arendt"
  
• Eugene Thacker, "The Wayless Abyss: Mysticism and Mediation"
• Whitney Trettien, "Becoming Plant: Magnifying a Microhistory of Media Circuits in Nehemiah Grew's Anatomy of Plants (1682)"

In step with the mission of the journal, this issue represents a wide range of fields and subjects, including performance studies (dance), architecture, art history, poetics, medieval literature, history of printing and engraving, the decorative arts, movement studies, history of taste and judgment, object-oriented studies, intellectual history, new media and technology studies, composition studies, mysticism, philosophy, botany, the history of books, history of science, the vegetal, the animal, theology, etc. What all of the essays have in common, in the words of the special issue's co-editors, Jen Boyle and Martin Foys, has something to do with

our dependence on the recursive circuitry and tangle of technologies, bodies, narratives, spaces, and mediating technics, across historical periods and across literary, scientific, philosophical, and theological modes of expression.

And in some sympathy with the aims of our own blog here [In The Middle] and with postmedieval's objective to trouble and complicate the supposed divides between past and present times, Jen and Martin also write, relative to the aims of this issue,

. . . the casting of new media studies as itself “new” raises troubling questions. To what extent is mediation ever “new”? Indeed, as the medhyo at the center of “medieval” would suggest, mediation appears as an always incomplete “middling” and “meddling” – always becoming, to itself and something other than itself; a troubling, meddling, unstable go-between. This second sense of becoming-media extends questions about the mediating artifact within its historical context to include issues of embodied and historical temporality; periodization as “meddling”; the feedback loop of technics-consciousness; the glance, glimpse, and touch of the mediated image as political and aesthetic affect; and the unstable registers of the trans/hyper-mediation of multiple past-present-futures.

We invite EVERYONE to join us in what is, for now, an EXPERIMENT in the crowd review of the papers listed above, and which will extend from today, July 16th, through Thursday, September 15th. We have set up the crowd review on a very user-friendly weblog-styled WordPress website, which allows you to comment as little or as much as you like, on one or more [or any portion] of the papers, and you can find everything you need to know to participate as a reviewer here:

• Crowd Review: How To Comment

Vive la Crowd Review!

The multifurcation of social media

by J J Cohen

So I'm on Google+.

It's been about a week, during which time most of the conversations have centered upon how to distinguish the site from other social media. At first, I must admit, I thought G+ would simply mirror my activities on Facebook and Twitter. I posted that I wished some program existed that would cross-post to all three at once so that I would not have to do so manually. Then Sarah Werner shared Tim Maly's Unlink Your Feeds: A Manifesto. Maly's plea not duplicate information across these spaces but to craft ways of distinguishing each forum resonates with me: I do get tired of seeing the same information about the people I follow presented as a tweet, a FB link, a blog entry that appears in my RSS reader, and now as a Google+ post. Why not specialize what is presented in each location and thereby create something uniquely suited to each?

Google+ is in its mewling infancy, so it is difficult to predict what it will in time become. Right now it seems a concentrated and tech savvy space which has attracted those with an abiding interest in social media and scholarly -- as well as other forms of -- communication. (At least among those who are posting actively; there is also a large population of people who signed up and are wondering what to do next). The ability G+ offers to classify those to whom you are connected into various circles, though, means that inevitably much of what it accomplishes will replicate Facebook, though in a more controlled, private and specialized way: you can post the vacation pics to your family and the Latin blegs to your medievalist friends. Here is how -- tentatively, and for the time being -- I am using the service.

Facebook is good for all purpose social updates, comic interactions, and quick catching up on various friends' and family members' lives. It's a dive in and skim kind of space, an enjoyable break from (say) composing a public lecture about affect and stone. Twitter is great for sharing links, for some quick and spontaneous interaction, and sometimes even swift feedback on questions and ideas. It's where I learn the most about digital humanities and the scholarly uses of social media, as well as a locale where I interact with many non-GW graduate students, especially (but not only) those who for various reasons wouldn't think of friending me on FB. As a blog, In the Middle offers a forum for more sustained rumination on medieval studies, critical theory and humanities topics, since there is no character limit to posts. If it has become less interactive over the years (we don't attract nearly as many comments as we used to), that's not because it is less read -- our audience is at an all time high -- but because such conversations seem to have relocated to Twitter and FB. And many of us are experiencing social media fatigue: it's enough to keep up with email.

At present I am thinking of Google+ as a hybrid space, a cross between FB and a blog, where there is social interaction around posts that tend to be much more substantial than anything I'd put up in the House of Zuckerberg. Another description: G+ is a workshop, where current research and essays and talks in progress come together, and topics of interest (especially, so far, meta discussions of social media) receive more sustained conversation. Facebook is the most personal venue, Twitter more professional, Google+ (so far) even more academia-oriented, and this blog a professional space with the occasional personal excursus.

We'll see if I feel the same way in a month. Meanwhile, are you on Google+? How are you using it? And even if you are not, do use different social media differently?

my lithic totem

by J J Cohen

Yes I should be writing that "Feeling Stone" talk, but then again I have 15 hours locked in an airplane journeying from Los Angeles to Melbourne, and what else am I going to do? Watch movies? Sleep? Please.

Well, maybe I should at least have a draft. Here is a picture of my desk this morning as I attempt to harness the powers of an extinct marine creature become a rock. Ammonites are fascinating: Pliny gave them their name (ammonis cornua) because they look like the horns of a ram (Ammon was an Egyptian god who was sometimes depicted with horns, or so says Wikipedia). They survived a good 300 million years before they vanished. Neolithic tombs like Stoney Littleton worked them into their decoration, seemingly an art born of stone itself. Fossils will make a minor appearance in this talk, which contains a section on stone as an artistic agent.

marking infinity

by J J Cohen

I'm just back from a swift, intense trip to NYC to view the Lee Ufan exhibit at the Guggenheim. Ufan is  Korean-born artist whose work is deeply influenced by his time in Japan. His fame comes from two rather different media: monochrome and minimalist painting (tansaekhwa), and sparse installation pieces that use rocks paired with industrial products like steel sheets, metallic bands, latex and pillows. The strategic use of blank space in both kinds of art can be annoying: there is something too precious, too screamingly aesthetic about these pieces, especially because having stone stand for nature and steel for culture is just too easy. But the exhibit is also suggestive. Ufan speaks of creating ephemeral networks of relation that include the viewer as well as the surroundings. It takes a commitment on the viewer's part to participate in that network, but once that surrender occurs the art becomes vibrant.

I learned this truth through experience. When I first started walking the exhibit I was underwhelmed. The pieces are modest and the museum is thick with summer visitors. I'd brought my daughter Katherine along with me, thinking it would make the trip to New York special for both of us. She'd been patient during the bus ride, and now I could see that she was wondering why the Guggenheim had been our destination. "So that's it?" she asked. "Just rocks on the floor?" She was voicing my own disappointment -- I must have expected a numinousness in the pieces that just wasn't there. To make it interesting I pointed to two stones that were separated by a metal sheet. "What do you think they are doing?" I asked. "What's the story here?" She rightly pointed out that the shapes of the rocks made it seem like they were peering forward, yet the screen and their own immobility ensured that they would never catch sight of each other. The piece seemed to be about yearning for something you are certain must be present, but forever out of sight and guarded from touch. Another installation was similar, but this time the second rock was under the seam of some metal sheets. Should the desiring rock ever be able to move forward, it would succeed only in crushing what it aimed to reach. Later versions of this series (most of them entitled Relatum, for things connected to each other), had rocks mischievously peeking from behind a screen, about to enter a ring for combat (said Katherine), or gathered in a circle and seated on royal pillows as if at some inscrutable parliament. You can discern from how I am describing these installations that what seems so still, so devoid of energy and motion, becomes as you walk around the pieces and start to link them to yourself and to narratives and to each other, metal and stone that is weirdly kinetic. The materials demand stories, and the stories grant them motion.

Of course, your reverie will be constantly broken by the museum guards, who with weary authority must repeat every few moments that the installations must not be touched. It is so natural for an onlooker to place a hand on the stone that despite the signs prohibiting this intimacy visitors perpetually forget.

My favorite moment was the exhibit's final segment, in a dead-end on the Guggenenheim's top floor. Not many people seem to make it that far; those who do behold only three tall museum walls that reach towards a small sky light. Each wall is adorned with a single brushstroke of grey paint. Ufan created these as site-specific versions of some of his famously stark canvases. I asked the museum guide who had been stationed to keep an eye on the walls what will happen to the three pieces once exhibit closes: would the drywall be cut and the strokes preserved? He told me no, they would be painted over. The artist never intended them to endure -- and indeed most of the stone installations were also transient copies of installations from elsewhere that would also be dismantled. Networks possess brief lives, even networks with rocks, but they create memories that persist, for a while. I asked the guide what kinds of questions people ask him, and he said most wanted to know if the skylight was part of the installation (it is not). Finally I asked him what he thinks about in that dead-end space, and he told me it was his favorite place to stand: serene, an end-point, an invitation, a place that would vanish soon, but a space that would haunt him afterwards for the time he had spent.

I wish I could have photographed the installations, but the Guggenheim doesn't allow pictures anywhere but the entrance foyer. I've therefore chosen to illustrate this post with one of my favorite scenes. Katherine and I sat on a bench and watched visitors enthralled by the museum's spiraling ramp fail to realize that they had become a part of one of Ufan's Relatum installations. Several bumped into the screen while snapping pictures of the ceiling. A harried guard was constantly reminding people that they were walking through art not mere metal and stones.

Besides re-learning how to live with and in art, another pleasure of this New York trip was Katherine's companionship. Despite our visits to the Central Park Zoo and Dylan's Candy Bar, the Guggenheim was her favorite destination: stories about the stones have haunted her since we started to imagine together what fables they relate. Her inexhaustible enthusiasm for pillow fights and jumping on the bed at the hotel helped us through a wet night that prevented much other activity. Two of Katherine's favorite people in the world, Karl and his wife ALK, were good enough to meet us in Central Park after the museum, and to have an early Indian dinner with us as well. For a weekend that focused upon stones, it was lively, powerful, and -- like those strokes of grey that Ufan left upon the museum wall -- not to be forgotten.

Beowulf in the Dark, Medieval Madness, and Blue: Some Items of Possible Interest

by EILEEN JOY

Readers of In The Middle may be interested to know that Blackwell's online journal Literature Compass, has just published a cluster of essays, "Beowulf in the Dark," edited by Francis Auld [Vol. 8, Issue 7: July 2011], that grew out of a 2008 MLA conference session on Beowulf and contemporary film:

Frances Auld, "Beowulf's Broken Bodies"

Bill Schipper, "All Talk: Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf, Wealtheow, and Grendel's Mother"

Eileen Jankowski, "The Post-9/11 Hero"

Robin Norris, "Resistance to Genocide in the Postmodern Beowulf"

As one of the Editorial Board members for the journal, I'm happy to pass on .pdfs of any of the essays for those who might be interested and whose institutions don't have subscription access to the journal.

Also of possible interest to our readers might be the recently-published volume of essays, edited by Wendy Turner, on Madness in Medieval Law and Custom [Brill, 2010], just reviewed in The Medieval Review by Michael Sizer who finds the volume a useful companion [and maybe also an historical corrective to] Foucault's work on the history of madness. I've been thinking about "madness" lately myself, partly because one of the sessions sponsored by BABEL at the Kalamazoo Congress this past May was on that topic, but also because there was a lively discussion on the topic recently across the speculative realist/object-oriented ontology/ecologies blogosphere:

• Levi Bryant, "Depression, Drugs, Society, and Politics" [Larval Subjects]
• Levi Bryant, "The Symptom and the Symptom" [Larval Subjects]

I myself began thinking recently about depression and ecology in relation to Jeffrey's new book project, Prismatic Ecologies, a planned volume of essays that had its genesis HERE and whose final list of contributors looks like this:

1. Jeffrey J. Cohen: Ecology’s Rainbow
2. Kathleen Stewart: Red
3. Robert McRuer: Pink
4. Lowell Duckert: Maroon
5. Julian Yates: Orange
6. Graham Harman: Gold
7. Vin Nardizzi: Greener
8. Allan Stoekl: Chartreuse
9. Will Stockton: Beige
10. Steve Mentz: Brown
11. Eileen Joy: Blue
12. Stacy Alaimo: Bluish-Black
13. Levi Bryant: Black
14. Jen Hill: Grey
15. Ed Keller: Silver
16. Bernd Herzogenrath: White
17. Ben Woodard: Ultraviolet
18. Tim Morton: X-Ray
19. Afterword: Lawrence Buell

My own thinking on all of this is sketchy at best, and I just KNOW it will change as I go along, but I'll share with everyone here the abstract I sent Jeffrey last week for my chapter [all comments and bibliographic assistance are much welcomed!]:

Blue

At a recent conference session (at the 2011 Kalamazoo Congress) devoted to ‘madness’ and mental illness as methodology (as well as particular forms of ‘medievalism’), an interesting question was raised: is madness partly the product (or even, ingenitor) of various social collaborations -- between people, but also between persons and their environments, both human and non-human? Is madness, further, something to be located on the so-called ‘interior’ of sentience and biological physiology, or is it in the world somehow, with the ‘becoming-haptic’ of the human mind only one of its many effects? Is madness, in other words, ecological -- does it have, or signify, an ecology?

Following Timothy Morton’s argument that too much of current ‘ecological’ thinking hinges upon the spectrum of ‘bright,’ optimistic, ‘sunny’ greens that are ‘holistic, hearty, and healthy,’ often leaving aside ‘negativity, introversion, femininity, writing, mediation, ambiguity, darkness, irony, fragmentation, and sickness’ (The Ecological Thought, p. 16), this essay will focus on sadness and melancholy as forms and signs of deep ecological connections, as well as ethically valuable modes of ‘plugging in’ to ‘worlds’ as always already post-catastrophe. More specifically, through readings of the Old English poems Seafarer and Wanderer, this essay will trace the co-implicated and also affective relations between the human figures and the non-human ‘strange strangers’ of post-apocalyptic (post-war, but also post-human) medieval landscapes in order to formulate a ‘blue’ ecological aesthetic that might take better account of our world as both empty (alone) and full (intimate).