Pivot: between Gower-fest and Chaucer congress #JGS2014 #NCS14

by JONATHAN HSY

Gower shoots his arrow at Chaucer's arms. Robbins Library, University of Rochester. [via @JonathanHsy on twitter, 2 July 2014]

Just got back from "Gower-fest" (Third International Congress of the John Gower Society) at the University of Rochester...and I'm already busily getting things in order for #NCS14 (Nineteenth Biennial International Congress of the New Chaucer Society in Reykjavik, Iceland). I'm pleased to be participating in Global Chaucers activities at NCS (note the international roundtable organized by Candace Barrington, and Thursday night's polyglot reading of Chaucer's works). I'm also co-directing the "Reorienting Disability" Seminar with Julie Orlemanski (on Friday; find out more about the participants and activities on the seminar blog), and looking forward to taking part in Saturday afternoon's "Things Books Do" session [Roundtable 10A] organized by the bibliographical-theoretical dream team of Alexandra Gillespie and J. Allan Mitchell.

The theme for this year's conference was LANGUAGE, COGNITION, PERFORMANCE. 

These keywords did not disappoint! To give you some flavor of what transpired throughout the conference, check out the Storify selection of Gowerian live-tweets (via M Bychowski's Transliterature blog). This archive reveals some of the more social/convivial aspects of the conference and also tracks a few threads that emerged across the panels regarding themes of disability, pedagogy, and theory. Other thoughts:

Vibrant threads. I was impressed by the number interrelated panel sessions that created de facto "threads" throughout this conference, particularly a number of sessions on science and medicine; and several panels exploring interactions between law and literature.

Many voices. Established figures in the field were active participants throughout the week (the conference was very much a tribute to Russell Peck with plenaries by Ardis Butterfield, Helen Cooper, and Derek Perasall) -- and I was pleased to encounter so many new faces at the conference as well. Jeff Stoyanoff observes in his aptly-named new blog Ernest & Game that this particular conference fostered an ethos of welcome: Gowerian "luminaries" and self-identified "young scholars" could be found all over Rochester commingling over drinks in local bars (or inns or hipster pubs) or chatting while on a boat.

"Gower & Theory" Roundtable, moderated by Brian Gastle. Left to right: Queer Gower [M Bychowski], Material Gower [Eve Salisbury], Crip Gower [Jonathan Hsy], Sensory Gower [Allan Mitchell], Multilingual Gower [Shyama Rajendran]. Photo courtesy of M Bychowski.

Theory and ethics. One highlight for me was taking part in the conference's concluding session on "Gower and Theory" -- in some respects, the presentations at this roundtable (in order of presentation: Queer Gower, Material Gower, Multilingual Gower, Sensory Gower, and Crip Gower) began to interweave a few conceptual strands emergent throughout the conference. I'm a big fan of the roundtable format (shorter presentations = more participants and more time for discussion), and our approaches intersected in unexpected ways. Eve and Shyama reminded us that instead of constructing a grand master-narrative (bibliographical or monolingual) we can start thinking more about the messy complexity of local contexts. My own presentation stressed an activist-oriented approach to disability and its implications for Gower's lived blindness, and Allan offered some thoughts on historicizing the under-theorized medieval senses of taste and smell; we discovered in the discussion afterwards that our presentations might suggest a two-pronged approach to the sensorium in Gower's Confessio: his tales can work against implicit hierarchies of sense perception that privilege the visual and auditory.

In their own ways, all of these presentations showed how scholars can more deliberately consider the ethical and political stakes in our respective approaches to Gower's works. Rather than providing my own thoughts on this, read Jeff Stoyanoff's beautiful reflections on M's "Queer Gower" presentation. How do our own identities (political or otherwise) inform our perspectives on Gower and shape our interactions in the classroom? It is perhaps fitting that the theory roundtable followed directly after an inspiring session on teaching Gower in diverse environments: Ben Ambler, on teaching Gower in a multiethnic and times politically conservative environment; Jerome Denno, on teaching Gowerian monstrosity to seminarians through the monster theses of JEFFREY (who received a few shout-outs in different sessions as a former University of Rochester undergrad); Jenny Boyar, on Gower in the medical humanities classroom; and Adin Lears, on Gower's work as venue for thinking close about the relationship between poetry, sound, embodied performance.

Sarah Higley's directoral debut: "Machinima" adaptation of three Gowerian tales.

New media. This conference really drove home to me how Gower's work can animate a surprising range of digital and multimedia endeavors. A session organized by The Gower Project offered updates on its open-access journal Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media, its ongoing bibliography of Gower studies, translation Wiki (with potential for use in classrooms), crowd-sourcing transcriptions of Confesssio manuscripts, and Serina Patterson's medieval astronomy app. Such efforts augment resources already available through the Gower Bibliography and International John Gower Society website. Performance studies infused the conference as well: a session on Gower in Shakespeare's Pericles; a stellar performance of music by Guillaume de Machaut; and Sarah Higley showed her beguiling "machinima" 3D film adaptations of tales from the Confessio created by recording real-time performances by Second Life avatar-actors. The conference also featured live readings and broadcast recordings of Gower's work as originally composed in Middle English and French as well as the English Confessio's late-medieval translations into Portuguese and Spanish.

Multilingual and transnational. If you're someone who loves to think and talk about the interplay between different languages, Gower's trilingual oeuvre offers an embarrassment of riches. In addition to vibrant papers and sessions expanding Gower's participation in Anglo-French contexts (or as Elizaveta Strakhov encourages us to call them, "cross-Channel" relations), this conference demonstrated that we are only beginning to understand how Gower's work offered new insights into medieval Anglo-Iberian relations as well. The whole "Gower and Iberia" subfield really emerged in full force in the 2011 Gower conference in Valladolid and this area of Gower studies has gained more prominence with recent essay collections (England and Iberia in the Middle Ages, ed. María Bullón-Fernández [2007]; John Gower in England and Iberia, eds. Ana Saéz-Hidalgo and R.F. Yeager [2014]). 

I end with two exciting items of Gowerian news.

R.F. Yeager awards the 2014 John Hurt Fisher Prize to Bruce Holsinger. [via @MedievalPhDemon (Shyama Rajendran) on twitter, 2 July 2014] 

Bruce Holsinger (most recently of Burnable Books fame) was awarded the John Gower Society's John Hurt Fisher Prize for his outstanding contributions to the field of Gower studies this year. If you haven't read (or heard or otherwise experienced) his novel A Burnable Book (2013) -- starring John Gower as detective-protogonist -- it's definitely worth your time; see also his website's sexy resources on life in late-medieval London.

Sebastian Sobecki delivered a talk at #WritBrit2014 (biennial conference Writing Britain 500-1500; see this year's Storify feed) that identifies John Gower's autograph hand in two important manuscripts. (In a case of cosmic irony, Sobecki's talk took place in Cambridge, UK, while the Gower conference was happening in Rochester -- so I think many Gowerians missed this bit of news.) Rest assured, more on this is forthcoming in an article in Speculum.

All in all, it's a VERY exciting time to be a Gowerian.

Looking forward to putting on my "Chaucer hat" at NCS!


UPDATE July 9, 2014 [morning]

The text of M Bychowski's presentation on Gower's Narcissus myth and politics of trans suicide has been posted on her blog; M's "#Gower tweets" and "#Queer Gower" blog posts are (as of today) displaying on the Aequalitas news site ("Science" page).

‘By chance’ or ‘in itself’: Automatos and The Problem of Material Agency

Coney Island Fireworks

by KARL STEEL

First, see Jonathan on Collective Nouns, below, and Mary Kate's online survey here on alternative academic communities.

Here's a draft of my paper for the New Chaucer Society, which I'll be giving on Friday July 18th 11am session on "Ecomaterialism: Questions/Problems/Ideologies." I have all of five minutes. Not 100% confident in what follows, but, here goes.

This paper, a shortened and somewhat rethought version of a paper I gave at Kalamazoo2014, implicitly responds to criticism of the "faith," "mysticism," and even "panpsychism" of the new materialisms. Now, that charge may be fair, depending on who we're looking at or what we're looking for. Here, for example, is William Connolly on "creativity" in The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism:

Creative processes flow through and over us, and reflexivity doubles the creative adventure. Actions are thus not entirely controlled by preexisting intentions; rather the creative dimension helps to compose and refine intentions as they become consolidated in action. To articulate the creative dimension of freedom, then, is to insert a fundamental qualification or hesitation into the ideas of both the masterful agent and agency as the activation of intentions already there. The creative element is located somewhere between active and passive agency. When creative freedom is under way in an unsettled context we may find ourselves allowing or encouraging a new thought, desire, or strategy to crystallize out of the confusion and nest of proto-thoughts that precede it. An agent, individual or collective, can help to open the portals of creativity, but it cannot will that which is creative to come into being by intending the result before it arrives. Real creativity is thus tinged with uncertainty and mystery. (75)

I'm sympathetic to this. I get it, because it describes, especially, how writing works for me, and probably for you. Outline all you like, something new is going to happen when you're trying to assemble your actual words. It does feel mysterious, but still, the language of "mystery" or of a "tinge" smacks of mysticism, at least for those who are sniffing it out.

My own hesitation, however, would be with the "proto-thought," since that, catnip to the humanists, strikes me as just as mysterious, obscuring as it does the question of the location of thought or, especially, its presumptive non-materiality.

That is my angle, then: in the background of this piece, you might hear me throwing the "mysticism" charge back against the accusers, whose certainty in the difference between thinking human subjects/nonhuman objects strikes me as both an act of faith and an unwarranted limitation of their attention only to familiar scales of time and size.

Another caution: the 20-minute version at Kalamazoo had a lot of room for Aquinas and also, especially, to give queer theory its due in assailing the paternalism of an absolute split between agent and object. This paper, like the new materialisms in general, wouldn't have been possible without Butler and Irigaray.

Here we go:

---

The word “agency” gets a lot of use from New Materialists; Jane Bennett talks about “material agency,” and Karen Barad about the “agential object.” A 9am session tomorrow will ask “Should We Believe in the Agential Object?” And so on. One of the key purposes in using this word “agency,” I think, is to counter the faith that humans, or maybe some animals, are the only agential objects. For the new materialists, nonhuman objects aren’t only mechanical; they might surprise; they might respond; to use Derrida’s terminology, they might even have an excessive “responsibility,” rather than just a limited, predictable reactivity; in short, they—and us too—might exhibit some kind of choice and creativity.

“Some kind,” which is, admittedly, a bit hand-wavey, but deliberately so, to mark the way that the word “agency” acknowledges that actors without obvious political power, without much obvious choice, without obvious importance, and even without deliberation or subjectivity, can still resist, fight back, or make something new. Where they might do something in ways that the dominant agent couldn’t have accounted for. Where we can recognize actors that we would otherwise not notice, to “provincialize the human” and its scales of attention.

Given the conference, of course I’m going to argue that medieval thought has something to offer these discussions. Which we of course already know. I’ll focus on something small: the difficulties Aristotle’s word “automatos” gave some his medieval Latin translators.

Aristotle uses automatos, among other places, in Metaphysics VII.7, where it’s one of his three categories of causation: natural, artistic—the word is techne—and automaton. Techne is a familiar kind of agency to the humanist: the “active principle” is in the “soul” of the artist. “Natural comings to be,” on the other hand, “are the comings to be of those things which come to be by nature.” The tight mechanicity of this obvious, almost hilarious circular reasoning may be why Aristotle provided the third category, of automatic causation.

Automatic causation appears when things are produced “without seeds,” like insects, which come spontaneously from mud or dung, or when things happen without deliberation or by accident. So we have at least two meanings of automaton here, both of which reserve an agency outside both human or quasi-human deliberation and outside the circular causality of nature.

In one meaning, automatic agency seems to be self-generated, like “natural things…whose matter can be moved even by itself.” This agency seems to come from nowhere because it originates in the thing itself—think for example of the auto in autobiography—so that agent and patient are the same thing. Alternately, automatic agency may be a kind of non-agential activity, with only patients and no agents, as when—to use Aristotle’s example—a patient gets healthy regardless of what the physician does.

Unsurprisingly, automatos troubled some of Aristotle’s medieval translators: Michael Scot and Roger Bacon render it as “per se” (cited from here, 134) through or by itself, and William of Moerbecke, at times, as “a casu,” by chance (here and HA, 130). Self-generated causation is an action whose cause cannot be disentangled from its effect. One analogue might be Anselm’s attempt in Cur Deus Homo to save God from being compelled by a motive (see note 1 here). For Anselm, “God does nothing of necessity,” not even to avoid dishonor, “since nothing whatever can coerce or restrain him in his action.” Here cause and effect form a neat little knot, immanent to and closed on itself.

By contrast, random causation, “a casu,” is a kind of atheistic but also nonmechanistic, nonsolipsistic account of agency. It might be as random as something that’s simply senseless, a thing that just happens. Just as well, random causation might preserve space for a surprise, the hap, the adventure arriving from some unidentifiable elsewhere. This is an agency that interrupts predictable causality to bring something new into being. It’s an agency that frees an origin from some already known end, or it's an agency that piggy-backs on some deliberate intention.

This excessive or random causality may be the one way short of a divine fiat that agency can bring something new into being. More simply, it may be the only way agency can actually happen.

Thank you!

Collective Nouns and Medievalist Collectivity: A Poem

by JONATHAN HSY

Briefly noted: If you haven't already, fill out MARY KATE's online survey about BABEL and "Creating Alternative Communities" (she's accepting responses until July 10). Check out KARL's recent posting as well!

I just got back from the amazing Gower-fest (i.e., Third International Congress of the John Gower Society) at the University of Rochester! Expect a blog posting about #JGS2014 very soon.

During the conference banquet, some of the conference participants were wondering if there's a collective noun for Gower scholars, and Brian Gastle joked that it should be called a "recension of Gowerians." On the last day of the conference I expanded Gastle's joke on twitter and Facebook and other people began submitting their own suggestions for other collective nouns for medievalists.

Culling from these discussions, I've composed this poem (taking my lead from KARL's earlier posting about medieval collective nouns):

Medievalist Collectives: A Collaborative Poem

A troop of Anglo-Saxonists
A roundtable of Arthurians
An orientation of cartographers
A compaignye of Chaucerians *
A gathering of codicologists
A circle of Dante scholars
A pageant of early drama scholars
An underappreciation of Early Middle English scholars
A garter of Gawain-Poets
A recension of Gowerians *
A rabble of grammarians
A tempest of Kempists *
A regiment of Hoccleveans *
A fair field of Langlandians
A reduction of Lydgateans *
A tournament of Malorians
A peregrination of Mandevilleans
A massacre of Martinists #gameofthrones
A Pandaemonium of Miltonists
A wonder of monster-theorists
A choir/quire of musicologists
A raze of Ockhamists
An orthography (ormography) of Ormulists *
A necklace of Pearl-Poets
An errant (errancy) of romance scholars *
A Swerve of Shakespeareans
A fellowship of Tolkienists
A torture of Websterians

* ALTERNATIVES: A parliament of Chaucerians; a pride (or romp) of Gowerians; a roaring of Kempists; a Series of Hoccleveans; a tedium of Lydgateans; a quadriga (or flamboyance) of Ormulists; a quest of romance scholars; a moot of Tolkienists. Collectively authored by H. Barbaccia, R. Barrett, @Exhuast_Fumes, A. Farber, C. Fitzgerald, B. Gastle, @GrammarRabble (note the GR tumblr feed and new blog!), J. Hsy, M.K. Hurley, A. Mittman, C. Perry, S. Rajendran, R. Rouse, C. Thomas, R. Utz, A. Walling, R. Wakeman, and M. Worley.


[EDITED July 6: adding Early Middle English scholars, Ormulists, romance scholars]

The Middle English Disputation between a Christian and a Jew: Materiality, or not.

by KARL STEEL

Just waving at the Gower conference from afar! Also, read Jeffrey doing his ecothing below!

Eric Corriel at LUMEN 2014

Because the field's so crowded, I'm reluctant to call the "Disputisoun bytwene a cristenmon and a jew" [Disputation between a Christian and a Jew, hereafter DCJ] one of the stranger Middle English poems; but it is a particularly weird one. Here's a recent summary:

[DCJ tells] how an English and a Jewish theologian disputed in vain at Paris. The Christian argues the Virgin Birth and the redemption through Christ's crucifixion and the Jew favors a God who has no son. In order to convince the Christian the Jew suggests he will prove the power of his religion by showing the Christian a vision of Christ on the cross. They travel to the Otherworld where the Christian proves the vision of the crucifixion to be a false one by confronting it with a consecrated host. The Jew admits the errors of his ways and converts to Christianity. At this point the Christian is identified as Sir Walter of Berwick, who was made a penitentiary by the pope.

Among these otherworld encounters are Arthur and his Round Table (!), a dinner with nuns, squires, and the recital of romances, and, finally, what turns out to be a fake crucifixion (a crucifiction?). [For another summary, see my comment to this 2008 blog post]

Luuk Houwen, whose summary I quote above, offers us one of the only articles on the DCJ, and, so far as I know, the only one published this century. I'm convinced by his argument, which is essentially an identification of its genre: the poem's not a romance, but a religious vision, developed from one of the many exempla designed to prove the sanctity of the Eucharistic Host.

Houwen, however, doesn't do much with the Jewishness of the disputant, and probably for good reason: Thomas of Cantimpré's exemplum, a likely source, features a contest between a heretic and a Christian; in another analog, from a Life of St Wolfram, it's pagans and a not-quite-yet Christian. The DCJ adds Arthur, the Nuns, and the other elements of what we might call a specifically British otherworld. But, apart from calling its figure of unbelief a Jew, it doesn't explicitly add anything to the tradition that's clearly about the Christian engagement with Judaism.

Still,some other differences from the analogs demand our attention. There's the Jew's similarity to Chaucer's Clerk of Orleans, in the Franklin's Tale, who similarly conjures up a chivalric entertainments:

he shewed hym, er he wente to sopeer,
Forestes, parkes ful of wilde deer;
Ther saugh he hertes with hir hornes hye,
The gretteste that evere were seyn with ye.
He saugh of hem an hondred slayn with houndes,
And somme with arwes blede of bittre woundes.
He saugh, whan voyded were thise wilde deer,
Thise fauconers upon a fair ryver,
That with hir haukes han the heron slayn.
tho saugh he knyghtes justyng in a playn;
And after this he dide hym swich plesaunce
That he hym shewed his lady on a daunce,
On which hymself he daunced, as hym thoughte.
And whan this maister that this magyk wroughte
Saugh it was tyme, he clapte his handes two,
And farewel! al oure revel was ago,
And yet remoeved they nevere out of the hous.

That's certainly a connection worth developing, perhaps having to do with the relationship between preachers, sorcerers, and storytellers; here, though, I'll just suggest that we put the poem in conversation with the medieval relationship between Jews and materiality, specifically, the way that medieval Christianity tended to insult Jews by associating them with materiality. For Christians, Jews were excessively literal, concerned only with brute facts and not with spiritual truths, stone-hearted, driven by instinct rather than choice, with bodies that were excessively corporeal: stinky, prone to bloody fluxes and--in the Siege of Jerusalem among others--dismemberment (see Steven Kruger's The Spectral Jew and Suzanne Conklin Akbari's Idols in the East). One of the goals of the new materialisms is, or should be, to drain the material insult of its force by, at once, recognizing the presumptively human/Christian/whatever as material too and the material as more agential or, at least, less foundational ("the ground of our discussion is" etc). More wobbly on the material side, less free on the human/etc side, with a serious reassessment of what we mean when we use the word "agency." Things like that.

That's important, but it's harder to implement in this case. What's strange in the DCJ is that the Jew isn't obviously associated with materiality, but with illusion; it's the Christian who wields the material object, the consecrated Host, that -- like the clap of the Orleans' Clerk--bursts the illusion apart, returning us to the world of dark, solid matter:

Whon he was schewed to the siht,
He barst þe Buyldynge so briht.
Bote was derk as the niht,
Heore sonne and heore mone.

If we just take the Jew as being made to stand in for the general unbeliever, that's not a problem, except, of course, for the general fact of its prejudice. But if we take the Jew seriously as a Jew in a Christian poem then we need to work harder.

Host desecration stories with Jewish desecrators, like the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, which Houwen cites, or several exempla in British Library, Royal 18.B.23, feature a kind of profane belief in the material sanctity of the Host. The Jews obtain a Host, by theft or purchase or deception, and then mistreat it until the Host reveals its truth. A sample, since BL Royal 18.B.23 isn't online. A Jew bets a Christian 20 pounds that his dog would eat a consecrated Host. The Christian accepts the bet, and then, by pretending to be sick, tricks a priest into slipping him the goods. When he extracts the uneaten Host from under his tongue and delivers it to the Jew, here's what happens:

Þan [the Jew] toke þe Hoste, þat was in þe purs, and cast it a-fore þe dogge. And a-noon þe dogge fled and wold haue renne owte of þe hous. Þan þe Iewe cached hym a3eyn and chereshed hym, and euermore he drewe a-bake. Þan þe Iewe saw þat he wold not for no cherishynge take itt, þan he bette hym. And anone þe dogge fell downe on all iiij knees and did as he couthe reuerence to þe Sacramente. Þan þe Iewe was wode wrouthe and toke a staffe and bette þe dogge, and toke þe dogge in is armes and put hym þer-to. And þe dogge felte þat he wold haue mad hym to haue eten itt. And sothely he stirte vp to is þrote and voried hym. 

Þan anoon þe Cristen man ranne to þe preeste þe wiche þat houseled hym, and told hym how it was and of þe dogge, suche an vnresonable beeste, how þat he did is dewe reuerence to Goddes bodie in þe forme of brede. 

So be þis meracle þou may be stered to beleue þer-on in þat, þat an vnresonable beeste do dud, þat neuer had techynge of holychurche. (130)

This isn't at all what happens in DCJ. Its Jew doesn't have any particular belief either way in the Host. He doesn't want to do things to it to prove that it's mere material. He's even, before its reveal, indifferent to it. Rather -- and this proposal is probably where I'll open discussion the next time I teach it -- the Jew in the DCJ champions visible immateriality, and the Christian invisible materiality. The DCJ isn't so much a dispute between materiality and its other (whether this is spirit, choice, free interpretation, immortal stability, &c) as it is between the falseness of visible things and the true materiality of invisible things. On the other side of (false) vision, we haven't arrived exactly at the realm of spirit, but at the one, true materiality of the Real Presence.

The trick, which I'll leave to my students, and to you, is to make this frankly rather dull reading more interesting.

[for more on/in the Vernon Manuscript, see here; and for a full TOC, here]