The Love of Life: Reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Close to Home

by J J Cohen

Below, my paper for the recent (and wonderful) Oecologies conference, "Engaging the World, From Here." My deepest gratitude to Vin Nardizzi and Tiffany Werth for inviting me and for pushing me to write beyond my comfort zone, and for all who attended and participated and made the event so memorable. From a joyous student staging of Gallathea to being lost in Stanley Park to superb presentations and a round table, truly among the very best eco-gatherings I've attended.

Let me know what you think of this piece, since in time it becomes a published essay. The footnotes at this point are fairly nonexistent. Manuscript images taken from the Cotton Nero A.x. Project' s Digital Facsimile.

With its Green Knight, Green Chapel, green garter, green holly, green horse, green axe, green everything, no wonder Carolyn Dinshaw describes Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as the “go-to text for ecocritical analysis of Middle English literature.”[1] Most attention centers upon its three enthralling hunts and the Green Knight as foliate intrusion, signaling that an eco-Sir Gawain has something in common with the anthropological approaches of the last century, when the traces of a pagan vegetation god were discerned in its Green Man and critics used to quote from The Golden Bough – but emphasis has moved from anthropocentric myths to human entanglement in an active, inhuman world. This shift to plants and animals has also entailed a quiet movement away from the groundbreaking, feminist reappraisals of the poem of the early 1990s, with their lingering over occluded stories, desires, lives. On the one hand, affiliating the ecological and the feminine risks repeating a binaristic and essentializing logic that aligns women and nature, to neither’s benefit. Yet environmental spaces medieval and modern too easily become the domain of vigorous, affluent white men having adventures (an expanse that queering or entangling into nature can paradoxically reinforce rather than undermine).[2] Can we shift the space of critical attention to a diversity and specificity of lives by engaging the romance’s worlds from multiple “heres,” manifold and thick? Can we displace the human from centrality without obliterating human difference?

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is an intricate romance, traversing time and space so swiftly they blur. Desire (or love) and vibrancy (or life) burgeon throughout, opening widest when we accept what the text has always insisted upon: Sir Gawain is not its protagonist – and his time, his history, are not always the poem’s. As the opening page of the manuscript makes clear, cutting something off will not extract it from enmeshment, will not flatten story into sequentiality, will not enable the solitary or the still. Around a linear and all too human, all too masculine narrative of blunder and supposed transcendence unfold tales of yearning and vitality: dormancy, season-change, lives glimpsed but not grasped, nonhuman tempos and durations, knotted structures of love and life to which a knight who thinks the world revolves around his adventuring remains blind, acephalic. The poem’s love of life entwines humans of all genders with nonhumans, creates a world not of static verities but repetitions with lively differences, sediments an enduring here inextricable from body, climate, atmosphere, season, plant, animal, stone.

The poem contrasts large environs swiftly traversed with small spaces of lingering. The immensity of the wilderness traveled and a plot unfolding over the course of more than a year contrast with the feasting chamber of the Arthurian court, the bedroom of Sir Bertilak’s castle and its surrounding hunting park (a space that can seem immense but amounts to no more than two enclosed miles [Crane]), and the ruins of the Green Chapel, not far distant. Building upon feminist re-readings of the poem that emphasize its knots, absent narratives, contradictions, and temporal intricacies over a masculine straightforwardness, I’m going to ask us to pause today within some time-spaces that Sir Gawain barely beholds on his travels, so hellbent is he to culminate a story he thinks his own. We won’t spend much time in the bedroom with Gawain and the Lady, nor at the chapel with the Green Knight. I’m interested in desire here, but desires that exceed the confines of Human subjectivities without leaving particular humans behind.[3] On the day she provides the green girdle that will supposedly keep Gawain safe, the Lady’s first act in entering his bedchamber is to throw open the window (1743), fresh air for the knight’s heavy, troubled sleep (dre3 droupyng of dreme, 1750). Might we allow our eyes to tarry at the vista she opens, perhaps feel the change in atmosphere an unlatched window enables? Can we gaze out towards the nearby hills and forest without transcending the feminine agency through which that portal opens? The Arthurian knight in restless sleep or atop his relentless steed embodies only one narrative trajectory. The desires of the poem’s four women entwine the poem with alternative stories, some of which challenge the relegation of the feminine to private and domestic space while men adventure outdoors.[4] So does the vivacity and precarity of the poem’s nonhumans, and an abiding love for their flourishing.

It’s easy to forget that SGGK exists in a single manuscript of unknown authorship, unclear scribal history, and lost context.[5] The history of this anonymous alliterative poem of the late 14^th century is discontinuous. We possess no evidence of medieval readers. Modern canonicity came about only after Frederic Madden rescued the poem from obscurity through his edition of 1839. Jesse L. Weston translated SGGK into comfortably modern English in 1898, enabling wide public access.[6] Its female characters were ignored or disparaged into the 1990s, even though the plot derives from their agency. In the long wake of its domestication into the Brit Lit Survey syllabus, as well as its mediation through multiple translations and remediation through new sites of representation (including film and blogs), we’ve lost a sense of the romance’s strangeness, its desire to estrange. Much remains dormant, awaiting its season, so close to home as to remain unseen.

How might turning to the past with a full sense of inhabited ecologies, medieval and modern, renew our acquaintance with a poem that has become too well known? How might love and life bring together a world of humans and nonhumans in which particularities (of gender, body, desire, ability, tempo, thriving) are not transcended or surpassed? Plunging through the wilds of Wales atop his horse, Gawain’s mammalian rapidity contrasts with the unhurried thriving of trees, the leisure of stone, incessant cyclicality of weather and botanical yearning, the pulse of climate and season. I use the term eco-temps to designate a HERE that is at once a place, a temporality, and a climate – ephemeral expanses that through repetition endure to bequeath across time a multisensory archive.

Few medieval texts are more alert to climate change than SGGK, in the many senses of the word: location, atmosphere, inclination, affect. Climat is passion and psychology in place, feeling close to home. The poem is arranged around recurring but not necessarily straightforward rotation, what in Middle English is called “sesoun” [season]. The tempo of lived geography, sesoun is composed of cyclical “eco-temps” or “time-spaces” “now-heres” “weather-worlds”  that knot the disparate in shared liveliness, that include but are not culminated by decay, violence, death. Season derives from sowing (Latin serere), the casting of dormant seed on bare earth in uncertain hope, in the trust even within long cold of some green futurity.

With its brief days darkly edged, its affection for Christmas and New Years revels, SGGK is a winter-loving poem. Most of its action unfolds within two iterations of that season of short days and chill nights, of frost and hearthbound fire.

Unlike some Arthurian tales, this romance opens with disaster rather than culminate in flames. The first stanza (to which the last circles back) describes the burning of the city of Troy “to brondez and askez” (2), detailing the transcontinental dispersal of its refugee population. Because they founded so many futures it is easy to forget that the Trojans were exiles and migrants, displaced from home by war. Burnt to brands and ashes: these dispersed peoples possess no city to which to return.[7] The smoldering of home must haunt what follows [Stephanie Trigg]. Camelot is a refuge built against fire and ice.

The poem begins in wandering but moves quickly to the construction of new habitations. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a story that its author tells us he first “in toun herde” (31). “Toun” is usually glossed as “court,” but the word primarily means a gathering of edifices into permanent settlement, as in “London toun” (MED), the kind of fortified place reduced to embers at poem’s opening. Toun also designates the community such buildings enable. A toun domesticates fire and banishes life-taking winter to its exterior. The Arthurian court is a shelter after catastrophe. Like Troy, it won’t last.

Festive and snug, Camelot knows the inevitability of intrusion. Expectation hangs heavy in the air. Although Arthur’s court has gathered to celebrate the holiday, the king will not be seated at the Yule repast until some wonder arrives. SGGK was composed when the mania for tales of Camelot was already centuries old, but the eager knights and ladies depicted here are young: “For al watz þis fayre folk in her first age” (54). This story is set in the early days of Arthur’s flourishing, before the treachery and infidelity and sheer viciousness that will someday rend its community, ruin everything achieved.

As readers and Arthur fans, we know what is coming. Lancelot and Guenevere will betray their king. Agravain will betray the two lovers. Mordred will betray everyone. Yet when we realize that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a prequel we can suspend our knowledge, ignore the approach of that calamitous future for a bit. The story is limned with darkness, harsh environments, and loss, but its narrative also holds vibrancy, promise, and unexpected life, even within what seems dead or forgotten. It’s a story of “boþe blysse and blunder” (18): beginning anew, trading culmination for multiplicity, linear time for seasonal modes, inevitable futures for the awakening of dormancies.

Camelot is built against a human world that loves to incinerate and a natural world aligned with chill; against story tellers who culminate their tales in devastation; against flame that will gladly ally itself with human hands to consume structures (of dwelling, of meaning, of remembrance); against an icy climate in which life is precarious and pained. And yet the court knows it cannot keep these forces at its exterior. The marvel is awaited. The outside must enter, or reveal itself as having always been within.

Sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference between an ally and an enemy, a host and a guest, protagonist and prey, a parasite and a symbiont, the fecundity of decay and the silent thriving of life, the death drive and cyclicality, between things which contradict and things that are simply entwined.

“Þer hales in at þe halle dor an aghlich mayster” (136). The awesome [“aue-lich”] Green Knight hurtles into the hall. He is sudden, flamboyant, immense -- and so very green. We will learn later in the poem that he is intimate to a story long unfolding at the heart of Camelot-toun. An emissary from Morgan la Fée, the Green Knight is sent to probe the court and frighten Guenevere (2456-60). Morgan does not much like her half-brother Arthur, an animus that tells a story close to home, lying dormant, springing to life only retroactively next winter. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a poem that demands to be read at least twice before it is possible to know how full its story is with alternative narratives from the very start, seeds lying dormant the first time through, awaiting a second season.

A little history. When first glimpsed in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini (c. 1150) Morgan rules the Isle of Apples (Avalon), the enchanted place to which Arthur is taken to have his mortal wounds tended. Geoffrey may have taken this story, as he takes so many of the tales he tells, from a combination of Welsh, Irish and Breton tales, underscoring the roiled British archipelago that Arthur’s eventual translation into a placid English king obscures. Geoffrey describes Morgan as wise in medicinal botany, astrology, and shape changing (she can fly through the air like Daedelus, and so is an intimate of birds).[8] In time elaborate mythologies developed around Morgan and her relation to Arthur. She studies with Merlin and masters much of his lore. She is married against her will. She is called le Fay (the Fairy) in recognition of her learning and power.[9] Because she was disparaged by Thomas Malory, and because we too easily assume that any medieval secular woman who exerts her own agency must have been reviled by her contemporaries, Morgan is often described now as sinister, evil. Yet she may also simply be an immensely learned woman whose stories and desires are not fully knowable.[10]

Despite all the founding fathers, stories of Troy depend upon women: Dido, Cassandra, Briseyde, Hecuba, Ignoge, Lavinia, Helen.[11] Feminist re-interpreters of SGGK taught us decades ago to take the words of the Green Knight seriously when he reveals that he is Morgan’s subordinate and stop making the poem about its male characters. Geraldine Heng pointed out in 1991 that Morgan tends to be noticed only to diminish her back into the masculine story, a proclivity that remains true today.[12] Heng, Gayle Margherita, and Elizabeth Scala (among many others) have demonstrated cogently how the poem enacts and is enlivened by feminine desires, stories with women as protagonists that have always been there, dormant until noticed by readers not content to follow only Gawain through the text. While most of the narrative is spent in that knight’s company, the ending of the romance makes us wonder if it ought to have been.

The poem diverts us from its intricacies then rebukes us for having been so distracted. “Oueral enker grene” (150). The magnificent, utterly intense [enker] greenness of the knight who intrudes on the Christmas court is overwhelming: verdancy of coat, mantle, hose, trim, gems, flowing hair and beard; his horse’s bit, stirrups, and saddle; even the horse itself. Yet the Green Knight is an ecotone of vegetal and animal, leaf and silk, tendril and embroidery, the work of nature and artisans. Viridescent glare can blind us to how much gold is woven into the ornamentation, precious substance and entangling thread. The Green Knight bears along with his tremendous axe a bob of holly “Þat is grattest in grene when greuez ar bare” (207). This holly would presumably shimmer with red berries, a speckled crimson that will return later when we behold Gawain’s blood on the Green Chapel snow. As the green aura shimmers it is easy not to notice details like the fierce Knight’s clothing embroidered “wyth bryddes and fly3es” (167), with birds and butterflies, a sartorial ecosystem. Sir Gawain will dress in rather similar clothing later in the poem, when he sets off in search of this stranger. The atmospheric birds and butterflies on these clothes are the labor and narrative of women’s hands.

The fierce guest challenges the court to a beheading game (possibly the least fun game ever invented). Noble Gawain volunteers to take the axe, sparing his king that perilous duty. Once severed from its body the head remains alive, a survival beyond death that declares green entanglement within a world exceeding and frustrating the human. The severed head commands Gawain to receive his promised return blow at the mysterious Green Chapel within a year. Unlike this uncanny visitor, Gawain has no reason to suspect that he will survive the return stroke: twelve months as terminus, not the restarting of a cycle. Can we blame him if he hesitates at Camelot while the seasons change? And they change rapidly. Within three brisk but beautiful stanzas winter will yield and return.

“And vche sesoun serlepes sued after oþer, / After Crystenmasse com þe crabbed lentoun” (“And each season in turn followed the other / After Christmas came difficult Lent” 501-2). We expect winter to be hard, but more difficult still are the earliest arousals of spring.

Lenten thoughts, for that austere time of year when the first stirrings of plants yield little nourishment, when winter is almost gone but the ground is brown and the trees stripped still of ornament. “Crabbed” means angry, ill-tempered, backward-moving, sour, unconvivial. A time of “fode more simple,” early spring tests the flesh in part for religious reasons, in part because the growing season is just starting while winter stores have neared depletion. You could starve to death at Lent.[13]

“Early spring is, famously, cruel,” observes Holly Dugan. “The bite of winter is still sharp.”[14] Spring’s ecological archive, she notes, is olfactory – and thereby fleeting. But not irrecoverable. Poetry records well the vernal balance of promise with “an indolic hint of decay and desolation.”[15] Memory with desire. To call this liminal season “crabbed” is not an instance of the Pathetic Fallacy so much as proof that the Pathetic Fallacy is true. The human body is an environmental mesh. Subjectivity is a material, multiensory extension into time, atmosphere and eco-temps. Affect is shared macrocosmically. Climate is weather and mood together, the human as meteorological interface, the ephemeral made flesh and feeling, the impress of an environing.

The seasons pass swiftly as Gawain lingers at Camelot. Lush thoughts intrude. Bot þenne þe weder of þe worlde wyth wynter hit þrepez (“But then the weather of the world contends with winter,” 504): cold sinks down, clouds uplift; rain topples, flowers swell. “Softe somer” combines what are for us two separate seasons, riotous spring and summer’s green fecundity.

Like that intruding knight at Christmas court, the world wears green clothing (“boþe groundez and þe greuez grene ar her wedez” [“both ground and groves are clothed green,” 508]). The soundtrack to this glorious greening is birdsong, as these creatures build their houses with industry (509). Later in the poem we will see and hear such birds in the depths of winter, as Gawain moves through a tangled forest, half frozen, no prospect of the Green Chapel at all. Let’s fast forward for a moment.

Into a forest ful dep, þat ferly watz wylde,

Hi3e hillez on vche a halue, and holtwodez vnder

Of hore okez ful hoge a hundreth togeder;

Þe hasel and þe ha3þorne were harled al samen,

With ro3e raged mosse rayled aywhere,

With mony bryddez vnblyþe vpon bare twyges,

Þat pitosly þer piped for pyne of þe colde.

Wandering a wild forest of entangled oak, hazel, hawthorn, Gawain beholds unhappy birds complaining against the chill. Maybe they are just allegories for how he feels. But maybe this is another moment when we might behold the human weather report, and wonder why Gawain does not apprehend in these miserable creatures a shared pain, a shared precarity.

Those lines create a microclimate, a winter environing in which life and death intertwine, where misery is shared even when that atmospheric interpenetration goes unrecognized. Trees are entangled, oak with hazel, hung with moss. Unhappy birds perch in their bows, their soundtrack a reduction to bare life, to creaturely misery. Pain of the cold. Sure, they’re just birds – and they will soon give way to frosty earth lit by a beautifully ruddy rising sun when Gawain is snug in the castle (1694-96) and to “wyldge wederer of þe worlde” that harasses the exposed (“þe naked to tene”) once he departs in search of the Green Knight (2000-2). Again, though, these are not instances of weather in the poem obeying “psychological rather than natural laws” but assertions that the Pathetic Fallacy is not so false.[16] Lesley Kordecki finds in Chaucer’s speaking avians an “ecofeminist subjectivity” that interrogates and undercuts the human.[17] In this poem the birds, filled with bliss in summer, distress in winter, do not speak. Yet they palpably communicate: create a feeling, an atmosphere, sorrow in a bitter climate, joy in a warmer one. They are the animals that fly on the embroidered garments of both Sir Gawain and the Green Knight he seeks. They are the animals that share in the bounty of the butchered deer after the hunt, when the ravens receive “þe corbeles fee” (1355). They are a story of nature, of course, but a story conveyed also in clothing, the labor of women, birdsong that is also art. And a protest against a world too cold.

Back to summer. Zephirus blows us, softly and warmly, deep into the year (516). Time passes at such a clip that it is easy not to see how animated this world observed by no one in the poem has become. But let’s linger, and spin some quick lines into longer intimacies.[18]

Blossumez bolne to blowe (Blossoms bulge to bloom, 512), while the hedgerows are “rych” and “ronke” (luxurious, libidinous 513). Leaf and stem are flourishing, becoming overgrown. Isn’t that how the Green Chapel was swallowed into ruin, reuse, rebirth?

Let’s pause in this vegetal profusion, catch our breath, smell the evening’s fleeting perfume -- or at least note that the poem is now green with inhuman desire. “Wela wynne is þe wort þat waxes” (“very lovely is the plant that grows”), dripping dew from its leaves, eagerly awaiting the joyful gleam of the sun (“To bide a blysful blusch of þe bry3t sunne” 520).

Yes it’s just personification and we should not take anthropomorphism too seriously. The growing plants and the soundtrack of birdsong that accompany their yearning simply set the mood for the human actors: expectancy, possibility, lushness, desire. Move on. 

In its rapid season-change and narrative hurtling forward, the poem offers what Rick Godden describes as a beautiful yet unnerving time-lapse.[19] We are inhabiting for a few months-as-minutes a vegetal temporality, a medieval version of sLowLife, plants revealed as motile and desiring.[20] Tim Morton describes the quickened apprehension that “speeding up the world” yields as making “things that seem natural reveal something monstrous or artificial, an uncanny, morphing flow” (The Ecological Thought 43). We sense how every green thing lives, burgeons, respires, maybe even feels. What a green climate in which to dwell, once temporal flow is estranged from human time keeping, from anthropocentric pulse, season over denouement, dormancy over death, climate over climax.

Yet vines and flowers are closer to our own heartbeat than much of the world (even if we are probably too much like hummingbirds as far as trees are concerned). When we inhabit a botanical tempo through poetry and other methods of sustained observation, we behold how plants live, witness what they love. We also realize their anxieties, those same intimations of mortality the court felt at Lent. Autumn is coming in a rush (“Bot þen hy3es heruest” 521). A changing climate signals nearing winter, with harsh weather, desolation, and rot (“Warnez hym for þe wynter to wax ful rype” 522).

Time to provide against the nearing devastation, or perish, or go dormant.

“And al grayes þe gres þat grene watz ere” (527): and the grass turns all grey that had been green. Verdancy recedes, and so does distributed liveliness. Chill returns. But here’s something to glean before the cycle completes and we find ourselves in Gawain’s company. Arthur had a half sister and we know at least in retrospect that she sets the story in motion. Her life is difficult to excavate and filled with contradictions, but one thing is clear: she wanted a world with more possibility than was given to her. She wanted a future of her own determination, a plot that did not terminate in someone else’s denouement. As we’ve dallied in the change of seasons I have been trying to honor what she loved in life, her intimacies and her knowledge. My hunch is that Morgan likewise lingered among birds and plants and knew well their vibrancy. I am also going to hazard that she had a deep regard for stones.

“Þenne al rypez and rotez þat ros vpon first” (528): Then everything ripens and rots that in the beginning grew. Arthurian literature has a way of obliterating the things it loves, just as the cycle of seasons turns spring plants to compost and soil to mud. Let’s turn our thoughts to the passing of swift things like blossoms, lost narratives, and flesh and contemplate the abiding earth. But not as grave.

Green is vegetal, seasonal, rapid, brief: a shade for plant life and botanic desire. A green sky may presage tornado, or dance as distant aurora. Green may be the last flash of the setting sun, le rayon vert, an opening of possibility even when the world dims. But green is more than that, if we can slow these rapidly turning seasons even more. Green is swift … but green also opens the text to durations that far exceed the momentary or the seasonal. Green is holly, springtime, leaf – but also gem, enamel, armor and pigment.

Think back to last winter, which might now seem a long time ago (but it was only three stanzas). The Green Knight’s hue at Camelot is “grene as þe gres” (235). Gift of chlorophyll and sunshine, green is the color of nature, as ecological a shade as can be had, as well as a promise of burgeoning, primavera within snow. Green is the color here of the close at hand, the immediate, the ephemeral: nearby trees and grass, the seasonal impress of holly and ivy. But green constantly intermixes other shades, other things. The knight’s color is also compared to “grene aumayl on golde glowande” (“green enamel glowing on gold,” 236). Green hue is the work of nature and of human craft, a radiance that arrives through alliance with earthbound and enduring substances, time long passed and time about to emerge.

The illustrations in the Sir Gawain and the Green Knightmanuscript are a symphony of mineral verdancies. Here in close up Sir Gawain faces the Green Knight at the Green Chapel. Sometimes the color was created by painting indigo over orpiment (blue over yellow). Malachite and verdigris were the most popular minerals for creating verdant hues – and remember that next to Sir Gawain in this picture is cave-like entrance to the Green Chapel, an entrance perhaps to this mineral world of green. These earthy substances that dye the animal skin on which the poem is inscribed resonate with the green gems said to sparkle on the Green Knight’s clothing, accouterments, and horse. They convey a materiality and a temporality that far outlasts the human – and yet to which the human is intimately, materially bound.

The people of the Middle Ages did not have quite the same sense of deep time that we are forever congratulating ourselves for having developed. They did, however, understand temporal immensity. Stone perpetually brought medieval writers and thinkers to such unseasonal, geologic contemplation, the awakening from dormancy of dreams of a world that holds a tempo nothing like that whirl of seasons preoccupying quick humans and other biological life.

Plants and minerals are lively, but their indigenous temporality renders human access to their thriving difficult to maintain long. Stare at them too long, and you can even lose sight of how specific human lives matter. The story can become too large. Or, as with Sir Gawain, too small. He forgets so easily how capacious the world is through which he moves, how full of creatures like the birds who like him love life and want to endure against a cold clime.

I could never possess a mind of winter. I can never not think of the misery in a cold wind. Here we are again. Perhaps we’ve lingered too long before arriving: we have completed a rotation of the seasons, and yet arrive only a few hundred lines into the poem, when a knight is just about to start his adventure.

A swift story of winter, Lent, summer, and harvest returns to winter and to Gawain. We lost of track of him, didn’t we? We were so intent on the poem’s plants, climate, season, and stones. We became stuck on what a medieval writer would call the “virtus” that these various ecomaterialities hold: their vibrancy and power as described in medieval botanical manuals, natural histories, encyclopedias and lapidaries, their ability to interrupt human stories and trigger wonder. In this lingering I have attempted to take seriously the presence of a woman “bi craftes wel lerned” (2447) who acquired her “maystrés” (arts, 2448) from Merlin. Her “koyntyse of clergye” (skill in scholarship) likely involved an intimacy with the herbs and gems that through proper alliance produce desire, eventuation, and magic. I hesitated in the seasonal stanzas in honor of Morgan la Fay – and it is worth exploring what that strange honorific signifies. The prose Lancelot (c. 1214-27) describes les fees as those women in the British histories who know “les forches des paroles et des pieres et des erbes” (the powers of words and stones and plants).[21] Magic is not the gift of demons, but of comprehension of natural law, acquirable “by all who applied themselves to the right books, or who were admitted to study with an acknowledged master, such as Merlin.”[22] Literacy is essential to magic and in many versions of the Morgan story her title of fée is bestowed in recognition of her wide learning and achievements in medicine and astronomy.[23] The Green Knight describes “Morgne la Faye” as a deeply learned women who once had “drwry” (love-dealings) with Merlin, the very initiator of the Arthurian court (2446-48). He says nothing negative about their relationship (their love was “dere”) and stresses the depths of her knowledge – so much so that she is also “Morgne þe goddess.” She earns her two titles not because she is somehow closer to plants and animals than men (the familiar troping of the feminine as the natural). She is goddess and fairy because she is an expert (“clergye”) in words, stones, magnetism, stellar influence, herbs – in what the Middle Ages called “magik natural,” a discipline today that we would call natural science.[24] SGGK is remarkably neutral towards Morgan. Gawain overlooks her during his time in the castle because she is advanced in age and thereby unattractive -- but the text never implies that her elderly body offers a moral allegory. Although described in terms that are physically unflattering when she is glimpsed from Gawain’s point of view (Bertilak more objectively calls her “þe auncian lady,” 2463), in her home she is clearly revered (“And he3ly honowred with haþelez aboute” 949). No negative adjectives cluster around her in the text – though plenty are to be found in critical discussion of her presence (including “evil” “dangerous” “aggressive” and “lascivious”). She is praised by Bertilak, her liegeman, for being so learned, and for her ability to tame the proud (“Weldez non so hy3e hawtesse / Þat ho ne con make ful tame,” 2454-55) – a talent she was practicing against with the Arthurian court. True, she also wanted to scare Guenevere to death, and that is not very nice, but no textual rebuke is given for that attempt. The poem offers only a story of a desire too quickly glimpsed.[25] As we have seen by tarrying in the change of seasons with Morgan’s interests in mind, SGGK is a poem of such stories and desires swiftly witnessed. Bertilak seems quite joyful to be under Morgan’s sovereignty. Bertilak’s castle, which is Morgan’s castle, seems a place of eternal spring. Because of the bedroom scenes and the tempting and the testing, critics typically describe it as a perilous place – and maybe it is, from Gawain’s point of view. Maybe. But after the business with the head chopping concludes at the Green Chapel, His request that Gawain accompany him back to the castle for a celebratory feast that includes his aunt appears to be sincere (“Þerfore I eþe þe, haþel, to com to þyn aunt, / Make myry in my hous” (2467-68). Once Morgan’s story awakens from dormancy, is important not to enact that violence against her again, that her life as Morgan the Goddess – who is also Morgan the Scientist -- be recorded, acknowledged, lingered over. Patricia Ingham writes that the lines of forgiveness from the Green Knight that free Gawain for his fault “reverberate with a compassionate understanding of a knight’s desire to survive.”[26] The lines she is referencing are the ones from which I have taken my paper’s title: “Bot for 3e lufed your lyf þe lasse I yow blame” (“But because you loved your life, the less I blame you,” 2368). The Green Knight serves Morgan, so why not see in these words a shared ethos of Hautdesert, one that reverberates with a compassion for all things that want to survive and flourish, all things that love life?

In the castle of Bertilak Gawain encounters Morgan but fails to recognize her. She is just a woman to him, all the more below attention because she is not young. Thus does he look at learned scholar and his own aunt and behold a crone. Gawain is not very attentive. We know this from the green girdle he will accept from Bertilak’s wife and then attempt to hide. Yet without Morgan the poem would not possess its plot. Scholars typically classify Morgan as either a supernatural being (in Geoffrey of Monmouth and a few early sources; hypothesized in her fairy or enchantress form as being a memory of a Celtic goddess) or as fully human, a woman who uses her craft in the petty ways the medieval misogynist imagination expects women to act. But a text cannot be a closed or total world. Narratives are porous ecosystems, always disrupted by the foundations (full of so many dormant things) on which they are built – dormancies that change the climate when they spring to life, ephemeral perhaps in their thrivings but through cyclicality and season more enduring than you might think.

The daily testing of Gawain in his bed is eerily analogous to the hunting of deer, boar and fox. Peril limns life and winter is difficult to tell from spring. The green of growth, eco-temps, and inhuman tempos and the white of chill, pain, precarity and perishing flesh are entangled. Circles entangle rather than flow. Dormancy and season give the lie to death. If Lady Bertilak had narrated the poem’s plot, how different would it be? We discover as the narrative moves towards its close that she comes each morning to tempt Gawain to physical intimacy because her husband asked her to do so: his game not hers. “I sende hir to asay þe” (2362) the Green Knight tells Gawain, robbing the wooing scenes in retrospect of tension and pleasure. We will never know her story, her desires, her pleasures. But when Gawain narrates human history as a long chronicle of men betrayed by women, from Adam onwards, it is hard not to wonder about Lady Bertilak’s ill fit with the tale he tells. She was working with her husband, and the green girdle she gave him seems to be a story about men from which she is excluded. Though it is useful to pause and think about who wove the garment.

Something worth contemplating as well, speaking of weaving or interweaving: when Gawain enters Bertilak’s castle, he departs harsh winter for a verdant season, cold birds for greenery and revel. But winter and summer end up being the same place, the same liminal zone. Bertilak’s Castle is the Green Chapel, just as jovial Bertilak is the fierce Green Knight. This forbidding monster excuses Gawain completely for having take the green girdle from lady Bertilak to protect himself: “Bot for 3e lufed your lyf; þe lasse I yow blame” (because you loved your life, the less I blame you, 2368). The love of life engenders sympathetic inclination, and a great deal of laughter (the Green Knight chortles his way through his last scenes). Gawain is invited back to Bertilak’s house to make merry with him, to make merry with his own aunt, “Morgne la Faye.”

Within the poem’s cycle of seasons temporal ripples flow within the narrative’s geographical bubbles. In the middle of the poem, in the middle of its recurrence of winter, Gawain discovers the home of Bertilak le Hautdesert, a park-like enclosure where everything is green as spring. For a while. The poem will return to white snow and biting ice, but even here will be found a verdant figure who seems menacing but in the end offers convivial invitations and sober lessons in how stories work. Invited to celebration with his aunt Morgan, the fairy-goddess-scientist, Gawain will refuse both offer and knowledge, will return to the Arthurian court where the action started, changed but not really changed. He tells a sad, heroic story about his nick in his neck and the green garter that it is the reader’s duty to ignore. Intensely attentive to the creaturely affects of the animal, human and vegetal denizens of its mixed ecologies, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight displays a recurring interest in culture’s becoming weather and climate’s linguistic and emotional impress. Identifications against (the monstrous, the animal, the inhuman) are constantly tripped up by recognitions and sympathy crossing ontological lines. Traditional readings of the poem resolve such tensions by turning to the theological, but they do not take seriously the Green Knight’s reason for excusing Gawain for his fault, based on a principle of the love of life: “but for 3e lufed your lyf.” In this pardon inheres a secular ethics of shared precariousness, an enlarging of the here of the poem that widens but refuses to transcend sense of place.

My place is here, close to home. I’ve been showing you some scenes of writing and thinking that form my own here when I think about place and the medieval poem.

An archive of ten years’ duration, the images I have used to retell the story of SGGK were taken in an urban park near my house. The abandoned terminus of a streetcar system that once linked NW and central DC, Willard Avenue Park (as it is unpoetically named) is a space I pass through every day as I move from home to work and back. At some point long before I lived in DC the area was landscaped into an urban park, but by the time I knew it most of the area seemed abandoned: overgrown with kudzu and bamboo, full of rotted and arsenic-cured wooden equipment, a place urban wildlife loved and humans ignored. Last winter a new playground was installed, a drainage system added, areas resurfaced and made accessible, and some invasive species removed.

My path today was given by the poem itself and this intimate space of writing and thinking bookended by a subway station and my home. I followed a series of interwoven ecological strands in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to emphasize a here that is temporally thick, eco-temps traversed by rhythms swift and slow, that pulse within the poem but require some attentive lingering over climate and season. I thought through much of my argument with Willard Avenue Park.

The park is not nearly so lovely nor so lively as my images suggest. One end terminates in high rise apartment buildings that during times of heavy rain dump sewage into the stream that flows through the woods. 

A street traversed by buses, fire engines, and trucks can be heard through the trees.But I know from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight there is no such thing as a preserve of nature, a space where purities abide. Even a subway is an ecosystem. Some of the stories that I have not dwelt upon enough in this essay include the fact that this area was for a time part of a plantation. When Little Falls Stream watered fields, they were worked by enslaved humans who had been kidnapped from Africa and sold as if livestock. Before that the land belonged to the Piscataway, Anacostank, Pamunkey, Mattapanient, Nangemeick, and Tauxehent. Although it is known that an Indian trading post was established near the park by the early colonists, and suspected that the deer trails nearby may once have been hunting paths, indigenous history has mainly been obliterated. These vanished traces open SGGK to stories that arrive from prehistory (the Green Chapel is thought to be a Neolithic site, but we do not know exactly where) and postcoloniality (the Wales through which Gawain treks was being aggressively colonized at the time the poem was written, Arthurian myth was snatched from the Welsh, who are the wodwos and etaynez Gawain fights against in the wilderness, and might they not have a story of their own to speak?)

I took this picture coming home one evening after a storm. I’d cut through Willard Avenue Park as I always do, and paused in the darkness to listen to the birds quieting for the evening, the purling of the stream, the steady rumble of cars. In the bamboo that has not been cleared away yet I saw a deer, then a fox, urban wildlife well adapted to constricted expanses.

I think I was a little drunk – I’d met a friend for drinks in Foggy Bottom, and we lingered until the storm broke. I crossed a busy road and was almost home, then looked down into a puddle. Time, for a moment, slowed. Water became sky, the ground close to home disclosed a deeper story. I knew at that moment that I had to take this picture to bring this “here” to you.

---

[1] Carolyn Dinshaw, “Ecology,” in A Handbook of Middle English Studies, ed. Marion Turner (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2013) 347-62; quotation at 359. Dinshaw ascribes its ecocritical popularity to “its vegetal villain, geographical realism, precise picture of the seasons, and detailed account of the hunting animals” (359). In fact, however, ecocritical readings of medieval literature remains thin on the ground, and the “green” bibliography for SGGK is not extensive: see work by Gillian Rudd and Susan Crane.

[2] Postcolonial readings of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight have carefully built upon this feminist tradition in a way that ecocritical readings so far have not. Such analyses tend to be attentive to environmental justice in their probing of what happens when one people’s land becomes someone else’s territory – but they typically have little to say about nonhuman lives. See for example Patricia Ingham.

[3] For an analysis that brings these expanses together well see Mark Miller’s recent, illuminating examination of death drive, stillness and desire in the poem, “The Ends of Excitement in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Teleology, Ethics, and the Death Drive,” Studies in the Ages of Chaucer 32 (2010): 215-56. I am interested in bringing this objectless desire into a realm that includes nonhumans as participants in what Miller calls the “field of aliveness” rather than symbols or displacements for human stories, and so focus not on death but decay, dormancy, and tempos that are alien to human subjectivity.

[4] On the gendering of the public and the private in the poem and its relation to a split between nature and culture, see Margherita 140-41. Geraldine Heng writes: “Like each constituent of the pentangle, the path of every woman in the poem is articulated with that of every other, so that each approximately "vmbelappez and loukez in oþer," "vchone ... in oþer, þat non ende hade" (628, 657), a knitting together that reproduces the shadow of a different "endeles knot"in the poem - a knot of the feminine and the figure of another desire and its text” (“Feminine Knots and the Other Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” PMLA 106.3 [1991]: 500-514, at 503).

[5] Elizabeth Scala gets at the precarity of the story’s survival well when she writes that “its canonical position as a superlative late Middle English romance and the gem of the so-called alliterative revival belies its chance survival from an era before the introduction of the printing press. The critical attention the poem has enjoyed in the last century often obscures the fact that it was lost to readers of literature for centuries and had practically no effect on the formation of the English poetic canon” (Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002]) 38.

[6] Good, short histories of the manuscript’s coming to public attention maybe found in the two handbooks dedicated to the poem’s author: Ad Putter, An Introduction to the Gawain-Poet (London: Longman, 1996), esp. 1-4 and John M. Bowers, An Introduction to the Gawain Poet (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012).

[7] I’m thinking here of Steve Mentz’s suggestion that “The poetics of exile and migrancy overflow premodern literary culture. What are Odysseus and Aeneas but violently displaced migrants who eventually make it to old or new homes?” See http://stevementz.com/notes-toward-a-migrancy-syllabus/

[8] See Geoffrey of Monmouth, Vita Merlini, ed. and trans. Basil Clark (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1973) ll.908-38.

[9] The first time she is called Morgan la fee is in Chrétien de Troyes Erec et Enide (c. 1170). James Wade explores her development in Fairies in Medieval Romance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) 9-38. Carolyne Larrington gives a thorough overview of the development of the Morgan legends, stressing her role as learned enchantress rather than fairy, in King Arthur’s Enchantresses: Morgan and Her Sisters in Arthurian Tradition (London: Taurus, 2006). See also Stephen Knight, Merlin: Knowledge and Power through the Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009) 39-40, 77-83.

[10] On the inscrutability of fairy motivation see Wade. Even defenders of Morgan’s point of view in SGGK describe her more negatively than the poem does: Margherita for example calls her a “sinister maternal figure” (141).

[11] On the relation of the Troy opening to the unfolding of the plot of SGGK – and especially to the romance’s interest in Morgan, digression and delay, and the active forgetting of alternative, feminine histories – see Gayle Margherita, The Romance of Origins: Language and Sexual Difference in Middle English Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994) 129-51.

[12] “Morgan's responsibility for the plot mechanism has been resurrected, debated, minimized, multiplied, classified, and reimagined-only to be reappropriated once again (albeit with difficulty) to serve the masculine narrative, whose priority customarily goes unchallenged” (“Feminine Knots” 501). For two (of many) examples of insisting that Morgan is not nearly so important as the Green Knight declares her to be, see Larry D. Benson, Art and Tradition in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1965) and 34 and Albert B. Friedman, “Morgan la Fay in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Speculum 35 (1960):260-74. Mark Miller writes that when Morgan’s agency is revealed, her intention is something “no one cares about” and “ludicrous” (“The Ends of Excitement” 234; see n.31 for his fullest argument). Margherita gets at the supposed danger of dallying with Morgan well when she connects it to a fear of lingering with (feminist) theory: “’theory’ itself is often spoken of in our field as a kind of rhetorical dalliance, a fetishistic deferral of the medievalist’s linear and epic journey back into the past … If we stay at Carthage with Dido, we’ll never get to Italy and build a legacy for our sons. Worse, yet, we may realize that what seemed a momentary dalliance was in fact the raison d’être for the whole narrative, and find ourselves, like Gawain, hopelessly alienated from the community as a whole” (Romance of Origins 150).

[13] I am grateful to Kathleen E. Kennedy (@TheMedievalDrK) for a twitter conversation on this topic. See especially: “spring also a traditional famine season, as early crops aren't ready and what is, isn't always enough to fill in dpltd stores” (September 10, 2015).

[14] See Holly Dugan, “Spring Smells of Lilacs,” JHU Press Blog http://jhupressblog.com/2014/04/01/spring-smells-of-lilacs/

[15] ibid. Dugan notes that indole is an aromatic compound that may be found in flowers (such as lilacs) as well as feces.

[16] The quote is from Ad Putter, An Introduction to the Gawain-Poet, 53.

[17] Lesley Kordecki, Ecofeminist Subjectivities: Chaucer’s Talking Birds (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

[18] I am inspired here by Chris Piuma’s use of “intimacies” to describe how the works of the Pearl poet spin into new texts or “dystranslations”: “The Task of the Dystranslator: An introduction to a Dystranslation of the Works of the ‘Pearl’ Poet,“ postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2015) 6, 120–126.

[19] See “Neighboring Wastelands in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” http://rickgodden.com/2015/05/26/neighboring-wastelands/

[20] http://plantsinmotion.bio.indiana.edu/usbg/toc.htm

[21] Lancelot: Roman en prose de XIII Siècle, ed. Alexandre Micha, 9 vols. (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1978-83), 7.38; Lancelot-Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation, ed. Norris J. Lacy, 5 vols. (New York: Garland, 1993-96), 2.11. The passage is speaking specifically about the Lady of the Lake rather than Morgan, and speaks of how such enchantresses use their powers to remain young and beautiful. SGGK departs from this tradition by rendering Morgan an old woman, but I think that aging is part of the poet’s strategy of calling attention to how Gawain does not see the powers that are shaping his world and story. Wade examines the passage from the Lancelot as an instance of rationalizing the Otherworldly figure of the fairy into a human in Fairies in Medieval Romance p. 11.

[22] Thus Carolyne Larrington argues is the dominant mode of understanding magic from the twelfth century onwards: King Arthur’s Enchantress 10. Helen Cooper makes the good point that enchantment is a learned skill available to both men and women, that witchcraft “was taken to be an act, not a state” and did not necessarily convey opprobrium: The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 160; see also 184-85. Corinne Saunders makes some similar observations in noting the negative depiction of Morgan in Malory; see Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010) 247.

[23] See Larrington, King Arthur’s Enchantress 14-15.

[24] See the entry for “magyk” in the Middle English Dictionary. Larrington compares the study of natural magic to the university curriculum after the introduction of Aristotle, and argues that magic is often a learnedness that seems marvelous only to those who do not comprehend the natural laws behind its operation (King Arthur’s Enchantress 10).

[25] While I agree with Larrington that the poem “deliberately gives us too little information to decide about Morgan” (King Arthur’s Enchantress 68), I do not find her resolving the Guenevere story through the “Val sans retour” episode in the Lancelot convincing: the point of the story is in part its incompletion.

[26] Patricia Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001) 134. This sentence also seems profoundly true to me: “We might, thus, view Gawain’s ‘failure’ with more sympathy than he does himself, and remain attentive to the poignant resistances within it” (1350). 

How We Wrote: The Aftermath of Written Chatter

by Suzanne Conklin Akbari, with a few endnotes by Chris Piuma

How We Write: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blank Page emerged out of an efflorescence of what I described, in the book’s introduction, as “written chatter” – blogposts, Facebook comment threads, tweets, emails – which generated a conversation that was subsequently crystallized in the thirteen essays collected in the volume. It’s clear that this is a conversation that struck a nerve in people: as Jeffrey Cohen pointed out in his blogpost on the occasion of the book’s publication by punctum books, the initial ITM blogpost by me and Alexandra Gillespie had on that date reached 8585 hits, and Eileen Joy wrote to me and Chris Piuma recently to say that the book itself – which is available at no cost as an e-book, though users are encouraged to support Open Access by contributing to punctum books – had been downloaded 915 times since its publication two weeks before. I say this not in any spirit of self-congratulation but as a fact: this is a conversation that was long overdue, and one that has opened up some doors to new opportunities, new encounters.

These new encounters were encouraged by making How We Write an Open Access publication: for a project that is all about community-building through the act of writing,* it was essential to take advantage of the spontaneity and speed of production as well as the freedom of distribution made possible by working with punctum books and the Open Access model. The impact made almost immediately by How We Write was made evident in an email I received a couple of days after publication:

Every weekday we pick one Creative Commons or free licensed ebook to promote. "How We Write" is our selection for today. Unglue.it is a website dedicated to the development of sustainable funding and distribution for Creative Commons and other freely licensed books. We are compiling a comprehensive catalog of these books while offering authors and publishers new ways to make their efforts sustainable. We recently  launched "Thanks for Ungluing" which lets creators ask readers for support for free works on our download link pages and from inside the books. Thanks for using a Creative Commons license!  Eric Hellman, President, Free Ebook Foundation and Founder, Unglue.it 

My initial response, I’m embarrassed to say, was “Is this spam?” But as soon as I looked up unglue.it, I realized that something very interesting was going on. Unglue.it is a project committed to making books more freely available, and supporting the wider use of Creative Commons licensing. By making How We Write a featured book – not on the basis of any specific interest in the topic, but because of its publisher’s clearly stated commitment to Open Access – unglue.it brought the project to a wider readership, and affirmed the principles of community-building that are essential to punctum books in general, and to How We Write in particular.

Other interesting conversational aftermaths, both in the form of “written chatter” and in the form of actual in-person chatter, have been abundant. I hope, too, that there will be much more opportunity to carry on this conversation at the upcoming meeting of the BABEL Working Group on 9-11 October, which features a session explicitly dedicated to “Counter-Productivity:Valuing Scholarly Processes,” organized by Marian Bleeke and Asa Mittman for The Material Collective. Their session asks the following questions: “What do you actually do when reading for a research project? …What do you do when you are thinking? When you sit down to write? …Have your practices as a scholar shifted over time and if so how and why?” These questions resonate with the essays collected in How We Write, with a shared focus on research – like writing – as process, and as a process that changes over time.

Among the many examples of written chatter already engendered by How We Write, let me give two short examples: emails from postdocs writing from two distant locations, echoing the geographical diversity that also underlies the essays collected in the book (xxi-xxii). Here’s a response from a postdoctoral fellow writing from a university in Israel:

As a postdoctoral fellow in the throes of converting my dissertation into a book, I look at a lot of writing blogs, books etc., and have become somewhat disillusioned with them. I took a look at "How We Write" because I thought seeing some other perspectives might be helpful (and also as a form of procrastination, I admit). Your essay was so incredibly helpful to me, because I, too, write the way you describe – long periods of procrastination, doing other things, and stalling, before finally settling in to write an entire chapter in a few days or weeks of concentrated work. I spend a lot of my time feeling guilty about this, and it is so great to read about other scholars who have a similar writing method and it works out for them. So thank you, so much, for this collection, and for your essay in it. 

And here’s another one, from a postdoctoral fellow in Norway:

I was made aware of How We Write through Derek Gregory. The anthology looks very interesting! I'm giving a talk at a PhD seminar about writing and would love to have a look at the anthology and tell my students about it, but it doesn't seem to be out yet, and the seminar is this Friday... I'm wondering if there's a chance I could get a reader's copy or something - a pdf - so that I could read it before the seminar and tell my students about it. Hope to hear from you!

These were wonderful messages to receive, on three different levels: first of all, Open Access – it was a delight to be able to respond to the postdoc in Norway with a link to the e-book, which he could use and then pass on to his students. Second of all: the extraordinary diversity of place in these responses, remote not only in physical location but also in terms of the web of connections that led each postdoc to the book. For the postdoc writing from Israel, the point of connection appeared to have been the various writing blogs she alludes to, where she may have found a reference to How We Write; for the postdoc in Norway, the connection came through the field of geography (two of the contributors to How We Write, Stuart Elden and Derek Gregory, had referred to their essays for the volume on their own blogs). Finally, the unpredictable, serendipitous nature of this community is perhaps most remarkable of all: these are people whom, in the normal course of things, I would never have run across – but through the collection, we are all in conversation. The postdoc in Israel writes to say, I recognize my own process in your account of your writing, and so we are together in this shared endeavor; the postdoc in Norway writes to say, I want to share the conversation of your book, which I learned about in a different conversation (either online or in person), within the conversation in my seminar. In other words, we are all part of conversations we don’t even know about. And that’s awesome.**

But there are also the conversations – some of them very tense conversations – that we do know about. An interesting and curious example of this appeared over the last few days, when I shared the book with some of the upper-level administrators in my workplace. There was initially much enthusiasm – “This is great!” – and expressions of eagerness to talk about the collection in university meetings of department chairs, where How We Write might provide a useful example of collaborative work on writing (a priority area, here at the University of Toronto as at many other universities). It might also be seen as exemplary in the way the book draws together contributions from such a wide range of academics: graduate students, postdocs, junior faculty, and those who are mid-career or senior faculty, including lower-level administrators. But then, I think, those upper-level administrators just may have noticed something that made them less comfortable: that is, the explicitly political dimension of the work that – while it is not foregrounded as much as it might be – underpins the collection as a whole and was, in part, a motivation for all that followed.

I am referring to the first essay in the collection, by Michael Collins, whose own blogpost (emerging from a roundtable at the School of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto) was the starting point for the “written chatter” that bubbled up all around. Michael’s essay addresses his experience of the writing process, but he also does not hesitate to identify the all too practical economic substrate of the challenges that face today’s graduate students in the Humanities: namely, how to carry out doctoral studies on a very limited stipend, without taking on the burden of debt. His essay closes this way:

Institutional support needs to be radically reimagined. Writing a dissertation is meant to be a full time job. It needs to be paid like one. There is no mystery here. PhD candidates do not have the time and energy to complete dissertations on time because they are distracted by extreme financial and material challenges. I can’t stress this enough. We are demoralized and exhausted, like any other employees who are overworked, underpaid, and demonstrably unappreciated by the most powerful within the University (if they actually appreciated us as they claim to do, they would pay us what we’re worth). A lost generation of should-be scholars is forming around this problem. Fix it, and dissertations will get written. (How We Write 7) 

While I may be in for some uncomfortable conversations with the said administrators, I think that there is nonetheless a great value in generating them: through this aspect of the first essay, which acts as a cornerstone for the contributions that follow, we are reminded in the strongest terms of the human, physical, embodied reality of the writer, which – as many of the following essays make clear – includes times of suffering.***

In his blogpost, Jeffrey pointed out the “embodied” nature of many of the contributions: “The volume reassures that many ways of getting writing done exist, that they will likely change over time, that none are perfect, that all adapt to embodied experience (crying infants are a running thread in the book; let’s call it the Writing During Colic topos).” This is a strand that was evident to me on one level while editing the collection, but which became evident on a whole different level when I looked at the collection in retrospect. It’s clear that the embodied nature of writing is foregrounded in many of the contributions, from Michael Collins’ comments on the economic pressures that confront the grad student writer; to Maura Nolan’s account of how changing health circumstances affect how much (and when) the writer’s body cooperates with the writer’s desire to write; to Rick Godden’s account of the physical circumstances of writing in situations where a book being out of reach required him to “become skilled in the art of Google-fu” (80); and so on. Several of the contributors talk explicitly, as Jeffrey notes, about the challenge of integrating child-care responsibilities with the work of writing. While allusions to the impact of child-care on writing appear in many of the essays, it is interesting that the most explicit and detailed accounts appear in essays written by men. These include Steve Mentz on writing with a screaming baby on his shoulder (124-25), Dan Kline on juggling child-care with academic duties (137-38), and – most vivid and charming of all – Jeffrey Cohen’s daughter photobombing the photo of his writing space on the opening page of his essay (44).

What’s interesting to me, looking back on this, is how male writers – and, in particular, more senior male writers – are able to talk with increasing openness and honesty about the bodily challenges to the writer’s work, especially as these include family-care responsibilities. This is, without a doubt, a good thing. It’s striking, though, that women writers are still hesitant to foreground the interplay of child-care with the writer’s work. This may in part have to do with a continuing anxiety on the part of women scholars (especially those in more junior, and therefore less secure, positions) that acknowledging their role as mothers may make them seem less ‘serious’ about their work. Here, the fact of childbirth – a condition of the body often understood (in my experience, wrongly) as debilitating, both mentally and physically, to the ‘serious’ academic – may inflect the writer’s ability to acknowledge the interplay of the role of parent with the role of writer. I would like to see more conversation, especially cross-generational conversation, on this topic. How are different constellations of family structures affecting these conversations? Has institutionalized parental leave, both for faculty and (at least in Canada) for graduate students, improved the situation, or has it created new challenges that are different from those that faced the graduate students and junior faculty who worked in a time before institutionalized parental leave?

In part, these questions pertain to our ongoing conversation about the role of the writer, especially the writer as an embodied self. But they are also the beginning of a different but related conversation, centering on the generational changes that have affected women in academia over the last two decades. There is an increasingly evident split between feminists of older generations and those of younger generations, often centered on topics such as sexual violence (especially sexual violence on campus), sexual harassment, and trigger warnings. The split centers not so much on the recognition of these as real problems on university and college campuses as on the question of how best to address these issues. Having been on both sides of this divide – as a younger faculty member, outraged by senior female colleagues’ toleration of sexual harassment on our campus; as an older faculty member, trying to figure out how to reconcile a commitment to academic freedom with students’ expressed desire for trigger warnings – I am increasingly eager to find ways to create spaces for intergenerational conversation. We have much to learn from one another.

This fact – that we have much to learn from one another – pertains to the last aspect of my retrospective look back at How We Write: that is, the experience of collaborating with Chris Piuma on the physical production of this book. Chris and I have had a long and fruitful relation in the context of his doctoral research, where I am a member of his advisory committee (not his primary supervisor), and we also worked together (as instructor and TA) in developing a large lecture class (about 400 undergrads) on “The Literary Tradition,” a survey of influential works of world literature from Homer to Goethe. In other words, we have worked together within existing institutional frameworks for professor-graduate student interactions. In creating the book of How We Write, however – both the physical, hard-copy book and the magnificently vivid e-book – bringing it from a jumbled series of contributions to an integrated whole that had a shape and an underlying narrative, Chris and I worked together as collaborators. He suggested the subtitle “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blank Page,” which introduced a poetic metanarrative for the essays, alluding to Wallace Stevens’ poem (which then became the epigraph for the introduction I subsequently wrote). The imagistic series of stanzas of Stevens’ poem became for me a kind of mnemonic for the essays that followed, each one understood as a kind of poetic image. It’s unsurprising, then, that the splash pages that open the essays have such a powerful effect on the reader – most strikingly in the colorful illustrations of the e-book.

While the original idea for including images came from Stuart Elden, who offered to provide a picture of his working space to accompany his essay, it was Chris who ran with this idea, encouraging contributors to come up with a wide range of opening images that might illustrate or epitomize the underlying theme of each essay.**** Alexandra Gillespie’s contribution, unsurprisingly, features a honey badger drinking a cocktail; no one who knows Alex will need a fuller explanation. Steve Mentz’s essay opens with a picture of him swimming the waters of the Atlantic, in a photo taken by his daughter – one of the “colicky babies” that were integral to his writer’s life. Every one of the images tells a story, a story that resonates with the content of the individual essay and with the collection as a whole. And some of these images have engendered new written chatter: Maura Nolan’s essay opens with a drawing made for her by her niece many years ago. That niece, now a freshman in college, was surprised and pleased to learn from Maura that her childhood drawing was illustrating Maura’s essay about her writing practice. Maura emailed to describe their encounter, as mediated by the book:

I have had the most wonderful exchange with my niece for the last hour!  I didn't tell her about using her picture in the volume--I wanted it to be a surprise….We have been texting a lot, and today I texted her the punctum link and told her that she had a picture in print.  She was SO excited!  She was absolutely thrilled--and she read my essay, and it really brought us closer together, as adults, for the first time. We have always been close, but of course, she's never read anything personal I've written, and we have generally talked via the medium of my sister, her mom. So the whole thing turned out to be a fantastic bonding experience for Siobhan and me. 

More written chatter! And, just yesterday, I saw that Steve Mentz had posted on Facebook a picture of his daughter reading How We Write – perhaps looking at the very page containing the portrait of him swimming, taken by her.

I learned a lot in the process of putting together this book – about what colleagues do when they write, about what I myself do, and about writing itself. The most important thing I learned is that there is no one right way to write.***** The other thing I learned was the importance of community. Without idealizing community, without underestimating the importance of existing power relations and inequities that must be acknowledged, we can still say: we share a space, and within that space, we can learn from one another, and support one another.

NOTES (by Chris):
* “community-building through the act of writing”: Yes, but. I designed the book, helped edit some of the pieces, and told Suzanne early on that there was the material for a book here. Some of that happened through “written chatter,” but I didn’t really write any of the book (except for a some incidental text, such as some of the photo captions).+ Editing, designing, publishing: These are all not writing, but they are parts of an ecology that allows writing to thrive. (Dear Reader, add “reading” to that list as well!)
** Being talked about in conversations that I’m not involved with is something I find terrifying and the opposite of awesome. I realize it happens, I realize it has to happen, I realize that good things can come of it, but it’s like other people’s bowel movements: for the most part, I’d rather not think about it. But the nice thing about a book—especially a book where your name only appears in small print on the bottom of the copyright page, tucked out of the way—is that people can talk about it without talking about you. This is an awesome thing.
*** There is so much suffering in this book. There is a lot of joy as well, but the dominant mood is perhaps a joyful regard at past suffering: so many times when writing caused physical, mental, emotional pain.++ But this is a book about academic writing, which is to say that it’s a book about academics, who mostly believe that a certain sort of writing is foundational to who they are and what they do. One of the things I felt on my last reading of How We Write was that no one really questions this. (And I guess, why would you, in an essay about how you write?) How We Write emerged during a period when I was questioning this, when I was coming to the realization that the pain of writing is not worth it for me. This spring I finally noticed that every paragraph I added to my dissertation cost me a few days of depression, and that this had been true for ages. (I went to grad school hoping that it would teach me a way past this: It did not.) And so I started to think, is there another way? I joined punctum and spent the rest of the summer designing and publishing books, and helping to organize the upcoming BABEL conference—all of which were challenging and difficult and (I think) important, but not painful and depressing the way that writing is. At this point, I am accepting that if writing is foundational to being an academic, then I am not going to be a functioning academic—or even one of How We Write’s dysfunctionally functional academics. But even if others don’t suffer from writing to the extent that I do (or just have stronger constitutions?), there is still clearly a vast amount of suffering involved: and I (idealistically) wonder whether there could be a more humane system. Or if not, whether we should look at each book that manages to get written as a monument to suffering.+++ I wonder whether the contributors to How We Write suffered when they wrote their essays. My sense is that they didn’t, or that most of them suffered much less than usual.
**** Designing a book is not writing, but it is a creative, interpretive, rhetorical act. It is perhaps like conducting: That performance of Beethoven is still clearly Beethoven, but it’s also Toscanini’s Beethoven.
***** And so, in response How We Write, my follow-up question: Is one of the right ways of writing: not writing at all? There are many ways to not write (from Bartleby to Socrates to Bénabou to...) , and some of those ways have more of an effect on a writing/publishing/thinking ecology (or, if you like, community) than others. How do we not write? And what do we do with people who are vital parts of the community—but who do not write?

MORE NOTES to Chris’s notes (by Suzanne):
+ Oh, but there was definitely a creative process there, even if we don’t call it “writing.” For example, after Chris had overseen the development of the splash pages, he looked back at the front matter (short bios of contributors, which he titled “Who We Are,” and “About the Images”) and asked, “Do we want an illustration for these as well?” And, of course, we did: a beautiful photo (so beautiful in the online color version!) of fluorescent minerals from Franklin, NJ, representing the vivid individuality of each of the contributors, “gathered” (in Chris’s telling term, in the caption). And, for “About the Images,” a photo of a mirror, showing the photographer in the mirror with an assortment of other photographs alongside the frame – caption: “Image, with images.” For me, those bits of the book are among its most intensively creative moments.
++ And joy! Several contributors talk about the enormous pleasure of writing, once the writing starts. Maybe the misery overshadows the joy too much in the retelling of the experience.
+++ Books as monuments to suffering: undoubtedly the case. As Christine de Pizan puts it, “Just like a woman who has given birth forgets the pain and labor as soon as she hears her child cry, you will forget the hard work when you hear the voices of your books” (L’Avision 3.10).

30% discount for readers: Medievalism: Key Critical Terms and Medievalism: A Critical History

by J J Cohen

Boydell and Brewer asked me if In the Middle would like to offer its readers a discount on two new books of wide interest among medievalists ... and I thought, why not? These books look great.

(ITM makes no money from this offer -- we are a zero profit entity, fueled by the labor of the five bloggers. We are happy to promote the work of any of any kindred spirits: just ask us. We are always open to guest posts, book excerpts, you name it.)

Here are the details.

Boydell & Brewer is pleased to offer a 30% discount on Medievalism: Key Critical Terms and Medievalism: A Critical History. Please use promo code 15562 when ordering atwww.boydellandbrewer.com.

In Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, edited by Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz, leading international scholars in the field define and exemplify essential terms used when speaking of the reception of medieval culture in postmedieval times, in a lively and accessible style.

http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=14589

Medievalism: A Critical History, by David Matthews, is an accessibly-written survey of the origins and growth of the discipline of medievalism studies.

http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=14638

The Pope Is Coming! Papal Visit 2015

by JONATHAN HSY

[Papal Visit 2015 swag on sale this morning, George Washington University, Washington, DC.]

The Pope is coming to town! DC has been abuzz as it prepares for a visit by Pope Francis (the pontiff is arriving here tomorrow and staying for a few days before heading to Philly and NYC). Back in April 2008, JEFFREY blogged about the visit by the previous pontiff (Pope Benedict XVI, aka Bishop of Rome) making his way down Pennsylvania Avenue and bypassing the aptly-named Rome Hall (where the English Department is located). It would appear that Pope Francis has a very busy agenda and, alas, will not be making his way by Rome Hall this time around.

Among many other things, the Pope (as head of state of the Vatican) will be making a visit to the White House and will also make an unprecedented address to a joint session of the US Congress. There's much speculation about what he'll discuss, but -- as befits his medieval namesake Saint Francis of Assisi -- Pope Francis is expected to address issues of poverty and the environment. Indeed, the Pope's June 2015 encyclical letter entitled "Laudato Si'" draws its title from the refrain of the Canticle on Creation by St. Francis of Assisi (read more about this on the Medieval Histories blog); subtitled "on care for our common home," this encyclical has been interpreted as a call for policymakers to take action on climate change [you can read the original document in Italian, in English, and other languages on the Vatican website].

[The FABULOUS coronation tiara of Pope Paul VI, on permanent display at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC. Photo taken August 2012.]

Even if the Pope isn't currently in town, there are a number of sites around DC where papal history and related aspects of medieval (specifically Franciscan) culture thrive. The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception has some lovely papal artifacts on display. Pope Francis will visit the Basilica to canonize Spanish missionary (and Franciscan) Junípero Serra, founder of many missions in California; this canonization mass will be conducted in Spanish--this being not only the native tongue of Serra but also that of Argentina-born Francis (this also marks the first canonization mass of a Catholic saint to occur in the US).

[A view of the gorgeous interior of the Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land in America, Washington, DC. Photo taken August 2012 (click to enlarge).]

The Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land in America is well worth a visit for its astounding replicas of religious sites in the Holy Land. This monastery is not surprisingly taking part in the visit of Pope Francis in a number of ways. The friars are hosting a watch party for the Pope's arrival, as well as an exhibit honoring Junípero Serra.

[Statue of Friar Godfrey (Rev. Godfrey Schilling), founder of the monastery, and a bypassing quinceañera procession. Inside the Garden of the Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land in America, Washington, DC. Photo taken August 2012.]

Some more resources regarding the Pope's visit to DC:

• Pope Francis Visit 2015 (the official website for the Pope's visit to the US), including the schedule for Washington, DC, Philadelphia, and New York.
• Papal Visit 2015 Guide (DC tourism website).
• How to get around DC during the Pope's visit (Washington Post).
• Where to see Pope Francis (Washingtonian).
• Coverage of some resistance to the canonization of Junípero Serra (Washington Post).
• Story about architecture students at Catholic University submitting their designs for a new papal altar (Washington Post).
• A subversive guide to the Pope's visit (Daily Kos).

Beowulf Trump and Lady Fiorina: GOP Debates and Medieval Rhetoric

by JONATHAN HSY

[Split-screen screenshot from the livestream of last night’s GOP debate: on the left, real estate mogul and zillionaire Donald Trump; on the right, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina.]

I spent last night grading Chaucer translations and poetry assignments while the GOP debate played in the background. As someone who teaches in Washington, DC, I find it’s always interesting to “tune in” whenever election season rolls around—political debates invariably provide timely and topical ways to think about present-day issues of gender, performance, and the arts of rhetoric (all of which are key themes in many of my literature classes).

Donald Trump’s prominence in the field of GOP candidates has driven much of the mainstream media coverage of this election cycle, and last night The Donald didn’t disappoint.

A few weeks ago, Bruce Holsinger's brilliant #BeowulfTrump tweets (archived here by Shyama Rajendran) enacted a witty parody of The Donald’s rhetoric by imagining Trump in the role of the hero of an Anglo-Saxon epic. For more insights regarding masculine posturing and bombast, read this interview with Holsinger in The Washington Post (this meme has also taken the form of a stand-alone @BeowulfTrump twitter account). For an excellent analysis (from earlier this summer) of Trump’s performance habits that connects Trumpian rhetoric to Classical epics, check out Jeet Heer’s piece in New Republic.

There is a lot to say about how the inclusion of Carly Fiorina—i.e., the first appearance of a woman in a primetime GOP debate this cycle—transformed the discourse. The Washington Post (for instance) quickly declared Fiorina the “winner” of the debate (and Vox justifiably praised her “mic-drop response” to Trump’s misogyny), so on many accounts she more than held her own. What intrigues me most this morning, though, is Fiorina’s response when all the candidates were invited to close the debate by offering their vision of America. Fiorina waxed poetic in a weirdly ekphrastic (and all-female) personification allegory (I cite the partial transcript here):

I think what this nation can be an must be can be symbolized by Lady Liberty and Lady Justice. Lady Liberty stands tall and strong. She is clear eyed and resolute. She doesn't shield her eyes from the realities of the world, but she faces outward into the world nevertheless as we always must, and she holds her torch high. Because she knows she is a beacon of hope in a very troubled world. And Lady Justice. Lady Justice holds a sword by her side because she is a fighter, a warrior for the values and the principles that have made this nation great. She holds a scale in her other hand, and with that scale she says all of us are equal in the eyes of God. 

And so all of us must be equal in the eyes of the government, powerful and powerless alike. And she wears a blindfold. And with that blindfold she is saying to us us that it must be true, it can be true, that in this country in this century it doesn't matter how you are, it doesn't matter who you are, it doesn't matter what you look like, it doesn't matter how you start, and it doesn't matter your circumstances. Here in this nation, every American's life must be filled with the possibilities that come from their God given gifts, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Fiorina’s rhetoric invites many questions:

• What’s up with this allegorical interpretation of the iconic blindfold of Lady Justice?
• Might Fiorina’s status as the only woman at this debate shape her rhetorical choices?
• Can the Bechdel Test (or Bechdel-Wallace Test) apply to personification allegory?
• How might this vision of America differ if it invoked Lady Fortune or Lady Philosophy?

I'm sure ITM readers will discern many other uncanny affinities between contemporary political discourse and medieval rhetorical traditions. I'll be curious to find out what other gems this election cycle will offer.

How We Write: Now Out from punctum books

by J J Cohen

Readers of this blog will be interested in the latest -- and perhaps speediest ever into print -- book from punctum. How We Write: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blank Page began here at ITM, with a superb guest post by Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Alexandra Gillespie. The piece resonated: as of today it has been read 8585 times. What's so refreshing about the post -- and the book that springs from its publication -- is a refusal to prescribe for others any method of accomplishing academic writing. Different modes are examined and their costs (especially emotional) are detailed without being judged. The volume reassures that many ways of getting writing done exist, that they will likely change over time, that none are perfect, that all adopt to embodied experience (crying infants are a running thread in the book; let's call it the Writing During Colic topos). What all the methods have in common is simple perseverance. There are no stories here of those who gave up, despite the toll writing takes. How We Write is diverse, bringing together scholars at various points in their careers. Many but certainly not all are medievalists -- but I don't think discipline really matters here. The methods described don't strike me as especially field specific. Suzanne did an incredible job of bringing How We Write together, and Chris Piuma ensured that the finished product would be a thing of beauty. It is.

My own contribution brings together two pivotal moments in my career: a period when I did not have quite so many demands on my time, because I had just stopped being an administrator (what a dent that put in my productivity); and a period a few years later when, even though I had finished being department chair and had had some fellowships that enabled me to complete my research for Stone, carving out the time to give the book the form, voice and argument it wanted was extremely difficult. I devised what I called a Writing Lockdown for fifty summer days. I did not by any means complete the shaping of the book during that time but the sustained focus it enabled assisted that goal immensely -- though at considerable cost. Re-reading my account now makes me realize how anxiety limns my writing, mostly as a productive spur rather than anything crippling. But I think I'd rather live without it. On a more personal note, I'm mentioning that affect because -- despite what some eminent colleagues say about how scholars ought to feel less and think more -- I actually believe cognition and affect to be inseparable. We are embodied creatures whose emotional lives are intimate to our writing and thoughts. That intimacy can often help us to understand distant times better. I also believe we don't talk about the difficult affective states enough, like depression or anxiety, in our work, or with our colleagues, or with our students. We can do better.

If you download a copy of How We Write, please make a donation to punctum books. Open access is not free. It is sustained in part by love (we are all donating our labor and time), but it is also sustained by the ability of those who enjoy its fruits to support the endeavor financially. Be generous! The world is better for having books like this within it.

II love that my daughter photobombed the picture I took of my study and ended up in the book)

Medievalists and the Global Refugee Crisis

by JONATHAN HSY

[UPDATED September 8 with more links! Scroll to the end of this post.]

This entry falls somewhere between a compilation of links/resources and a proper essay. In this blog posting, I wanted to reflect a bit on the global refugee crisis that's currently in the news and consider how (or if) medievalists might respond to what's happening in Europe and elsewhere.

Part I: Medievalists on Twitter

[Images from my twitter feed yesterday (September 6), including premodern iconography of the biblical Flight into Egypt.]

The image above is a screenshot from my mobile device yesterday morning—and it happens to provide a sample of different ways medievalists (premodern academics) are engaging with media coverage of the plight of refugees in Europe and other places around the globe:

• The Refugee Tales Walk is a collective effort by activists and storytellers to showcase the stories of refugees indefinitely detained in the UK; taking its cue from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the project tells stories of lives in transit. Note this brief blurb on the Global Chaucers blog; you can also follow "Refugee Tales" on Facebook or on twitter.

• The Chaucer tweeter (@LeVostreGC) urges his followers to support the UN Refugee Agency.

• Kees Teszelszky, historian of early modern Dutch-Ottoman-Hungarian relations, chimed in on the plight of refugees by tweeting depictions of the biblical Flight into Egypt (Mary, Joseph, and infant Jesus on horseback) from 16th-century sculpture and stained glass; another tweet suggests the recursive history of refugees in transit through Hungary in particular. [Medievalists.net also linked to an article about medieval refugees fleeing Hungary during Mongol invasions.]

Popular media (especially social media) has deployed the adjective “medieval” to varied ends: sometimes the term targets refugees themselves, but other times refers to the perceived mentalities of governments (European as well as Middle Eastern) in response to this crisis [I won't link to particular examples here, but a quick search for "medieval" and "refugee crisis" certainly brings up examples].

In mainstream news media, people of varied religious backgrounds are discussing the ethics of refugee welcome, including

• Jewish traditions of welcome for strangers (from The Guardian, September 5).

• Coverage of the Pope's very recent call for Europe's Catholics to welcome refugees (The Washington Post, September 6).

• Forceful critiques of nativism and Islamophobia in responses to the refugee crisis in Europe and online (The Conversation, June 24).

Historical context: In an earlier conversation on twitter (after the mass murders in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC, and subsequent news coverage of an online racist screed attributed to the shooter), Karl Steel stated that we as medievalists must be prepared to disrupt racists’ idea of "Europe." As indicated in the article about nativism and xenophobia linked above, the refugee situation has laid bare political anxieties over a "Muslim takeover" of Europe, and related fantasies of a white, Christian nation can become the implicit or overt basis for excluding refugees from over land or sea—and not only in Europe but also across the so-called “Global North” of industrialized countries (e.g., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United States).

Part II: Discomforts of Analogy

[Top half of image: The opening to The Man of Law's Tale (illus. Edward Burne-Jones) in The Kelmscott Chaucer (William Morris, 1896) depicts Constance set adrift on a rudderless ship. 

Bottom half of image: In the opening scene of the 2003 BBC adaptation of The Man of Law's Tale (written by Olivia Hetreed, directed by Julian Jarrold), Constance is a Nigerian refugee.]

In addition to addressing a broader historical view of "Europe" and its meanings over time, how might medievalists think more carefully about analogies made between the lives of medieval people and refugees today?

• The Refugee Tales Walk (mentioned in Part I) provocatively invites people to contemplate similarities between the plight of present-day refugees and experiences of medieval travelers, with a clear ethical and political objective: building compassion and solidarity with displaced peoples and using art and storytelling to combat prejudice.

• In a blog post from over a year ago, Steve Mentz reflected on Caroline Bergvall's book Drift (2014), a work that juxtaposes the Anglo-Saxon elegy "The Seafarer" with the story of a boat of Algerian refugees that was seen—but not rescued—by NATO vessels in March 2011.

• Chaucer's The Man of Law's Tale tells the story of Constance, a tempest-tossed and much-imperiled protagonist. Her story begins in Rome, but her subsequent transit to (Muslim) Syria and (pagan but Christianizing) Britain—with many travails and dangers in between—have invited comparisons between this story and refugee experiences in the present. In a 2003 adaptation of The Canterbury Tales for the BBC, six tales were set in modern multiethnic Britain. The Man of Law's Tale (written by Olivia Hetreed and directed by Julian Jarrold) casts Constance as Nigerian refugee who mysteriously washes ashore in northern Britain—and the story goes on to consider modern-day complications of race, trauma, religious community, and cultural assimilation. This adaptation is complete with a scheming mother-in-law figure and courtroom drama scene (all present in Chaucer's original), and I've found this attentive adaptation useful when teaching my medieval literature classes. [For more about this production, see Susan Yager's 2007 article; I also address some linguistic aspects of this adaptation in a 2014 essay collection.]

I'll end this post by referring, in a roundabout way, to my own discussion of medieval Constance narratives (Chaucer's rendition as well as analogues by Boccaccio, Gower, and Trivet) in my book Trading Tongues (2013). The focus of my analysis on that book was on perpetual disorientation of the protagonist and she moves across space and language. Earlier this year, Pamela Troyer reviewed my book in the Rocky Mountain Review, and I was intrigued by her account of how she brought my chapter into her classroom. I quote these paragraphs here not because of what Troyer says about my book itself but what rather for her attentive reflections on the varied perspectives and life experiences of students from recent immigrant backgrounds:

After reading Trading Tongues, I experimented with Hsy's ideas in a required course I teach that includes readings from Canterbury Tales. The class had students majoring in literary studies, secondary or elementary education, and creative writing. Three of them were bilingual and most of them from area public schools, which are now multilingual communities; the Denver Public Schools posts its "top languages spoken" as Spanish, Vietnamese, Arabic, Somali, Amharic, Nepali, and Russian. Since we only spend six weeks on Chaucer's works, I have never assigned the Man of Law's Tale, but after reading Hsy's treatment of the Custance story [...] I wondered if the students might identify with her traumatic experience of geographical and linguistic displacement. [...]

I fully expected the class to be perplexed and stymied by the strange elements of the story and by Custance's impossible travel trajectory—the story is so medieval!—but a surprising number of the students related to her vulnerability and powerlessness. They saw her as a recognizable victim of racial violence, religious persecution, and sexual harassment, bartered by "pimps" or "slave traders." A student whose parents immigrated from Guatemala wrote with unexpected clarity that Custance "is just like many women in the world today, a social outcast with no access to justice except the fantasy of God's grace." My students found Custance's peripatetic suffering plausible and accessible. What they found "medieval" and unrealistic was the conclusion of the story: Custance survives her travails (the French root of travel) without having been raped or beaten and without losing her healthy child to kidnappers or death. Unrealistically she is reunited with her people in material comfort in her homeland. One first-generation American summarized it as "typical immigrant wishful thinking." (Troyer 98)

Troyer's discussion tantalizingly ends there, and there's much more about this classroom experience that could be explored. How does an affective response to a seemingly alien medieval world change how one thinks about (im)migraiton, desire, hope, nostalgia, life trajectories? I'll just end this posting by asking few questions. What are the ethical investments of medievalists in this current humanitarian crisis (or any crisis, for that matter)? How (or should) we address urgent present-day concerns in our scholarship, in our classrooms, online, or in the streets?

UPDATES [September 8]:

• Steve Mentz: "Notes toward a Migrancy Syllabus" (September 8)
• Cynthia Haven: "'Mountainish inhumanity': Thomas More, Shakespeare, and the refugee crisis" (September 7)

The Lewis Chessmen and "Margret the Adroit," their Maker (?!)

by J J Cohen

St Martin's Press asked me to bring this new book to your attention, and I am happy to do so, since the volume does appear to speak well on behalf of what makes studying the people and objects (as well as, by way of the sagas) the texts of the Middle Ages so rewarding. It's Nancy Marie Brown, Ivory Vikings: The Mystery of the Most Famous Chessmen in the World and the Woman Who Made Them -- and yes, OK, that title is quite attention grabbing: women as medieval sculptors and artisans? Not sure how that will be discernible in the art but I have not read the book yet so ... here is the blurb.

In the early 1800's, on a Hebridean beach in Scotland, the sea exposed an ancient treasure cache: 93 chessmen carved from walrus ivory. Norse netsuke, each face individual, each full of quirks, the Lewis Chessmen are probably the most famous chess pieces in the world. Harry played Wizard's Chess with them in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Housed at the British Museum, they are among its most visited and beloved objects.

Questions abounded: Who carved them? Where? Nancy Marie Brown's Ivory Vikings explores these mysteries by connecting medieval Icelandic sagas with modern archaeology, art history, forensics, and the history of board games. In the process, Ivory Vikings presents a vivid history of the 400 years when the Vikings ruled the North Atlantic, and the sea-road connected countries and islands we think of as far apart and culturally distinct: Norway and Scotland, Ireland and Iceland, and Greenland and North America. The story of the Lewis chessmen explains the economic lure behind the Viking voyages to the west in the 800s and 900s. And finally, it brings from the shadows an extraordinarily talented woman artist of the twelfth century: Margret the Adroit of Iceland.

You can read more here and buy the book in the usual places. Would be great, I think, for a course on contemporary re-imaginings of the Middle Ages.