Decentering Medieval Studies: A guest post by Shamma Boyarin

a guest post by Shamma Boyarin

[ITM welcomes ongoing informed conversation about the recent challenges to medieval studies as usual that have unfolded at conferences and across social media: see for example On Race and Medieval Studies, Decolonizing Anglo-Saxon Studies, Pushback Promise Progress, Whiteness in Medieval Studies Workshop, #MoreVoices, Anti-feminism Whiteness and Medieval Studies, White Nationalism and the Ethics of Medieval Studies, Re-making The Real Middle Ages -- and the multiple discussions and resources linked by those posts.  -- JJC]

A Quick Preface

The following was originally composed in a series of comments on Facebook, posted on three separate dates (11 July, 18 July, and 24 July) in response to issues raised by IMC Leeds. My thoughts are not aimed at Leeds specifically but speak to related issues arising from this year’s IMC and conversations that took place among scholars on social media afterwards. I am at home caring for our children full time this summer, and, while I have revised my comments slightly, I cannot now add references or notes for further reading; I am aware of many relevant studies. Since my comments appeared on Facebook, too, a number of colleagues have responded with smart useful feedback that I would have liked to quote here—but they were posted to another venue, and I don’t want to include them without authors’ permission. Those authors may want to add to, or repeat, their interactions in this venue as well. Finally, my thanks to Jeffrey Cohen for offering In the Middle as a forum for these meditations.

11 July

First, an anecdote. Among the first conferences I presented at as a student was a graduate conference at Columbia. One of the keynotes was given by an important senior professor (though I can't now remember who), and it was about why Spain should be more fully included in Western medieval studies. As someone working on medieval Hebrew and Arabic literature in Spain, I was sad and surprised that the argument needed to be made, but I was happy that it was being made. To my dismay, though, the gist of the argument turned out to be that Spain should be included in medieval studies because, even during the Muslim conquest, there was an active Christian presence there; the bulk of the talk documented the evidence for this. In other words, the take away was that for something to be relevant to medieval studies it had to be Christian.

This was twenty years ago. One imagines that such a keynote would not be given today—but I'm not sure. The roots of medieval studies—and I speak from the literary corners of the field, though I suspect there are corollaries in history as well—are deeply connected to nationalism. As we know (others have written about this), the creation of a Western literary canon, one that has its beginnings with Beowulf and Roland and the like, was tied to the creation of nation. The same is true, with some differences, for the study of medieval Hebrew literature, where the “secular” literature of Golden Age Spain was mobilized to help bolster the literary canon of Hebrew in service of the state (others have written about this too). The tools of medieval literary studies—philology, codicology, the tracing of stemmata, discussion of textual transmissions and corruptions, etc.—are all colored by these origins. Current university structures, such as the division of departments along linguistic and geographical lines, grow out of and continue to reinforce these tendencies, which are now clearly problematic. Most course sequences that cover English literature for majors, for instance, still reproduce this sense of there being a “national” literary canon. Broadening medieval studies to include other literary traditions—say Persian, Arabic, Chinese, or African—is certainly a good thing. But what we really need is a radical departure from the field’s origins. We need to find a way to explode medieval studies and rebuild it anew.

July 18

Here is another perhaps not well formulated thought; I say so mainly because I’m sure others have already expressed this better: saying things like “more medievalists should work on Arabic” or “the field would look different if there were someone working on medieval China” reveals a certain shortsightedness about our definition of “medievalist” and who we think counts as a medievalist. There are already many great scholars working on these subjects! Instead, we need actively to expand the list of scholars that we already think of as medievalists. We should automatically, without reserve or prompting, be including in “medieval studies” people who work on, say, twelfth-century Arabic poetry, or the Cairo Genizah, or the Shahnameh or Byzantine history, or Chinese history, in Western universities and beyond—regardless of whether they are ever present at Leeds or Kalamazoo, or publish in Speculum etc. Doing this will dynamically change the field. The field would then look very different than it now seems to present itself internally and publicly, both in content and in terms of the racial and religious affiliations of those involved. More significantly, this would be a much bigger step towards making our discipline truly about a global Middle Ages (which, in this vision, it in fact already is) than an approach that focuses on arguments about how diverse Europe was and regardless of the degrees of diversity different people ascribe to different areas and centuries of medieval Europe. I do not mean to suggest that such arguments and scholarly interventions are not important—especially in the current political climate, they are—but rather that we can augment them by also decentralizing medieval Europe. That is, once medieval studies becomes about the medieval world, it is harder to sustain fantasies (held still by some scholars in our field) that the period was when White Christianity was dominant. There will be other implications and complications—for example, current debates about periodization in different regions—but in truth I believe that a change in medieval studies will only truly be felt if we embrace this decentralization approach wholesale.

July 24

Another thought (and I want to be clear, as I write, that I am in no way offering an excuse or a pass for racists in the field). Many of us were attracted to studying the Middle Ages because of a favorite childhood book, movie, television show, or game, and we perhaps imagine that studying medieval literature is a chance to engage with the materials that inspired us and these objects of childhood fascination—a chance to work with the people and stories we loved as children. Some even imagine that medieval studies is far removed from present-day politics or religion, and they want to retreat—I have heard people express that as part of their motivation for studying medieval texts. Undergraduate introduction to medieval studies tend to play into this now: they focus on the strange and weird of the Middle Ages, or use modern or child-directed medievalisms as a “hook.” I think in advanced undergraduate courses, and certainly in graduate seminars, we offer a much more sophisticated and complex reading of the field and its objects of study—and gender, class and race are among the sophistications and complications to be discussed there—but this still comes at a relatively late stage in one’s training in medieval studies. Further, even in advanced graduate classes, even courses that deal with the history of the discipline, rarely are the problematic roots of medieval studies engaged, especially as regards gender, class, race, and even wartime politics (and again, I am thinking of the discipline in relation to English and Hebrew literary canons especially). We are only truly confronted with the roots of the field, and its profound and long-term consequences, when we have devoted many years of our lives to becoming part of it. Not only that: with this realization, too, comes the knowledge that those childhood favorites, those things that inspired our devotion in the first place, are impacted and changed. There are a number of ways scholars seem to react: denial and outrage—including blaming the messengers, often people of color, women, and LGBTQ scholars—for ruining this fantasy; silence, not engaging at all, either by leaving the field or by continuing on as if nothing has changed; or, finally, some (many?) see that confronting these issues in medieval studies makes the field stronger, more important, and vital, because these are also the problems that face our classrooms, our departments, our conferences, and our world. That love we all had (and have) for things medieval can be productively harnessed, to bring us back to those inspiring materials, to find the interesting and valuable aspects of them but also (this time without blinders on) engage their racist, sexist, classist, ableist discourses with all of our hard-earned authority—and to confront the history of medieval studies and its political role in national and modern history.

Shamma Boyarin is Director of Religious Studies at the University of Victoria, where he also teaches in the English Department and Medieval Studies Program. His research and teaching interests include medieval Jewish literature (particularly of Spain, the Near East, and England), comparative literature (particularly Hebrew and Arabic), translation studies, and connections between religion and pop culture (particularly Heavy Metal). His most recent publications are “The Contexts of the Hebrew Secret of Secrets” in Trajectoires européennes du Secret des secrets du Pseudo-Aristote (Brepols, 2015), “Hebrew Alexander Romances and Astrological Questions: Alexander, Aristotle, and the Medieval Jewish Audience” in Alexander the Great in the Middle Ages (Toronto UP, 2016), and “‘Changing the Order of Creation’: The Toldot Ben Sira Disrupts the Medieval Hebrew Canon” in Talmudic Transgressions (Brill, 2017). He has also written for the British Library Asian and African Studies Blog (on a Hebrew manuscript made for King Henry VIII here and blogs himself here.

On Race and Medieval Studies

by Medievalists of Color [cross-posted from the Medievalists of Color website]

Medieval studies is increasingly acknowledging realities of race and racism in the profession—reflected in everything from the call to recognize that racism is inherent in the very use of the term “Anglo-Saxon”; to Richard Spencer and the so-called alt-right’s cooptation of Western European medieval studies to buttress their white supremacist ideology; to concerns about the exploitation of Hawaiian culture in the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists’ conference currently underway in Honolulu. These issues have arisen most visibly since the International Medieval Congress at Leeds in July 2017 with individual and collective calls for structural change in the profession and its culture.

Caspar of the Three Kings, Germany, 15th c., The Cloisters Collection, 1952

Medievalists of Color is a fellowship of scholars who study the early, high, and late Middle Ages across the disciplines and who identify as persons of color from a variety of national and cultural backgrounds. We, the Medievalists of Color, find it necessary to offer a collective response that advocates for a more inclusive, productive, and world-improving medieval studies.

If the recent controversies in medieval studies have seemed shocking, that shock derives simply from the truth of how uneven and disparate our realities are within the field. A tasteless joke about skin color that inaugurated the 2017 Leeds keynote plenary on “Otherness” illustrated this disparity all too well. Those who object to the attention given to a single joke about race fail to understand that for medievalists of color, this joke is not an isolated event. It is a symptom of a culture, both in medieval studies and in the wider world, in which we regularly hear jokes about our appearances, accents, names, and experiences. Indeed, such jokes frequently escalate into mockery, threats, and even physical violence. Opening the plenary session on the problematic thematic strand “Otherness,” the joke established an unwelcoming environment from the outset. Likewise, the open acceptance of such racist jokes has proliferated in various social media, listservs, and other spaces in which medievalists congregate. This then is not merely a sensationalized incident, but rather a normalized speech act that indicates a pervasive and deeply problematic professional and social climate.

Creating and maintaining a climate that is welcoming to all requires intention and deliberation. Drawing from extensive administrative experience in higher education in the UK and Australia as well as several traditions of philosophical inquiry, Sara Ahmed attests to how professional environments and intellectual cultures engage in a “politics of stranger making” that reveals “how some and not others become strangers” and “how some bodies become understood as the rightful inhabitants of certain spaces” (On Being Included, 2012). The moderator’s joke—that a suntan would make him appear as an “other”—would have been inappropriate in any professional setting, but in the particular context of an introduction to the opening keynotes at one of the major medievalist conferences in the world, this act of “stranger making” reveals an underlying assumption that the physical presence of nonwhite medievalists—and our collective years of expertise in the field on topics of “otherness”—is ignorable and extraneous to primary conversations in the field.

We emphasize that our letter is not just about any one person’s alienating comments, nor even about the conception of one problematic thread. What is at stake here is the very possibility that such a statement, like countless similar statements every day, could be made and condoned while its real harm to nonwhite medievalists was left unacknowledged and unchecked. Though such statements are sometimes made without malice or intent to harm, the harm they cause is nonetheless real—from stigmatizing individuals to foreclosing lines of scholarly inquiry. When our scholarly spaces are not welcoming to all who would practice in the field, the field loses the capacity for intellectual risk and no longer serves its primary objective: to seek a comprehensive understanding of the past in order to analyze the present and help shape the future.

The current controversy offers an opportunity for medievalists who identify as white to understand the perspectives and experiences of medievalists and other people of color. On blog posts and comments, on listservs and on Facebook, the reactions of many of our fellow scholars have been deeply disturbing, with remarks that range from dismissing such jokes as “harmless social lubricant” to accusing those who legitimately express dismay at such jokes as “policing,” “silencing,” or “blacklisting” conference speakers to violent and profanity-laden abuse directed at medievalists of color. Some comments and conversations suggest that our white medievalist colleagues experience dismay at assumptions about them based on their race: their intentions seem not to matter; they are objects of suspicion; their positions are assumed to be wrong. We ask white medievalists feeling this way to recognize that this is what is it is like to be a person of color every day, in the world and all too often in the profession. We make this point not to perpetuate a loop of mutual resentment but rather to offer an inroad to understanding our perspective. This is a watershed moment that, if used productively, will make medieval studies home to an intellectual environment that is sustainable and innovative, promotes risk-taking, and leverages an ever greater number of experiences and scholarly lenses in order to build the most comprehensive body of knowledge about the Middle Ages possible.

We, the Medievalists of Color, need our colleagues to understand the systemic racism of which we speak and the role it has continued to play in our field’s constitution and practices; to educate themselves in the critical discourses that address systemic racism both explicit and implicit; and in doing so to move past preoccupations with individual intentions. Chafing at the accusation of racism is illogical: systemic racism dictates that we are all entangled in its articulations and practices. The most damaging consequence of systemic racism is not that one might stand accused of racism; it is the harm—historically manifested on a continuum from rhetorical to psychological to physical violence—done to persons of color. Were more constituents of medieval studies to educate themselves in the critical theory of race, we could all actively address these harmful impacts in ways hitherto not possible in the field of medieval studies.

Indeed, the intellectual and ethical protocols of our discipline require us to immerse ourselves in relevant scholarly discourses. No medievalist working on Western Europe would dare discuss the term “nation” without consulting Patrick Geary’s Before France and Germany. No medievalist working on medieval memory would ignore the work of Mary Carruthers in the Book of Memory. We affirm that the same ethic of scholarly rigor applies to critical race studies and to the discussion of race, ethnicity, nationhood, and “otherness” because these topics are crucial to both the content and the professional conduct of medieval studies. Even, and especially, if we find that the scholarly paradigms of critical race and ethnic studies, postcolonialism, and decolonization do not speak fully to the historical moments we study, we are obligated to enter, and even expand, the conversations they engender. If we wish medieval studies to engage meaningfully in the modern world of which it is a product, and in which it is an agent, then medievalists must also rigorously engage with the fields that examine the ideologies and distributions of power that define the modern world. When medievalists endeavor to understand systemic racism, medieval studies becomes a stronger field whose constituents together have far greater resources for analyzing the past and present while shaping the future.  

We aim our attention toward the survival and future of the study of the Middle Ages, which we must continuously work to separate from its links to nationalist and white supremacist impulses. At a time when such impulses have increased the rates of violence—rhetorical, psychological, and physical—in the US, UK, Europe, and elsewhere, we must ensure that the conditions for violence are not fostered within medieval studies. Indeed, medieval studies must form a bulwark against such conditions. We wish to foster a medieval studies whose members respond to one another, even in disagreement, with the responsibility to be ethical, compassionate, and well informed about the systems in which we operate in order that medieval studies will be a space for free intellectual inquiry—for all medievalists. Race has always mattered to medieval studies, and scholars of color play key roles in the field’s past, present, and future.

We intervene, putting ourselves at professional risk and in the path of potential aggression and hostility, because of the meaning this field holds for us, the stakes we have in it, and our commitment to contributing productively to its continued viability. We intervene for the sake of the innovative space medieval studies has at times been, and can increasingly be. We intervene to protect the powerful lessons that the Middle Ages holds for the modern world, and because we believe that deep and considered knowledge of the Middle Ages, with rigorous scholarly practices, can help realize a future in which the world is a better place—for medievalists and non-medievalists alike.

FURTHER INFORMATION AND RESOURCES

For additional professional responses to the “Otherness” thread at the International Medieval Congress, see the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the open letter and petition by the President-Elect of the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA), and two letters from the President of the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship (SMFS).

For resources pertaining to the intellectual and professional significance of race in medieval studies, see this bibliography of scholarship on race and medieval studies, the special issue of the journal postmedieval on “Making Race Matter in the Middle Ages,” the plenary session on “The Color of Membership” held at the SAA Meeting in April 2017, the workshop on Whiteness in Medieval Studies (held at the International Congress of Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, MI, May 2017), as well as its participants’ reflections and an organizer’s reflection.

Decolonizing Anglo-Saxon Studies: A Response to ISAS in Honolulu

by ADAM MIYASHIRO

[Please read this timely guest posting by Adam Miyashiro originally published as a Facebook status update on July 28, 2017. We are proud to republish his work on this site.]

Image description: Excerpt from Nupepa Puka La Kuokoa, February 23, 1893, showing various ways to count to 10, including Old English, Welsh, Gothic, Greek, and Latin.

In late July and August, the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists (ISAS) will meet in Honolulu, Hawai‘i for a four day conference on Anglo-Saxon studies that has as its main theme, “Global Perspectives.” The conference website states that

The Pacific venue is ideal for gaining a broader understanding of our field precisely because Hawaiʻi is not Anglo-Saxon England: viewing our research from halfway around the world puts Anglo-Saxon studies in perspective, looking from the outside in—and potentially inside out. In particular, a global and comparative view suggests new ways of thinking about the relationship between past and present and the role that English language, history, and culture play on a world stage.

The program boasts that there are over seventy presentations, some of which focus on “applying global and comparative perspectives to the study of Anglo-Saxon England,” as well as more field-specific approaches. The conference program is adorned with what looks like a photo of the Hokule‘a, the contemporary reconstruction of a wa‘a kaulua, the Polynesian voyaging canoe associated with the disappearance of the kanaka maoli big wave surfer, Eddie Aikau. It liberally uses ‘olelo Hawai‘i (Hawaiian language) in phrases such as “Aloha e kakou,” and boasts tours of Hawaiian kingdom sites in Honolulu, a tour of Bishop Museum, and a touristy luau. I also imagine that the conference attendees will also muse about Hawaiian food, especially poi, which they will all be obliged to “try” to get a sense of “authentic” Hawaiian food, which, of course, must taste bad.

The thing that strikes one the most is absolutely how white this conference is. With the exception of a couple of East Asian scholars, virtually the entire roster of papers is from white scholars. Of course, there are many scholars involved who I absolutely admire, including one of the keynote speakers. And a brief overview of the topics is unimaginably predictable: “Patristic Number Symbolism in Anglo-Saxon England,” “Repton Revisited: The significance of 873 A.D.,” “The Old English Prefix Ge- and the Structure of the Dictionary of Old English.” This is pretty much standard fare for any K’zoo panel, or Old English special session at the MLA. There is no need to go to the most militarized, colonial space in the US to present on the finer points of problems in Old English lexicography.

In full disclosure, I applied to present a paper at this conference, but my paper was rejected. I’d also like to disclose that I’m from Hawai‘i, and I am a medievalist who is a product of the multiethnic mix of Asian and Polynesian peoples and cultures of the islands. The paper I proposed was called “Beowulf and its Others: Sovereignty, Race, and Medieval Settler-Colonialism,” which considered Grendel as an indigenous person with a specific biopolitics, and linked a non-European reading of Beowulf to the contemporary issues of white supremacy that plague Anglo-Saxon studies, and medieval studies more broadly. Allen Frantzen’s anti-feminist and misogynist blog has shaken Old English studies; Rachel Fulton Brown’s defense of Milo Yiannopoulos and her blog and columns for Breitbart has brought awareness to white supremacy in medieval studies; Richard Spencer’s white supremacist “alt-right” fascism trades on settler-colonial ideologies rooted in modern understandings of the Middle Ages and specifically about modern “Anglo-Saxon” identity. In all of these discussions about right-wing political thought inside of our own field of medieval studies, not a single paper in this conference explicitly addresses these developments. And the only paper to actually deal with anything Polynesian in relation to Anglo-Saxon studies is a paper from a white man from New Jersey, replicating the worst possible legacy of colonial representation of kanaka maoli from America’s colonial history. We thought we were past that; but then again, we live in the age of Disney’s Moana and Aulani Resort in Ko ‘Olina, where Hawaiian culture can be commodified and repackaged in a less threatening and fully domesticated manner.

This conference practices what is known in indigenous studies as “erasure of the native.” In the conference materials, we are given the image of the “presence” of native identities – from the Hokule‘a picture to the liberal use of ‘olelo Hawai‘i as welcoming phrases. Yet, native voices are noticeably absent from the conference program, except for Uluwehi Hopkins, who will present on Hawaiian sea navigation.

Given the recent turmoil in medieval studies, and especially with Anglo-Saxon England and Old English, one might think that this conference – with its purported interest in globalizing the study of Old English – would address the racism that has generated so much controversy. Old English’s race problem was featured in a recent JSTOR blog post by Mary Dockray-Miller, who lays out some of the problematic features of the term “Anglo-Saxon”:

Outside the university, however, the phrase “Anglo-Saxon” did not refer to early medieval English. Instead, it was racial and racist, freighted with assumptions of privilege and superiority. The cultural rhetoric of Manifest Destiny specifically defined “Anglo-Saxons” as superior to enslaved and free Africans, Native American Indians, Mexicans, and numerous other groups defined as non-white, including Irish and Italian immigrants. The titles of college courses in Anglo-Saxon also carried these racial connotations and cultural associations.

This racist understanding of the term “Anglo-Saxon” as defining white Anglo-Americans has a long history in the South Pacific as part of the settler colonial landscape in places such as Hawai‘i, Aotearoa (New Zealand), and Australia. Of course, French settler colonialism in Tahiti is not far from this mark.

When I was finishing my Ph.D., a friend of mine in Nebraska, an early modernist, asked me about the best books to use to teach Old English. She had been participating in a prison literacy program and said that several of her incarcerated students wanted to learn Old English. Surprised, I asked her for the background of why they wanted to learn Old English. Saying that there was an unsavory reason, she related that these inmates were part of an Aryan Nation prison gang who had built up a religion around the heroic poem Beowulf called “Theodism.” Old English, as one blog post notes, has an “image problem.” But it goes beyond simply an “image problem.” It goes right to the core of settler-colonial, white supremacist ideology.

As I said earlier, the colonialist Anglo-Saxon conference taking place in Hawai‘i will have no understanding about how the term “Anglo-Saxon” is understood in the south Pacific. Recently, in a post in the Facebook group Aha Aloha ‘Aina, an image of a Hawaiian phrasebook from 1906 illustrates the power of colonialism in the islands (reproduced below). The image is of derogatory and inflammatory insults to Hawaiian people in both olelo Hawai’i and English, including “Lazy people cannot be trusted;” “They lie in wait to pilfer while folks are asleep or at church;” and “When he thinks, it is of evil.” After the overthrow of the last legitimate government of Hawai‘i, the US took policy of cultural and linguistic genocide, since the actual genocide had already been underway from the late 18th and early 19th century. ‘Olelo Hawai‘i (Hawaiian language) was banned; students in schools were beaten for speaking Hawaiian. The reason Hawaiian creole English (pidgin) even exists is because of the compulsory language policies of the newly formed territorial American state led by white wealthy sugar barons.

Image description: 1906 phrasebook showing how Hawaiians can insult themselves in English.

Until medievalists, and the wider academic world, can decolonize their fields, they will be (unwittingly or not) part of the problem of white supremacy and settler colonialism. In Hawai‘i, this is also true of the sciences, where just yesterday [i.e., July 27, 2017], a judge has allowed the continuation of the building of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on the summit of Mauna Kea (Mauna a Wakea) on the big island of Hawai‘i. The leaseholder of this land is the University of Hawai‘i, which is itself an institution that participates in the military-industrial complex on the islands – land, sea, and air – and that contribute to the furthering of settler colonial spaces and the continued dispossession of indigenous peoples, the kanaka Maoli.

About the Author

Image of Adam Miyashiro.

Adam Miyashiro teaches comparative medieval literature at Stockton University in New Jersey. He is a native of Kahalu'u, O'ahu, Hawai'i. He has a PhD in Comparative Literature from Penn State University, and has also taught at Temple University in Philadelphia. He is currently working on a book about race in Mediterranean and European medieval literature.

On Pushback, Progress and Promise

by J J Cohen

I offered a version of this note this morning on a friend's Facebook feed after she posted about sadness, frustration and anger in the aftermath of the personal and social media backlash against medievalists of color and their work in the wake of the recent Leeds conference (and an article in the Chronicle about the issue). I offer it here to anyone who has felt dispirited in the wake of what has been unfolding, but especially to scholars of color who are young in the field and undertaking the kind of work that is generating resistance in its many modes.

The field of medieval studies is changing: it's too late, those transformations are already quite advanced (look around at peer reviewed publications and social media alike: the list of resources and scholarship is vast). The backlash is fear at the realization of the profundity of these changes. Yet there is no turning back: the groundwork is in place -- and larger, sturdy, innovative structures for rethinking what the Middle Ages is and does are rising and have risen, transforming already the future's horizon. Those working to change medieval studies have had a success that is not at this point ignorable and cannot be dismissed, silenced, or lost. This success scares scholars (of many ages: it is not generational) so deeply because the excellent scholarship behind it demands a complete rethinking of assumptions that have shaped them in their professional formation as medievalists. Those normative tenets are now being shaken to the core and the cracks are showing. It would be very difficult to return to business as usual medieval studies at this point.

If you are feeling the backlash, please keep this in mind: YOU are the future of the field. I and many, many others thank you for all you are undertaking and have accomplished. We have dreamed and worked in our own way towards such a re-alignment of what medieval studies could be -- and sometimes despaired that lasting change would not take hold. But it is arriving and its roots are already deep. Backlash, painful as it is to endure, means you are doing things right and that you are doing things well. Please do not despair, do not think about not continuing -- and know that panicked negativity can be so shrill its noise drowns out voices of support. 

But never for long.

2 posts by Angie Bennett

my favorite picture of any medievalist ever (from AB's post) 

by J J Cohen

Anything that Angie Bennett writes is well worth your time, but these especially: two beautifully written pieces examining the entanglement of the personal, the professional, the political, the critical ... and so much more. With a paean to London thrown in along the way.

Here is Song of Summer part one, and here is part two. Much food for thought here as well as some playful, insightful, and moving prose.

David Wallace on Europe: A Literary History

by J J Cohen

Writing cultures continue to matter, even as they become ever more intricately involved with digital, video, and other technologies and less exclusively associated with the paper page.

So observes David Wallace in a recently published interview at Romanische Studien in support of the publication of the massively collaborative (83 scholars!) two volume project Europe: A Literary History 1348–1418 from Oxford. The book is indeed a paean to what working in collaboration can achieve, and is well served by its multivoicedness. And the endeavor makes a problem of Europe in ways that have become only more useful post-Brexit:

“Europe” is indeed a complex, permeable, and uncertain term; in ancient Greece it indicated more of a direction than a specific, locatable territory. Europe is not a continent: as previously suggested, north-western Eurasia might be a more appropriate term. So yes, the folly and contradictoriness of the European-Song-Contest speaks or sings to this muddled (but creative) state of affairs quite eloquently.

The Europe project is incredibly wide ranging, and the interview well captures the capacious ambit of its two volumes plus digital presence. Let me close with David's words about why Damascus should be a part of the book's scope as an inspiration to more wide-ranging work from all of us.

And why include locales such as Damascus? Two of the greatest literary men of our period, and two of its greatest travellers, made their way here along the Maghreb from the western Mediterranean and then north along the region known as the Levant. Ibn Baṭūṭah travels through Jerusalem to Damascus, and on to Mecca. Ibn Khaldūn, born in Tunis from an Andalusian family of Arab descent, was one of the great intellectuals of the age: the father, we might provocatively say, of European sociology. His genius was acknowledged at, or just outside, Damascus by Timur (Tamerlane), Mongol conqueror, during weeks of intensive intellectual debate. The work of Shams al-Dīn Ibn al-Jazarī, who was educated at Cairo and Damascus and died in Shiraz (Iran), found its way to a translator in Aragon. Christian pilgrims arriving in Jerusalem were sometimes inspired to continue their journey south along the Mediterranean to Cairo—thereby, they thought, following the path of the Holy Family. Mamluks ruled the sites of the Holy Land, ruled Damascus, and ruled Cairo: without some knowledge of their crucial literature-producing centers the experiences of westerners pushing east, if we are to adopt such a circumscribed view of “European” experience, cannot be made intelligible.

Read and enjoy the interview in its entirety here.

Informal Events at IMC Leeds 2017: Public Medievalism and Disability Mentorship

by JONATHAN HSY

Are you heading to the International Medieval Congress in Leeds tomorrow? Note these INFORMAL EVENTS not listed on the official program: on Monday, an informal discussion on public medievalism and countering the alt-right; on Wednesday, an informal mentorship gathering for medievalists with disabilities (and allies).

Full information below! [Click image to enlarge; equivalent text also provided in this blog post.]

#PublicMedievalism event at #IMC2017; original tweet here

#PublicMedievalism: Developing Methods to Counter the Alt-Right

An informal discussion for delegates at #imc2017

Wilson Room, Emmanuel Centre, 13:00-14:00, 03/07/2017

For enquiries please contact Shihong Lin (on twitter @shlin28) and James Harland (on twitter @djmharland)

The rapid growth of social media usage and the emergence of social media subcultures such as #medievaltwitter have led to historical scholarship arguably never being more open, vibrant, or accessible. Alongside this development, however, has been an alarming growth of appropriation of the past by resurgent far-right and white supremacist movements to promote their goals, as charted by authors such as Dorothy Kim at In the Medieval Middle and The Public Medievalist’s special series, Race and Racism in the Middle Ages.

The battle for the past is fought across the twittersphere. Alongside a regular output of memes promoting distorted, far-right interpretations of a purely white, Christian past, events such as #femfog and Rebecca Rideal’s withdrawal from the Chalke Valley History Festival have also attracted backlash online, and most medievalists with a presence on twitter will have experienced the reception and misinterpretation of their output—either by open members of the alt-right or members of a wider public informed by nationalistic and racialist ideas.

We invite delegates, especially those who make frequent use of Twitter, to an open, informal discussion on the development of methods to effectively counter this trend, while ensuring that our twitter output remains no less lively, engaging, and publicly accessible.

Informal disability mentorship event #disIMC at #IMC2017; original tweet here

Medievalists with Disabilities

An informal gathering for disabled students, ECRs, academics, researchers and allies. All welcome!

12:45-14:15 on Wednesday 5th July, St George Room, University House

Accessible via lift from either Refectory Foyer or via University House

Bring your lunch and come and meet other medievalists with disabilities, or support your disabled colleagues. This gathering is completely informal, and we hope it will be the start of a supportive community.

[event hashtag for twitter is] #disIMC

If you have any queries, especially about accessibility requirements, please contact Alicia Spencer-Hall by email via aspencerhall [at] gmail [dot] com or on twitter @aspencerhall or contact Alex Lee by email via alexralee12 [at] gmail [dot] com or on twitter @AlexRALee.

If you're not attending IMC in Leeds this year, you can follow the official hashtag on twitter #IMC2017. The hashtags for these two informal events are #PublicMedievalism and #disIMC respectively.

P.S. Online PDF and mobile-accessible version of the official #IMC2017 programme is available through this link on the Congress website.