Outer Banks Bound

[image: Cohen children scamper the lunar landscape of Jockey's Ridge, 2007]
by J J Cohen

I've promised to respond to so much of the recent activity at ITM, and now am faced with an impending family trip -- sans laptop -- to the Outer Banks. Poor, poor me. We leave Thursday afternoon, and return on Monday. I promise (in blood) that I will catch up then.

Weeping with Erkenwald, or, Complicit with Grace

by KARL STEEL

During Steven Kruger's plenary at SEMA, I got to thinking about the dynamic of supersessionarity in St. Erkenwald. I'm sure K. Biddick has handled this somewhere, or probably any number of Erkenwald's many critics, so apologies in advance, and also apologies for not having a copy in the house of the poem in Middle English.

If you don't remember Erkenwald offhand, here's the plot, cribbed from the very first paper I wrote at Columbia, back in 1999:

A group of masons discover a tomb while renovating St. Paul’s. In the tomb is an incorrupt body dressed as a king. Efforts to determine the identity of this supposed king prove unsuccessful, so the Bishop of London, Erkenwald, is summoned back from a visitation. After mass and prayer, the corpse speaks, revealing itself as the most righteous of judges under the pre-Roman kings “Sir Belyn [and] Ser Berynge . . . his brothire” (l. 213). Despite his righteousness, the soul of the nameless judge is still in Hell. Erkenwald prays for the soul, weeps in compassion, and the formula of baptism and a single tear baptizes the judge. The judge’s soul ascends to heaven, his body disappears into dust, and Erkenwald and the community of London are united in praise of the inscrutable mercy of God.

The poem begins "Not long after / Christ suffered on the cross and sanctified Christendom, / The city had a saintly and sanctified bishop; / And it happened that Erkenwald was the holy man's name." It then turns to Augustine's conversion of the Insular pagans, when in London

" at that time the temple most eminent
Was partly pulled down and purified by dedication,
Having been heathen in the days of Hengist"

Apollo's temple becomes St. Peter's church, Mahomet's St. Margaret's, Jupiter and Juno become Jesus or James, and the "Þe synagoge of þe Sonne was sett to oure Lady." The note to my sad Penguin edition explains "'Synagogue' in Middle English was used to describe any heathen temple. Probably the identifications in this stanza were determined by alliterative needs." (17 n5), a point supported, just barely, by the MED.

But in that synagogue, converted to a church of "oure Lady," I can't help think of St. Mary’s in Jewry, which Robert Stacey (“The Conversion of Jews in Thirteenth-Century England.” Speculum 67 (1992), 265) tells me was a converted synagogue (anyone have pictures? Know if it's still around? Know what happened to it?).

And, driven by that thought, I wonder at the very opening of the poem: I know Middle English poetry is not notable for its historical precision, but the historical Erkenwald was bishop some 700 years after the purported death of Christ. But if he's set "not long after" the death of Christ, Erkenwald very closely follows the cruxifixion and resurrection and thus the supersession of Judaism by Christianity. Why not understand London's converted heathen architecture as the converted Jewish architecture of post-Expulsion England (something to think through for your stone project, Jeffrey?)? Why not take "synagoge" literally instead of as a cheap metrical filler (after all, another word might have done the trick just as well, or as poorly). Why not imagine that the builders discover in the foundation the foundation of their faith, the Jewish bedrock that literally held up several London structures? Why not hear in the noise of the bells that end the poem a triumphant counter to the enforced silence of London Jewry in the 13th century, who were first told they had to worship quietly before being expelled altogether a few decades later? Why not hear in the "New Werke" the New Work of Grace? I realize the poem probably dates to the 1390s, which is rather late for all this, but, otherwise, why not?

All this is by way of setting up the question I asked Kruger after his talk: "Why a judge?" The story's normally about Trajan, an emperor, so why make the change? Why a judge rather than a king? I remember suggesting (which is not to say I actually suggested anything of the sort at that moment!), clearly this is a supersessionary narrative about the passing away of the Law, represented by the good judge, in the time of grace, represented by Erkenwald's weeping affect. The potency of his tears utterly dissolves the Law, pagan, or Jewish (which, barring the Natural Law that predated the Mosaic Law, is virtually coterminous with "the Law"), or even the Christian Law that left the righteous judge languishing in Hell (note, I prefer to aim at a reading of utter dissolution of any Law to what I recall as the standard approach to the crux of the judge's salvation, viz., to snap the miracle back into some clear doctrine and so to give it back to a law while taking away the truly miraculous).

This reading of the poem as a supersessionary allegory leads me to my final question: our philosophical interests at ITM tend towards affect and affirmation; we tend towards refusing the "said" or "being" in favor of the "saying" or "becoming"; we tend to find the rigorous application of any one critical model, particularly models of the Law (stereotypically psychoanalysis), interesting at best, but often enervating. We find ourselves on the side of the miraculous, l'avenir, on the side of surprise. And if not "we," then certainly "I." If I had to place myself anywhere in St. Erkenwald, I would find myself in Erkenwald himself, surprised by the efficacy of my own tears, unsure what to do other than praise the moment and what it wrought. I would linger in the liquefaction of the Judge, of the bodily contact between the Bishop and the Corpse in this in-between zone of fluids. But given how I have read the poem, to what degree am I conditioned by or complicit in ongoing supersessionary narratives? In whose camp do I fall when I refuse the Law?

A query: Chaucer translations?

by J J Cohen

Last year I mentioned in passing a course I'd newly designed called Myths of Britain. I'll be teaching the class again come spring, this time with ninety students and three TAs (the course is as much about mentoring graduate student teachers as it is about developing critical thinking through writing among undergraduates). So, considering the theme, I thought I might introduce some Chaucer this time ... and here is my question. If you've ever taught a Brit Lit survey, do you keep the Chaucer in Middle English (a la the Norton anthology) or do you utilize a snappy translation into Modern English? If so, what translation do you use?

My students will mostly be sophomores; most will not be English majors (though experience proves the class can cause sudden conversions). We want to challenge them, of course -- but I also worry that if we do Chaucer for only one or two weeks, and do him in Middle English, the students will be too wrapped up in just getting the langauge that they won't move to themes and analysis -- as they do, say, with our excellent translations of Beowulf, Marie de France, and SGGK.

What do you think?

Wrætlic is back

by J J Cohen

Check out the latest post, Caught With Your Pants Down -- Naming, Being, and Fetishes. Welcome back, Dan Remein!

Insomniac dreams; also, piles of foreskins

by J J Cohen

So it was one of those nights -- you know, when your child with his upset tummy or his little cough awakens you three times within an hour, then passes into deep slumber while sleep then evades you for hours more. When I finally did return to the land of Nod, I dreamed that due to a classroom shortage my seminar had been assigned to meet in a freight elevator. We gathered the desks into a circle, and we tried to concentrate on some Latin something or other while the cube surrounding us rose and fell. At odd moments the doors would open and students would enter, bound for more comfortable pedagogical spaces than this. Or was I trapped in some bizarre allegory about teaching, the meaning of which wholly evaded me? I finally used all my powers as department chair to have the classroom changed, to an ominous space called the House of Visions. We were on our way there together, certain only that the House was owned by a cult with supernatural beliefs, when the little coughing tummy ache guy woke me again.

So, this morning with a fuzzy brain I am attending a seminar about these manuscript illustrations. The paper is fascinating, asking how a rabbi forced to produce a glossed bible and illustration scheme for a Christian audience intentionally "Judaized" its content. Midrash, blood, circumscision, covenant, and equivocal readings (one for Jews, one for Christians) is what it is all about.

Not a SEMA Paper, But Something Allied to It and to Us: Nathan Englander's "The Twenty-Seventh Man"

Figure 1. the place where we sometimes feel we work, but it is an illusion

for Dan Remein

by EILEEN JOY

This may be a stretch, but I was cleaning up my website this morning and paused to reread some of the response papers written by students who took my contemporary literature course last spring on the topic of Fantastic/Slipstream/Realism, and I was immediately struck by the apropos-ness, if you will, of a short response paper one of my students, Daniel Ising, wrote on Nathan Englander's heartbreaking short story "The Twenty-Seventh Man" to the SEMA panels on "Eros and Phenomenology," as well as to Justin's "Becoming the Medieval Jongleur" paper [and perhaps other papers presented at SEMA as well that considered the bodiliness of texts and of persons in texts], which we posted here a couple of days ago. Daniel is an M.A. student at Southern Illinois, specializing in creative writing, but he is very interested in medieval and cultural studies, and he attended many of the sessions at the SEMA conference and also helped us with the running of the conference. Many of you will remember meeting him here and there. Since I posted my own paper here last night on "Eros and Event in Malory's Tale of Balyn and Balan," I have been thinking about everything I don't know or understand about phenomenology, but also about that "literary-magic power" which John Caputo says is "astir" in literary worlds--which literary worlds have "causal powers that are released from the constraints of actuality," and here were Daniel's brief remarks on Englander's story somehow bringing me right back to another way of thinking through the being-ness [the phenomenology, but also the ontology] of fictional worlds, and what is possible in them, and why they matter so much. I also felt, in re-reading Daniel's remarks, that something important was also being expressed--both in Englander's story and in Daniel's response to it--regarding the absolute brutality under which authors and artists sometimes have to strive to be creative--to continue writing--even when someone [either figuratively, or more literally] is trying to kill them, to make them stop writing. And it can be hard, then, as Daniel intimates in his remarks, to remain true to oneself, to one's vision, not only of the world, but of the worlds we want to create within this world, worlds in which, perhaps, there is more justice and more compassion. There is an amazing passage in Englander's story when the main character, the Russian writer Pinchas Pelovits, who has been picked up and imprisoned as part of one of Stalin's purges, is being tortured and falls unconscious as a result, and yet, he is managing to do the only thing he has been doing since his first day in prison, compose a story, his last one, short enough to be written entirely in memory:

Pinchas Pelovits was not unconscious. He had only lost his way. He heard the conversations, but paid them little heed. The weight of his body lay on him like a corpse. He worked on his story, saying it aloud to himself, hoping the others would hear and follow it and bring him back.

In short, Englander's story concerns itself with the lowly and unknown writer Pinchas Pelovits who, either accidentally or as a direct result of something he has done [although this is doubtful since he has spent his entire life in one room in his parent's inn only writing, and never publishing--constructing "his own world with a compassionate God and a diverse group of worshipers"--and with such fervor that when Stalin's agents first knock on his door his immediate response is, "not hungry"], is arrested by Stalin's agents and thrown in a gulag prison with twenty-six other writers, all of them well-known and some even personal heroes of Pinchas's. The guards proceed to beat and torture all of them every day and there is no doubt that these beatings will end when they are all shot together in the yard. While the other writers worry over and rail against their fate [after all, as one character exclaims, "who would dare to kill the poet laureate of the Communist empire?"], Pinchas, the most frail of all of them and only a "boy" to the others--so much so that he even has to be propped up by two of the writers when he is finally executed, because he has been beaten so badly he can no longer stand--can only think of composing, because that is all he has ever known. Over and over again he composes his one last story so that, just before dying, he can recite it to his heroes. Even while being beaten, Pinchas "had focused on his story, his screams sounding as if they were coming from afar. With every stripe he received, he added a phrase, the impact reaching his mind like the dull rap of a windowpane settling in its sash." His story is short, and goes like this:

The morning that Mendel Muskatev awoke to find his desk was gone, his room was gone, and the sun was gone, he assumed he had died. This worried him, so he said the prayer for the dead, keeping himself in mind. Then he wondered if one was allowed to do such a thing, and worried instead that the first thing he had done upon being dead was sin.

Mendel figured he'd best consult the local rabbi, who might be able to direct him in such matters. It was Mendel's first time visiting the rabbi in his study--not having previously concerned himself with the nuances of worship. Mendel was much surprised to find that the rabbi's study was of the exact dimensions of his missing room. In fact, it appeared that the tractate the man was poring over rested on the missing desk.

"Rabbi, have you noticed we are without a sun today?" Mendel asked by way of an introduction.

"My shutters are closed against the noise."

"Did no one else mention it at morning prayers?"

"No one else arrived," said the rabbi, continuing to study.

"Well, don't you think that strange?"

"I had. I had until you told me about this sun. Now I understand--no sensible man would get up to greet a dawn that never came."

"This is all very startling, Rabbi. But I think we--at some point in the night--have died."

The rabbi stood up, grinning. "And here I am with an eternity's worth of Talmud to study."

Mendel took in the volumes lining the walls.

"I've a desk and a chair, and a shtender in the corner should I want to stand," said the rabbi. "Yes, it would seem I'm in heaven." He patted Mendel on the shoulder. "I must thank you for rushing over to tell me." The rabbi shook Mendel's hand and nodded good-naturedly, already searching for his place in the text. "Did you come for some other reason?"

"I did," said Mendel, trying to find a space between the books where once there was a door. "I wanted to know"--and here his voice began to quiver--"which one of us is to say the prayer?"

And herewith are Daniel's comments. They will remind us, I hope, that, as writers and scholars, we are always something, and somewhere, even without our bodies, and also, that when the sun appears dimmed, and even goes out, take heart--there is still so much work to do, so much writing to be accomplished, so many created worlds still to enter, and to ask, what is to be done here?

Yet Another SEMA Paper: Eros and Event in Malory's "Tale of Balyn and Balan"

by EILEEN JOY

As promised, I offer here the paper I delivered [with a few modifications, primarily due to a comment from Fabienne Michelet] at the SEMA conference as part of BABEL's two panels on "Eros and Phenomenology" [about which Jeffrey said there was much eros and not much phenomenology, which I've been thinking about a lot, especially because, on many days, I don't even know if I can define phenomenology, at least, not in the way that helps me to understand whether I can do it, or am doing it, or not--I suspect not]. Indeed, one of the most interesting questions asked afterwards, by Jeffrey, was what each panelist [I, Anna Klosowska, Nicola M., and Jessica Rosenfeld, on the first panel] meant by phenomenology and the answers were varied and interesting [and maybe also confusing and contradictory?]. It would be interesting to see if we want to take a stab at that here one more time.

For me, phenomenology has always been the thing I have most wanted least to do with, and I have never been one of those [unlike Nicola] who love to read Heidegger and Husserl and to think about structures of consciousness, or about the thought of thought, or even, the appearance of the real-ness of the world in relation to certain structures of thought or modes of apprehension/sensing? I want to be like Samuel Johnson who kicked the table to prove it was there and not have to discuss abstract philosophy at all. And I don't know, either, about Heidegger's Being with a capital "B" [in which actual beings/persons are subsumed under or covered over by the emphasis on Dasein which becomes a kind of mystification]. But then it seems to me that, somehow, phenomenology is also [or becomes] about what I would call enworlded subjectivities, about being-in-the-world, bodies in relation to other bodies, and even about worlds-within-worlds [and maybe even, too, it is about elucidating something Yeats wrote, which Nicola reminded me of this past weekend, "there is another world, but it is in this one"]. So, for me, trying to think about phenomenology, at least in relation to what I am trying to do with Malory's "Tale of Balyn and Balan," might have something to do with tracing the outlines and momentary emergences of this "another world" that is "in this one." But I really don't know [yet].

In any case, I share with you here my SEMA ruminations. This is my third pass through this story of Malory's, and I would appreciate any helpful comments as I am developing this into a longer chapter for BABEL's next volume of essays, Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism:

Eros and Event in Malory's "Tale of Balyn and Balan"

Nice SEMA piece at Indirections

by J J Cohen

Check out the blog Indirections by Nic D'Alessio for another overview of the recent SEMA conference. Nic picked up on my seismic metaphors, which I admit I overused -- but I was provoked by Mandeville's Travels as an event rather than a mere text. My plenary lecture was obsesssed with Mandeville and rocks, moving from a geological conceptualization (stones, ruins and marble tombs as inanimate holders of history) to a seismic one (a vibration, a movement, a vector of change -- discernible better as a passing than as the residue of a wake).

I did say, repeatedly, that SEMA was seismic. I meant it: the conference has already outlived its three day course, and continues to ripple through blogs, conversations, emails, emergent projects. If you haven't felt its tremors yet, you will.

Guest Post: Justin Brent, "Becoming the Medieval Jongleur"

by J J Cohen

At SEMA last week, Justin Brent gave a talk at a BABEL-sponsored panel entitled "The Place of the Medieval in the Present." A continuation of a conversation instigated at Kalamazoo, the panel was rich indeed, featuring excellent presentations by Myra Seaman and Erica Carson; Betsy McCormick; and closing remarks by Anne Clark Bartlett.

Justin's paper was, I thought, one of the most moving presentations I've attended, starting with an acknowledgment of his personal investment in the project and his own embodied response to that ownership ("If I have a tremble in my voice..."). We asked Justin if he'd be willing to post his paper here at ITM, and he was gracious enough to assent.

“Becoming the Medieval Jongleur”

The other day a colleague of mine was recalling what she was doing on the morning of September 11th, 2001. Still a graduate student, buried amidst moldy books in her studio apartment, Molly sat preparing for her orals, happily oblivious to the smoke and helicopters circling the Twin Towers in New York City. It was a phone call from her mom later that afternoon that broke her studious reverie and awakened her to the horror. Molly’s a first-year professor at Presbyterian College; for her, the anecdote was a testament to the otherworldliness of graduate school, allowing one to shut out the external world and inhabit a textual reality. Her story resonated with me because of how different my own 9/11 experience was. I had just begun teaching at Presbyterian College when the Towers fell; I was, in short, where she is now, learning as no doubt all of you know that teaching requires us to be creatures of this world, of the here and now, even if our subject is remote. Within an hour of the first plane’s impact, I knew about it. At our campus-wide convocation that morning, we learned of the second crash; we began with a prayer for those involved, hastily went through the motions of the convocation, and then rushed to our television and computer screens. Had I wanted to remain oblivious to the events of 9/11, I couldn’t have. Even at my provincial liberal arts college, an hour’s drive from a major city, it was impossible to remain aloof, insulated from the threat.

Mulling over my conversation with Molly, I couldn’t help thinking about the grad student both Molly and I were, not so long ago. So focused, so blinkered. I wonder: have I ever been as medieval as I was in graduate school? My Old English, Old Norse, Old French – hold your ears everyone – my LATIN all proclaim emphatically NO! My teaching load laughs uproariously at the ridiculous question—“ha ha ha, a medievalist? With this kind of course load?” And my family life, now far more complicated than it was then, replies with genuine curiosity, “Daddy… what’s medieval?”

With the explosion of non-medieval demands on my time, I often feel as though my ability to do medieval research has stagnated. There are no blocks of time for striking out into terra incognita. Even conference papers, until recently, were rehearsals of dissertation chapters. On the other hand, the courses I teach are now terra firma, thanks to the virtues of trial and error. I’m better at playing my medievalist part, at least for the limited duration of eighty minutes, and better as well at filing the medieval away in order to take up linguistics, composition, faculty status committee, school newspaper, and various other demands. The juggling routine no longer compromises my performance. I’ve become, in short, the medieval jongleur, quite adept at playing limited roles, intensely aware of and responsive to the audience in front of me, and dismissive of the content beyond the horizon of my class notes or conference presentation. Like a good jongleur, my performance introduces anachronisms from my audience’s present—Chaucer’s Pardoner becomes Jerry Falwell; Gutenberg’s press, the World Wide Web; Welsh literature, a discourse circumscribed by Western hegemony; Charlemagne’s siege at Saragossa, the Liberation of the Iraqi People. The connections, moreover, make sense, they feel relevant, build community, and my audience typically likes them.

And yet, I don’t entirely disagree with Nancy Partner, a trailblazer of medieval feminism who more recently has grown skeptical of “theory’s” relevance to the Middle Ages. At Kalamazoo last spring, she derided a Babel panel entitled “What is the Place of the Present in Medieval Studies?” One of her more critical comments went something like this:

…[M]edievalists suffer from a collective resentment at being ignored and slighted, a fear of being considered boring by definition, and are thus pathetically susceptible to acting out in exaggerated bids for attention.

Admittedly, Partner showed little tact. Are we all, for instance, pathetically susceptible? Be that as it may, the jongleur in me acknowledges, if not resentment at being ignored and slighted, at least anxiety about being overlooked; it acknowledges as well a fear of being considered boring; and yes, most emphatically does my jongleur acknowledge exaggerated bids for attention.

On the other hand, Don’t we all? Isn’t the historicizing or new-critical curmudgeon who feigns insulation from the things of this world nevertheless offering his own bid for attention? In all honesty, I’m less worried about bids for attention, indeed even exaggerated ones, than the opposite—an exclusively hindward gaze that overtly dismisses relevance to the present. To imply an exclusively backward focus risks relegating our discipline to the dustbin of the past.

Fortunately for us, some incredibly bright people in our field are refusing to consign us to the dustbin. Partner’s position, I am convinced, would change if she read their work. At present, I’m thinking of Steve Guthrie (though I could easily add Steven Kruger, Bruce Holsinger or Kathleen Biddick, but let’s stick with Steve G). His connection between the torture policies at Abu Ghraib and 14th Century Inquisition practices is breathtaking. Guthrie makes you realize that the past does have predictive power, that those of us who study it have an obligation to make our voices heard.

Jeffrey Cohen’s sense of temporality suggests we should be doing even more. It’s not enough that the past help us “understand better the present” or “render predictable the future” (Medieval Identity Machines). For Cohen, time itself must become a problem, and the medieval “middle” a hermeneutic for understanding it. He discerns … and let me throw Eileen Joy in there with Jeffrey … They discern in good scholarship an unsettled restlessness, a joie de vivre that embraces, even loves, the past, refuting any possibility of stability or consensus. I suspect that a good deal of the jongleur I’ve uncovered for this presentation owes its formulation to the “nomadic, mobile, vagrant” scholarship that Cohen called for at Kalamazoo this past Spring. His blog, moreover, has left a stamp on the field that will endure for many years to come. Consider for instance his recent post on “Messages to an Uncertain Future,” in which he characterizes Stonehenge, the Cairn at Maeshowe, and York Minster as “time capsules” and “messages to a known-in-advance receiver,” colonizing space and time in excess of our typical historical parameters. He invites us to consider: “How do you communicate with a future to which you will have become remote history?” While he doesn’t really offer an answer, Cohen implies that we look to Stonehenge, Maeshowe and York Minster as models.

Make no mistake, these are compelling cases for the relevant restlessness of the past. They’re big, they’re exciting, they’re important, and they’re changing medieval studies. Like Nancy Partner, I’m not always comfortable with the presentist claims they make, but unlike her, I wouldn’t want a field without them! Medieval studies, like any other scholarly discipline, should be receptive to what Betsy McCormick calls “hermeneutic juxtapositions”: it must allow divisions and indeed thrive on the rifts that these juxtapositions create. Failure to give voice to them isolates us, deprives us of relevance, invites snickers and spitballs from the back row, and leaves us vulnerable to academia’s grim reaper. If we fail to bring the present to medieval studies, provosts may decide medieval studies has no place in the present.

But eternal optimist that I am, I believe those who represent the future of medieval studies are jongleurs like myself, juggling their research endeavors with a variety of institutional demands and non-medieval teaching obligations. Perhaps we remember a time somewhat fondly when we could block the present out of our lives, bury ourselves in o-stem declensions, lose our way in the tangle of medieval romance, maybe even shiver with delight at holding a fourteenth century Book of Hours. Like the Roland jongleur, we may look back with nostalgia and reverence at our past, wanting to revisit it, caress it, even love it. But if love calls us to our medieval past, it also calls us to the things of this world.

Returning to the question at the beginning of this essay – that is, have I ever been as medieval as I was in graduate school? – let me now reply with an emphatic yes! Indeed, a much better one, and better because of the demands of this world. For although they tend to shatter and refract my medieval gaze into an unsettling array of fragmentary pieces, the jongleur eventually grows adept at assembling the pieces and integrating them into the audience’s present. Recalling the aftermath of my 9/11, I remember now that following convocation most of my History of the English Language students showed up for class, eager for someone to make sense of the crisis. But I was equally stunned, so we sat there in a state of uncomfortable silence until finally I dismissed the class. My inner-grad student had little training for such a crisis and therefore stood frozen, like Chaucer, before the gates of horn and ivory. But my inner jongleur, now seasoned with hindsight and a healthy dose of presentism, knows that I missed an opportunity. I should have turned on the classroom TV and grieved with them, like Margery Kempe at Calvary.

SEMA, You're Great, Don't Ever Leave Me

by EILEEN JOY

Just as SEMA pre-opened with a bang with Betsy and I at the vodka bar Sub-Zero, then Niche Restaurant, in Saint Louis, so it also closed with one at Chez Leon, where the elegant elderly ladies and gentleman of the Central West End still dress for dinner and close their evenings over roast chicken and salad lyonnaise and Sancerre. We were there on the sidewalk until they began folding the tables and chairs, then retired to the bar for whiskey and a music mix that included Daft Punk, Pet Shop Boys, Chaka Khan, and Jimi Hendrix [let's just say that after dinner service ends, the place takes on a different vibe entirely]. Here is just to say what a wonderful time I had at the SEMA conference and how we couldn't have done any of it without each other. A more substantial post later, but for now, I send everyone my eternal gratitude for, maybe, the best time ever at a medieval studies conference. Cheers and good night. [Now, in the meantime: read Karl's amazing SEMA paper.]

The Return of the Pig?

by KARL STEEL

I'm told that I've been away for too long. What brought me back, today, and I hope again and again, is a dispensation sealed with a promise. Various people, bless their hearts, wanted to bi- or even tri-localize at SEMA Saturday morning, and I convinced them to leave my panel alone by promising to load down the blog with my conference paper. ITM wouldn't suffer too much, after all, since chunks of what I gave at SEMA I've done in some version before.

But, my friends, by missing my paper, you also missed a very alimentary journey from eating to digestion to excretion to more excretion (yes, twice, for what is shit but excess?): Fabienne Michelet on the OE Andreas, a favorite poem around these parts; Michael Johnson, on a chain of shitty asses in Provençal lyric; and Susan Morrison, Charlotte Allen's bête noire, who, in granting us a glimpse of her fecopoetics, refused play the hoarder (a favorite piece from her paper: the 15th-century travel guide that describes the habitus of the committed shipboard shitter in a bit too much detail: remember how the reluctance to pray is overcome by habitual kneeling? How habitual kneeling itself makes prayer sincere? Now imagine unbuckling your cloak, 3 times a day, to trick your Jerusalem-bound bowels into sliding past their ironic refusal to engage).

Away from St. Louis, having given your Saturday morning to other pleasures, weep for your loss, charissimi, if you can, but not so hard you can't track what follows. Pour yourself a cup of tea, put up your fuzzy slippers, and read on.

The earthly material out of which men’s mortal bodies are created never perishes; but though it may crumble into dust and ashes, or be dissolved into vapors and exhalations, though it may be transformed into the substance of other bodies, or dispersed into the elements, though it should become food for beasts or men, and be changed into their flesh, it returns in a moment of time to that human soul which animated it at the first, and which caused it to become man, and to live and grow.

This argument for the persistence and return of the human body, taken from Augustine's Enchiridion, might have been drawn from any medieval explanation of Christian resurrection doctrine. The doctrine was well suited for alleviating concerns over catastrophic change and the total disappearance of the body. Shipwrecks and anthropophagous animals, deaths in the arena or at the stake, putrefaction, dessication, and dispersal: none of this actually destroyed the body. There could be nothing simpler than coping with catastrophic destruction, but life itself proved an almost insoluble problem. During their life, humans grew, and eating, digestion, and assimilation—apparently—caused this growth. Life means change. If the human body changed as a result of things it consumed, what could be identified as the original body? What if the inhuman substance of food supplanted rather than merely supplemented the resurrectable human body? What if, as Peter Lombard wondered (see Bynum Resurrection 124), eating and digestion gradually transformed human bodies into bread or roast pig? What of the human would remain?

Peter Lombard's anxiety about bread is unusual. Typically, resurrection doctrine focused on the problem of meat. Another twelfth-century theologian, Master Martin, offered the argument that the

meats of animals and fish that are fit for the table of humans turn into the flesh of the eater. All the flesh of humans will resurrect, therefore the flesh of these animals, having been made human, will resurrect. Also, the flesh of humans crosses over into the flesh of a wolf [that has eaten humans] and thus the flesh of the wolf will resurrect since the flesh of humans, which has crossed over into the wolf, will resurrect.

Similarly, Gilbert of Poitiers argued that if what humans ate turns into human flesh, then “pig flesh would resurrect”; and an anonymous twelfth-century Summa wondered whether “man, in eating beast flesh, turns it into his own flesh and that conversely a beast eating human flesh turns it into its own flesh, and thus the flesh of a beast having been converted into human flesh or having been made human will resurrect” (see Richard Heinzmann, Die Unsterblichkeit der Seele und die Auferstehung des Leibes 211). These questions all implied the possibility of a paradise thronged with human-animal hybrids. In a sense this was a best case scenario, as the “chain consumption” problem suggested that some unfortunate humans might not be able to resurrect at all. In a typical chain consumption scenario—such as that found in Julian of Toledo's seventh-century Prognosticon or its thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman translation—a wolf kills and eats a man, and then a lion kills and eats the wolf, and then dies shortly afterwards. I'll quote from the translation: “The carcass lay on the ground and entirely rotted and turned to earth: where could the man be found in here? Know, indeed, that I do not believe at all that this man could be recuperated from death into life, because the earth that was the man cannot be divided from that which became the beasts'!”

Resurrection doctrine focused particularly on animal flesh because of the essential role played by the resurrection in distinguishing human from merely animal life. The Christian tradition almost universally asserted that the afterlife would be without plants and animals. Irenaeus's Against Heresies argues that immortal, resurrected humans would spend eternity with animals—including straw-eating, vegetarian lions; there is also the common medieval story about Judas's rooster [e.g., Cursor Mundi, Horrall ed., III.15985-93], which springs back to life to mock Judas's declaration that Jesus could no more resurrect than the rooster in his pot; but, to the best of my knowledge, Irenaeus's conception of heaven as an exact restoration of the Edenic paradise did not take root in medieval Christianity, and Judas's rooster, after all, was presumably resurrected only to end its existence, once again, in the soup. The main literary tradition on the resurrection, The Fifteen Signs of the Last Judgment, shows humans entering into eternity and animals, if it acknowledges them at all, as only mourning as their complete destruction approaches. Christian scholars generally insisted that the souls of animals did not outlast animal life. And Aquinas explained that since “in that final renewal of the universe...the body will rise not natural but spiritual...animals and plants will...cease to exist then.” Both humans and animals had bodies that were born, that grew and ate, and that underwent pain and putrefaction, but resurrection did away with these resemblances by breaking human life entirely from any shared bodily existence with animals. Furthermore, since humans would resurrect, only animals could really die; humans experienced what might better be called a temporary setback, or a preparatory stage for a more perfect existence. Resurrection would fail as an ultimate guarantee of difference, however, if the doctrinal worries about digestion proved justified. If animals that were eaten by or ate humans could enter into eternal life, if humans might enter eternal life as hybrid human-animals, and if humans eaten by animals might, through digestion, become animal flesh and thus be unable to resurrect, then to quote once more the question from the Dialogue of St. Julian, “where could the man be found in here?” With every bite, the human would gradually meld with the animal and be given over to death.

There is at least one additional complication to the utility of the resurrection for separating humans from animals: the resurrection is the promised, eternal demonstration of the distinction between humans and animals, while the worldly, present-day guarantee of difference is the human subjugation of animals. In a process that Derrida termed carnophallogocentrism, humans establish themselves retroactively, through this subjugation, as uniquely possessing “speech or reason, the logos, history, laughing, mourning, burial, the gift, and so on”: had Derrida extended his analysis to the Christian Middle Ages, his “and so on” would have included the immortal soul. The human consumption of animal flesh is the central act of domination by which animal life is denigrated and human life exalted and thereby created as human life. In this system, no human can be slaughtered and eaten, at least not legitimately, whereas no form of Christianity could deny the legitimacy of eating animals without incurring the suspicion of heresy. A human death might be murder, but an animal death at the most would be only a property crime. With a few notable exceptions, any claim that an animal might possess more than merely instrumental life was self-evidently absurd: this explains, in part, the humor of the Testamentum porcelli and the Stultus Stultorum, and the scorn of the Apostle Paul and Guibert of Nogent for the Deuteronomic verses that call for kindness towards animals.

If the human establishes itself as human by dominating animals, then, in another instance of the key insight of any number of postmodern philosophies, there is no essential human identity; there is only a fundamental conflict. The human is both a structural position and an ongoing event that seeks to produce both the human and the animal by elevating one and denigrating the other. It might be expected that this conflict could end once humans resurrected into an afterlife populated only by God, angels—or demons—and by other humans, where humans will have assumed their perfected bodies, freed from all flux. By passing through death, humans finally realize their distinction from nonhuman earthly life, and, in an afterlife lacking any lifeforms that can be dominated, they should be freed from the necessity of conflict. This peaceful end might be understood as the point when the human at long last comes into its own. But if the meat-eating by which the human struggles to be human contaminates the human body, if the pork we eat resurrects with us, then that struggle will be marked on the human body for eternity. Rather than finally arriving at an identity, the human will permanently display a corporeal reminder of its systemic antagonism; rather than transcending flux, flux would be fixed in the human forever. The truth of human nature—its contingency, its inessential relationality—will be irrepressible.

Christian thinkers countered this truth of human nature by proposing another truth. Only what belonged to what they called the veritas humanae naturae, “the truth of our human nature” would resurrect. In effect, this clarification set aside a portion of the human body as essentially human, rendering the rest of the body a kind of inhuman supplement unfit for resurrection, associated rather than joined with the truth of body. Philip Lydon Reynolds's Food and the Body: Some Peculiar Questions in High Medieval Theology tracks the doctrinal debates over whether food could contribute to the truth of human nature. Theologians like Peter Lombard and Master Martin answered no. Proof texts for this position included God's creation of Eve from Adam's rib, the feeding of the 5,000 from the 5 loaves, the resurrection of infants into adult bodies, and Matthew 15:17, “Do you not understand, that whatsoever entereth into the mouth, goeth into the belly, and is cast out into the privy?” Thus, the human would be preserved from its own eating; pig flesh, as Gilbert of Poitiers wrote, would not resurrect ["Die Sententie Magistri Gisleberti Pictavensis Episcopi (II). Die Version der Florentiner Handschrift." Archives d'histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge (AHDLMA) 46 (1979): 45-105]. While this solution required that human growth take place miraculously rather than naturally, while it cut off the human from any alimentary interaction with the world, it had the advantage of simplicity on other points: nothing essential in the human body was subject to change.

Later theologians promoted a naturalistic explanation for human growth. The aforementioned anonymous twelfth-century Summa, which, after wondering whether animals might resurrect, provides several options, the first two miraculous, and the latter at least tending towards a naturalistic explanation of growth:

Neither human flesh turns into that of a wild beast or the other way around, but...one nourishes the other and makes it grow . . . Or, if it is allowed that one is converted into another, it is not however converted into the truth of human nature or the other way around. Or, however, if they are converted the Lord will know one from another and in the resurrection will separate them.

Another anonymous treatise, De novissimus, argues that pork eaten by people

is not pork but is transformed into human substance to be resurrected, and so will not be unsuitable, just as the mud of the earth is not simply mud, but, having been transfigured into the human form, will arise with Adam. [Edited in Odon Lottin, Psychologie et morale aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles, 6 vols. (Louvain,: Abbaye du Mont César, 1942), Vol. V, 396.]

Chain consumption arguments, like that in the Prognosticon, always ended by asserting that God would sort things out. The Elucidarium explains:

What was the flesh of the man will resurrect; what is of beasts will stay behind. For He knows well how to separate these, who knew how to make everything from nothing. Therefore, whether they are devoured limb by limb by beasts or by fishes or by birds, all will be reformed in the resurrection so much so that not one of their hairs will perish.

Finally, Aquinas, like De novissimus, asserts that “although that part of matter which at one time was under the form of bovine flesh rises again in man under the form of human flesh, it does not follow that the flesh of an ox rises again, but the flesh of a man: else one might conclude that the clay from which Adam's body was fashioned shall rise again.”

The double argument that food contributed to human growth and that only the human body could resurrect granted humans a monopoly on constructive earthly violence. Animals' own meat-eating could have no long-term effect: animal flesh consumed by other animals might assimilate to the carnivore's body, or it might pass out of its body, but both eater and eaten were destined for the same end to which all nonhuman animals were subject. Human flesh consumed by animals might become part of their bodies, for a time, but God will separate human from animal flesh for the resurrection, so ordering animals and humans into their own proper destinies.

Barring the cannibal consumption of unensouled fetuses—which I won't get into today—the violence of the human consumption of animals is the only violence that might transform flesh into a substance fit for the Eternal City. No pig or cow could become immortal, but by suffering the violence of humans, either might contribute to an immortal substance. What could be put to use would be, and the rest would be discarded. The life of an animal was only a means, never an end.

Yet even while belittling animals, theologians nonetheless commemorated animal life and death, as the peculiar attention to meat in these debates itself attests to the value of animal life. It is that moment prior to the final belittlement, the moment the life of the pig enters the theologian's consciousness, the moment prior to the declaration that the pig will not resurrect, the moment before the theologian announces that God cannot think the life of a pig worth preserving, on which I want to linger as I continue to think about these matters.

Homeward bound

[illustration: Shriner liquor bottle with screw-off fez that serves as a shot glass, Moolah Lounge, Saint Louis; photo by Mike Smith]

by J J Cohen

It ended with a bang (a graduate student panel that indicated medieval studies' bright future) and a whimper (a small communal awwww that the event had to come to its end). I commend Eileen Joy, the local organizers (faculty and graduate students alike), Saint Louis University, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Washington University, and every single conference participant for making SEMA one of the best confabs I've attended.

And now, after a week spent away, it is time to return home.

Moloch etc

by J J Cohen
Speaking of obscure pagan deities, Michael Berubé is back. Check out his faith based initiative. Because he didn't offer a child sacrifice, it is unlikely his prayers will be answered.

So far so good at the SEMA conference. I attended quite a good Old English panel at which GW student Mike Smith talked about Cuthbert's folded body and prostheses. He (meaning Mike, not Cuthbert) was wearing running shoes as he spoke so he was clearly spooked at the possibility that the Q&A session would turn inimical (he hadn't sacrificed to Moloch yet either). Fortunately the post-papers conversation did not go to a dark place; in fact the conference has been filled with conviviality.

Mike Smith took the photo at right at an undisclosed location. An undisclosed plenary speaker is doing his patented "Talk to the hand / Photographs steal what little remains of my soul [which I am saving for Moloch]" maneuver. I believe he was eating a very fine soup made of leeks and goat cheese at the time. The impeccably coiffed medievalist to his right has clearly had enough of his mealtime shenanigans; she changed seats immediately thereafter (though not before he secretly replaced her iPhone wallpaper image of her adorable niece with a wacky picture of ITM's own Mary Kate, who was happy to assist). Also at this dinner the undisclosed speaker was forced to confess that nothing of what he says is actually funny; it is just so hurtful that people laugh at it as a defense mechanism.

I am looking forward to my talk today, though my insomnia- filled night featured a dream in which John Mandeville sailed to an island close to the earth's edge and found Sarah Pahlin lecturing naked Brahmins about energy policy. They listened serenely to lines that were supposed to be sassy but came across instead as overly rehearsed. One of the Brahmins snuck up behind Pahlin and untightened the bun in her hair, causing the time-space continuum to begin to unravel. This is not a political commentary. This is simply a restless sleeper's fevered dream, filled with the anxieties about apocalypse and end-times that he always gets before speaking to 263 people at a plenary lecture.

OK, room service just sent up the small child. I better get a-sacrificin'.

Ready (Almost) for SEMA

Figure 1. Eileen hiding behind her Hello Kitty bag at Sub-Zero in Saint Louis

by EILEEN JOY

The annual meeting of the Southeastern Medieval Association is only three days away and I think I can almost say I am almost ready for it [not to mention, pretty psyched]. Betsy McCormick arrived on Saturday to help me with last-minute organizing chores and we decided that the first thing we should do is spend all of Sunday shopping, drinking, and having one of those dinners where you think you see God and you have to be trundled out of the restaurant in a wheelbarrow. So we went to Target and bought stuff we really don't need, then we hit Bar Italia in the Central West End for paninis and Peroni beer and gelato, and then Left Bank Books where we fought each other over the one copy of Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night [I won], then we hit Sub-Zero, which boasts 200 vodkas and we did our best to sample many of them, and then we headed out to Niche Restaurant in order to indulge in the culinary wonders of chef Gerard Ford Craft, who Food & Wine magazine recently named one of the "Best New Chefs" of 2008. Needless to say, we closed the place down and were extremely sad to have to leave. On the way home, we listened at loud volume to the official BABEL mixtape for the SEMA conference, "California Soul," and we leave you with that mix here:

California Soul [Marlena Shaw and Diplo]
Safe and Sound [Rebelution]
Early in the Morning [The Gap Band]
Let's Get It Started (Spike Mix) [Black-Eyed Peas]
Genius of Love [Tom Tom Club]
Praise You [Fatboy Slim]
She's Not There [Santana]
Higher Ground [Stevie Wonder]
Got To Give It Up, Part I [Marvin Gaye]
There Was a Time (Kenny Dope Remix) [James Brown; Verve/Remixed 4]
The Only One I Know [Mark Ronson, feat. Robbie Williams]
Take Care of Business (Pilooski Remix) [Nina Simone; Verve/Remixed 4]
Music [Leela James]
100 Days, 100 Nights [Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings]
Golden [Jill Scott]

It is now time, of course, to get back to work and start running around like crazy women making sure no detail of the conference has been left to chance. To those of you who will be joining us in Saint Louis: we can't wait to see you. And to those of you who won't be here: what's wrong with you?

Figure 2. a dessert at Niche [what was in it? who can recall?]

Shana Tova, or Judaism Today

by J J Cohen

From the NYT, some paragraphs about a synagogue's desire to become a "spiritual Starbucks" (can I have a double shot of spirituality, but with soy and sugar-free vanilla?) that give a small glimpse of Judaism (and, really, religion in general) as tending towards the culturally mixed and remaining historically fragile:

Inspired by the movement known as Chabad, a Hasidic sect with a missionary tradition around the world, Rabbi Jacobson said he would offer his programs — which until now he has operated on an itinerant basis around the city — at the Sixth Street synagogue in hopes of creating “a spiritual Starbucks.” The plan is to attract people, regardless of their faith, from all over the city, he said. But the goal is to restore Jewish identity to those estranged from Judaism and, if possible, to add them to the membership rolls of Community Synagogue.

Like many Lubavitchers, Rabbi Jacobson embodies a paradoxical mix of strictly conservative theology and a freewheeling, nonjudgmental hipster style. He is partial to drum circles. He is friendly with the Hasidic reggae-rap-klezmer artist known as Matisyahu.

Of course, this is not everyone’s cup of tea. “Is there tension because we love things the way they are and he wants to make everything completely different?” asked Ruth Greenberg, 90, a member of the congregation, which had about 250 members when she joined in 1950 and now counts not quite 100. “Not at all, not at all. We may not like each other, but that doesn’t mean there’s tension.”

I was also struck by these lines, about how the synagogue found its original home:

The building needs work. The pews and the pipes date from the mid-19th century, when the place was built as St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church (which effectively died on June 15, 1904, along with about 1,000 of its parishioners, in a fire aboard the steamship General Slocum, en route to a church picnic). The roof leaks.

From Evangelical Lutherans to drumming Lubavitchers in a mere century.