Blogging the Middle Ages: Unlocked Wordhoard

[#7 in our series of blog histories]

Despite its name, the Unlocked Wordhoard did not begin as a medievalist blog; instead, it grew out of a series of conversations I had with a colleague in the summer of 2005. We had begun discussing the fall of the public intellectual, how so few remained in the popular consciousness, and how little respect we had for those who did. As I recall, our lament was that scholars were either public or intellectual, but not both.

My colleague, however, had a strong conviction that all scholars have the responsibility to be public intellectuals to our own communities beyond the classroom. He argued that although not everyone is going to have a column in a national newspaper or appear as regular guests on nationally-syndicated radio and TV shows, we have a responsibility to the community to at least put ourselves out there. Over the course of a few weeks he convinced me that he was right, and furthermore convinced me to experiment with him in creating blogs. I agreed and jumped in with both feet. After a couple of months he abandoned blogging altogether and became a vociferous critic of the practice, while I became an enthusiast.


The early days were mostly struggling to find my voice, searching for one that was accessible but not condescending. I notoriously misspelled nous every time in my first post on June 16th^, 2005 then went on to blog about any topic that caught my interest – Fathers’ Day, Bloomsday, “Why We Need Art,” a review of Batman Begins, Rosie O’Donnell’s poetry, etc. A few months after starting the Wordhoard, Hurricane Katrina hit the region, and I temporarily turned the Wordhoard into a public posting of relief efforts and needs.

Blogging about Katrina gave me time to reflect on some things I didn’t like about the Wordhoard: I didn’t like the voice I used in writing about subjects I had no expertise in – after all, a PhD in medieval literature doesn’t exactly qualify me to speak from on high about chemistry, yet like many other bloggers I found myself writing about current events even if they were not in my area of specialty. I began to call this voice “Professor Awesome, PhD” for his arrogant assumption of intellectual superiority in all areas. In order to banish Prof. Awesome, I made a silent policy to limit the Wordhoard to a very few topics I know a bit about: literature, medievalism, and academic life.

I assumed that this change would lessen the Wordhoard’s readership, but counter-intuitively the readership spiked. I found that the more I mentioned other topics, the less people read. Furthermore, I found that people really responded when I wrote about medievalism, which was one of my main interests and the implied topic of the blog title in any case. Once again, I narrowed the focus, expecting a drop in readership, and once again readership spiked. While occasionally Professor Awesome, PhD popped up, he mostly disappeared, and whenever I felt led to talk about something I have no specialization in, I tried to ironically ascribe it to my evil alter-ego, Professor Awesome, PhD.

While the subject matter narrowed, the readership broadened. My policy of keeping comments on the front page helped me combat my own Professor Awesome, PhD tendencies, but it also created a space for scholars and popular audiences to meet and discuss issues. Today academic blogging has become so popular that it is practically passé, but it must be remembered that back in those days blogging was considered a radical, potentially subversive activity. The pseudonymous “Ivan Tribble” was darkly warning in the Chronicle of Higher Education that bloggers would be viewed with suspicion and never find jobs, Daniel Drezner was denied tenure at the University of Chicago (a denial that was, fairly or unfairly, ascribed to his blogging) and I would estimate that most academic bloggers were either writing pseudonymously or anonymously. The fear was very real, but in my own situation I was being encouraged by Troy University to blog, the trail having been blazed by our own Professor Steven Taylor of Poliblog. The Wordhoard became a safe space where graduate students and established scholars could write without fear of being outed, and popular medieval enthusiasts could rub elbows with the experts.

I also found an unexpected role that I could relish: the promotion of other people’s blogs. I found that a lot of the traffic going out of the Wordhoard was going through the blogroll, and realized that (in the days before RSS feeds became popular) many people were using the Wordhoard as their first stop to see what was new at other blogs. Old-timer blogs like Owlfish, the Scela (the Digital Medievalist), Blogenspiel, Quod She, and In the Middle were contributing material that I could never produce, and a passel of newer blogs were emerging to become staples of the medieval blogosphere (such staples that the handful of selective links above necessarily omits many indispensible sites). Eventually people who planned to start new medievalist blogs would contact me before the first post, knowing that the Wordhoard would promote their blog and send traffic their way.

The best vehicle of the Wordhoard’s mission to promote medievalism is probably the Morning Medieval Miscellany feature, in which the Wordhoard offers a set of links for the day of new medieval postings around the internet – a daily mini-Carnivalesque, if you will, or perhaps a geekier version of the Drudge Report. With so many people using RSS feeds it is impossible to be sure exactly how many people are using the Miscellanies, but I regularly get e-mails from people reporting sharp spikes in traffic on their blogs after they are featured on the Miscellany.

As with all things online, the Wordhoard is changing today. I’ve had so many people address me as “Professor Awesome” in e-mails at and conferences and conventions that I’ve given up on thinking of Professor Awesome as an alter-ego, and instead now have an unnamed figure I call “my evil twin.” The sheer number of active medieval blogs has erupted so that the Miscellany which used to take 15-20 minutes to put together now takes an hour to 90 minutes, making it more difficult to do with regularity. Just as RSS feeds have changed the way people read blogs, Twitter and Facebook appear to be changing the blog as a medium as well, leading to challenges of parallel comment threads on blogs and their Facebook links. New applications like Google Wave are on the horizon, and I’m sure more developments are beyond the horizon now, but the blog as a medium will either evolve or die, and the Unlocked Wordhoard with it.

Blogging the Middle Ages: The Ruminate, or iSwain

by Larry Swain

[#6 in our series of blog histories]

I think in the following that my choice of a blog title will become very clear.  Back in the day as I transitioned from working stiff: unwilling computer guy to graduate level medievalist in late 1998-1999, I became aware of LiveJournal and other such sites.  I was already at that time creating web pages for both research and teaching applications, some under the auspices of the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University and some on my own.  We had already also begun work on The Heroic Age.  Rambling around in my brain then were some thoughts of creating a medieval based web presence of some kind modeled in part on some things I had been a part of earlier, but for the web rather than lynx, telnet, gopher and the like.  So let me back up a bit.  In the early '90s, I had been a subscriber to a list of burgeoning links that were culled from the growing web and sent round usually on a weekly basis.  The subject of the list was generally Rome and the Roman Empire.  Eventually this weekly list of links became the Lacus Curtius site.  Later yet, another person interested in classics began The Explorator, a weekly email of news items related to the Ancient and Classical worlds.   But, what kept me from beginning such a site or list of my own was time, the fact that some really great online projects in the field were underway such as Netserf, ORB, Internet Medieval Sourcebook, and at WMU we had and continued to produce online content.  

Slowly, my thoughts began to solidify that what was needed wasn't really another site of texts, or a site of links (Netserf and Heroic Age were already doing that), but medieval news and announcements.  At that point, c. 2000, no one was doing that.  But I was bogged down in my own studies and efforts of becoming a medievalist; the result was that the thoughts and intent were there, but I did little to put them into action.  Along about 2002-2003 blogs were becoming more widely known.  To that point, blogs were mostly a) announcement portions of corporate sites b) personal diaries attached to web pages.  Once Google purchased Blogger though, some colleagues and friends in Biblical Studies and Classics who had been instrumental in early web sites in their fields began experimental blogs.  No one was sure how this application could be applied to academia, much less specifically to the Humanities.  It occurred to me that my desire to publish abroad news and announcements of interest in Medieval Studies generally could fit in the new blog atmosphere.  I actually started a blog as an experiment.  I quickly stopped posting my thoughts, I didn't want to do a personal diary sort of thing, and I doubted anyone but me would be interested in my musings on things medieval.  Once I had a format down, I launched The Ruminate.

In those early days of the blog, first published over Christmas break in 2003, I published simply news items.  I am disinclined to draw attention to such efforts, so since I was really the only one reading the blog, I did not update regularly...and admittedly a full load of taking classes, teaching classes, commuting, and the like left little time for it.  At the same time I was still experimenting with the format and so eventually my announcements included: news of the week, saints days, historical events commemorated during the week, medieval words showing up in the various dictionary "word of the day" features, and Medieval television.  Each topic might disappear for a week or more depending on my time to compile the material.

I posted intermittently until 2006.  My first real post was reacting to a flurry of posts first from Mike Drout on his blog, Wormtalk and Slugspeak, regarding the State of the Field in Anglo-Saxon studies.  Several other burgeoning bloggers, Eileen Joy, Scott Nokes, Tiruncula, responded.  These blog posts eventually became a feature in The Heroic Age.  But that was what I would call my first post (well, technically, I wrote about a Top Chef episode immediately before this one).  Over 2006 and 2007 I found my voice as a medieval scholar as well as a blogger.  I've reported news, discussed issues, interacted with other bloggers.  I've used the blog to begin to generate on paper some research results, to suggest books or articles, or to interact with books, articles, email discussions, and the like.  Interestingly, the majority of those who check in on me are people I've never met personally...not that my numbers are large.  But unlike many who blog, my family, spouse, friends, and longest, closest colleagues don't read the blog, and in some cases I don't think they know it exists. 

For the foreseeable future, I'll continue as I am: blogging ideas, research, reading, interacting.  I've broken off my original idea of an announcements blog to the The Heroic Age blog that posts news, announcements, CFPs and the like.  I've also joined Matthew Gabriele at Modern Medieval and post on medievalism topics there as time permits.  I've found blogging to be a positive element in my professional life and hopefully have made one or two people think along the way.  I use newer media too, FB, etc, but while these sites have many a medievalist on them, they do not seem conducive to the types of things that blogs, e-lists, and other media offer us.  That is not a negative thing, it is important I think to have many tools in the box and to be able to use them all.

Blogging the Middle Ages: Quod She

by Dr. Virago

[For background on this archival project, read the posts here, here, here, here, here, and here]

The History of Quod She

I began my blog in September, 2005, two years after starting my first tenure track job, but my entry into the blogospheres precedes that date by some years, as I have been reading and commenting on blogs and proto-blogs at least since 2001-2, the year I was finishing my dissertation . (What a surprise: my introduction into the blog world took place during the most isolating year of my life.)  However, my blog reading didn't really become a regular habit until the fall of 2003, when Ancrene Wiseass started the first version of her blog to chronicle her year of living and studying in Ireland.  I'd known the Wiseass in real life, and so I was reading it to keep in touch with her, and also because I was simultaneously starting a new life in a new place that could, at times, seem as foreign as another country.  Then through her I discovered other blogs, written by people I didn't know, and over time I found myself equally interested in the stories they told and the issues they wrote about, particularly on the personal or mixed personal/professional blogs of other academics.  Negotiating my own life as a new assistant professor in a regional university, I started to see myself, or at least lives like mine, in these blogs.  I read blogs by other professors in literature, other medievalists in a variety of fields, and also other assistant professors in all sorts of disciplines.  Reading and commenting on these blogs became a kind of substitute for the long conversations my friends and I used to have in the TA offices in graduate school, or the long e-mail exchanges I had with a few select friends both during and after graduate school.  But I never really intended to start my own blog, and was content during those early years to read and to comment.  I didn't think I had anything different to contribute, other than what I might comment on someone else's post.

How I ended up starting my own blog was something of an accident.  Somebody's blog required me to create a Blogger account in order to comment -- I think it may have been Got Medieval -- and so I created one and came up with the name Quod She, which I thought was oh-so-clever and couldn't believe no one had used yet.  And then I thought I might as well use the blog for something.  And so I did.  Originally it was meant to be a purely personal blog, set up to keep up with various friends all over the world.  I didn't even come up with my pseudonym until a few months into the blog; original I posted under my unimaginative initials (the nickname version of them, anyway).  But from the start my first readers and commenters were from those blogs I'd been reading and commenting on for the previous year or two:  New Kid on the Hallway, Tiruncula (now blogging elsewhere under another name), Another Damned Medievalist, and, of course, Ancrene Wiseass.  Soon others joined them, not all of them medievalists, and my blogging circle grew, as did my audience.  Eventually I started writing about more professional issues, but with a decidedly personal twist, and more and more my blog became a record of how often academic professional identities become deeply personal to us, and how intertwined the threads of our complicated lives are.  Once I started writing about more professional issues, InsideHigherEd started linking to me and I started gaining more occasional if not regular readers.  And I started writing more medieval content, too.  But even my medieval posts were often simultaneously posts about teaching, or about perceptions of the medieval and medieval studies outside the academy, or about about explaining one's work to colleagues in other fields and disciplines, or about what it's like to work in archives, and so I continued to engage readers in other fields and disciplines, or even the family and friends in other professions and businesses who had started reading when it was a purely personal blog.   I also continued to write those personal posts on topics such as my long-distance running triumphs and defeats, on the death of my mother, on moving in with "Bullock" (as my partner is called on my blog), and on the adoption of our dog, Pippi.  But I think of that content as part of a continuum with the more professional posts. After all, the death of my mother and the very personal confrontation with the fact that we all will die inspired what is probably one of my most memorable medieval-related posts, "Speaking for the dead."  And another post, "Why I teach medieval literature," began with an emphasis on why I teach medieval literature before moving into the question of why medieval literature should be a subject of study.  In short, I think my blog exemplifies a truth about academics that sometimes students and the general public need to be reminded of, which is also a truth about humanity in general:  that we're not, in Bitch Ph.D.'s phrase, "brains on a stick."

Because of that overlap of personal and professional in my blog, I've made countless connections in the academy that are a little bit of both.  Even though I blog pseudonymously, it's pretty easy to figure out who I am, and I'm pretty forthcoming in revealing my identity to academics outside of my university.  My partner jokes that when I spend summers in London at the British Library, I have more of a social life there than I do here, and many of the people I'm spending time with are "blog friends."  And even the bloggers that I haven't met and socialized with, or have only done so briefly at a blogger meet-up here and there, feel something more like friends.  The most mysterious of them, the Chaucer blogger himself, touched me deeply when he posted a comment with condolences for my mother's death, posting as "Geoffrey Chaucer," but writing in Present Day English.   It may be awfully sentimental of me to say this, but the connections that the blogosphere have engendered are important to me.  And those connections have professional benefits as well -- mostly the intangible ones that come with being well-networked, but benefits nevertheless. And I have people I can turn to when I have a question in an area of medieval studies where I am less well-informed.  It's a bit like being in a large, elite research institution with countless colleagues in medieval studies, but without any of the high-level pressures that come with such a position.  But since I did my doctoral studies at such an institution, I don't know that I would be as happy being the sole English literature medievalist in an embattled College of Arts and Sciences at a regional comprehensive university as I am if it weren't for the blogosphere.

I don't know what the future holds for my blog or others in the new age of Facebook and Twitter.  My blogging has fallen way off this year, though it is only partly due to my rather unproductive Facebook habit. I simply feel generally less compelled to write things out, to present them to an immediate audience -- or rather, I feel I need to save some of that energy for other things. But even if I never post another entry (doubtful, but not impossible), the blog remains as an archive of an assistant and then later associate professor of English, a medievalist, a marathoner, a daughter, a sister, a significant other, a traveler, a scholar, a speaker for the dead, a fierce defender of the importance of the humanities for all, an animal lover and dog owner, and a blogger.

Blogging the Middle Ages: A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe

by Jonathan Jarrett

[JJC says: I don't know about you, but I am deeply enjoying these brief histories of blogs I've long admired. For background on this archival project, read the posts here, here, here, here, and here. And doesn't that picture of Jonathan capture his very soul?]

       I began A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe in very late 2006, in a period of frustration with the academic job market as well as other parts of my life. Unable to forecast with any certainty when I might manage to get anything into print, and conscious that even if I submitted several papers the very next day (or as it really transpired, over the next twelve months) they would still take months to emerge (and to date none of those five submissions have done so), I decided to make a stand for myself in a forum I could influence and affect immediately, to wit the world-wide web. So I first set up a respectable set of permanent web-pages on a non-commercial server[1] and when I was sure that they would do for anyone who should web-search me to find, considered the matter of a blog.

       I was already aware of academic bloggers in my field--most notably, the long-serving Another Damned Medievalist, whose very nom de blog indicates that there were others when she started--her particular interests had brought her up in web-searches of mine for teaching material and I had made some initial attempts at contact, though she rightly ignored the unknown crazy man at that time--ironically we are now good friends.[2] Investigation of her blogroll however made it clear that this was a method of communication now being pursued by clever, serious and above all employed people, and something that several of them appeared to feel was no shame to do under their own names. Carl Pyrdum's Got Medieval and Richard Scott Nokes's Unlocked Wordhoard especially caught my attention, the former because of his sheer command of irreverence and scholarship delivered in alternate blows in a web-friendly style, and the latter partly, indeed, because of his good humour, but also because of his apparent intention to run a clearing house for everything medieval in the Blogosphere.[3] This seemed like a good club to be part of. However, very few of them were British, and I was not at all sure that my local academic climate was so conducive to such growth. (I wasn't at the time aware that Magistra et Mater, who had by then been a colleague and great source of advice already without my having had any notion of her Internet presence, was representing her and my country in this way.[4] That took me far too long to discover.) It would, I suspected, be seen as trivial, a waste of effort that a serious scholar would have put into 'real work' and also liable to be taken the wrong way unless absolutely spotlessly academic.

       On the other hand, a few months before I had been at a party in London held by a friend of mine who worked in stock market technology, and both he and a friend of his had recently been encouraged to start professional blogs for their company. I, raised in British academia true enough, couldn't see what the company thought it would gain from this--it seemed like a dotcom idea that money would just fall from the sky if the Internet were invoked enough. I did at least recognise, however, that this was the crest of a wave, and my friend's friend, whose name I have unjustly forgotten, tried to persuade me fervently that it was much more. He asked me about my field, and about my web presence, and said, "Well, if I Google 'tenth medieval' I ought to get you, first page.' He was convinced that a blog was the way to do this (and, it must be said, currently Google proves him right). As you can tell from A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe's actual domain identifier, this stuck with me.[5]

       So the choice came down to waiting forever with a bare-bones CV and a web presence basically confined to undergraduate music obsessions, and not getting a job, or to taking over my own presentation on the web and making sure that I looked like, not just a scholar, but one who was in touch with new media and outreach to the public, something which I believed and believe still is a moral obligation of our profession, especially in the UK where it is so substantially state-funded. You already know which one I chose, so there seems little point in trying to dress it up as if it were an even choice. I tinkered with the design for a while and then put a first post up on 6 December 2006. (It's still there; I've only ever deleted one post, though I now forget what or why.) That month I got 31 page-views, and no-one commented. The advert that the blog was always intended to be was there, but it didn't seem that anyone was seeing it yet.

       For a year or so the blog continued to do nothing, though I was having fun writing it, perhaps too much fun given the danger of an apparent lack of audience on the Internet. Comments began, but were few. Richard Scott Nokes did me the great kindness of noticing and linking me several times and every time this brought me a few extra readers, and similar generosity from Steve Muhlberger at Muhlberger's Early History also helped in the same way.[6] All the same, by the end of 2007 the traffic was still only just over a thousand views a month, many of whom appeared to be web-searchers hoping for rather more from my use of the word `sex' than I think they got, and I didn't bother posting any kind of anniversary.

       2008 however really was the year of Tenth Medieval. Again the big numbers were coming from porn searches, at least at first, but it's been my experience that any link to a big forum nets one a few readers who stay, and this kept happening. By now, too, the blog had long replaced my static pages as my public face; I answered comments quicker than I answered e-mail, because no-one else could see if I failed to answer e-mail but the blog would betray inattention. And it seemed to be working. The numbers grew slowly and also quickly, incremental growth and occasional big links, and I realised that daily updating grew them even more. (That was a lunatic thing to attempt and only goes to show what obsession and procrastination can do combined.) By 2009 they had started falling again, but I'm glad to say that they're now healthier than ever although I am devoting far less time to the blog, a paradox that has dogged it all its life.

       I had started giving reports of seminars at the Institute of Historical Research some time before, partly because I was presenting and partly because I've always felt lucky to be part of them when I have been able--whether the reports constitute a proper return is maybe questionable, but some colleagues further afield have told me how grateful they are for them so it's been a particular blow not to be able to go to them this term. I tried to leaven my reports of others' work with plenty of my own, recycled or occasionally original but trivial; I was trying to avoid, however, any problems with signing off work for journals as never previously published, and I still mainly avoid premiering academic content I intend to use `for real' on A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe. (This is one of many ways in which publication in the humanities has yet to catch up with the Internet's existence, I think.) When no inspiration came I usually had a bag of other people's posts to comment on, and I can find something to say about almost anything, but I have been quite proud of how much actual work has gone into my blog; I have sometimes depended on other blogs who just aggregate content from elsewhere but I've never wanted to be one of them. My Corner is ultimately supposed to be mainly about me, and always has been.

       This all improved my thinking, or so I like to believe. I'd learnt quite a lot of my debating on the Internet, largely on an old text-based system called Monochrome (still out there[7]) and on Usenet; now, when I got into arguments, which I did and still do as readers of ITM will surely and especially know, those skills tended to mean that I would rarely back down even when I had to admit I was wrong; a ground shifted could then be defended anew. That and the discipline of regular writing have, I think, strengthened my actual writing a great deal. And, of course, by following links and clicking things I have learnt a great deal, especially in technological fields that are dark to a lot of my contemporaries. So that has been worthwhile, though not so much dependent on having my own blog.

       But, the blog has made me contacts and friends. The latter know who they are, but I also occasionally get people at institutions with vacancies urging me to apply there--they have, alas, always been overconfident of my `fit', it seems--and been invited to speak at three conferences now solely though the strength of the blog, as well as been invited to submit material to two journals (and Larry Swain of the Heroic Age[8] deserves a particular plaudit here for having actually published something that I wrote in the lifetime of the blog!). It also earnt me an invitation to join the team at Cliopatria, although I think that they've been struggling to remember why ever since I did![9] And, although a few European colleagues have slowly discovered it, including eventually all my referees (and they still write for me, which was a relief), my first trip to the USA as an academic for the Haskins Society Conference of 2008 was an eye-opener. People knew me for the blog, quite a lot of people, and I found this rather scary. I'd been hoping initially that people would find the blog only because they were looking for me for some other reason; now, I realised, I'd built something that threatened to drown out any scholarly presence of conventional appearance I could hope to put together in the same time.

       As you can see, then, I'm ambivalent about the good the blog has done me. There certainly is some: the invitations and the friends, as well as the reassurance during vacations that actually someone is interested in what I have to say, has been hugely helpful and at times a lifeline. On the other hand: it has caused me numerous embarrassments where I've met someone about whom I'd been careless years before; it has sucked up an immense amount of time which I might, in retrospect, have been much better advised to spend in libraries or formatting copy for submission; and, most crucial of all, it has not helped me get hired, and I don't know that it hasn't hindered me. I don't think the UK academic environment is really aware of such things yet, though students citing my mini-paper on the First Crusade will slowly change this perhaps! but when it is, I fear it is some way behind the enthusiasm of the USA for such things. (I've said elsewhere and will say again that this is because UK academia has been throttled by the Research Assessment Exercise's dictation of funding. The RAE, although this may now be changing as it becomes the Research Development Framework, has always been utterly unsure how to rate online work and outreach, and has filed it with exhibitions and performances as bottom in overall importance. Having a blogger on staff never brought a UK history department any extra funding, and they would rather have someone with two journal articles than four hundred blog posts any time. Who can argue with that when it may mean job cuts if they don't?) Well, these are the times we face and I knew that when I started, but I was hoping to see some change and that gamble has flopped.

       Meanwhile I am now considerably more famous as a blogger than as a scholar, whereas I had originally planned to be a blogging scholar. Obviously that balance was basically mine to control, so if it's faulty I have only myself to blame. And I do feel hypocritical about feeling this way about it: if, after all, the reason to do such a thing prima facie is outreach, and that's why it's good advertising, the fact that I now have a public outreach of ten thousand-odd readers a month should be good, right? And it is: but it isn't, sadly, what I was trying to achieve, and it turns out that it doesn't help achieve that goal in the slightest.

       It has been fun, of course and most of all, and that's why I continue to do it, but if a budding scholar in my position of late 2006 were to ask me now whether he or she should do similar, I'm afraid I'd advise against. Before Facebook and Twitter took off (and they will presumably fall, as the life-cycle of social applications follows that of boy-bands after the oozlum bird) it made a kind of sense as advertising, but only in friendly fields where this kind of third string output was valued. In the humanities at large, and in the European humanities especially, the establishment still mistrusts online work, seeing it as unreviewed and insignificant, unvalued by funding bodies and of course, transient. Such a scholar would be much better advised to concentrate all-out on print media before it finally kicks up its heels, because until it does there are no CV points in blogging medieval history. It's just for fun. So it's just as well it is fun, really!

[1] http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~jjarrett/
[2] http://blogenspiel.blogspot.com
[3] http://www.gotmedieval.com & http://unlocked-wordhoard.blogspot.com
[4] http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/
[5] http://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/
[6] http://www.nipissingu.ca/department/history/MUHLBERGER/blog.htm
[7] http://www.mono.org/
[8] http://www.heroicage.org/
[9] http://hnn.us/blogs/2.html

Blogging the Middle Ages: Blogenspiel

by Another Damned Medievalist (ADM)

[for background on this archival project, read the posts here, here, here and here] 


I started Blogenspiel at the urging of The Cranky Professor who I met the day I arrived for grad school and have been friends with ever since. We’d sort of fallen out of touch after I went to Germany on a DAAD research grant and ended up staying there for three years, during which time my academic career sort of took second place to family things. Cranky had lured me into the then-fun project that is the Wikipedia (oh, you do NOT think I’m linking to it, do you?), and then, as we started to be less willing to put up with the garbage that academic contributors were beginning to have to deal with at the time, he started a blog. With a little nudging, I started my own, but looking back on the first couple of years, I really wasn’t focused much on anything. Mostly, the blog was something that allowed me enough of an internet presence to read and comment at Crooked Timber, Easily Distracted, Bitch, Ph.D., the late Invisible Adjunct, Dr. Crazy, Profgrrrrl, and several other academic blogs (you people know who you are… especially the medieval and early modern folk). The connections I made to other academics in several fields helped to re-integrate me into a conversation that I’d really been missing for several years.

It wasn’t till I returned to teaching full-time in a visiting position that I really started to blog more regularly, and the blog began to take shape. Posts covered a lot of bases, from politics in my state of residence to lots of quizzes and memes – the last is an aspect that I think has been lost as many of us have joined Facebook, LiveJournal, and other social networking sites where such things seem to fit better. Mostly, though, I began to post about teaching and rediscovering my footing as an academic. Those posts fell into a couple of categories (other than the big one, which was, “What the hell am I doing? I don’t belong here! They’re going to find me out!!”): teaching, navigating the corridors of academe, and looking for a permanent job. Looking back, there is a lot there that I never realized, and many of the things I thought were there are missing. I hadn’t thought I’d posted so much about teaching and academic politics, nor about professional issues that really revealed who I was under the pseudonym. I had thought I’d posted more hints about my private life. Taken as a whole, though, Blogenspiel serves as sort of a memorial to who I was, and I think shows who I am and am becoming as an academic and as a medievalist, rather than what I thought it was at the time, which was a place to connect with other academics, test out my ideas, and really to feel as if I were a member of an academic community when I was so desperately unsure of my right to be there. Yes folks… it was about the validation.

It still is, but now more in the way that all academic conversation is about validation and peer review. As I have found my feet, not to mention a ‘permanent’ position, I’ve blogged about teaching with more authority. The more I have written and delivered papers, the more I have written about writing papers. The more conferences I attend, the more I blog about conferences and sometimes critique what I’ve heard at them. And the more I’ve connected with other medievalists through the blog, the more I’ve blogged about my own research. In one sense, the blog still has one stable purpose, and that is to continue to connect with a community I respect and appreciate. But over time, and as the posts have had more to do with teaching and with being a working medievalist, the community has also changed. Part of that is probably due to the fact that there are so many more blogging medievalists now than there were in 2004 or 2005. As I picked up more medievalist blogfriends, I started to lose touch with people on non-medieval blogs. There’s just too much to read, and after a couple of blogger meet-ups, it seemed a priority to read the blogs of the people I actually knew. I think that the change in the makeup of my reading list and my readership also helped to change the sorts of things I wrote about. I wonder sometimes whether my blog posts are now more or less accessible to non-medievalists. The non-medievalist/non-pre-modernist readers I recognize are all people I know in real life, most of whom I met in that first phase of blogging when I was looking for a job and commenting a lot at other people’s blogs. I’ve also moved a lot of the personal stuff to Live Journal, where I can lock it down. That may change the tone a bit. Finally, as more and more people have learnt who I am, I feel less comfortable talking about my private life. It was one thing when people could sort of put two and two together and figure out that I was seeing someone. It was even fine when some of those same people saw me at conferences with the person I was seeing and knew we were ‘an item’ as one colleague put it. But it seems odd to write about the relationship in public when it means talking about someone else who is fairly private. There is a liminal area between the blog and the blogger’s life, just as there is between my colleagues who may be friends and whom I might confide in as friends, and my colleagues in a group in a professional setting. The limes is broad, and like the one following the Rhine and Danube, there is a lot of negotiation and interaction that occurs along it. But that, too, is part of the blog’s development, and perhaps reflects the sort of negotiation between our public and private selves that all academics do.

In the meantime, the community and ties that have come from the blog have given me support, friendship, and opportunities to give papers and appear on panels as a medievalist and a blogger. The blog has allowed me to develop my voice as an academic and as a person, and that voice has been one that others have chosen as a colleague, with very real benefits to me professionally. No, I didn’t get my job through blogging, but it has connected me very tangibly to at least one professional position and to colleagues who are influential in fields in which I now work – in part because of them and their invitations to join them.

As to where the blog is going? I think it’s going to keep going with me. In that sense, even as I might add more posts that respond to the challenges of colleagues like Matt Gabriele, Scott Nokes, and the lovely people at In the Middle to make the Middle Ages more accessible, or that of Jonathan Jarrett and Magistra to post really thoughtful scholarly posts (not that there isn’t a crossover!), I would say that Blogenspiel will keep to its core. That is, it will continue to reflect my own development as my life and career change and grow. In other words, it’s my blog, and as much as I hate to say it, it’s all about meeee!

Blogging the Middle Ages: Modern Medieval

by Matthew Gabriele

[for background on this archival project, read the posts here and here and here] 

Modern Medieval began at the end of May 2007, mostly because I had something to say and I needed at least the illusion that there was someone out there who would listen to me. In large part, the things I had to say came from my being a medievalist and being at Virginia Tech in the aftermath of the massacre on 4/16/07.  I saw something in the coverage of that event that was being neglected, an insight into the shooter's mentality -- one dealing with Christianity -- that no one seemed to be talking about.  So, my first substantial post was an expanded version of an op-ed I'd written for the local paper. I got into academia because I liked the research and the teaching but also because I believe that there's a place for public intellectuals in our society.  Too often, however, academics lament that no one takes them seriously.  I think part of that is our fault.  The onus, to a large degree, falls on us academics to put ourselves out there and have something to say about something.

The blog has continued to be an extension of this idea.  But within reason.  The epigraph to the blog -- "Although long-dead, the people of the Middle Ages still have something to say." -- means something to me.  I know (a lot of) something about the Middle Ages but I'm also a well-educated US citizen, who knows what's going on in the world.  So, I try to use the Middle Ages to, as appropriate, both intellectuallyfamiliarize and destabilize the present with the past.  I try to show lines of (unexpected) continuity and problematize romanticized notions of what the Middle Ages were. We, as both academics and medievalists, can and should contribute to the public conversation -- indeed, we must -- but the onus is mostly on us to get our voices heard. 

But this isn't just my voice.  I started the blog because I knew of other good, academic medievalist blogs.  That circle has only expanded and it welcomes newcomers with open arms.  At "Modern Medieval," I've tried to open things up too.  We did a 4-part "blog forum" with guest bloggers (parts 1, 2, 3, 4), which met its goals in that the series generated a good amount of discussion.  I've also been fortunate to have Larry Swain, also of "The Ruminate" and "The Heroic Age," as a co-blogger for some time now.  And I'm always on the lookout for other co-bloggers to help share this responsibility.  The more voices the better.

Moreover, the blog is just one way of getting our voices out there.  I see the blog as 1 part of a much larger whole.  I organize events locally, showcasing the extensive talent we have a VT and in SW Virginia more generally.  I podcast to promote events, to aid my teaching, to make the aforementioned events available to an even wider audience.  I sometimes write op-eds for the local paper.  And now, I tweet; one of a growing number who do.  I became more convinced about moving to Twitter shortly after Kalamazoo 2009.  I'm still excited about the possibilities.  I've used it for research and I've used it for more general conversation.  Now, for the first time, in Fall 2009, I've tried to integrate Twitter into my courses, telling students about my public twitter feed, using appropriate hashtags to keep material together, trying to use this form of social networking to have a public, academic conversation among professor and students beyond the classroom's walls.  It's a work in progress... 

Finally, we should be aware that there are new frontiers out there.  Facebook is the elephant in the room right now but there will be others (Google Wave?).  Blogging is just 1 thing.  Tweeting is just 1 thing.  This post, along with others, will appear in a book.  And that's another thing.  Each format reaches a substantially different audience, so it's imperative that we keep up and not be afraid to put ourselves out there.  We, as academics and medievalists, have good answers to some important questions.  Let's speak our mind.  Hopefully, some will be listening. 

Blogging the Middle Ages: Humanities Researcher

by Stephanie Trigg

[for background on this archival project, read the posts here and here]

It sounds odd now, but I began to blog as a way of saving time. I was the “shepherd” for grant applications in my department, and found I was repeating my experiences and exhortations over and over to colleagues with less experience. It’s a long drawn-out and difficult process, applying for research grants in our national system, and I thought it would be useful to build an archive of the process from beginning to end as I developed my own new application from scratch. I was also involved, at the time, at the edges of some other research projects that were looking at the way humanities researchers, especially in Australia, could make their findings and discoveries more accessible to a broader audience, and this was a secondary motivation: to experiment with the blog format to see if there might be a broader audience for the discussion of medieval studies and medievalism. On the other hand, I had no idea about how to reach an audience that would be broader than my students and colleagues.

Three months after I began the blog, I was diagnosed with early stage breast cancer. Like many people facing serious illness, I found writing was therapeutic, a way of making sense of what was happening, putting a shape and a narrative around it. It wasn’t hard to decide to keep blogging. The blog was also a way of letting people know how treatment was progressing. I knew many women were very scared of breast cancer, but I was hardly ever mortally afraid, and wanted to show, day by day, that it was ok to be sick.

This meant the blog very quickly transformed from a pretty straight professional blog to one that sought to articulate the relationship between public work and private work. During the pointy end of my treatment, in 2006-7, I was also fascinated by the way the medical professionals I encountered conducted themselves.

I try as hard as I can to respect other folks’ privacy, so there are many, many times when I deliberately don’t blog about people and events that aren’t already in the public sphere. I’ll admit to enjoying moments when I test the limits of my own privacy, though, in blogging about a diseased body, and the side-effects of cancer treatment. For the record, I’ve just completed three years of hormone therapy, with another two to go: there is no sign of any recurrence.

The blog’s readers are, I think, my colleagues, postgraduate and undergraduate students, former students, family members, friends, breast cancer patients, and medievalists, as well as other bloggers in a relatively small, charmed circle. I link, and am linked most often to In the Medieval Middle, and Still Life with Cat the blog of a former colleague, Australian literature expert, and now freelance reviewer and essayist in Adelaide, Kerryn Goldsworthy.

Returning to work after illness — both mentally, in the act of walking back into the building; and intellectually, trying to finish a book — have been immensely difficult. The blog was — is — a safe space of mediation between my study at home and the world of public interaction. Since I began the five-year program of medication, I think I’ve become a less efficient worker. Some would blame blogging, as a form of time-wasting, but I think blogging has helped me loosen up my academic writing, and develop a stronger sense of the audience for our work as medievalists.

I’ve published a couple of things about the blog: a newspaper feature and an article, “I’ve written my talk: blogging, writing and temporality,” Heat 15 n.s. (2007): 115-26.

And an article by Anthony McCosker discusses my blog, along with some other blogs about illness: “Blogging Illness: Recovering in Public,” M/C Journal, 11, no. 6 (2008).

Blogging the Middle Ages, cont'd

by J J CohenM

My small project to compose a communal history of blogs and medieval studies got quite a boost through the generous comments at this post. Thank you, everyone, who has contributed to the chronicle of electronic medievalists up to about the start of the millennium.It isn't too late to add your own comments if you have more to say.

Having sketched some background and ancestry, I'd like to now move forward in time to focus on blogs themselves. I've invited the authors of the following to contribute brief histories of their blogs:

• Modern Medieval
• Unlocked Wordhoard
• Humanities Researcher
• Blogenspiel
• The Ruminate
• Quod She
• A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe

If you are on this list, check your email! I chose these blogs because they have been around for a long time, have proven influential, and publish mainly medieval content. I am certain there are other important blogs that I have neglected, sometimes because they are now defunct and I do not have email addresses for their authors, sometimes out of my own ignorance.

What am I missing?

Post-Apocalyptic Canterbury Tales

by J J Cohen

I blogged about it two years ago, and now the Chaucerian apocalypse has arrived. The pilgrims are passengers on a nuclear-powered steam train, Canterbury is the new capital of England, a storm is raging and the waters are rising ...

Canterbury 2100 is now on sale. Considering all the impending doom, that's quite the chipper monk on the cover, isn't it?

Blogging the Middle Ages I: Early Days on the Electronic Frontier

by J J Cohen

Exciting news: fingers crossed, it seems the Chaucer Blog will appear in print, via Bonnie Wheeler's always innovative New Middle Ages series. Fans of the blog know that beneath some excellent humor lurks serious material for scholarly thought. A cross-over success, the blog has well illustrated the powers of medievalism that scholars like Stephanie Trigg, Tom Prendergast, and David Matthews have been detailing -- as well as the inseparability of medieval studies from medievalism, a core tenet of the first two writers' recent work.

I have been asked to compose an essay for the book, a piece focusing on blogging and medieval studies. At first I thought I'd just sit down and write the thing. Then the inappropriateness of a solitary author essay to such a convivial, communal phenomena hit me. So I'd like to compose "Blogging the Middle Ages" through, well, blogging. I'm inspired by the fact that ITM enabled the migration of a discussion of queer green bunnies into print as the afterword to Queering the Non/Human. I'll be working on the essay in parts over the next month or so. I'll post draft fragments here, hoping to instigate discussion. Any contributions made to the comments that are incorporated into the body of the published essay will be properly attributed. This is not an egalitarian wiki, of course, but I am thinking that this blogged form of composition offers a more collective way of creating an essay than typical academic practice.

Such collective endeavor is not unprecedented, though, as the account below should make clear. Read on, comment, see your name in print.

I start with academic blogging's prelude: electronic medieval studies to about 1996. What am I missing, or am I the only one old enough to have been e-active at the time?

-------
Medievalist ardor for technology is paradoxical only at first glance. Those who study texts inked onto animal skins employ electronic data bases, html and other kinds of coding, digital facsimiles, ultraviolet light, and a plethora of sophisticated machines of varying sizes (scanners and pens and notebooks and cameras). This conjoining of the ancient and the electronic is most publicly evident in the e-texts, email discussion lists, blogs, Twitter streams and websites that have become part of the contemporary practice of medieval studies. On the one hand, such tool use is nothing new. The Middle Ages were not devoid of machinery and equipment: quills and vellum are technology, after all, not markers of its absence. The 1000 years of Latin crammed into Migne's Patrologia Latina could not have been bequeathed to us without ample 19th century technology; printed on cheap paper, the endeavor would not be so useful to us now were it not for electronic storage, search, and retrieval. Yet even if the discipline of medieval studies was built through and looks back to such tools, we can still ask: Why do scholars who research a past so distant that its inhabitants could not imagine a virtual space like a blog embrace such apparatuses themselves?

Medievalists are, among many other things, philologists: philos, "loving" + logos "word." As word-lovers we happily learn Latin, Old English, Old Norse, Middle High German, Provencal, alien tongues plundered from history's solitude and revivified for communication. Computers likewise speak in arcane languages that demand translation. Is it any wonder that medievalist logophiles were early participants in conversations about technology? J. R. R. Tolkien studied (albeit briefly) to crack enemy codes during World War II. More recently, Martin Irvine, trained as an Anglo-Saxonist, completed one of the first humanities dissertations composed entirely on a computer in 1982. These were in the days far before Microsoft Word; the Apple computer would not be released until the following year. Irvine and Deb Everhart are the founders of the no longer maintained but, in 1994, absolutely innovative website The Labyrinth, which also holds the honor of being the first website hosted at Georgetown University. With a minimal amount of institutional support the Labyrinth became a clearing house for the vast amounts of medieval-related material proliferating on the world-wide web.

When I signed up for my first email address in 1992, not all that many people possessed one of their own to contact ... with the exception of medievalists, who had already established a number of electronic mailing lists on increasingly specialized subjects. The discussions that unfolded on this email discussion groups were often impassioned, especially when the subject was the place of those new approaches to the interpretation of literature and culture grouped under the rubric "theory." Sometimes the heatedness of the discussion became a deterrent to having any conversation at all. Hence the birth of Interscripta, a series of moderated electronic discussions of limited duration focused upon a single topic. I was an eager but at times obnoxious participant in the inaugural foray, Jim Earl's conversation on medieval subjectivity. Later topics included "Augustine and His Influence on the Middle Ages" and "The Everyday." I moderated the concluding colloquium myself, on medieval masculinities. I later collated the email interchanges into a hypertext article -- and, because electronic publication was still very much a novelty at the time -- arranged for the essay to find its way into conventional print ("The Armour of an Alienating Identity" Arthuriana 6.4 [1996] 1-24).

Meanwhile, several of us in DC put together a big conference on the future of medieval studies called Cultural Frictions: Medieval Cultural Studies in Post-Modern Contexts. One of the first humanities conferences with a web portion integrated into its staging, the event seemed to arrive before its time, before an eager electronic audience had been formed. Very few questions were submitted for discussion, and the conference mainly proceeded as an ordinary conference would ... except that the web had allowed us to advertise the event well, and then to archive it. The conference has had an excellent afterlife, especially because we published most of the presentations via the Labyrinth immediately upon its conclusion.

It is interesting to consider how different Cultural Frictions would be if it unfolded today, when blogs and twitter are an accepted part of our medievalist praxis.

[So what came next? I am having a hard time moving from these spaces c. 1995 to blogs ten years later. Were there intermediary spaces, or just electronic discussion lists? Have I left anything out of this brief account?]

From Inside HigerEd: U Presidents, Thesis Writing

by J J Cohen

Two articles that make a great deal of sense. First, an argument that the best leader of a university valuing research is a successful researcher. That might seem obvious, but the connection often eludes search committees.

Second, a helpful blog post by Peg Boyle Single about getting a dissertation done via writing as a daily practice. Although I realize I write too much, and clearly do not suffer from the hesitations perfectionism instills, the piece underscores some practices that have been essential to my own craft:

1. get a sufficient amount of sleep (exercise helps a great deal)
   
2. write in the morning, before the brain soaks up the minutiae of the day and the innovative connections that make for compelling argument are difficult to form
3. write every single day, even when the words don't want to arrive. Better to delete later than to have created nothing.

Single speaks of writing from the wide perspective of argument rather than the small view of word choice, observing that dallying over terms causes the quicksand to swirl. I don't fully agree with this dictum: obtaining le mot juste is often what propels me forward. Then again, I would not dither over words for long since I know my doom is to return and to revise. I also find my three electronic thesauri to be among my most important tools.

How about you? How do you get writing done?

A Spooky Day to You: A Transvestite Monastic Zombie, a Singing Corpse, and other tales? of woe

by KARL STEEL

Important conversations on what we do as literary critics continue below, but as today's Halloween, we ought to take some time to scare ourselves. Here are a few of my favorite spooky medieval tales. I've occasionally mentioned the medieval story of the transvestite zombie (a variation of the Marina legend?):

The evil one envied a religious man who applied himself assiduously to hospitality along with his other pious works. Dreaming up a novel sort of malice, the evil one occupied the corpse of an unfortunate woman who had died without confession and viaticum. Dressed as a man, he entered the monk's cell, and accepted for an annual wage the necessary service of receiving guests. For a while he showed himself diligent, quick, and ready, seeking an opportunity to upset him with the malign sting of carnal desires.

But divine loving-kindness was ahead of his cunning. A holy bishop endowed with a prophetic spirit arrived to visit his parishes. Observing the hired servant at work, he perceived the hidden intent of the evil spirit. In private he anxiously asked his host who he was and where he came from. When the monk responded openly and unsuspectingly, the priest began to ask whether he ever saw him enter the oratory or participate in the divine mysteries. He answered that, when he himself arose for vigils, the man remained asleep outside with the rest of the seculars, but beyond this he had noticed nothing. The bishop called the man, and commanded him by authority of the divine name and of his episcopal office to tell who he was, what he was called, and why he came. But, gnashing his teeth and melting away, he replied, 'Truly, is what concerns you so well finished--or neglected--that you have to come to inquire about my affairs, which are none of your business? If you had delayed your prying visit a few days, I would have gotten what I came for.'

But, O great power of the divine name, and episcopal authority, so effective against us! At the bishop's command this creation of diabolical fraud vanished, and the corpse fell into dust and dry bones.

(from Geoffrey of Auxerre, On the Apocalypse, from a series of reanimation, golem, and fairy stories, all seemingly inspired by his horror at women priests)

And here's another:

A demon singer walks among us!

Cesarius tellis of a clark that som tyme had a swete voyce, to so mekull that men at hard hym syng thoght that it was a grete delite to here hym. So on a day a religious man happend to here hym harpe, and onone as he harde hym he sayd in this maner of wyse; "This voyce & this melodie is not of a man bod, rather of the devull." And all men mervayld of this at he said, & evyn furthwith he co[n]iuryd hym; & the fend onone went his way, & lefte the bodie as a dead, dry caryon; & so thai mott wit at it was a dry caryon.

And here's the Latin from Caesarius of Heisterbach: I have to say I much prefer "cadavere mox corruente ac foetente" to "lefte the bodie as a dead, dry caryon," not only because it's more repulsive, but also because it reminds me of "And alle the blee of his body was blakke as þe moldes / As roten as þe rottok þat rises in powdere" from the Middle English St. Erkenwald)

De clerico cuius corpus diabolus loco animae vegetabat.Clericus quidam tam egregiam et tam dulcem vocem habebat, ut audier illam deliciae reputarentur. Die quadam vir quidam religiosus superveniens, et cytharae illius dulcedinem aure percipiens, ait, 'Vox ista hominis non est, sed diaboli.' Cunctis vero admirantibus daemonem adiuravit, et exivit, cadavere mox corruente ac foetente. Et intellexerunt omnes idem corpus a daemone diu fuisse ludificantum.

Some Other Kind of Relation That is Not Just Possible but Already at Work: Reading, Criticism, Interpretation

by EILEEN JOY

A necessary task of theory is precisely to provoke a text into unpremeditated articulation, into the utterance of what it somehow contains or knows but neither intends nor is able to say.
—Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text

Somewhat prompted by Jeffrey’s two posts on what it has meant for him to serve as Chair of his department and some of the frustrations attendant upon advocating to sometimes unreceptive audiences the value of literary studies within the university, and also for the importance of community and shared vision when negotiating some of the university’s largest [more global] concerns relative to funding, strategic initiatives, and mission, I cannot help but be struck at the same time by the short-sightedness and perhaps even the [possibly irresponsible, or at least, disingenuous] banality of Stanley Fish’s argument, conveyed by Mary Kate in her post “Is There a Methodology in This Class?”, that the best thing we can do with a literary text is to “find out what the author meant” [i.e., hunt for and articulate the so-called “intentionality” behind literary texts, because, in the end, texts mean what their authors say they mean]. This represents, I really believe, an incredible constriction of what literary studies are capable of doing [and at a time, historically, when literary studies are imagined not to do anything of much real “use” within the university, and humanities programs have to struggle with sometimes strangulating budget limitations]. Somewhat accidentally, I also read Fish’s comments in relation to the essay by Louis Menand, “The Ph.D. Problem,” in the recent issue of Harvard Magazine [an excerpt, actually, from his forthcoming book The Marketplace of Ideas, and thank you to both Julie Orlemanski and Jennifer Brown for posting links to this on Facebook and Twitter, respectively], where Menand describes a fairly woeful state of affairs in the world of graduate studies in literature relative to the scarcity of jobs in literary studies within the university [also related, I might add, to the shrinking numbers of English majors at the Bachelor’s level], which has partly been the outcome of the profession of literary studies becoming more and more about a certain self-isolating “professional reproduction,” with no regard for whether or not there is a viable market for the growth of overly specialized, professionalized humanities disciplines. Whether or not one agrees with all of the aspects of Menand’s argument [and I don’t necessarily—read the whole essay if you have time], one can’t help but pause and think that the last thing literary studies needs now is a constriction and narrowing of its objects and methodologies of study; if anything, it needs a greater pluralism of its objects and methodologies and a wider purchase on multiple realms of application. I am leery of any argument that either begins or ends with the idea that we should do one thing over another [that chooses, further, between “better” and “worse” ways of pursuing our studies], because frankly, we should do everything we can. Even more frankly, we need the multiple fires of wild experimentation, even if some of them die out and only leave smoke behind them. We need to stop playing so safely [although granted, when jobs are at stake, and furthermore, when those jobs are scarce, playing safe is often the name of the game, but for what ultimate benefit, as a far as the progress of any field or discipline is concerned, not to mention our own personal happiness? how can our field hope to innovate, in serious fashion, under this aegis?].

I find Fish’s argument especially hysterical in relation to reading Milton, especially Milton’s Paradise Lost. I am not a Miltonist, of course, but I have always loved teaching Paradise Lost and have been teaching it every year for about eight years now. This is a perfect text to talk about in relation to intentionality, of course, since there are few literary works that expend so much energy in continually reminding the reader of what the author’s intentions and arguments are [and when we take into account how much verbiage Milton expended in non-literary polemical writings, such as his “Doctrine of Discipline and Divorce,” locating the ideological motivations of the author is no overly-laborious shell game]. So, where is the fun, anyway, in locating intentionality in Paradise Lost, when the author has spent so much time already in showing his own hand? I’m not an idiot and I realize that, even given this state of affairs, Miltonists still continue to argue, and seemingly without end, over exactly what it is Milton might have meant in any particular passage in the poem, but literary studies in Fish’s scenario becomes a kind of compendium of disputations over this or that supposed intention, and all this within the framework of a text that is practically screaming its intentions [and here, I find Suzanne Conklin Akbari’s comments, regarding how different texts, more and less “energetic” in their textual design, strongly or more weakly manipulate readers, really worth thinking about further, especially across the medieval/early modern divide].

Wouldn’t some kind of law of diminishing returns apply to this state of affairs, or is Fish content with a literary criticism that argues, ad infinitum [and perhaps ad nauseum] over what an author might have intended [and if so, what is the value of such a literary studies that is so situated in contests over historical moments of instantiation—can these studies “speak” to anything other than those moments, and if not, how is literary studies different than archaeology, brushing off the dust of multiple modernities from the artifacts of the past and keeping those artifacts, however preserved in comtemporary locations, firmly in the past, breathing in and out their antiquarian airs]? Within medieval studies, of course, we have seen the hold that typological and exegetical-type readings have had on the field, and we have also seen how the replication, in literary critique, of so-called medieval world-views can sometimes ground the critical enterprise to a sort of halt: what happens when criticism of medieval texts merely enacts a repetition and contemporary paraphrase of the perceived “original” message? This may be exemplary excavation, but is it criticism? Shouldn’t criticism entail some critique of the various [often oppressive] “orders” [social, political, religious, whathaveyou] thought to be held together and maintained in language?

For those of us who have spent any amount of time reading and thinking about and teaching Paradise Lost, we know that half the fun is all of the ways the text breaks down under the weight of its own preposterous logic and grandiose ambitions [I mean, really Milton, you’re going to reveal the mind/intention of God to Man?—I guess this actually makes Milton himself an intentionalist, doesn’t it?], and even argues with itself. Although some scholars, led by Fish, will argue that these dislogics and counter-arguments within the grand argument are all part of the author’s scheme, there are just so many ways in which the text of Paradise Lost cracks open, without too much prying, to reveal all sorts of what Jeffrey, following Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, might call unfolding-worlds caught within and pulling against the textual mesh of “what Milton said” [which is related, sure, to “what Milton meant”—but did even Milton always know what he meant?]. Regardless, therefore, of the high level of artifice and poetic rhetoric that Milton “energetically” [to borrow from Suzanne] imposed upon his poem [and the reader], there is practically no end to all of the ways in which the poem pulls at its own seams, and it may be that one of the important functions of literary criticism, as I have written elsewhere, might be to trace the inexhaustible dimensions of that which, with every reading, is always still unfolding and becoming in these texts, which is also to speak, I believe, of the utopian possibilities of reading. Otherwise, how else to define history as that thing which is always happening, then and now, simultaneously, in perpetual exchange and interchange, always in transit, moving between definition and the undoing of definitions as openings to new ways of “seeing,” both in the past and the present, as opposed to history as what is dead and always over—frozen in time—and always different? I am reminded here of something Christopher Nealon once wrote, that “the whole point of doing historical work is to situate it along the seam of its becoming-historical, which is a way to keep it in touch with that which eludes it.”

Let’s consider, too, all of the ways in which the English language Milton employed carries within it all sorts of connotations, denotations, and thicknesses of meaning that no author can be in complete control of, and at the same time, Milton, like many authors before and after him, hurries to cover over or throw road-blocks in front of alternative readings that nevertheless can be seen as intrinsic to the text, which “says” what it means partially by “not saying” what it does not want to mean, but which anti- or other type of meaning is dragged along nevertheless in the wake of the language chosen at the expense of the language not chosen. In other words, the “meaning” of any given text resides partly in the gaps between what is articulated explicitly and what is under active erasure in a particular act of articulation—in this sense, deconstruction is no mere “tool” for reading a text but actively uncovers important historical dimensions relative to what is sayable at the cost of what is buried in very particular times and places of textual inscription. This is a critical practice, as Dan Remein points out, that attends to the Other and Outside of texts [which are nevertheless somehow also within the texts that actively cover them over], and therefore, deconstruction is, again, not just a tool brought to the working table of the interpretation of a text, but more importantly, represents a deeply ethical way of paying attention to possibilities and potentialities that, while lying in palpable silence within certain texts, can only really be “opened” and unfurled in a series of readings situated in “other times” that come after a particular text’s originary instantiation. But this also means allowing for the possibility that the present in which we are located is just as unstable as the texts we read from the past—both the past and the present are in flux together and even inhere in each other in “untimely” ways, depending on our angle of vision in any given moment of reading. Utopic readings, in other words, can work in both directions: forward, yes, but also backward—the past and present are both always “available,” therefore, in my view of history, for “becoming undone” in the presence of the other. Literary criticism might be a way of not only tracing all of these acts of “becoming undone,” but also of actively engaging in the untying of threads of teleological time that sometimes bind too tightly the texts we read, limiting their potential for multiple acts of combustion across different times and places.

This brings up, also, the point raised in the comments to Mary Kate’s post by mon-rodriquez amat concerning the relations [and tensions] between power and knowledge that inhere in texts, which situation, I would argue, ethically entails mis-readings of texts against their intentionality [the classic Foucauldian archaeological approach, of course]. What if the intentions behind a text are morally despicable [with the understanding that even a term such as “moral” has to be debated in thickly constructed historical contexts], and the act of reading and interpreting a literary text, as much as it will highlight intention, also needs to be about unveiling certain social, political, and other conditions that constrain interpretation in different times and places, and maybe even, in certain moments of social circulation, limit agencies, harm persons, pervert justice, and so on and so forth? And so, finally, as regards Fish’s commentary [as conveyed by Mary Kate], to talk about literary criticism as a practice that, with all humility, should attend to texts in a way that is limited to the texts themselves [id est, to the textuality of texts only, leaving aside any other scholarly desires for the potentialities of texts to say something beyond the individual minds who created them, seen to be trapped in a sort of temporal amber] seems, again, incredibly short-sighted, maybe even dishonest. BUT, at the same time, and in the hope of reinvesting our critical practices within medieval studies with newly-imagined modes of attention to texts as aesthetic objects that “travel,” I want to also hold open the possibility of a critical practice that would, as Fish commends, attend only to the text itself [in constellation with other texts, also attended to in terms of their textualities and inter-textualities], but in ways that move far beyond the hunt for author or other intentionalities. This criticism would be post-historical, but it would not be ahistorical.

Now, as is typical of Mary Kate, she has mined Fish’s talk at Columbia University for far richer questions buried within Fish’s comments, having to do with whether or not literary studies can be called empirical and in what ways, exactly? And further, what do we mean when we invoke terms such as “methodology” in our studies and how might that differ from “interpretation,” and what then, also, do we mean by “interpretation”? [I will say here that you can put me in the camp of people that is decidedly not interested in turning literary studies into a social-scientific, empirical endeavour; I see literary studies, rather, as a site par excellence for a-methodological experimentation, but give me a bit more time to figure out exactly what I mean by that.] One possible route here might be to follow Susan Noakes’s lead in her book Timely Reading: Between Exegesis and Interpretation [Cornell, 1988—thanks to Anne Clark Bartlett for recommending this book] and say that an ideal mode of reading might be one that “shuttles” back and forth between “humanistic” modes of exegesis that attempt a “reconstruction” of the “dismembered” bodies of texts and modes of interpretation that would envision “texts as bodies that the skilled reader will metamorphose into new shapes without end” [p. xiii]. Also, and very importantly, is “theory” just one “tool” among many for deciphering and reading a text, or is it something more than that? [I actually do think theory is about life, and about changing our lives, but we’ll leave that argument for another place.]

Implicit in Mary Kate’s thoughtful comments are also, I believe, some very important questions about reading itself—what does it mean, say, to read a medieval text that “says” what it does across hundreds and hundreds of years, carrying with it all sorts of social, historical, cultural, political, and other baggage that gets re-configured in each particular time and place within which it is read? If the predominant mode of the criticism of medieval texts is historicist [both of the old-fashioned and newer varieties], where does that leave literary criticism? If everything is “text,” in a sense, and historical studies have become decidedly literary [aware of their construction as narrative] and literary studies have been, for a long while now, decidedly historicist, what finally distinguishes a literary from an historical reading of a text? Does it matter anymore [other than in terms of discussions about genres of writing and forms of production]? Has literary criticism, further, lost something in what seems to be its primary concern these days—tracing, as Stephen Greenblatt and the other architects of New Historicism might put it, not the transhistorical meanings of texts, but rather, the ways in which they help to form and circulate certain social, political, psychological, and other energies in very particular historically embedded contexts [contexts, moreover, that are typically drawn very tightly around “initial” moments of “entry” of the work of art; id est, do not talk about presentism to a New Historicist, for whom the time(s) in which various works are first created and “performed” matter most of all].

These matters have been much on my mind lately as I have been reading the provocative essays collected in Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Frederico’s The Post-Historical Middle Ages [Palgrave, 2009]—essays which, collectively, do not advocate for anything like leaving history behind in our reading of medieval texts so much as they imagine history’s operations within medieval studies in ways that transcend what the editors call “historicism as usual.” Indeed, as Jeffrey writes in his essay in the volume, historicism “does not denote a monolithic practice—and there is no “other” to it; meaning that historicism has to be part of any critical encounter with the past. It is the sine qua non that enables other, potentially unhistorical modes” [“Time Out of Memory,” p. 61, n. 37]. Most important for Jeffrey, as he articulates it in his essay, is that past, present, and future be kept “alive—capable of plenitude, heterogeneity, change” across different times and places, and therefore history is never static, never fixed in just one place or mode of communication [p. 57]. At the same time, Maura Nolan’s essay in the same volume, “Historicism after Historicism,” argues for a “genuine historicism” that would be “a kind of formalism”—as “medievalism,” it would have to “embrace form as the precondition of historical apprehension,” or else it “cannot ever understand the workings of poetic art.” Therefore, to “think through what a culture’s aesthetic production actually does, from the inside and at close range, should be a primary objective” in contemporary medieval literary studies [p. 83]. Ultimately, there is a certain “particularity” and difference that inheres in artifacts of the past that must be engaged with, and the best sort of historicism names a practice of reading that is “sensitive to alterity and difference, aware of multiplicity and variation” [p. 84]. All times are, in a sense, different from all other times, and this includes, as Nolan points out, that sometimes the past is different from the past, and the present can be different from the present—I thought these points were quite important, actually.

But I must admit that I really stopped cold at Nolan’s call to think through a culture’s aesthetic production “from the inside and at close range”—is such a position even possible? If there is any inside, proximity, or closeness to the Middle Ages, it is by virtue of its artifacts being here with us now, in the present. We are not so much close [nor can we get closer to] their time of production, as they are close to our time of interpretation. But we might also return here to Fish’s call to attend to the textuality of texts and ask if, by virtue of attending primarily to the textuality of medieval literary texts, do we thereby enter into a particular history somehow different and other than our own? And if, as the New Historicists assert [following Derrida] that all culture is text and everything counts as culture, do we believe that we have enough of that medieval “culture” to be able to inhabit it from the “inside” [however partially]? This would entail, of course, that medieval persons had some kind of full understanding of themselves which was evinced somehow in their culture, which I don’t see as true for any group of persons situated in any time period. Isn’t the beauty of art, in some respects, that it performs this state of affairs? [Even Nolan’s valuing of the attention to unique form in medieval aesthetic production seems to me to assume a certain coherence of form in any particular time period, whereas I would see the question of form, in any given period, as always emerging, partial, both backward-and forward-looking, and never fully “formed,” as it were.]

Nolan’s arguments stand in some contrast to Aranye Fradenburg’s essay in the collection, “(Dis)continuity: A History of Dreaming” [an astounding and beautiful essay that was, in many ways, my favorite in the book, along with the essays by Jeffrey, Patricia Ingham, and Stephanie Trigg and Tom Prendergast], where she announces up front that she will be offering a critique of “discontinuist historicism—of the idea that different periods of time are simply and radically other to one another,” and where she also avers that “we all live in different times” and “different times live on in us and in our practices” [p. 88]. And I am reminded here, too, of an essay Frandenburg cites approvingly, Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon’s “Queering History” [PMLA 120.5 (2005): 1608-17], where they argue that “we need to question the premise of a historicism that privileges difference over similarity, recognizing that it is the peculiarity of our current historical moment that such a privileging takes place at all” [p. 1609]. The “unhistoricism” and “homohistory” that Goldberg and Menon propose would not stand outside of history, but it would not understand “difference” in only chronological terms, nor would it privilege “teleological sequence or textual transparency.” Goldberg and Menon’s historicism would not choose between alteritist or self-identitarian modes of historicizing so much as it would call both of these moves into question, and ultimately it would

not sacrifice sameness at the altar of difference nor collapse difference into sameness or all-but-sameness. In keeping alive the undecidable difference between difference and sameness it would refuse what we might term the compulsory heterotemporality of historicism, whether it insists on difference or produces a version of the normative same. Reading unhistorically would validate reading against the categorical collapse so often performed in the name of history. [p. 1616]

It seems to me that the most interesting historicism, one that would attend to the textuality of texts [but in ways much more capacious than Stanley Fish is willing to allow], would be devoted to exploring [as Fradenburg does in her essay, relative to the signifying of dreams in both Freud and Chaucer] the connections and disconnections between different ways of signifying just about everything. As Fradenburg writes,

Signifiers are remarkably mutable, but they can also be very persistent—and persistent does not mean timeless. Signifiers enable repetitions, revivals, and resurgences; they mark the spot where things have gone missing, hence where we begin to look for them (again). [p. 90]

So, signification travels, and also disappears, in interesting ways, across time and place, and one of the tasks of literary criticism today [whether in medieval or more contemporary studies] might be to track these migrations. But what also of the domain of the “literary” in particular? One result of New Historicism has been that everything “counts” as culture, and all of culture is “text” [as I indicated above], and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we now might begin to locate, or re-locate, the “literary” against or beside the “historical”—even as the domain of that which actively subverts and up-ends the historical, the realm in which everything is always contiguous somehow while also held in various processes of mediation and translation across space and time [and I've also been thinking about ways in which, when the text itself does not up-end anything, that we, as critics, should up-end the text ourselves, and by any means necessary--not in order to harm or mis-speak its historical or "truth" content, but to enlarge its domain and "time" of signification]. I am thinking here, especially, of Cary Howie’s call, in Claustrophilia: The Erotics of Enclosure, following Catherine Brown, to recognize the medieval as coeval: “Our dealings with the world, with difference, are ultimately fumblings, necessary and beautiful, toward an immediacy that is im-mediate, in the strongest sense: not beyond mediation but inside it.” And this immediacy, this “inside-between, is grounded in the notion, indeed in the experience, that between immediacy and mediation, so to speak, some other kind of relation is not just possible but already at work” [p. 9].

Some other kind of relation that is not just possible but already at work [yet in need of interpretation, unfolding]. Might the task of literary criticism within medieval studies today be to trace this relation [while also sharpening our definition of what we mean by “literary” versus “historical”; “reading” verus “criticism”]? And what might that look like? Well, start with Cary Howie’s book. Then go here. Read The Post-Historical Middle Ages. As for me, I’m still working on it.

To be continued.