restless

by J J Cohen

This morning my expense report was rejected for not having checked a button that does not exist. This afternoon the resubmitted version was rejected for not having the documentation and notes that were in fact attached. The report was initially composed with great urgency, since the university sent several emails in ALL CAPS announcing that some of my expenses were more than thirty days old and would therefore be ESCALATED TO MY MANAGER if I did not submit them. I have no idea who that manager would be since my department chair has nothing to do with these things -- but I am also not keen to be escalated all the same. I have again submitted the report with a screen shot of the relevant page in Concur (why give a software program a name that is an ominous imperative?) and documentation that I consulted the Help Desk and was told that if such an unchecked button did exist it would be an error to check the thing for the type of expense I was recording. I pointed out that the missing documentation is the documentation that was always attached.

In other words this is a normal day of me working on the GW MEMSI budget. I fully expect the report to come back again tomorrow because I did not provide a business purpose for the iced tea imbibed at a planning lunch (you think I am kidding but the business purpose of iced teas and salads are topics I have discussed with those who have rejected my reports in the past). Anyway, then this came up as a Facebook memory:

So it seems that some issues are perennial. But maybe not infinite. Here is what I wrote as I shared this memory on that other social media platform:

Every year at this time such thoughts recur -- and these institutional impediments are among the reasons GW MEMSI as a university-funded entity (but not as a community) is coming to an end this spring. But that's not the only reason. Ten years amounts to a very good run for the Institute. Its innovative work is in large part done (meaning, I don't want merely to replicate what we've long been doing, the default mode of an institution when it focuses upon its own existence rather than creation of new structures and possibilities). It is perhaps time to make space for other communalizing entities, here at GW or elsewhere, whatever they might be. 

And, in all honesty, I need a change: I cannot keep doing what I have been doing for the next ten years. I don't know what the future holds, but I acknowledge that I am restless, and I am not sure what will come next.

It's been quite a summer, one that included two trips to the emergency room, once in DC and once in London. Both were the result of having been bitten by a Lyme disease bearing tick, possibly while hiking in search of the three Green Chapels in Staffordshire (who says that the life of the mind won't kill you?). The good news is that the onset of symptoms was so swift that I was on the prescribed regimen of antibodies almost immediately, so I caught the infection just about as early as possible -- and that makes my prognosis for a full recovery excellent. Yet the infection took its toll, and it's only this week that early morning runs feel invigorating rather than a danse macabre in action. I have been coming to my office every day, partly because I am dropping my daughter off nearby for Camp Shakespeare and partly because I am trying desperately to catch up on email, dissertation chapter comments, syllabus writing, GW MEMSI planning for 2017-18 ... and expense reports. The routine has given me time to think about routines, and futures, and what I want to do with my life next. I don't really have an answer, but I acknowledge that I need a change.

Once I am no longer directing MEMSI (our ten year celebration is in March: join us!) I do not know what will come next. But not more of the same.

Held in his lap Deliciously: Medieval Hermits, Distracted by Cats

by KARL STEEL

Obviously, if you like what we do, join our community. And please, if you haven't done so yet, read this guest post by Shamma Boyarin, which will give you a good sense of what we've been up to recently. This post here is comparatively, and perhaps even absolutely, frivolous.

Apparently it’s International Cat Day, and, for several days, unwitting I have been researching medieval cats and the envious hermits who love them. What good fortune!

You probably know that the Ancrene Wisse (early 13^th century) allows anchoresses one cat: “Ye, mine leove sustren, bute yef neod ow drive ant ower meistre hit reade, ne schulen habbe na beast bute cat ane” [VIII 76-77; My dear sisters, unless need drives you and your director advises it, you must not have any animal except a single cat, 201, trans. slightly modified]. Fewer of you might know how the passage continues: anticipating the damage that cows [“kues”] might cause, it warns the anchoress of the trouble that comes when her neighbors have anything to complain of [“Ladlich thing is hit, wat Crist, hwen me maketh i tune man of ancre ahte” (It is a hateful thing, Christ knows, when men can make in town anything of about an anchor; 201, trans. slightly modified)]. And especially if any anchoresses must have animals, it advises “loki thet…hire thoht ne beo na-wiht th'ron i-festnet” (see that…their thought is in no way fastened on it).

Have a cat, but beware of being too attached to it. To put this another way, even then, cats were liable to draw our love. For these reason, the eleventh-century Liber confortatorius by Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, written in England to Eve, a woman recluse, insists that “No cat, no chicken, no little animal, no irrational creature, should live with you: fleeting time should not be wasted” (Book III, Otter trans., 80). For this reason, in the fifteenth century we encounter the unfortunate Margaret, a nun tormented in purgatory, who “had a lytel hound and a lytel catte folwynge hyr, al of fyr brennynge” [61; had a little dog and a little cat following her, both of them aflame], and who would not relieved from them until the “drosse of syn” (78) is fully burned away.

In the twelfth century, in his manual for rulers, Gerald of Wales includes a feline temptor of this sort in an aside about Gregory the Great. It’s written that a certain hermit had heard of the sanctity of Pope Gregory and went to see him in Rome, where he witnessed a grand procession of cardinals, clerics, and especially Gregory himself, bedecked with his imperial regalia. He returned to his place [locum suum], and wondered at night whether this glory suited humility, and then, as he slept, he heard a voice reciting this verse [hunc versum modulantem audivit]: 'Pluris habes catum quam praesul pontificatum’ [You esteem the cat more highly than the pope does the papacy]. For, as Gerald explains, this good man had a cat, which he was accustomed to play with [ludendo] after he finished his work and prayers. (Thanks Trevor Russell Smith for help here).

The earliest surviving version of this story may be in Gerald; Robert Bartlett, who alerted me to it, does not list anything earlier (Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?, 199), nor have I been able to find anything earlier on my own. Despite what some claim, the cat story is not in John the Deacon’s early life (PL 75:103-6, pdf), nor in this early life from Whitby. But it does appear in Vincent of Beauvais’ Speculum historiale, sadly denuded of Gerald’s catum/pontificatum pun: "Angelus Domini ad quendam eremitam, qui unum cattum pro relevando taedio secum habebat, de eodem Gregorio testeretur dicens: Majorem delectationem habes in hoc catto, quam Gregorius in omni imperio Romano" (XX.19, p. 867; an angel of the lord came to a certain hermit, who had a cat to relieve the tedium of living alone, and said to him about Gregory, you have more delight in this cat that Gregory does in all the power of Rome).

And from there, it strolls into the Golden Legend of Jacobus da Varagine (more commonly, Voragine), whose more than 1000 surviving Latin manuscripts attest to a universal readership in medieval Latin Christendom. I can cite, for example, the translations by Jean de Vignay, themselves quite popular: “tu aimes miex cele chate que tu aplanies tous les jours que il ne fait les richesces (BnF fr. 241, 76v; you love this cat that you caress every day better than he loves his riches). Judging from the examples in Godefroy’s Old French dictionary, which have to do mainly with horses, the verb for caressing, aplaner, may have been used particularly for animals, and therefore might be translated as “pet”; it certainly, and charmingly, was related, then and now to flattening, leveling, or smoothing out (the modern French aplanir).

Jean de Vignay wasn’t the only French translator; Jean Belet, for example, writes “En ces tans fu uns hermitains hons de grant vertu qui avoit laissie toutes choses por dieu et n'avoit nule chose fors que une chatte, laquelle il aplaignoit souvent et aussi com sa copaigne en ses genouz la norissoit” [Bnf fr. 20330 47v; In those times there was a hermit of great virtue has had left all things for god and had no possession except for a cat, which he caressed often, and like his companion, he fed her [while she sat] on his knees; thanks Jeanette Patterson for paleographical assistance!]. We also find the story in a thirteenth-century French verse translation of Life of Gregory, where the smugly pious hermit is more proud (“orguillous e fier”) than Gregory, because of his delight in his cat:

Tu ton chat eimes e nourris,
Bailles e beises e polis
(You love [presuming that eimes is from aimer] and feed your cat / and play with him and kiss him and “polish” him).

And of course we find it in English too, and once on a window in Canterbury Cathedral. While Gregory is missing from the saints collected in John Mirk’s Festial, and while the South English Legendary (in both EETS editions) focuses, narcissistically, on Gregory’s famously inspired evangelization of Britain (“not Angels, but Anglicans!”), it does appear in the 1430s in the Gilte Legende (taken mostly from Jean de Vignay): “How durst thou make comparison betwene the richesse of Gregori and thi pouertee, sethe thou louest more thi catte that thou handelest and strokest eueri day thanne he dothe all the richesse that he hathe, for he dispisethe hem and yeuith hem frely to eueri man” (Vol. 1, 203). And from thence, but also via Jean de Vignay, we have Caxton’s translation, which may be the most delightful of all: "And in that time there was a hermit, an holy man, which had left and forsaken all the goods of the world for God's sake, and had retained nothing but a cat, with which he played oft, and held in his lap deliciously" (Vol III, 66-67).

And that would be that for the cat, were it not for one more story of this sort, still more brief, in a Life of Saint Basil. Again, this story does not appear in the early life, attributed to Amphilochius (PL 73); nor have I yet found it anywhere earlier than the Golden Legend: it’s not in Aelfric, for example. Again, a seemingly proud prelate; again, a smugly humble hermit and his cat; and then one more detail, its tail: “Tu amplius delicaris in palpando caudam gatte tue que delectetur Basilius in apparatu suo valent” [Einsiedeln Stiftsbibliothek Codex 629(258), 41v; You delight in stroking your cat’s tail more than Basil does in his vestments: dating to 1288, this is the second-oldest copy of the Golden Legend, made during Jacobus’s lifetime, and delightful to me, because of what strikes me as an Italianate gatte for catte, hinting at a casual, vernacular affection for this animal].

Again, we have this in French (BnF 241 48r, tu te delictes plus en aplamant la queue de ton chat que Basille ne fait en son appareil), and in English, losing the tail, here from the Gilte Legende:

Another hermyte seigh another tyme Seint Basile go well besain [“be seen,” that is, “on display”] in abyte of a bisshop and despised hym in his thought, seyeng: ‘Lo what delyte he hathe to go in suche bobaunce.’ And a vois ansuered hym and saide: ‘Thou delitest the more in strokyng of thi catte thanne Basile in al hys araye (Vol 1, 117) (Caxton here).

The thirteenth-century Franciscan Chronicler Salimbene di Adam would not have approved. In Coulton’s translation:

I have seen in mine own Order certain Lectors of excellent learning and great sanctity who had yet some foul blemish, which caused others to judge lightly of them. For they love to play with a cat or a whelp or with some small fowl, but not as the Blessed Francis was wont to play with a pheasant and a cicada, rejoicing the while in the Lord (90)

Sic in ordine meo, qui est ordo beati Francisci et fratrum Minorum, vidi aliquos lectores optime litteratos et magne sanctitatis, et tamen aliquam merditatem habent, per quam leves persone iudicantur ab aliis: libenter enim ludunt cum murilego vel cum catulo vel cum avicula aliqua, sed non sicut beatus Franciscus cum fasiano et cicada ludebat et delectabatur in Domino. (146)

As much as I like pheasants and cicadas, I’m charmed by how cats insist on getting into our business, on demanding our attention, on substituting for God, on puffing us up with pride for them, how they draw ascetics astray from their celestial thoughts down to this warm and fuzzy and tailed earth. Delicious.

Corrections are welcome!

Medieval Cat Bibliography

Aerts, Erik. "La relation entre l’homme et le chat dans les anciens Pays-Bas au moyen âge et à l’époque moderne I. Le chat utile, diabolique et imaginaire."  Vlaams Diergeneeskundig Tijdschrift 84 (2015): 212-222.

Aerts, Erik. "La relation entre l’homme et le chat dans les anciens Pays-Bas au moyen âge et à l’époque moderne II. Le chat domestique et le chat tourmenté," Vlaams Diergeneeskundig Tijdschrift 84 (2015): 271-80.

Gray, Douglas. “Notes on Some Medieval, Mystical, Magical, and Moral Cats.” In Langland, the Mystics, and the Medieval English Religious Tradition: Essays in Honour of S. S. Hussey, edited by Helen Phillips, 185–202. Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1990.

Jones, Malcoln H. “Cats and Cat-Skinning in Late Medieval Art and Life.” In Fauna and Flora in the Middle Ages, edited by Sieglinde Hartmann, 97-112. New York: Peter Lang, 2007.

Lipton, Sara, “Jews, Heretics, and the Sign of the Cat in the Bible moralisée,” Word and Image 8 (1992): 362–77.

Poole, Kristopher. "The Contextual Cat: Human–Animal Relations and Social Meaning in Anglo-Saxon England." Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 22.3 (2015): 857-882. [thanks Matt E. Spears!]

Thomas, Richard, “Perceptions Versus Reality: Changing Attitudes towards Pets in Medieval and Post-Medieval England.” In Just Skin and Bones? New Perspectives on Human-Animal Relations in the Historical Past, edited by Aleksander Pluskowski, 95-104. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2005.

Walker-Meikle, Kathleen. Medieval Cats. London: British Library, 2011.

And another short blog post on medieval cats, from 2013, here.

Join the ITM Community on FB

by J J Cohen

The ITM co-bloggers are happy to announce the formation of a new Facebook group, ITM Community. A moderated space for discussing posts and comments from the blog In the Middle as well as all related humanities concerns, the group has 260+ members already and many vigorous conversations unfolding. If you are on Facebook, join us!

This forum is yours to fashion and sustain the kinds of affirmative, challenging community we need right now -- so please feel free to do with the group forum as you will. Be kind, be generous, and let's see what we can make together.

Decentering Medieval Studies: A guest post by Shamma Boyarin

a guest post by Shamma Boyarin

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

A Quick Preface

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

11 July

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

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

July 18

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

July 24

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

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

On Race and Medieval Studies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FURTHER INFORMATION AND RESOURCES

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

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