Authenticity, Medievalism, Music 1843845032, 9781843845034

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FUGELSO (ed.)

Studies in Medievalism XXVII

Authenticity, Medievalism, Music

Given the impossibility of completely recovering the past, the issue of authenticity is clearly central to scholarship on postmedieval responses to the Middle Ages. The essays in the first part of this volume address authenticity directly, discussing the 2017 Middle Ages in the Modern World conference; Early Gothic themes in nineteenth-century British literature; medievalism in the rituals of St. Agnes; emotions in Game of Thrones; racism in Disney’s Middle Ages; and religious medievalism. The essayists’ conclusions regarding authenticity then inform, even as they are tested by, the subsequent papers, which consider such matters as medievalism in contemporary French populism; nationalism in re-enactments of medieval battles; postmedieval versions of the Kingis Quair; Van Gogh’s invocations of Dante; Surrealist medievalism; chant in video games; music in cinematic representations of the Black Death; and sound in Aleksei German’s film Hard to Be a God.

Editor: KARL FUGELSO

KARL FUGELSO is Professor of Art History at Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland. Contributors: AIDA AUDEH, TESSEL BAUDUIN, MATTHIAS BERGER, KAREN COOK, TIMOTHY CURRAN, NICKOLAS HAYDOCK, ALEXANDER KOLASSA, CAROLYNE LARRINGTON, DAVID MATTHEWS, E.J. PAVLINICH, LOTTE REINBOLD, CLARE SIMMONS, ADAM WHITTAKER, DANIEL WOLLENBERG.

Studies in Medievalism XXVII Authenticity, Medievalism, Music an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com

Authenticity, Medievalism, Music

Studies in Medievalism XXVII 2018

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Studies in Medievalism Founded by Leslie J. Workman Previously published volumes are listed at the back of this book

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Authenticity, Medievalism, Music Ecomedievalism

Edited by Karl Fugelso

Studies 2018 Studies in in Medievalism Medievalism XXVII XXVI 2017 Cambridge D. S. Brewer

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© Studies in Medievalism 2018 All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2018 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN 978-1-84384-503-4 ISSN 0738-7164

D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc, 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This publication is printed on acid-free paper

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Studies in Medievalism Founding Editor Editor Advisory Board

Leslie J. Workman Karl Fugelso Martin Arnold (Hull) Geraldine Barnes (Sydney) Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr. (Leiden) William Calin (Florida) A. E. Christa Canitz (New Brunswick, Canada) Philip Cardew (Leeds Beckett) Elizabeth Emery (Montclair State) David Matthews (Manchester) Nils Holger Petersen (Copenhagen) Clare A. Simmons (Ohio State) Paul Szarmach (Western Michigan) Toshiyuki Takamiya (Keio) Jane Toswell (Western Ontario) Richard Utz (Georgia Institute of Technology) Kathleen Verduin (Hope College, Michigan) Andrew Wawn (Leeds)

Studies in Medievalism provides an interdisciplinary medium of exchange for scholars in all fields, including the visual and other arts, concerned with any aspect of the postmedieval idea and study of the Middle Ages and the influence, both scholarly and popular, of this study on Western society after 1500. Studies in Medievalism is published by Boydell & Brewer, Ltd., P.O. Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK; Boydell & Brewer, Inc., 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA. Orders and inquiries about back issues should be addressed to Boydell & Brewer at the appropriate office. For a copy of the style sheet and for inquiries about Studies in Medievalism, please contact the editor, Karl Fugelso, at the Dept. of Art + Design, Art History, and Art Education, Towson University, 3103 Center for the Arts, 8000 York Rd, Towson, MD 21252–0001, USA, tel. 410-704-2805, fax 410-704-2810 ATTN: Fugelso, e-mail . All submissions should be sent to him as e-mail attachments in Word.

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Acknowledgments The device on the title page comes from the title page of Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Alte deutsche Lieder, edited by L. Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano (Heidelberg and Frankfurt: Mohr and Room, 1806). The epigraph is from an unpublished paper by Lord Acton, written about 1859 and printed in Herbert Butterfield, Man on His Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 212.

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Studies in Medievalism List of Illustrations Preface

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Karl Fugelso xiii I: Medievalism and Authenticity

Introduction: Medievalism as Colony and Conqueror: Reflections after MAMO

David Matthews

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Genealogies of the Early Gothic: Forging Authenticity

Nickolas Haydock

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The Rituals of St. Agnes and the Lure of Authenticity

Clare A. Simmons

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Mediating Medieval(ized) Emotion in Game of Thrones

Carolyne Larrington

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A Princess of Color amid Whitewashed Medievalisms in Disney’s Sofia the First and Elena of Avalor

Elan Justice Pavlinich

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The Medievalizing Process: Religious Medievalism Timothy Curran and Constructs of Historical Authenticity

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II: Other Responses to Medievalism (and Authenticity) The Breaking Point: Alain de Benoist’s Critique Daniel Wollenberg of Medieval Nominalism

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“This Most Historic of Locations”: Performing Matthias D. Berger Authentic Nationhood at Hastings and Morgarten

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Kingdoms of Infinite Space: Three Responses to the Kingis Quair

Lotte Reinbold 103

Vincent van Gogh, Dante, and the Studio of the South Aida Audeh 123 Surrealist Medievalism: A Case Study

Tessel M. Bauduin 151

III: Early Music (and Authenticity) in Films and Video Games Introduction Beyond (the) Halo: Chant in Video Games

Alexander Kolassa 181 Karen M. Cook 183

A Plague of Medievalism upon You All: Medievalism, Music, and the Plague

Adam Whittaker 201

The Past is a Different Planet: Sounding Medievalism in Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God

Alexander Kolassa 227

Contributors 251

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Illustrations Color plates between pp. 126 and 127 Plate I.  Vincent van Gogh (1853–90), Portrait of Eugene Boch (1855–1941), 1888 (oil on canvas), Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France (photo: Bridgeman Images) Plate II.  Ernst Josephson (1851–1906), The Water Sprite, 1883, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (photo: Erik Cornelius/ Nationalmuseum) Plate III.  Vincent van Gogh, The Bedroom, 1888 (oil on canvas), Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (photo: Bridgeman Images) Plate IV.  Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait, 1889 (oil on canvas), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA (photo: Bridgeman Images) Plate V.  Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait, 1889 (oil on canvas), Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France (photo: Bridgeman Images) Plate VI.  Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait, 1889 (oil on canvas), Private Collection (photo: Bridgeman Images) Plate VII.  Max Ernst, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1945 (photo: Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg. Photographer: Achim Bednorz vom Ullmann Verlag, Potsdam). ©Max Ernst c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2017 Plate VIII.  Matthias Grünewald, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, from the Isenheim Altarpiece, 1515 (photo musée Unterlinden). ©Musée d’Unterlinden, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais Lotte Reinbold: Kingdoms of Infinite Space Fig. 1.  William Bell Scott, “Lady Jane Listens to the Nightingale.” Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

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Fig. 2.  William Bell Scott, “The Court of Venus” (photo: author) Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

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Aida Audeh: Vincent van Gogh, Dante, and the Studio of the South Fig. 1.  Charles Bargue (1826/27–83), Fragments de Têtes – Nez, Cours de dessin 1ere partie, modèles d’après la bosse, pl. 3, 1868, lithographie, épreuve avant la lettre, inv.90.1.1.594 (1), Collection Musée Goupil, Bordeaux, ©Mairie de Bordeaux (photo: B. Fontanel)

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Fig. 2.  Charles Bargue (1826/27–83), Têtes de profil – Dante, Cours de dessin 1ere partie, pl. 34, 1868, lithographie, inv.90.1.1.620 (1), Collection Musée Goupil, Bordeaux, ©Mairie de Bordeaux (photo: B. Fontanel)

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Fig. 3.  Charles Bargue (1826/27–83), D’après Raphael Sanzio (1483–1520), Portrait de Dante, Cours de dessin 2eme partie, pl. 32, 1869, lithographie, inv.96.1.1.177 (1), Collection Musée Goupil, Bordeaux, ©Mairie de Bordeaux (photo: B. Fontanel)

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Fig. 4.  Anonymous, Dante’s Mask, n.d., Plaster, 21 x 16 x 12.5, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent Van Gogh Foundation) 134 Tessel M. Bauduin: Surrealist Medievalism Fig. 1.  “Erutarettil,” Littérature 11–12 (1923): 24–25 (photo: author) 154 Fig. 2.  Page-spread from Documents 5 (1929): 286–87 (photo: author) 160 Fig. 3.  Page-spread from Minotaure 10 (1937): 64–65 (photo: author). From: Chants exploratoires: Minotaure. La revue d’Albert Skira, 1933–1939 (Geneva: Cabinet des estampes du Musée d’art et d’histoire, 2008): xliv–xlv

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Fig. 4.  “Crucifixions. Suite de dessins de Picasso, d’après la Cruxifixion de Grünewald (Musée de Colmar) (inédits),” Minotaure 1.1 (1933): 30–31 (photo: author). From: Minotaure. Nos. 1–13. 1933–39 (Geneva: Skira, 1981 [facsimile reprint])

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Illustrations xi Fig. 5.  “Max Ernst’s Favorite Poets and Painters of the Past,” View 2.1 (April 1942): 14–15 (photo: author)

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Fig. 6.  André Breton, “Le Graal,” 1988 (photo: author). From: André Breton, De la survivance de certains mythes et de quelques autres mythes en croissance ou en formation (Paris: Terrain Vague – Losfeld, 1988 [1942]): no page numbers

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Adam Whittaker: A Plague of Medievalism upon You All Fig. 1.  The troupe of actors engaging in a musical performance, all clad in costumes reminiscent of court jesters, with a medievalist stage backdrop. The Seventh Seal, dir. Bergman, 1957

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Fig. 2.  Opening two phrases of the Dies irae sequence

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Alexander Kolassa: The Past is a Different Planet Fig. 1.  Opening scene from Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God (2013) 227 Fig. 2.  Don Rumata plays his clarinet in Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God (2013)

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Fig. 3.  Rumata with Don Reba and the King in Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God (2013)

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Fig. 4.  Guard plays horn in corridor for Rumata from Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God (2013)

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The editor, contributors and publishers are grateful to all the institutions and persons listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publishers will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

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Volume XXVII 2018

Two great principles divide the world, and contend for the master, antiquity and the middle ages. These are the two civilizations that have preceded us, the two elements of which ours is composed. All political as well as religious questions reduce themselves practically to this. This is the great dualism that runs through our society. Lord Acton

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Preface As rigged elections, identity theft, and pirated products fill newspaper headlines, which, we are often told, may themselves be fake, authenticity would seem to be in particularly short supply these days. And there are indeed many contemporary challenges to and manipulations of it, especially by politicians and media outlets that, often through those very machinations, have recently moved to the center of public consciousness. But debates about what constitutes authenticity and where it is to be found are nothing new to medievalism. Indeed, they have always been central to it. The distance implicit in any response to the past represents a space for doubt as to the identity of that past, but that ambiguity may be particularly acute in medievalism. Though there are enough medieval artifacts to suggest the period’s contours and to give it an enduring presence in contemporary culture, there are so many lacunae in its historical record, and often such large ones, as to leave extraordinary room for interpretation. Nor are those responses delimited by the kind and degree of self-consciousness that is endemic in later and, often, earlier periods. Indeed, the very erraticness with which that and many other traits apply to the Middle Ages indicates the elusiveness of an era that, as conventionally defined, spans all of Europe from at least the middle of the fifth century to the beginning of the fourteenth. And it is precisely this slipperiness that makes medievalism extraordinarily informative and important. In creating their own particular middle ages, each interpreter reveals much about not only the malleability of the Middle Ages, but also themselves and their circumstances. As they flesh out, adapt, and/ or depart from the medieval record, they at least indicate, and sometimes outright declare, their own values, experiences, and expectations. They open large, clear windows to the very real contexts from which they often produce fuzzy, limited constructs. Moreover, the elusiveness of their material frequently creates a secondary space in which scholars of medievalism may reveal themselves and their own circumstances. In examining responses to the Middle Ages, and particularly in discussing the authenticity of a medievalist’s middle ages, researchers often reveal at least as much about their own biases and those of the moment in which they are working as about the medievalists, much less the Middle Ages. That is to say, questions of authenticity become crucibles in which medievalism and the scholarship on it, not to mention the emerging field of scholarship on that scholarship, may expose multiple postmedieval contexts

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and even serve as a core sampler for changing attitudes toward politics, race, ethnicity, class, gender, etc. Indeed, all of the essays in this volume’s first part not only revolve around such questions, but, in responding to the following call for papers I issued in October 2016, also address them directly or via one or more examples: By blatantly concentrating on constructs, medievalism studies may seem to avoid the problems of defining an authentic Middle Ages. But what do such studies presume about that middle ages or any other? About the studies’ medievalist subjects? About the medievalist subjects’ constructs of the Middle Ages? When it comes to authenticity, how do medievalism studies relate to the Middle Ages? To medievalism? To (other) postmedievalism? To neomedievalism? In the first essay, “Medievalism as Colony and Conqueror: Reflections after MAMO,” David Matthews observes that there was relatively little discussion at the 2017 “Middle Ages in the Modern wOrld” conference, which he hosted at Manchester University, as to whether medievalist artifacts define an authentic Middle Ages. The speakers generally seem to have assumed that their subjects were refracting the Middle Ages through ideology, and they rarely discussed the implications of that assumption. Matthews then goes on to weigh the merits and potential problems with the concomitant issue of locating medievalism studies relative to other disciplines, and proposes that this is, at the very least, a discussion that needs to continue. Which Nickolas Haydock does in “Genealogies of the Early Gothic: Forging Authenticity,” as he examines late eighteenth-century controversies over the authenticity of medievalism, particularly in Gothic novels. In constructing a new literary genre, Horace Walpole and the other authors of these works had to establish their legitimacy relative to the prevalent taste for neoclassicism, and they often did so by claiming to have roots in anti-Catholic polemics that went back to at least the late medieval debate over the Spanish Black Legend. Indeed, in the course of authenticating their own texts, they often contributed to the debate over the legitimacy of the very sources from which they were attempting to draw authority. Moreover, as Clare A. Simmons demonstrates in “The Rituals of St. Agnes and the Lure of Authenticity,” Gothic novels were not the only British Romantic texts built on shaky medievalism. While exploring the roots of John Keats’s 1820 poem “The Eve of Saint Agnes,” she punctures the myth that it and its descendants are completely grounded in medieval practice. Though there was a medieval ritual associated with Saint Agnes, it is quite far from the behavior that came to be enshrined in later versions of the Eve of Saint Agnes and in the literature about it, as authenticity suffers particularly acutely in this case from dependence on person-to-person transmission.

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Preface xv A more highly political and perhaps deliberate manipulation of medieval aspects that are often not only transmitted by intangible means but also intangible in and of themselves is examined by Carolyne Larrington in “Mediating Medieval(ized) Emotion in Game of Thrones.” In focusing on displays of emotion in George R. R. Martin’s tremendously popular books and television series about mythical “medieval” kingdoms, Larrington sketches some of the many ways that scholarly and/or popular information on medieval approaches to emotion have been adopted, adapted, or ignored by the author and his interpreters. She demonstrates how, through ostensibly greater efforts for authenticity, even and perhaps particularly in areas where that is especially difficult to achieve, a narrative can be coated with enough credibility to allow extraordinary license from its audience in otherwise departing from the past and in catering to contemporary tastes. Indeed, according to Elan Justice Pavlinich’s “A Princess of Color amid Whitewashed Medievalisms in Disney’s Sofia the First and Elena of Avalor,” the Walt Disney Company has made a literal industry out of manipulating contemporary understandings of the Middle Ages while, and often through, claiming to remain faithful to that period. The author explores how these television shows play on tropes about the Middle Ages in such a way as to promote values that are nowhere near the progressive ideals the company claims to maintain. Through a medievalism that is extraordinarily far from authentic they authenticate narratives that work against social justice, often in the minds of society’s most impressionable members. In “The Medievalizing Process: Religious Medievalism and Constructs of Historical Authenticity,” Timothy Curran proposes ways in which that and other tensions between historical authenticity and contingent representations may be navigated. Invoking recent writings by Haydock and Richard Utz, Curran suggests that religious medievalism may be the best discourse within which medievalism can accommodate constructs of historical authenticity, and sets out to demonstrate this via examples from nineteenth-century literature. Through discussion of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Christina Rossetti, he argues that, in religious medievalism, modern practitioners can draw from authentic religious codes “that spiritualized the medieval world in the hope that their reinscription may enchant its own.” Though Curran’s essay may not be the only one in this collection to shape responses to one or more of the articles in the second and third parts of this volume, his essay may particularly inform, and be informed by, the first article in the second part. In “The Breaking Point: Alain de Benoist’s Critique of Medieval Nominalism,” Daniel Wollenberg explores the many ways in which a leader of France’s populist Nouvelle Droite (ND) party has employed and distorted medieval nominalism, particularly as represented in the writings of the religious philosopher William of Ockham, to legitimize the party’s agenda. Through blatantly inauthentic interpretations of Ockham, whom

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Benoist seems never to have actually read, and in an adult version of the historical manipulation Pavlinich ascribes to the Walt Disney Company, the leaders of ND and similar organizations attempt to authenticate nativism and other ideologies that, in the eyes of their opponents, promote social injustice and are not, in any case, authentically medieval. At least ostensibly more benign, and certainly more overtly self-conscious, yet no less determined and nationalistic manipulations of the Middle Ages are explored by Matthias D. Berger in “‘This Most Historic of Locations’: Performing Authentic Nationhood at Hastings and Morgarten.” While exploring re-enactments he witnessed of the battles at Hastings and Morgarten, the author dissects the ways in which the organizers carefully arrange props, settings, actions, and dialogue to validate contemporary identities, particularly English and Swiss nationalism, via festive presentations that knowingly nod at their own manipulations. Even as they acknowledge the artifice of their constructs and flatter their audiences’ postmodern sense of enhanced self-awareness, they suggest through their own reflexivity that they are aware of such traps and have made every effort to achieve as much authenticity as possible. That is, they attempt to enhance the authenticity of their medievalism and to promote their nationalistic agendas by selectively admitting their inauthenticity. Less blatantly self-conscious justifications of the present via attempts to authenticate it in a medieval past that may or may not be authentic are, of course, to be found in many other reimaginings of the Middle Ages, such as those explored by Lotte Reinbold in “Kingdoms of Infinite Space: Three Responses to the Kingis Quair.” Out of the many adaptations of the first Scottish dream-poem, which was supposedly authored by James I, Reinbold focuses on Washington Irving’s satirical travelog The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (1819–20), William Bell Scott’s etchings (1868), and Diana Wynne Jones’s novella “The True State of Affairs” (1995) to illustrate the enduring influence of a supposedly medieval text. And, in the course of doing so, she demonstrates that, despite the tremendous differences among those responses, they each can claim to authentically represent not only the Kingis Quair, but also, and in no small part through that claim, the (other) circumstances from which they emerged. Not long after Scott completed his etchings, Vincent van Gogh revealed much about his circumstances, and himself, by drawing inspiration from another perceived middle ages. In “Vincent van Gogh, Dante, and the Studio of the South,” Aida Audeh argues that Van Gogh was trying to turn his “Studio of the South” into a utopian, medievalist community in which the poet Eugène Boch, the artist Paul Gauguin, and he would function as a late nineteenth-century version of the original Tre Corone: Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Given the known rivalries, and often animosities, among those three Italian writers, such a vision could hardly be authentic, but it reveals

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Preface xvii much about Van Gogh’s ideas and ideals, not least as his relations with Boch and especially Gauguin were soon disrupted by the sort of tensions that bedeviled the original Corone. Authentic revelations about artists, writers, and their circumstances as they respond to and often foster overtly dubious interpretations of the Middle Ages are explored on a much wider scale in Tessel M. Bauduin’s “Surrealist Medievalism: A Case Study.” In looking at that movement’s medievalism and its sources, the author tracks how some artifacts perceived by the Surrealists as medieval, particularly Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece, came to have an outsized impact on the values and production of the movement’s members. Though these allusions to the past have often been seen as quite natural and, as in the dubious link between Salvador Dalí and Hieronymus Bosch, almost necessary, Bauduin reveals how constructed and revelatory they actually are, particularly when it comes to the interrelations and motivations of the Surrealists, as she makes a case for more-authentic scholarship of artistic and literary authenticity built on sometimes quite inauthentic characterization of the Middle Ages. A similarly broad case for such an approach, albeit for an entirely different medium, is made by the first author in this volume’s third part, which contains three essays submitted as a collection by the Representations of Early Music on Stage and Screen (REMOSS) Study Group. In “Beyond (the) Halo: Chant in Video Games,” Karen M. Cook examines insightful and often highly revealing ways in which medieval plainchant and its postmedieval descendants are deployed in video games to set a mood, characterize a figure, action, or scene, and otherwise shape the narrative. The particularly popular series “Halo,” for example, opens with a theme that, according to its composer, attempts to establish an “‘ancient, mysterious, and epic’” tone for the game by building a “‘legitimate monk chant melody’” out of the Beatles’ song “Yesterday.” A rather different use of at least ostensibly medieval music is explored by Adam Whittaker in “A Plague of Medievalism upon You All: Medievalism, Music, and the Plague.” He argues that two films set during the first wave of the Black Plague, Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) and Christopher Smith’s Black Death (2010), deploy medievalist music to help construct and authenticate their atmospheric landscapes. Through pre-existent or periodstyle newly composed pastiche music, the audience is encouraged to perceive the films’ depiction of the Plague and of the wider Middle Ages as authentic and, in part through that ostensible verification, to more fully immerse themselves in the narrative and empathize with the characters, particularly at extraordinarily dire, plague-related moments in their developmental arc. Of course, sound can also play many other roles in cinema, as demonstrated by the final essay, Alexander Kolassa’s “The Past is a Different Planet: Sounding Medievalism in Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God.”

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While framing German’s film in the Soviet cinema of its time, Kolassa demonstrates that this director goes well beyond his contemporaries in having at least ostensibly medieval sounds construct his narrative. Rather than merely punctuate the dialogue and visual story of the film, the soundtrack often promotes meanings distinct from those suggested by what the audience sees and otherwise hears. As it not only reinforces but also supplements and sometimes (otherwise) departs from or even competes with other information offered by the film, it authenticates the film by imitating particular sounds one might have heard in the Middle Ages as well as embodying the fact that sounds outside of cinema often do not perfectly synchronize with other sensory data. Even as it introduces a sensory discordance that threatens to remind audiences they are experiencing cinema, it gambles that this disjuncture will in fact enhance the authenticity of the audience’s perceived immersion in the Middle Ages as a whole and the film’s narrative in particular. The articles in parts two and three thus test, even as they are informed by, the initial essayists’ discussion of authenticity. A symbiotic relationship is established around an issue whose very elusiveness embodies the extraordinary value of medievalism and helps to explain why it has become one of the most engaging and rapidly expanding fields in academia.

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I Medievalism and Authenticity

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Introduction: Medievalism as Colony and Conqueror: Reflections after MAMO David Matthews Where is the study of medievalism going? Grand statements about disciplinary directions have a way of rebounding on those who pronounce them. But I am emboldened by the fact of writing this just a few days after hosting the third “Middle Ages in the Modern wOrld” (MAMO) conference, when more than a hundred scholars from around the world converged on Manchester, all professing in their different ways the study of medievalism. It is a striking feature of MAMO that it is now as autonomous as can be imagined from the discipline of medieval studies. Although, this year, 2017, it was hosted by an English department that still offers medieval literature at all levels, the bulk of participants are not medievalists in any traditional sense. Many of them would not claim to be; they profess medievalism, and they do so with a confidence that I do not think would have been seen just fifteen years ago. There was relatively little discussion at MAMO, consequently, of whether medievalism’s artifacts were defining an authentic Middle Ages. There was, instead, a broad assumption that, from fantasy novels to computer games, from eighteenth-century drama to present-day museums, there is a vast range of ideological investment at work in representations of the Middle Ages. There was also relatively little meta-reflection on this. The question of what medievalism studies actually is – a discipline of its own, a subdiscipline, a version of cultural studies? – was largely left alone. Is that a sign of a field in rude good health? Or one that is not confronting certain intractable problems? I think there are in fact elements of both, and I want to approach this via a long, historical route. So far as I have been able to determine, it was exactly two hundred years ago, in 1817, that the minor antiquarian Thomas Fosbroke accidentally Studies in Medievalism XXVII, 2018

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coined the adjective “medieval.” This occurred in a larger context in which, in the post-Napoleonic period, a new phase was opening up in the European study of medieval culture. At exactly the same time, for instance, Thomas Rickman was publishing his account of gothic architecture and introducing the terminology, still standard in English ecclesiastical architecture, of Early English, Decorated, and Perpendicular styles.1 Walter Scott’s influential Ivanhoe was just a couple of years away from publication, and these are the kinds of writings with which Scott was familiar; he certainly had Fosbroke’s book on his desk by 1820 at the latest, for example, when he was writing The Monastery. In a strict sense, we have had two centuries of the medieval, and as I have written elsewhere, the deployment of the new terminology was part of a scholarly push to give a more objective sense of the medieval period and separate the terminology from what was by then implied by “gothic.”2 If the fall of the Napoleonic regime liberated scholarship – opening up continental travel to the British scholars once more, for example – the present in which Fosbroke, Rickman, and Scott were writing was in some other ways scarcely a propitious time. Though no one in Europe knew it, on the other side of the world from Waterloo there had been a massive volcanic eruption, that of the Indonesian volcano Tambora. Less famous than that of Krakatoa later in the century (as it was witnessed by far fewer people), it was immensely more powerful, and the disruption to weather patterns brought about by this cataclysmic event produced the notorious “year without a summer” in Europe in 1816. The same bleak weather that, famously, confined Byron, the Shelleys, and John Polidori indoors and writing gothic tales was linked to a cholera pandemic that spread throughout Asia and would eventually reach Europe. As Scott completed Ivanhoe in mid-1819, Britain and the world were undergoing a third successive year of global famine and epidemic as a result of chaotic weather systems produced by the eruption.3 Scott’s novel begins with two Saxon thralls in a woodland, late on a summer’s day at the end of the twelfth century, and a celebrated dialogue in which the thralls Gurth and Wamba lament the Norman incursion, anachronistically describing the Norman Yoke thesis. In this foundational medievalist text, the characters themselves are already nostalgic. They are medieval, and so already positioned to be the objects of nostalgic desire for the reader in 1819, but they are themselves already nostalgic for what they see as an earlier, better time: a medieval past of wholeness and plenitude, before the Normans destroyed it. (Indeed, another facet of the scene is the description of a Celtic Thomas Rickman, An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of Architecture, from the Conquest to the Reformation (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1817). 2 David Matthews, Medievalism: A Critical History (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015). 3 Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). 1

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stone circle, which hints at yet deeper times beyond the medieval, and even more distant imagined harmonies.) So, the opening of Ivanhoe offers the possibility of an endlessly recessive medievalist nostalgia, in which the desirable past is always just a little further back. While Gurth and Wamba’s dialogue is the most often recalled element of this scene, it is worth noting also the loving detail with which Scott renders his twelfth-century summer’s day. This, in 1819, might have been more than a way of projecting a gorgeous light on to the period. It was perhaps in addition born from a simple longing, after three years of awful weather, for one more good summer. The scene ends, in fact, when Gurth complains that he wants to get moving because a storm is in the offing, threatening summer rain.4 As “medieval” tentatively made its way into the vocabulary and a new sense of the Middle Ages was forged by such fictional and scholarly works, these were important moments for medieval studies and medievalism. On one hand, such a work as Rickman’s was scholarly and corrective, seeking to put an end to popular, fanciful theories about gothic architecture, such as the longstanding idea that the origin of the gothic pointed arch was to be found in the shape of two trees meeting in the primeval Germanic forests.5 On the other, Scott’s Ivanhoe opened up the possibility of a fictional entry into the Middle Ages that would eventually influence early re-enactment. Such diverse impulses led to the intertwined lineages of medieval studies and medievalism, which developed in tandem but at varying degrees of distance from one another across the next two centuries. Standing at the end of that period, it is possible to see that a period of institutional intellectual pre-eminence in departments of English and History in the twentieth century for medieval studies appears to have come to an end, while the study of medievalism, which correspondingly had no prestige in the heyday of medieval studies, has now reached acceptability and gone beyond it. The number of recent publications that simply accept medievalism as a field is quite remarkable. Of these, perhaps the Cambridge Companion to Medievalism edited by Louise D’Arcens is the most significant.6 Any individual can go into print with his or her reflections on the field, but when major academic presses judge the area to be worthy of a companion, something more is going on. The very notion of the “companion,” suggesting an object worthy of accompaniment in the first place, locates D’Arcens’ volume See Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, ed. with an intro. by A. N. Wilson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), chap. 1. There is little doubt, but in chapter 6 the season is confirmed as being summer. 5 For discussion, see Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1998), 28. 6 The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, ed. Louise D’Arcens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 4

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somewhere other than such recent works as Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl’s Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present (London and New York: Routledge, 2013) or Stephanie Trigg and Tom Prendergast’s forthcoming Affective Medievalism. One thing, however, that such works have in common is that they are written by people who trained as medievalists and later became interested in more recent manifestations of the medieval (which is certainly my own trajectory). In D’Arcens’ companion, this kind of scholar is perhaps represented par excellence by John Ganim, author of several books on Middle English literature who then turned to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in his valuable book Medievalism and Orientalism and has now become interested in medievalist architecture within modernism.7 But these kinds of scholars, with a career in medieval studies behind them, no longer have the field to themselves. As became clear to me during the MAMO conference, this is the moment of those scholars who specialize in one or another aspect of medievalism without ever having been medievalists in the traditional sense. Such scholars might never have had any particular allegiance to medieval studies, having emerged from media studies or cultural studies. Some of these scholars might identify with what has sometimes been called neomedievalism. As originally formulated by figures associated with the Medieval Electronic Multimedia Organization (MEMO), it has been defined as engaging with “alternative realities of the Middle Ages” and taking “[a]lready fragmented histories” in to repurpose and rebuild them “to suit whimsical fancy.”8 Any commitment to an original medieval reality is deliberately forgone and the researcher is happy to point to a background in modern fantasy, rather than, say, medieval romance. I do not mind confessing that I sometimes find this alarming. To an older breed such as I represent, there is an instinctive reaction against the freeing of medievalism from the Middle Ages, the period I know through the work of historians and primary texts. The program of the MAMO conference has convinced me (belatedly, no doubt) that this formal freeing up of the study of medievalism from an originary medieval studies is a necessary and exhilarating development. MAMO made it obvious, for example, that medievalist computer gaming is now deep into a period of serious and extended John Ganim, Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 8 , last accessed 2 August 2017. See, further, Carol L. Robinson and Pamela Clements, “Living with Neomedievalism,” in Studies in Medievalism XVIII: Defining Medievalism(s) II, ed. Karl Fugelso (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2009), 55–75. See, for a development of the idea in the succeeding issue, Cory Lowell Grewell, “Neomedievalism: An Eleventh Little Middle Ages?,” in Studies in Medievalism XIX: Defining Neomedievalism(s), ed. Karl Fugelso (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), 34–43. 7

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discussion, with a strong focus on, precisely, the relationships between this postmodern cultural form and history, the representation of history, and the ethical dimension of play. It is interesting to think about how computer games might represent an originary Middle Ages. But it is far from being the sole, or the most important concern. It is not surprising that much of this work is being done (where the U.K., at least, is concerned) in newer universities, where the boundaries between older and newer disciplines are less rigid, and hence where traditional historical or literary studies might mingle more readily with cultural and media studies. The MAMO conference was particularly marked, in this regard, by the work of scholars at the University of Winchester, Robert Houghton and Karl Alvestad, and the University of Lincoln’s Andrew Elliott (along with Adam Chapman at the University of Gothenburg). All are working on computer games, in some cases in institutional contexts where it is unlikely even a partial medieval-studies program could be mounted. Of course, one of the things this might mean is that the study of medievalism, before too long, will need neither traditional medieval studies nor its practitioners. Perhaps, like a colony that has separated itself from an imperial power via a bloodless coup, the study of medievalism will go on with a respectful but always wary attitude to the former colonialists. This would have many implications that I suspect we will be exploring over the coming years. I and others have argued that the study of both medievalism and the Middle Ages belong inextricably together; I have previously tried to suggest that medievalism studies is an expanded cultural studies of the medieval.9 Is this connection now under threat? Was it perhaps not as strong as some had wished it to be? Another notion that I feel is certainly under threat is the cherished idea about medievalism that it might act as the “gateway drug” to medieval studies itself. Louise D’Arcens has formulated it thus in the Cambridge Companion, but the idea has been around for a long time. It proposes that undergraduate courses on, to take random examples, modern Arthuriana or medievalist films will be so attractive to students that they will inevitably want to learn Middle High German, master Carolingian minuscule, and become proper medievalists. In short, why stop with Braveheart if you can have Barbour’s Bruce? This notion is fairly clearly born from the longings of traditional medievalists, chasing student numbers. Its first problem is that it assumes the priority of an originary medieval studies. A more obvious problem is simply that the evidence for a Braveheart-to-Bruce effect is slender. Still another difficulty is the snobbery that lies behind the idea that a student will not really be content until she has tried the harder drug, the real thing. Or to remain within the earlier metaphor, until she has journeyed from the colonial outpost to the See Matthews, Medievalism, chap. 7.

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ancient imperial metropolis. That opposition is not sustainable when the new discipline has become an entity unto itself. The evidence of MAMO is that that is precisely what has happened. To put this in a historical context, the “gateway drug” approach was exactly the attitude of Frederick Furnivall in the 1860s: in a cultural landscape that included Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Furnivall thought, people would soon want to read real Arthurian romance (which, in its early days, it was the mission of the Early English Text Society [EETS] to offer). He himself had started with Tennyson, whose work “turned his attention to that distant past wherefrom faint but audible voices called to him […].”10 In fact what mostly happened after the establishment of the EETS was that the readerships for the two different things remained largely separate. With relatively few exceptions, people who read Tennyson’s Idylls ended up – unlike Furnivall – wanting to read more things just like Tennyson’s Idylls, just as the majority of people who grew up reading Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings end up wanting to read more things like Lord of the Rings, something that two or three generations of fantasy writers after Tolkien have been happy to give them. The EETS, in due course, became a publishing venture aimed almost exclusively at academic markets, without which it would have disappeared long ago. In short, there are many people for whom medievalism leads to more medievalism. They have now been given disciplinary warrant for precisely this turning away from the notion of the original, with the assumptions about authenticity that come with the pursuit of that original. If I was in any doubt about this tendency before hosting MAMO, I am no longer. Rather than remarking on this development in order to lament it, I find it liberating. For most of the past thirty years or so, while medievalism studies has been developing, there has been a lingering concern with a question of authenticity and a tendency to see the parent medieval studies as dealing in authentic remainders of the past, to the disfavor of medievalism studies. Studies today, in computer gaming alone, show that this has become an old-fashioned concern. The issue in gaming is to do with where it goes next, the ways in which it can be developed to push at its own constraints and boundaries. The issues are not primarily those of authentic representation. Still another camp in these debates is one that is neither celebrating the newly found independence of something called medievalism studies, nor lamenting the break-up of an earlier unified empire. It has been evident, perhaps from the beginning, that medievalism did not necessarily need to become a more organized form of study to survive and flourish, and one of the ramifications, today, is that the term “medievalism” itself is perhaps According to John Munro in the year after Furnivall’s death: Munro, Frederick James Furnivall: A Volume of Personal Record (London, New York, Toronto, and Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1911), xliii.

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paradoxically becoming less important. The first proposition is demonstrated by the existence of thousands of medievalist re-enactors around the world, for whom medievalism is a matter of lived practice rather than anything formally studied. This has led some critics to challenge the primacy of a “studies” approach to medievalism. Most notably Richard Utz, a leading figure in the study of medievalism, has proposed in a recent work the idea of getting away from “studies” and has argued that medievalism offers a way for an academy he sees as cut off from the public realm to reconnect with it. Utz calls for “a more adventurous and entrepreneurial kind of academic than the one we have too often attracted and rewarded over the last 130 years.”11 I am in general sympathetic to Utz’s call for the academic to get out into the field. But I am skeptical that those in the public realm, having managed without us pretty well thus far, now want us to get active (in, say, re-enactment circles). We will always need “studies,” I feel; without them we are just people with interests, pretending that those interests do not come from long researches. One of the most fascinating things about re-enactors and re-enacting is the deep expertise that many re-enactors have acquired in previously obscure areas, such as the fashioning of medieval armor. When the Eglinton Tournament was staged in 1839, it was a bonanza for the armor maker Samuel Pratt, who had to forge (in more than one sense) the kit. But today, there is presumably more armor available than at any time since the Middle Ages, and perhaps more even than then. Specialized knowledge is an extremely good thing. Specialized knowledge acquired by craftspeople, who have reinvented it and are able to pass it on without a mediating set of “studies,” is also a good thing. But we academics have our job to do too, and if we are not practitioners and craftspeople (as I am not) then that job is “studies” and interpretation. I wholeheartedly endorse the breakout of medieval studies, via the practices of medievalism, into the wider world. But what, we can hypothetically ask, would we do if neomedievalism were to spread so much in, say, the sessions of the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo that it became increasingly difficult to find actual medieval studies? What happens when we are all doing medievalism, and Middle High German and Carolingian minuscule assume the status held today (in the west) by Arabic or classical Japanese? The problem is that when “studies” are abandoned the logic of the market takes over. My own little corner of the academic world – the study of medieval English literature – gets harder to sell each year. The playing field is not level; the majority of students are drawn to contemporary fields. They are drawn to what they know, or think they know. And in this regard medievalism can have the deeply ironic effect of ­performing a Richard Utz, Medievalism: A Manifesto (Kalamazoo, MI, and Bradford: Arc Humanities Press, 2017), 86.

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contemporary and therefore less threatening version of the medieval. The relentlessness of the contemporary is something that, in my view, needs to be contested. Not – I want quickly to add – because it is wrong that students want to do it, but simply because, in traditional disciplines such as literature, their experience is partial if it concentrates on recent chronology. Just because it is hard does not mean that it is not worth doing. My own experience in this regard is that of someone who takes part, every year, in a semester-long module on medieval literature, compulsory to all English Literature students, and I have lost count of the number of students who later say how glad they were that they were made to take this module they had feared. That is what “studies” brings about; it legislates a certain form of cultural memory and learning, something that, if left to market forces, will wither away and die. Right now, the study of medievalism does not apparently need much help. It is flourishing. The naysayers, so vocal even a few years ago, are much less often heard these days. It seems that we medievalists are all doing medievalism now. And it is often the way that when battles appear to be won, the ideological struggle quickly recedes into the past. It seems to me that while such works as Utz’s manifesto are still making bold statements within what we might call a meta-medievalism, the evidence of MAMO is that meta-medievalism might be retreating in importance. “Medievalism studies,” almost in the same moment it has been christened, is becoming less interested in itself as a form of organized study with a set of disciplinary problems and is instead characterized by scholars who simply get on with the work in their chosen subfield. This can happen because medievalism emerges from so many other disciplines. Its founding mothers and fathers, such scholars as Alice Chandler and Norman Cantor, did not think of themselves as doing something called “medievalism studies,” and they were not hampered by that lack of apparatus (they had historiography, after all). In this sense, I feel that the analogy I once drew between medievalism studies and cultural studies still holds. Medievalism is – more than ever, I feel – like cultural studies before it, an antidiscipline. If it is, this does not seem to be doing it any harm. But I think it would be highly useful for there to be, somewhere within medievalism studies, an ongoing discussion about how it relates to the original discipline of medieval studies and indeed the Middle Ages as a period. (A forum such as this one does help, of course.) This is not because medievalism studies needs any kind of guarantee provided by that originary historical period, but rather that there is a risk otherwise of a discipline vanishing into a hall of mirrors, of representations of representations. The Middle Ages happened; how, when, and where remain questions that are very much alive, and they are questions from which I do not think medievalism studies can turn away. Throughout this piece, I have had recourse to the metaphor of colony and

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colonial power. That is partly, no doubt, because I am myself from a former colony (the remote city of Adelaide, outpost of an outpost). I have never been in any doubt that it was the influence of that famously neo-gothic city, with its university of traditional disciplines, that shaped me in the directions I have since pursued, which have led to another city of neo-gothic in Manchester and the staging of MAMO. So it will be interesting, in 2018, to see what shape the “Middle Ages in the Modern World” conference takes when it returns – as a conqueror? – to the imperial city, Rome. I hope some of the questions raised here will be topics to engage with at the conference’s next iteration.

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Genealogies of the Early Gothic: Forging Authenticity Nickolas Haydock Controversies over the authenticity of medievalism were probably most intense and formative in the late eighteenth century. The early Gothic novel emerges during this period, a substantially new genre that rivaled neoclassical tastes and prescriptions in provocative ways. In this essay I trace some of the ways the Gothic responded to its own questionable legitimacy as a new genre. The OED lists four definitions for authenticity, an abstract noun formed in the eighteenth century from the adjective authentic. All four definitions are relevant to my analysis of Gothic authenticities below: 1. True or in accordance with fact; veracity; correctness; 2. Authoritative or duly authorized; authority (now rare); 3. With reference to a document, artifact, artwork, etc.: the fact or quality of being authentic; genuineness; 4. The fact or quality of being real; actuality, reality.1 My argument attempts to demonstrate the depth and breadth of Gothic engagements with authenticity through an analysis of mimesis, authority, and nationalist literary history. Early Gothic novels such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, and Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer make profound investments in the literary authority of earlymodern writers. They also invest in iconophobic, anti-Catholic polemics that were a distinctive feature of John Foxe’s Protestant martyrs to the Inquisition, Edmund Spenser’s fairyland, and Christopher Marlowe’s Faust. As we shall see, one of the darkest sides of this cultural inheritance – the Spanish Black Legend – also makes a deep impression on the Early Gothic. Walpole, inventor of the Gothic novel in The Castle of Otranto (1764), exemplifies the first definition of authenticity (“true, in accordance with fact”) in his Anecdotes of Painting in England (1760): “The portrait was rather I have slightly abbreviated the entries. The Oxford English Dictionary (“authenticity”) at , last accessed 26 August 2017.

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a work of command and imagination than of authenticity.”2 Perhaps not coincidentally, the authenticity of likenesses (in this sense) is crucial to the anamorphic portraits of Gothic fiction. The hero of Otranto, Theodore, bears an uncanny resemblance to the portrait of Alfonso the Good, a dead hero of the Crusades whose ghost steps through the frame to taunt and haunt the usurper, Manfred. Later, the resemblance causes Manfred to mistake the youth for Alfonso’s ghost – a comic bit of business ultimately borne out when Theodore is finally established by a birthmark and “an authentic writing” to be the legitimate son of Alfonso and the rightful heir of Otranto.3 The genetic resemblance between the crusader hero Alfonso and his progeny confirms the portrait’s miraculous authenticity. In his defense of Walpole, Sir Walter Scott also has recourse to painterly vraisemblance as a metaphor for the authenticity of the novel’s medievalism: It was his object to draw such a picture of domestic life and manners, during the feudal times, as might actually have existed, and to paint it checkered and agitated by the action of supernatural machinery, such as the superstition of the period received as matter of devout credulity.4 Lewis’s The Monk does not employ pictorial likeness as a guarantor of hereditary legitimacy. Instead, Lewis’s ekphrasis of supernatural portraits is driven by iconophobia and the demonization of Catholic Spain, wherein likeness is motivated by an intention to deceive. The monk Ambrosio has an icon in his cell, a portrait of the Virgin Mary that he worships with intense devotion. In a fevered, erotic dream, caritas slides over into cupiditas, as the Virgin steps through the frame to embrace him: Sometimes his dream presented the image of his favorite Madonna, and he fancied he was kneeling before her. As he offered up his vows to her, the eyes of the Figure seemed to beam upon him with inexpressible sweetness. He pressed his lips to hers and found them warm. The animated form started from the canvas, embraced him affectionately, and his senses were unable to support a delight so exquisite. […] His unsatisfied desires placed before him the most lustful and provoking images, and he rioted in joys till then unknown to him.5 The Oxford English Dictionary. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, ed. Nick Groom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 105. 4 From Scott’s Introduction to the Ballantyne edition published in Edinburgh, 1811. Gothic Readings: The First Wave, 1764–1840, ed. Rictor Norton (London: Continuum, 2000), 324. 5 Matthew Lewis, The Monk: A Romance, ed. Christopher MacLachlan (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 61. 2 3

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Later, his temptress Matilda, posing as a male novice in the convent, reveals that she also posed for the portrait of the Madonna, in effect tricking Ambrosio into worshipping her, and thereby easing his transition between chaste and erotic love. A shocking volte face comes at the end of the novel when Satan reveals that he fashioned the face of a succubus to look like the icon in Ambrosio’s cell: “I observed your blind idolatry of the Madonna’s picture. I bade a subordinate but crafty spirit assume a similar form.”6 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes that many readers assume this a mistake; she argues instead that it is consistent with destabilized Gothic identities.7 Fair enough, but there are additional reasons motivating the double méconnaissance. In the opening cantos of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Archimago first sends an erotic dream to the Redcrosse Knight in the form of a sprite shaped like the virgin Una: “Whose semblance she did carrie vnder feigned hew” (1.1.46).8 Redcrosse wakes to find his dream an apparent reality when another demonic double of Una, “most like that virgin true” (1.1.49), attempts to seduce him. Satan in The Monk closely imitates Archimago’s strategy. He fashions first a sex dream and then a demonic simulacrum – both made to leverage the sensuality assumed to be implicit in Mariolatry. In addition, the names Ambrosio and Matilda almost certainly descend from a single stanza in Book Three of the Faerie Queene recounting the ancient history of Britain. As it happens, a certain “Lady Nonne, Matilda,” is the mother of the famous Merlin, “wondrously begotten and begonne / By false illusion of a guilefull Spright” (3.3.13). Matilda is related to King Ambrosius on her father’s side, and Spenser twice emphasizes her son Merlin’s magical transformation of sprites into servants of his will. The Ambrosio of The Monk first appears as textual double, perhaps even as a broad parody of Spenser’s Redcrosse Knight. Redcrosse, remember, was dubbed “the Knight of Holiness.” Ambrosio’s title, repeated with increasing irony, is “the Man of Holiness”; he, like Spenser’s knight, is ignorant of his birth and remarkably innocent in the ways of the world, until the devil begins tempting him with shape-shifting doubles. Both are notable sufferers from pride and sexual dissipation. Like Redcrosse, Ambrosio’s mounting hubris leads him to be imprisoned in the dungeon ruled in Spenser by Orgoglio and in Lewis by the Inquisition. The cruelest cut, though, comes in Lewis’s parody of the climax of Spenser’s first book. Both exemplars of holiness are seized by Satan, are swept up into the sky and fall from the clutches of the predator. The catastrophes of Redcrosse are fortunate: regenerative wells and healing balms soothe his flagging spirit and mangled flesh, fostering miraculous recoveries. Lewis, The Monk, 375. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “The Character of the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel,” PMLA 96.2 (1981): 261. 8 Edmund Spenser: The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London: Pearson, 2001). 6 7

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Ambrosio’s back is broken; paralyzed, he wastes away for seven days, prey to insects and carrion birds, grotesquely desiccated on the verge of a river, which finally swells in evocation of an angry God to wash his corpse but not his sins away. These heretofore unflagged broad and deep allusions to what Bishop Richard Hurd famously dubbed “Gothic” Spenser (1762) bring us to the second meaning of the word authenticity. From the eighteenth century authenticity was often conflated in a way now unusual with authority or the authoritative. When Hurd insisted on the Gothic structure of Spenser’s Faerie Queene he meant that its form was better understood in relation to the errant assemblages of medieval romance than classical epic, more similar to Gothic cathedrals than ancient temples. Writers of Gothic fiction from Walpole through the early nineteenth century, invoking a parallel distinction between the neoclassical novel and their own productions, typically called their works “romance.” Yet the early Gothic is fraught by the conventional, blatantly in-authentic character of its medievalism, its rotting castles and corpses, its prisons of the Inquisition, its terrifying sounds and shadows, its terrified heroines. But if the Gothic was inauthentic with respect to the historical Middle Ages, it lavished unprecedented attention on the literary authority of canonical English writers from Spenser to John Milton (cf., the second definition given above). Neoclassical poets like Alexander Pope and novelists like Henry Fielding made classical imitation and mock-heroic allusion the hallmark of urbane, erudite composition. Gothic writers extended this habit of allusion to a native English tradition, especially those works featuring terrors both sublime and bathetic. Bishop Hurd had insisted upon “the superiority of Gothic charms and incantations, to the classic,”9 but he also traced through the history of western civilization a rising tide of the supernatural: For, to the frightful forms of ancient necromancy (which easily traveled down to us when the fairer offspring of pagan civilization lost its way, or was swallowed up in the general darkness of the barbarous ages) were now joined the hideous phantasms which had terrified the Northern nations; and, to complete the horrid group, with those incorporated the still more tremendous spectres of Christian superstition.10 In the Gothic novel’s construction of literary authenticity pride of place went to Shakespeare’s plays, in particular those Dark Age tragedies Hamlet and Macbeth. Walpole’s Castle of Otranto is a giddy pastiche of these two works, especially their presentation of the supernatural: Richard Hurd, The Works of Richard Hurd, DD in Eight Volumes, vol. 4 (London: Cadell and Davies, 1811), 288. 10 Hurd, Works, vol. 4, 286. 9

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Genealogies of the Early Gothic 17 Ha! what art thou, thou dreadful spectre! Is my hour come? – My dearest, gracious lord, cried Hippolita, clasping him in her arms, what is it you see? Why do you fix your eye-balls thus? – What! cried Manfred breathless – dost thou see nothing. Hippolita? Is this ghastly phantom sent to me alone – to me, who did not – For mercy’s sweetest self, my lord, said Hippolita, resume your soul, command your reason. There is none here but we, your friends. – What, is not that Alfonso? cried Manfred: dost thou not see him?11

Walpole’s second preface admits flatly, “Shakespeare was the model I copied.”12 Shakespeare’s influence on the Gothic movement is the focus of two recent collections of essays that establish beyond any doubt his centrality to the formation of the genre.13 Less comprehensively studied is the thorough-going, profound influence of Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and Milton’s Satan on a range of early Gothic fiction, including William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), Lewis’s The Monk (1796), Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, or The Moor (1806), and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). Indeed, these works constitute something akin to a Gothic subgenre of demonic temptation. If the “Gothic” of early Gothic fiction is second-hand, mediated through Elizabethan and Jacobean literature rather than any sustained encounter with medieval texts or history, its own textual practices often skirt charges of forgery and plagiarism as well. The third definition of authenticity given above, which concerns the authenticity or genuineness of a document or artifact, is and continues to be one of Gothic’s most controversial features. Like imitation, forgery is a powerful engine of literary history. But the kind of forgery that interests me here has less to do with the forgery of documents than the forging of traditions, what Giles Deleuze terms the “powers of the false.”14 Walpole knew little enough about medieval literature in English to be initially taken in by Chatterton’s Rowley poems, yet his initial preface to Otranto probably encouraged the young genius to apply to him for patronage in the first place. Four years before Otranto in 1760, Walpole received a copy of James Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry, and continued to vacillate over the authenticity of the Ossian poems for some time. His hoax in the original preface to Otranto, which he maintained for less than a year, is substantially different. It does not purport to be based on a found manuscript – like Chatterton’s poems – but rather imagines a story set during the time Walpole, Otranto, 76–77. Walpole, Otranto, 10. 13 See Gothic Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis and Dale Townshend (New York: Routledge, 2008), and Shakespearean Gothic, ed. Christy Desmet and Anne Williams (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009). 14 Giles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 126–55. 11 12

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of the Crusades, extant in the “perfect Italian” of Onuphrio Muralto and printed in Naples in 1529. Walpole’s mendaciousness became legendary.15 Still, his use of the sixteenth century as a conduit for medieval stories parallels the early-modern sources of many early Gothic practitioners, including Beckford, Ann Radcliffe, Lewis, Dacre, and Maturin. It is unlikely that Walpole’s winking attempt at deception in the first preface would have fooled learned readers like Samuel Johnson or Thomas Gray, any more than visitors to Strawberry Hill would have mistaken Walpole’s neo-gothic mansion for a medieval castle. It was only in the second edition where the still-anonymous author confessed his forgery that he introduced the term “Gothic” into the title (The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story) – and the genre and fraud have been associated ever since.16 The novel’s studied inauthenticity, its monstrous anachronisms quite literally falling from the sky, is a self-conscious stylization, a mock culpability that remains widespread in Gothic fiction. The pattern Walpole established has proven endlessly adaptable. Umberto Eco’s neo-gothic Name of the Rose begins similarly with historical stages of transmission for a found text, and his title too plays on the mendacity of titles – and of language itself.17 Walpole’s revival of the Gothic, like the Celtic and Norse revivals of the same period, drew strength from the need to fill gaps in the record available to readers.18 One of the chief powers of the false is the discovery of something substantially new in the process of forging something “ancient.” The relationship between early Gothic and the medieval was always tenuous at best, especially since the settings for many of these novels are postReformation. The final definition for authenticity with which I began this essay, “the quality of being real, actual,” seems the least relevant characterization of texts that are after all fictions. Yet accepted truths and realities, those apodictic truths that fiction routinely invokes and upon which its moral universe depends, are no less foundational for the genre than haunted portraits or things that go bump in the night.19 We have already touched upon how See Jeffrey Kahan’s fascinating discussion of imitation and forgery in the career of W. H. Ireland, whose “literary father” was Horace Walpole. “The Curse of Shakespeare,” in Shakespearean Gothic, 60–86. 16 See, for instance, Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 60: “Walpole’s hoax […] may have forever cemented the link between the Gothic and forgery.” Also see: Andrew Smith, Gothic Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 20. 17 See Eco’s Borgesian remarks about “visions of books as yet unwritten” (3). Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanavich, 1980), 1–5. 18 For a good, brief introduction to these three “revivals,” see Michael Alexander, Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 1–23. 19 On “apodictic” truths and on truth in fiction more generally, see Michael Riffaterre, Fictional Truth (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 1–28. 15

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Gothic nationalist literary history employs the authority of canonical writers like Spenser, Marlowe, or Shakespeare to supplement the impoverished authority of the genre. Now, I turn to a “truth universally acknowledged” about Spain’s alleged “cultural belatedness.” I employ the phrase advisedly, as no less a medievalist than Ernst Robert Curtius thought the idea still worthy of serious consideration in his European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages.20 Indeed, the perdurability of the Black Legend and the Inquisition in English imaginations from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century is a remarkable example of how nations used (and still use) time as a justification for xenophobia. Early Gothic relies upon the Renaissance as the locus of an epistemological division of Europe into two opposed chronotopes: one in which the medieval is never fully transcended, and another based in an enlightened, northern Europe that identifies this time warp as a realm of menace and eroticized nostalgia.21 The early English Gothic’s uncanny chronology sets its tales in an unreformed southern Europe, especially Spain and Italy, realms where medieval “superstitions” were thought to endure.22 The Monk opens with a call to mass, but the tendentious narrator immediately undercuts the apparent devotion of the droves flocking to the Church: “in a city where superstition reigns with such despotic sway as in Madrid, to seek for true devotion would be a fruitless attempt.”23 This first salvo in a novel that adopts Reformation polemics wholesale launches a tale of horror thickly leavened with anti-Catholic satire, including scathing attacks on monasticism, the worship of images, and the dungeons of the Inquisition, where Satanic tempters come and go as they please. Radcliffe’s response to Lewis’s novel in The Italian was less lurid and sensationalistic, but her terror Gothic remonstrates trenchantly against the perverseness of clerical celibacy and revels in the specters that haunt the prisons of the Inquisition. The priest-assassin given sanctuary by the Church in the opening scene of The Italian remains a crucial commonplace in Dan Brown’s neo-gothic Da Vinci Code.24 The virulent anti-Catholicism of Brown’s novel shocked and enraged some readers who were perhaps most troubled by his extension of these stock tropes into the modern world, along with a biological descendant Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1952, repr. 1990), 541–44. 21 The issue of time in medievalism has been widely discussed and variously theorized. For a recent survey, I suggest Stephanie Trigg’s “Medievalism and Theories of Temporality,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, ed. Louise D’Arcens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 196–209. 22 The best introduction to the rise of this mentality in early-modern England is still Richard Helgerson’s chapter “Two Versions of the Gothic,” in Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 19–62. 23 Lewis, The Monk, 11. 24 Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (New York: Doubleday, 2003). 20

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of Jesus Christ. Though thoroughly conventional in its miraculous Gothic genealogies, the authenticity of Brown’s work was witheringly scrutinized as a crackpot conspiracy theory. The Monk and The Italian have their own conspiracy theory, a congeries of accepted truths to which their narrators repeatedly appeal in apodictic and gnomic statements – truths (in England at least) crucial to the Gothic. What gave the early Gothic novel authenticity for its readers and writers was not medieval history or romance but rather these Reformation polemics serving as common knowledge about Spain and the evils of monasticism. Ideologies, especially xenophobic ones, produce and frame our experience of others. In this sense, the world of the early Gothic took as given the attitudes inherited from the religious polemics of Reformation England. Shakespeare’s medieval tragedies perform a return of the repressed that became paradigmatic in the early Gothic. In Hamlet, audiences witnessed the ghost of the father, perhaps even Jacques Lacan’s “name of the father,” return from a Purgatory that the Reformation had supposedly obviated.25 Macbeth cuts even closer to the bone. Scottish Catholic specters, early in the reign of James I, haunt an English, Protestant audience. In a similar vein, Anglican congregants at the turn of the nineteenth century avidly confront the specter of incarceration in the dungeons of the Inquisition. The Elizabethan and Jacobean inheritance of the Spanish Black Legend was every bit as influential, as fundamental to the development of the early Gothic as was the literary authority of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. Initially, the medieval Inquisition was established to combat the Albigensian heresy; later Inquisitions in Spain, Portugal, and Rome revived this model. The stated purpose of the Spanish Inquisition (established 1476) was to identify lapsed Conversos and Moriscos, thus reviving the mission of the medieval Inquisition to combat heresy. With Lewis’s The Monk and Radcliffe’s The Italian, the Kafkaesque interrogations of the Inquisition and the demonic specters stalking its dark corridors become for a time the sine qua non of the Gothic novel. Through the late 1790s writers churned out numerous examples of what we might christen Black Legend Gothic, culminating in two 1799 novels, William Godwin’s St. Leon and William Henry Ireland’s The Abbess. It is sometimes suggested that the “Spaniard’s Tale” in Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) revisits from an ironic distance the Black Legend and other Gothic stereotypes such as the Faustian bargain. Yet what always gave an edge to Black Legend Gothic was its readers’ understanding that by virtue of their Steven Greenblatt is certainly correct to focus on the “magical intensity” of apparitions in the play, rather than attempting to fix the play’s doctrinal orientations. Steven Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002, exp. ed. 2013), 21. Especially relevant for Shakespeare’s influence on the Gothic supernatural is Greenblatt’s fourth chapter: “Staging Ghosts.”

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faith they were guilty of a heresy that the Inquisition had been established to identify, interrogate, and bring to punishment. For the Anglican-Irish Maturin, the descendant of French Huguenots serving as a Protestant clergyman in an overwhelmingly Catholic country, the threat of the Inquisition was a fantasy terror supported by real anxieties. By 1820 the Spanish Inquisition posed no threat to Irish clergymen, or anyone else for that matter. But just as Shakespeare and Spenser conferred a second-degree authority on the medievalistic fictions of the early Gothic, so, too, did the enduring popularity of another early modern work, John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, lend a kind of enduring authenticity to Black Legend Gothic, especially in its demonization of the Inquisition. The influence of Foxe’s work on the presentation of the Inquisition in Lewis, Radcliffe, Godwin, Ireland, and Maturin is immeasurable, not least because it is the source of an enduring climate of opinion: horrible “truths” about an inquisition that had once held sway in England and just might do so again. Early Gothic’s xenophobic and religious paranoia, hallowed by tradition, is the “reality” to which these texts repeatedly appeal. Its reliance on these traditions at least partly explains its popular appeal.

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The Rituals of St. Agnes and the Lure of Authenticity Clare A. Simmons John Keats’s 1820 poem “The Eve of Saint Agnes” is a medievalist’s dream, not the product of the Middle Ages but a Romantic-era vision filtered through readings of Spenser and Shakespeare – the very version of the past that seems most patently inauthentic.1 Multiple scholars of medievalism have pointed out that each age recreates the Middle Ages in response to its own concerns and preoccupations,2 and the British Romantic era is no exception. Yet, selfevidently, people did live in that time later designated the Middle Ages, and they too must have had their own hopes, fears, and interests. As the countless works published yearly based on research into a more accurate picture of the Middle Ages testify, the authentic – the “real” – still has an allure. Even in an artificially medieval poem, the reader is tempted to identify some germ of the actual Middle Ages. If there is an authentic medieval element in “The Eve of St. Agnes,” it would appear to be the Saint Agnes ritual, which suggests that the poem recalls pre-Reformation times and beliefs passed down through oral tradition. The kinds of evidence used to establish authenticity, however, such as contemporary written records and artifacts, do not help much in the case of a practice transmitted from person to person. From the English perspective any rituals associated with Saint Agnes must date back at least to medieval times. Saint Agnes’s feast day prompted no official celebration by the English Church in Keats’s time. Early versions of the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer omitted St. Agnes entirely, See Pam Clements on “Authenticity,” in Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, ed. Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), 19–21. 2 For example, Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970); Norman Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages (New York: William Morrow, 1991); Medievalism in the Modern World: Essays in Honor of Leslie Workman, ed. Richard Utz and Thomas Shippey (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998); and David Matthews, Medievalism: A Critical History (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015). 1

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although she and other saints were reinserted in the calendar in the 1600s. This would seem to be a fragment of something authentically medieval, yet problems immediately arise. Where and when is Keats’s poem set? The easy answer is that St. Agnes’s feast day is January 21, and the poem takes place the preceding day and night, but which January 21, and where, are harder to determine. The poem’s form, Spenserian stanza, by invoking the Protestant yet chivalric epic The Faerie Queene, simultaneously suggests medievalism and Englishness, but the setting is immediately made alien. The opening stanza takes the reader into a Roman Catholic world,3 where a beadsman, whose task is to say prayers for the dead, is repeating the rosary in front of an image of the Virgin.4 “The Eve of St. Agnes” has been the subject of much critical scrutiny,5 but while critics recognize the temporal setting of the poem as vaguely medieval, they seem unconcerned as to where the story is supposed to take place.6 The story’s resemblance to Romeo and Juliet7 and Catholic setting may have prompted associations with Italy, echoed in Pre-Raphaelite artists’ imagining of the scene,8 but the weather and ritual seem English. It is a very wintery location: ST. AGNES’ Eve – Ah, bitter chill it was! The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold; The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass, Katharine Garvin explores the poem’s use of Catholicism and what she calls “not vaguely Christian, but positively Catholic allusions” in “The Christianity of St Agnes’ Eve: Keats’ Catholic Inspiration,” Dublin Review 234 (Winter 1960–61): 356–64. 4 John Keats, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1820). Correspondence indicates that the poem was composed in early 1819. Quotations from the poem are identified in the text by stanza number in Roman numerals, following Keats’s practice. 5 See, for example, Jack Stillinger, Reading the Eve of St. Agnes: The Multiples of Complex Literary Transaction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 6 Robert Gittings points out Keats’s debt to the French romance Pierre de Provence et La Belle Maguelone (89). From this, and from Porphyro’s Provençal lute-playing, he concludes that Porphyro is from Provence. Even accepting this, it does not solve the problem of where Madeline lives. Gittings, “Rich Antiquity,” in Twentieth-Century Interpretations of “The Eve of St. Agnes,” ed. Allan Danzig (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 86–98. 7 The Romeo-and-Juliet connection is made, for example, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th edn. (New York: Norton, 2012), 912; and Herbert J. Wright in TwentiethCentury Interpretations of “The Eve of St. Agnes,” 14. 8 John Millais, Arthur Hughes, and William Holman Hunt, for example, all painted scenes from the poem, using vaguely medieval costuming. The poem appeared in an illustrated edition with drawings by Edward H. Wehnert in 1856; again the costumes are generically medieval. Wehnert removes the ambiguity of the ending – do they live happily ever after or not? – by concluding his illustrations with a picture of Porphyro and Madeline with two children and a dog. 3

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The Rituals of St. Agnes 25 And silent was the flock in woolly fold: Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told His rosary, and while his frosted breath, Like pious incense from a censer old, Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death, Past the sweet Virgin’s picture, while his prayer he saith. (I)

References to time – the last stanza describes the characters as “gone – aye, ages long ago” (XLII) – suggest that the poem takes place in some part of Europe several hundred years ago, but the few names given do not help locate the story in any recognizable space. “Angela” – ironic, since Madeline’s nurse is not much of a guardian angel – could be an Italian name, but “Madeline” is a French version of (Mary) Magdalene, who in Christian tradition, possibly conflating women in the Gospel story, is a repentant but previously sexually active follower of Christ. Keats was clearly conscious of this, since one manuscript version of the poem contains the idea that a maiden who dreams the St. Agnes dream will “wake again / Warm in the virgin morn, no weeping Magdalen.”9 “Porphyro” is Greek for “purple”: in Keats’s time, purple would have been associated with power and wealth; unlike Madeline and Angela, it is not a “Christian” name.10 The two additional names given, Hildebrand and Maurice, are warlike, but not Italian.11 Furthermore, Porphyro, noting that he has a home for Madeline “o’er the southern moors,” describes her household as “Drown’d all in Rhenish and the sleepy mead,” which do not sound like Italian beverages (XXXIX). Given the range of what Porphyro has delivered to Madeline earlier – “candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd, / With jellies soother than the creamy curd” (XXX), we either have to assume the castle has a World Market within easy reach, or to understand that for Keats the Middle Ages functions both as time and place. Nevertheless, the poem contains two hopeful young people, Porphyro and Madeline, who seem to be separated by a Romeo-and-Juliet-type family feud: Porphyro thinks of Madeline’s kin as “barbarian hordes” (X). Madeline has Quoted in Stillinger, Reading, 134. Anna Comnena, for example, notes that the royal family of Byzantium were called “Porphyrogenitus/a,” which she explains as born in the purple room of the Palace (Anna Comnena, Alexias [Paris, 1651]). While Marcia Gilbreath’s quest for a source in her essay “The Etymology of Porphyro’s name in Keats’s ‘Eve of St. Agnes’” (Keats-Shelley Journal 37 [1988]: 20–25) is unconvincing, she at least draws attention to Porphyro’s “cavalier attitude toward religion” (23). James Twitchell’s ingenious connection of Porphyro with disease and vampirism through resemblance to the term “porphyria” does not work historically, since porphyria was not identified as a disease until the 1870s. James Twitchell, The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1981), 100. 11 St. Maurice was a Roman soldier and is the patron saint of infantrymen; “Hildebrand” means war-sword in Old German and was the given name of Pope Gregory VII. 9

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no interest in the “argent revelry” of her wealthy relatives but has “brooded, all that wintry day, / On love, and wing’d St. Agnes’ saintly care, / As she had heard old dames full many times declare” (V). Associated with this particular day is a ritual through which young women can obtain a magical glimpse of their future lovers. According to this tradition, specifically stated to be passed down orally among women,12 if a young girl completes a specific ritual, usually involving fasting, and lies “supine” in her bed without looking behind her, she will see “visions of delight” that identify her future lover. Madeline sighs “for Agnes’ dreams, the sweetest of the year” (VII). Before Madeline goes to bed, however, she has an almost-encounter with Porphyro, “with heart on fire / For Madeline” (IX). Citing the feud between their families, Madeline’s nurse Angela ushers him away; although she identifies the evening as among “holy days,” she attributes Porphyro’s decision to venture into the palace to magic: “Thou must hold water in a witch’s sieve, / And be liege-lord of all the Elves and Fays” (XIV). The reference to holy days and magic together is appropriate, since after spying on Madeline Porphyro has a syncretistic idea. If it is the Eve of Saint Agnes, then he might hide in Madeline’s bedchamber and “win perhaps that night a peerless bride, / While legioned fairies paced the coverlet, / And pale enchantment held her sleepy-eyed.” The stanza concludes, “Never on such a night have lovers met, / Since Merlin paid his Demon all the monstrous debt” (XIX). Although it is a saint’s day, the moonlit night is again associated with ancient enchantment, charms, and faerie lore.13 The reference to Merlin as a lover who pays a “monstrous debt” suggests that his “Demon” is the damsel of the Lake who enchants the enchanter to such an extent that he reveals a charm to her.14 In Malory’s version of the story, Merlin shows Nenyve “many wondyrs,” but always is desiring “to have hir maydenhode.”15 She fears him as a “devyls son.” When Merlin shows her a “wonder” in the form of an enchantment involving a “grete stone,” she induces him to go Jack Stillinger’s useful overview of the poem’s development, however, reveals that the stanza on oral transmission was not part of the original conception but added in the poem’s second draft (Stillinger, Reading, 26). 13 Basil Blackstone draws attention to the moon in his essay on “The Eve of St. Agnes” reprinted in Twentieth-Century Interpretations of “The Eve of St. Agnes,” 45–46. 14 Because of the specific reference to “lovers” I would agree with Karen Harvey that the “demon” referred to here is not Merlin’s incubus father but the damsel of the Lake who traps him under a rock. See Karen Harvey, “The Trouble about Merlin: The Theme of Enchantment in ‘The Eve of St. Agnes,’” Keats-Shelley Journal 34 (1985): 83–94. This is the only point on which I agree with Judith Arcana, who accepts the concept of oral transmission and sees in the poem echoes of the “old religion of the Britons.” See Arcana, “Midwinter Night’s Dream: ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ as Sacred Ritual in the Old Religion of the Britons,” Journal of Ritual Studies 1:2 (1987): 43–57. 15 Sir Thomas Malory, Works, ed. Eugene Vinaver, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971, rpt. 1983), 77. 12

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under it “to latte hir wete of the mervayles there, but she wrought so there for hym that he come never oute for all the craufte he coude do.” In this story, the man is the sexual aggressor, and the woman uses a charm to avoid sexuality. The parallel with “The Eve of St. Agnes” is suggestive but inexact, since Madeline, inspired by sensual imagination if not exactly sexual desire, tries to use a charm, but it is actually the male lover who succeeds in charming, although not through any supernatural power. Madeline herself seeks supernatural insight. When she retires, she carries out the ritual, kneeling to pray, then going “supperless to bed” (VI) without looking behind her; she goes so far as to fancy “Fair St. Agnes in her bed.” For St. Agnes to become the patron of a ritual of desire seems odd, since according to legend Agnes committed her life to purity. Agnes was a Christian child around the end of the second century. She was ordered to marry, but chose to maintain her purity and devotion to Christ. Roman authorities sent her to a brothel, attempted to expose her naked in public, and to burn her at the stake, but in all of these ordeals Agnes’s purity was miraculously preserved. She achieved martyrdom when the Romans beheaded her, and her bones and skull are still said to be preserved in Rome.16 Agnes’s name suggests “Agnus,” Latin for lamb, and her personal sacrifice is associated both with the Lamb of God and with a festival in Rome involving lambs, mentioned briefly in the eighth stanza. The legend of Saint Agnes thus seems in conflict with her association with a ritual that assumes sexual desire on the part of young women, and that they are eager to find out who their future lovers might be. It would be tempting to believe that Keats knew of this ritual through oral tradition that might have survived from before the English Reformation – in other words, that even in this Italian-influenced setting he is shaping his story around a practice known in medieval England. More likely, he was aware of it through a couple of written sources. A version of the story appears in John Brand’s Observations on Popular Antiquities, issued in an expanded version in 1813. Brand’s book was a revision of accounts of popular belief that date back to Henry Bourne’s 1725 Antiquitates Vulgares. Ironically, given that this book remained a source for popular belief, Bourne’s original goal was to identify folk-practices that should be eliminated.17 He says of vulgar opinions, “they are almost all superstitions, being generally either the Produce of Heathenism; of the Inventions of indolent Monks, who having nothing else to do, were the forgers of many silly and wicked Opinions, to keep the World in awe and ignorance” (xi). He does not mention the St. Agnes charm but claims that “The Observation of Omens, such as the falling of Salt, a Hare See, for example, William Carew Hazlitt’s revision of Popular Antiquities, Dictionary of Faiths and Folk-Lore, 3 vols. (London: Reeves and Turner, 1905), 1: 3–4. 17 Henry Bourne, Antiquitates Vulgares, or Antiquities of the Common People (Newcastle-onTyne, 1725), preface. 16

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crossing the way, of the Dead-Watch, or Crickets, &c. are sinful and diabolical: They are the invention of the Devil, to draw Men from a due Trust in GOD, and make them his own vassals.”18 By the time of the Gothic Revival in the later years of the eighteenth century, Britons were less sure that the remnants of England’s medieval past should be eliminated and works such as Francis Grose’s Provincial Glossary, with a Collection of Local Proverbs and Provincial Superstitions (1787) collected fragments of traditionary practices. John Brand republished Bourne’s book with far more sympathetic additions in 1777, attaching an appendix in which he makes two brief mentions of St. Agnes rituals, including sleeping with cheese under one’s pillow.19 Bourne’s original work and Brand’s additions were rearranged into calendar order by Sir Henry Ellis, whose edition was published in 1813.20 Here, for the first time, the text notes John Aubrey’s Miscellanies. Aubrey mentions seeing young women finding the necessary components to dream of their lovers on “the Day of St. John Baptist” the previous summer, that is, 1694 (136).21 He goes on to remark that similar rituals are associated with St. Agnes: The Women have several Magical Secrets handed down to them by Tradition, for this purpose, as on St. Agnes Night, 21 Day of January, take a Row of Pins, and pull out every one, one after another, saying a Pater Noster, or (Our Father), sticking a Pin in your Sleeve, and you will dream of Him, or Her, and you shall Marry. Ben Johnson in one of his Masques makes some mention of this. And on sweet Saint Agnes Night Please you with the promised Sight, Some of Husbands, some of Lovers, Which an empty Dream discovers. All of the subsequent versions of Popular Antiquities that I have found, including William Carew Hazlitt’s 1905 Dictionary of Faiths and Folk-Lore, quote Aubrey on the St. Agnes ritual, including the lines from Ben Jonson. The problem is that Jonson does not mention St. Agnes at all. An “Elfe” speaks these lines as part of a tribute to Mab, Queen of the Fairies in Jonson’s Particular Entertainment of the Queen and Prince Their Highnesses at Althrop, Bourne, Antiquitates, 75. John Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1777), 387. 20 John Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities, Arranged and revised with additions by Henry Ellis, 2 vols. (London: Rivington, 1813), 1:27. This version reverses the quotation and charm as presented by Aubrey. 21 John Aubrey, Miscellanies Upon the Following Subjects... (London, 1721) (Hathi digital trust), 136–37. 18 19

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a masque performed on 25 June 1603 and published the following year.22 In all the versions that I have been able to locate that were published before Aubrey’s death, the “Elfe” names St. Ann, not St. Agnes. Practical reasons exist for the choice: it may be a tribute to Anne of Denmark in whose honor the “entertainment” was written; or to acknowledge that it is summer, not winter (St. Anne’s Day is July 26); or perhaps both.23 Thus, some summer ritual associated with identifying one’s future partner was known to Ben Jonson in the early 1600s; John Aubrey states that he observed girls carrying out a ritual in midsummer in the very late 1600s, and connects this with St. Agnes’ Day with a misremembered quotation. Keats may have consulted Brand, but, very likely, he derived ideas directly from Aubrey. This becomes more apparent when Aubrey goes on to mention another charm that enables women to see their future husbands: “Accordingly in your Dream you will see him; if a Musician with a Lute or other instrument; if a Schollar with a Book or Papers.”24 Porphyro has brought to Madeline’s chamber not only a large quantity of food – she has, after all, gone “supperless to bed” – but he also takes up “her hollow lute,” with which he plays medieval music in the form of “an ancient ditty, long since mute, / In Provence call’d, ‘La belle dame sans mercy’” (XXXIII). The intertextual references are thick here: Keats’s reference to a lute recalls Aubrey, but the song played recalls another medieval imitation of his own, a poem where a man is enchanted by a woman. So can these rituals be traced back any further? A slightly different ritual even more clearly overlaid with magic is found in Youth’s Delightful Pasttime; Aristotle’s Last Legacy, printed in 1710: On St. Agnes Day. Take a Sprigg of Rosemary, and another of Time, sprinkle them with Urine thrice; and in the Evening of this Day, put one into one Shooe, and the other into the other; place your Shooes on each side your Beads-head, and going to Bed, say softly to your self: St. Agnes, that’s to Lovers kind, Come ease the Troubles of my Mind. Then take your Rest, having said your Prayers; when you are asleep, you will dream of your Lover, and fancy you hear him talk to you of A Particular Entertainment of the Queen and Prince Their Highness at Althrop [i.e., Althorp], No publication information, , last accessed 29 September 2016. 23 W. C. Hazlitt remarks in Dictionary of Faiths and Folk-Lore (London: Reeves, 1905) that in Cornwall, Anne is the saint associated with the ritual, not Agnes (1: 3). 24 Aubrey, Miscellanies, 137. 22

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Love; looking into your Shooes, and attempting to put them on your Feet, with much Kindness; If two are desirous of you, they will both appear, and strive who shall do you the best Offices, and the Party who overcomes in this, is your Lot; for you will perceive the other quickly vanish, sighing, and much displeased.25 Whether the young ladies need to use their own urine is not entirely clear, but it presumably would take a major curiosity to know one’s future lover by putting pee-splashed items in one’s shoes. The version in Aristotle’s Last Legacy uses “Time” (thyme) as a charm to see future time, and rosemary, presumably, for remembrance. Aristotle’s Last Legacy demonstrates that even if Keats’s knowledge of the ritual is derived from his reading, around 1700, people in England do seem to have known about the St. Agnes charm, and one of them connected it with the English medieval past. Less well remembered, but quite possibly also known to Keats, is John Gay’s 1713 stage-play The Wife of Bath, a comedy that explicitly links the ritual to the English Middle Ages, although with an overlay of eighteenth-century rationalism. The character of Alison, the Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s genuinely medieval Canterbury Tales is the inspiration for the play, but not much in the drama is indebted to Chaucer. The scene is an “Inn, lying in the Road between London and Canterbury.”26 Here are staying not just Chaucer himself and the Wife of Bath, but also, among other characters, the Lady Myrtilla. Myrtilla is (at least in the eighteenth-century perspective) a very medievally minded woman: she is a devout believer in fortune-telling who has resolved to become a nun because she has no prognostications of a future husband. She has, she tells Alison the Wife of Bath, “try’d three Midsummer Eves successively; and there hath been not so much as a shadow of a Man” (4). Even though she swears in the style of the Middle Ages, Alison is more pragmatic: she points out, “What signifies the Shadow, when your Ladyship hath Youth and Beauty enough at any time to command the Substance?” (4). Alison, who has specifically identified herself as not superstitious, reads, or pretends to read, Myrtilla’s fortune in her palm and advises her to go to bed “and dream of a Husband.” Myrtilla has apparently already made the experiment with some “Bride-Cake” under her pillow, but since it is “St. Agnes’s Night” she resolves “to try the Experiment of the Dumb-Cake” (7). A couple of points should be made here. The dumb-cake “On St. Agnes Day.” Youth’s Delightful Pasttime; Aristotle’s Last Legacy, printed in 1710 and quoted in The Oxford Companion to the Year, ed. Bonnie Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-Stevens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 45. 26 The Wife of Bath, A Comedy (performed 1713). John Gay, Dramatic Works, ed. John Fuller, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 1: 107. Subsequent references cited by page-number in text. 25

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would be either a piece of dough marked with a name that the spirit-lover would touch; or some kind of cake made in silence. Secondly, the play echoes the confusion over the time of year common in accounts of the ritual. Is it January, or the pilgrimage season of April as specified in the Canterbury Tales? Such details do not seem to matter in this play. When Chaucer learns of the plan to carry out the ritual from Myrtilla’s companion Busie, who describes her mistress as “as superstitious as an ignorant Abbot,” the poet, who has apparently been pursuing Myrtilla to no avail, determines to take on the role of the “Apparition” (8). When Myrtilla carries out the St. Agnes ceremony, she apparently has no problem with the apparition (actually Chaucer) addressing her and explaining that “you see Destiny will have it so”; but when he attempts to approach her she “shrieks” and runs away (24). Myrtilla characterizes the vision as “the most my Aversion of the whole Sex” (27), but Alison advises her to “have at him” all the same, or to try more fortune-telling. Chaucer borrows necromancer’s garb from Dr. Astrolabe, including his false beard, and is thus able to assure Myrtilla, “The Gentleman, that at this time, seems your Aversion – will – make you happy” (37). After a brief interruption from Alison, he contrives to appear as himself in the “Necromantic Mirror.” At his next opportunity, Chaucer tells Myrtilla he dreamed of her and that he “is now convinced that the Presages of Dreams are not to be ridicul’d” (42). After more complications brought about by tricks of the Wife of Bath, Chaucer again proposes and is accepted. This marriage, and others in the play, are explicitly not the work of destiny but of human contrivance: Alison jests that “The Pilgrim’s here have made Hymen’s the Shrine of their Devotion, insead of St. Thomas’s” (170).27 In the characters of Chaucer and the Wife of Bath, then, Gay uses actual and fictional medieval people to turn the Middle Ages inside out. Neither accepts the superstition of their contemporaries, but both use it to their own advantage. Yet, in effect, the two have created a self-fulfilling prophecy in their manipulation of the St. Agnes charm: Myrtilla, after all, really does see her future husband. Just how happy the rationalist Chaucer will be with the credulous Myrtilla is a question that the play does not try to answer. The Wife of Bath is important because it explicitly connects the St. Agnes charm with the Middle Ages. Keats may possibly have known of it since his Porphyro tries a variation of the trick that works for Gay’s Chaucer. Porphyro takes his role as a dream-vision further, since after appealing to Madeline’s sleeping senses with exotic food and music, he “melts into her dream,” shortly before the time that “St. Agnes’ moon hath set” (XXXVI). Although critics Continuing her lack of reverence toward the medieval, she also jokingly tells Doggrell that his new wife Busie’s “Great Grandfather was killed at the Battle of Cressy; and her Great Uncle, in the Fifty Ninth degree, was Groom of the Privy Stool to William the Conqueror – ha, ha, ha” (1: 169).

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are divided as to whether this not-consciously consensual sexual moment is a rape, the phrase “St. Agnes’ moon hath set” marks the end of the eve, and, we must assume, the end of virgin dreams. The dream-sex associates Porphyro with the medieval concept of the incubus, the widespread belief that demons could have sexual encounters with mortal women. The association between Porphyro and Merlin continues, as Merlin’s “devil” father is defined by Geoffrey of Monmouth as an incubus.28 Yet Keats would also have known the real Chaucer’s wry rationalizing joke when the Wife of Bath says that there used to be elves and fairies, but the prayers of the “lymytour” have driven them away, so that “Wommen may go saufly up and doun; / In every bussh or under every tree / Ther is noon oother incubus but he.”29 When Porphyro and Madeline finally converse, the narrative describes the weather as “an elfin-storm from faery land, / Of haggard seeming, but a boon indeed” (XXXIX). In an interesting reversal of the literary and folkloric, on 21 January 1835, Leigh Hunt’s London Journal announced, “To-day is the Eve of St. Agnes, and we thought we could not take a better opportunity of increasing the public acquaintance with this exquisite production, which is founded on the popular superstition connected with the day.”30 (It was actually not the eve, but St. Agnes’s feast-day, but, very clearly, authenticity is less important to Hunt than winning Keats the recognition he deserves.) Hunt retells the legend of St. Agnes and explains, “In the Catholic church formerly the nuns used to bring a couple of lambs to her altar during mass. The superstition is (for we believe it is still to be found) that by taking certain measures of divination, damsels may get a sight of their future husbands in a dream” (17). He then cites Aubrey, quoted from Brand’s Popular Antiquities. Just in case the readers may have missed the medievalism, Hunt draws attention to “the legends of the season,” and goes so far as to claim that the line “Its little smoke, in pallid moonshine, died” (XXIII) is “a verse in the taste of Chaucer, full of minute grace and truth” (18).31 Hunt has thus united the Catholic and folk practices, triangulating them through Keats’s poem, which he prints in its entirety, along with some close reading of the opening stanzas and some interspersed comments. Until fairly recently, I was still inclined to believe that the St. Agnes ritual had some basis in a medieval oral tradition – after all, I recall being told as a teenager in Sussex, England, that on Hallowe’en certain rituals, including Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain, Book 6 chapter 18. “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” 878–900; Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn., ed. F. N. Robinson and Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 117. A “lymytour” is glossed as a friar who confined his wandering to a particular area. 30 Leigh Hunt’s London Journal 42, ed. Leigh Hunt (21 January 1835): 17–20. 31 Some commentators have misinterpreted Hunt here: the source is not Brand, but Aubrey as quoted by Ellis in his edition of Brand. 28 29

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eating an apple in front of a mirror, could cause one’s future partner to appear. Yet again, the oral seems to be supplied by the written text. Games for Hallowe’en, by Mary E. Blain (really New Yorker Mary Emma Barse, whose family published the book) appeared in 1912 and was much reprinted. She identifies Hallowe’en in somewhat Keatsian terms as “the night when Fairies dance, Ghosts, Witches, Devils, and mischief-making Elves wander around.”32 Among her suggestions for Hallowe’en parties (one of which, decorating the gas-jets with jack o’lanterns made out of cardboard, seems extremely dangerous) are a variety of partner-identifying rituals, including Dumb-cake and mirrors. The one glimpse of medieval authenticity in “The Eve St. Agnes” thus proves to be a mirror-trick itself.

Mary E. Blain, Games for Hallowe’en (New York: Barse, 1912), 7.

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Mediating Medieval(ized) Emotion in Game of Thrones Carolyne Larrington HBO’s Game of Thrones, based on George R. R. Martin’s cult book series A Song of Ice and Fire, is currently the world’s most popular television show. It mediates a medieval world – more correctly, a constellation of imagined medieval societies – in a “utilitarian bricolage.”1 The show focuses, particularly in its final seasons, on the western-style cultures of the continent of Westeros. Here, as many online commentators note, a familiar type of medievalism, the “life is filthy, brutal, and short” version, intimates that the show is “realistic,” clearly setting itself in opposition to the idealized “Merrye Olde Englande version” of many early twentieth-century medievalist imaginings – for example, Tolkien’s Shire.2 Game of Thrones also offers, in some respects, a highly orientalized version of eastern societies – both Middle and Far Eastern – with its depictions of the Dothraki (a nomadic society of horsemen based on the Mongols) and the slaving cultures at Slavers’ Bay, who owe much to medieval notions of Saracens.3 The show depicts a range of different emotions within its complex, interweaving storylines; by deploying emotions strongly associated with the medieval period in the popular imagination it claims, at an implicit level, to authenticate the alterity of the realization of Martin’s Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William J. Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1986), 67. Cf. Nickolas Haydock, “Medievalism and Excluded Middles,” in Studies in Medievalism XVIII: Defining Medievalism(s) II, ed. Karl Fugelso (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2009), 17–30: “bricolage […] dominates the poetics of medievalism” (28). 2 See (last accessed 23 August 2017) for a representative and unnuanced view of the show’s historical accuracy. Citations from Carol L. Robinson and Pamela Clements, “Living with Neomedievalism,” in Studies in Medievalism XVIII, 55–75 (62). 3 See Carolyne Larrington, Winter is Coming: The Medieval World of “Game of Thrones” (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015) for discussion of historical and literary parallels to the Known World in medieval cultures. 1

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world created by showrunners David Benioff and Daniel Weiss, foregrounding alternative and challenging aspects of human experience.4 In so doing, the show elicits powerful emotional reactions both within its fan community and among more casual audiences. The concomitants of “medieval” emotion in the show are frequently shocking, characterized by (often sexual) violence, or explicit nudity and sexual activity (a noted hallmark of HBO programming).5 “The ‘un-modern’ setting of these films [sc. medieval movies] is used as a licence to project taboo images and actions – particularly around the body and what might be done to it or done with it, or how it might be displayed,” notes Andrew Higson of films set in the medieval past.6 So, too, with the TV show. Notwithstanding these sensationalizing impulses, other historically attested medieval emotions or emotion-related behaviors are eschewed or downplayed as just too alien and unsympathetic. The world of Game of Thrones instantiates a medievalism that may, at times, be misleading about the past, but also one that both invites and integrates critique of its imagined emotional systems.7 The show opens up larger questions about human feeling as both universal and culturally contingent: questions at the heart of current thinking about emotions and emotion research methodologies. Certain feelings and emotion-related behaviors mark the Game of Thrones show-world as distinctively non-modern.8 They constitute part of the “thousands of collectively owned tropes” argued for by Carol L. Robinson and As David W. Marshall notes, specifically of Dan Brown, but his observation is more generally true for Game of Thrones, “[The] use of extreme elements of the medieval past make a distorted version of the Middle Ages (existing in the present) by isolating and exaggerating them.” David W. Marshall, “Introduction: The Medievalism of Popular Culture,” in Mass Market Medieval: Essays on the Middle Ages in Popular Culture, ed. David W. Marshall (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland, 2007), 1–12 (1). 5 Dan Hassler-Forest, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Politics: Transmedia World-Building Beyond Capitalism (London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), 86. 6 Andrew Higson, “The Period Film and the British Past,” in Medieval Film, ed. Anke Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 218. 7 “The tendency to recast an older story in light of current tastes or to address contemporary issues under the guise of historical representations, is not, in fact, new,” notes Martha Driver. “What’s Accuracy Got to Do with It?,” in The Medieval Hero on Screen: Representations from Beowulf to Buffy, ed. Martha W. Driver and Sid Ray (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004), 19–22 (20). 8 The first citation of “emotion” in its modern sense in English dates from 1602 (Oxford English Dictionary, sv. “emotion”). See Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003): “The category of emotions, conceived as a set of morally disengaged, bodily, non-cognitive and involuntary feelings, is a recent invention” (3). “Feeling” was the principal Middle English term for what we might now characterize as “affect.” See Sarah McNamer, “Feeling,” in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 241–57, and Stephanie Trigg, “Introduction: Emotional Histories Beyond the Personalization of the Past and the Abstraction of Affect Theory,” Exemplaria 26.1 (2014): 3–15. 4

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Pamela Clements.9 They include such emotions as pride and shame, as experienced within the distinctive discourse of personal honor; anger, in particular the desire for vengeance; and romantic love. Although none of these emotions (defined in the broadest possible sense) is unique to the Middle Ages, they are imagined as typically medieval; thus their staging authenticates the show-world as both medievalized and alternative.10 Emotions associated with honor are much discussed. Ned Stark’s pride compels him to cling to his idea of honor as a viable ideal, even in “that rats’ nest they call the capital” (1.1: “Winter is Coming”).11 “You think my life is some precious thing to me, that I would trade my honor for a few more years of what … of what? … I learned how to die a long time ago” (1.9: “Baelor”), he tells Varys when the Master of Whisperers visits him in prison to strike a deal. Nevertheless the show is often doubtful about the effectiveness of honor when set in opposition to political expediency: “Honor? I’ve got seven kingdoms to rule!” expostulates Robert Baratheon to Ned’s objections to assassinating Daenerys Targaryen (1.5: “The Wolf and the Lion”). Personal pride, a sense of self-worth, is seen from this perspective as a handicap; its close connection with naïvety is consistent with the show’s often cynical critique of the southern nobility’s value-system and its engagement with the pragmatics of power. Yet the hero cannot dispense with considerations of personal honor, as Jon Snow’s career trajectory in the Night’s Watch bears witness. When Jon almost breaks his oath in order to join Robb in his rising against the Crown, his friends prevail upon him to return to Castle Black. “Honor made you leave; honor brought you back,” says Lord Commander Mormont. Jon demurs, “My friends brought me back.” Mormont ripostes, “I didn’t say it was your honor” (1.10: “Fire and Blood”). Ned’s dishonoring public confession on the steps of the Great Sept (1.9: “Baelor”) is strikingly staged, recalling Pilate’s display of Christ to the mob, the Ecce Homo scene often depicted in medieval art.12 The camera follows the prisoner from behind, out of the dungeon, onto the platform where he faces a baying mob, head bowed, beaten and humiliated, the epitome of shame. Petyr Baelish, with his neat little beard, plays the role of Judas, Robinson and Clements, “Living with Neomedievalism,” 62; see also Veronica Ortenberg West-Harling, “Medievalism as Fun and Games,” in Studies in Medievalism XVIII, 1–16: “The reader can feel at the same time superior, nostalgic, and plunged into a world strange, but not totally unfamiliar through collective memory” (4). 10 See the extensive bibliography at , last accessed 20 August 2017. 11 References to the TV show are given in-text in parentheses by season and episode number, and title. 12 As related in John 19.5. See, for example, Hieronymus Bosch’s painting from around 1475 in the Städel Museum, Frankfurt-am-Main, , last accessed 20 August 2017. 9

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witnessing without remorse the outcome of his betrayal. Ned thus becomes a Christ-figure, but one forced to declare his treachery in a shaming ritual that – like Cersei’s “Walk of Atonement” (5.10: “Mother’s Mercy”) – is marked as medieval in its publicness and theatricality, and in its framing as a performance.13 Shame is clearly signaled by conformity to the prescribed script, yet, as the show-audience knows, it reflects only loosely – if at all – the characters’ interior feelings. Key central plot-lines are driven by the emotions associated with vengeance: hatred, rancor, and joyful satisfaction when revenge is achieved. Theon’s storyarc thematizes his father’s compulsion to avenge the Greyjoys’ earlier defeat. Balon Greyjoy resents the Starks in particular, not only because they have apparently flourished with Robert’s favor, but also because Theon has been a hostage in Winterfell since his childhood, apparently becoming detached from his Greyjoy identity. Balon’s vengeance is sweeping, but ultimately unsuccessful; though Theon captures Winterfell, Balon fails to achieve independence for the Iron Islands, and he loses his son once more to the clutches of Ramsay Bolton. More multivalent and more sympathetically viewed than revenge for a wrong done to one’s House or kingdom is personal vengeance, embodied by Arya Stark and her long list of those whom she intends to kill. Season six’s final episode concluded with a remarkable intertextual staging of her baroque revenge on Walder Frey, leaning on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Arya reveals that Walder’s sons are, contrary to appearances, present at his dinner-table, indeed cooked in a pie: “They weren’t easy to carve, especially Black Walder,” she taunts, exulting that the last thing he will see is “a Stark smiling down at you.” (6.10: “The Winds of Winter”). Arya slits Lord Frey’s throat in a powerful echo of her mother’s own death-scene in that very hall (3.9: “The Rains of Castamere”). In the opening moments of “Dragonstone” (7.1), she encompasses the poisoning of all the male adherents of House Frey. If Arya’s revenge-project is endorsed by the show’s narrative perspective, other kinds of vengeance – such as Cersei’s spectacular move against the Sparrows in the same season-concluding episode – are presented as much more ethically problematic; vengeance must be seen to be proportionate. As Eco notes, “[i]n the Middle Ages we witness the rise of […] even our contemporary notion of love as a devastating unhappy happiness.”14 Romantic love, arguably an invention, and certainly a refinement, of the Middle Ages, comes under consistently critical pressure in Game of Thrones. Delusions of romantic love drive Lysa Arryn’s mania; they may yet prove to be the chink in the carapace that Littlefinger has built around himself. Knightly In contrast, the silent Yara Greyjoy, marched through the streets of King’s Landing by Euron in “The Queen’s Justice” (7.3), seems to express a shame in defeat that is congruent with her actual emotional state. 14 Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, 64. 13

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wooing as a key element of the chivalric behavior-script is shown to be empty and strategic when undertaken by Joffrey.15 Sansa’s long journey toward disillusioned pragmatism after her father’s death is aided by the skeptical running commentary on love offered by Cersei: “The more people you love, the weaker you are. You’ll do things for them that you know you shouldn’t do. You’ll act the fool to make them happy, to keep them safe. Love no one but your children” (2.7: “A Man Without Honor”). Other passionate attachments – Jon and Ygritte, Robb and Talisa – end disastrously. Jon’s feelings for the wildling woman are always in tension with his loyalties to the Night’s Watch. Robb’s attraction to Talisa is entirely understandable in modern terms – they “meet cute,” tussle about their different values, exchange kisses, and become lovers; they are clearly made for one another. In the books Robb is trapped into marrying a minor nobleman’s daughter, Jeyne Westerling, for whom he has little feeling: his idealistic adherence to the honor-code drives him to atone for her defloration through marriage. The show-runners, in contrast, reframe Robb’s marriage as a true and modern love; yet it is his undoing. Like the show’s other romantic relationships it cannot withstand the pressures of conflicting political obligations and personal loyalties. The love of Catelyn and Ned, the most enduring love relationship in the show, as Catelyn explains, grew gradually out of an arranged marriage. That such a model conjugal partnership should arise under apparently unpropitious circumstances destabilizes our modern normative ideas about true love – though, of course, it speaks to other cultural practices now better understood in western societies. So, too, Daenerys’ relationship with Drogo (despite the problematic rape scene that the show introduced for the couple’s wedding night) flowered into a strong and loving partnership. Daenerys’s continuing readiness to wed for political gain subverts modern beliefs about love; while her strategic marriage alliance aligns her with medieval aristocratic models, the crucial difference is that she is able to dispose of herself. Certain medieval emotion-related practices are apparently too strange for Game of Thrones to assimilate. William Reddy reminds us that certain emotions, such as acedia, “a state of restlessness and inability either to work or to pray,” a precursor to sloth that took its place in the analysis of the Seven Deadly Sins, have faded from our present consciousness.16 Occitan amor de lonh, conceiving a romantic passion for someone one has never met, is not a The series (books and show) is highly skeptical of chivalry as an institution. See Charles H. Hackney, “‘Silk ribbons tied around a sword’: Knighthood and the Chivalric Virtues in Westeros,” in Mastering the Game of Thrones: Essays on George R. R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire,” ed. Jes Battis and Susan Johnston (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), 132–49. 16 William Reddy, The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia and Japan, 900–1200 (London and Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012), 16; cf.: , last accessed 20 August 2017. 15

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feeling to which Game of Thrones could give credence; modern notions of fanworship will not quite serve.17 Martin’s books do their best to queer modern conceptions of maternal love – Daenerys breastfeeds her dragon babies – but the showrunners balked at displaying that behavior. One fan approves the show’s squeamishness: “They decided not to go with Daenerys breastfeeding the dragons […], which was probably smart. Lord knows we’ve had enough weird breastfeeding this season.”18 The reference is to Lysa Arryn’s suckling of her well-grown son (1.5: “The Wolf and the Lion”), rated as eighteen in a list of the twenty most shocking scenes (so far) in a Game of Thrones listicle.19 Medieval cultures were much more comfortable with the bodily intimacy of breastfeeding than are contemporary Americans or Europeans: metaphorically, the Christian suckles from Christ’s wounds; the spiritual father of a community gives suck to his monks; and in one remarkable Norse saga, a father, stranded in the ice with his infant son and a dead wife, nurtures the baby by cutting off his nipple and allowing the child to feed, as the blood miraculously turns into milk.20 Game of Thrones acknowledges that modern audiences have different notions of individuality and of processes of emotional and social maturation from those visible in medieval genres. Daenerys rejoices in many titles: “Queen of the Andals, Rhoynar and the First Men, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, Breaker of Chains, Mother of Dragons,” a list that echoes the intersectional allegiances – of ancestry, lordship, brotherhood, faith, for example – that constituted individual identity in early medieval cultures.21 The show, however, encourages us to see the titles rather as recalling stages in Daenerys’ personal history, not as concurrent and intersectional identities. Indeed, when the list is reeled off by Missandei, viewers are invited to see it as ridiculous, when contrasted with Jon Snow’s simple style as “The King in the North” (7.3: “The Queen’s Justice”).22 Roy Rosenstein, “New Perspectives on Distant Love: Jaufre Rudel, Uc Bru, and Sarrazina,” Modern Philology 87 (1990): 225–38. 18 , last accessed 20 August 2017. 19 , last accessed 20 August 2017. 20 Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982); Flóamanna saga, in Harðar saga, ed. Þorhallur Vilmundarson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, Íslenzk fornrit XIII (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzk fornritafélag, 1991), chap. 23. 21 See Patrick Geary, “Ethnic Identity as a Situational Construct in the Early Middle Ages,” Mitteilungen der anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 113 (1983): 15–26, and Antonina Harbus, “The Medieval Concept of the Self in Anglo-Saxon England,” Self & Identity 1.1 (2002): 77–97. 22 , last accessed 20 August 2017. 17

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The show is primarily an epic fantasy, yet it deploys a number of subgenres. One such is the Bildungsroman; the learning curves of the younger generation – Daenerys, Jon Snow, Sansa, Arya, Bran, and Theon – are central to the storylines. In contrast to such medieval generic models as romance or hagiography, these young people’s end-goals (apart from those of Daenerys) are not clearly constituted. Marrying and living happily after is explicitly problematized through the romantic and marital experiences of Jon and Sansa. Turning to God, a key move within the hagiographical model, will not serve when so many gods are available; nor is it clear, despite the evident efficacy of R’hllor, the Red God, in the case of resurrection, that there is a transcendent divinity among the different cults of the Known World.23 The Bildungsroman structure foregrounds the show’s modern conception of individuality, as maturing into a self that is in part always implicit, in part shaped by experience, rather than as an identity constituted by intersecting group memberships. As in medieval romance, argues Raymond Thompson, modern fantasy characters aim for “self-realization”; the genre assumes that there is a constant self to discover.24 Thus, psychological explanations rooted in characters’ back-stories are offered for troubling emotion-behavior. Viserys’s instability may be a product of his incestuous genetic inheritance, though the “Beggar King’s” unhappy circumstances must have compounded his obsessiveness, cruelty, and impetuosity. “Who can rule without wealth or fear or love?” he asks Jorah Mormont pitiably, for he can lay claim to none of these (1.6: “A Golden Crown”). Ramsay Bolton’s sadism is explained in terms of his father’s treatment of his mother and of the young boy; its psychopathology has deep roots (3.5: “Kissed by Fire”). Cersei usually lacks insight, but she has a clear view of how her love for Jaime is inseparable from their twinship: “Jaime and I are more than brother and sister. We came into this world together; we belong together,” she tells Ned Stark (1.7: “You Win or You Die”).25 Like much medieval fantasy, Game of Thrones relies on an emotional repertoire already associated in the contemporary imagination with the m ­ edieval Martin was raised Catholic. In April 2014 he remarked, “Religion is an important part of the world and should be depicted, but I won’t endorse one over the other. I wouldn’t choose one particular god.” , last accessed 20 August 2017. 24 Raymond Thompson, “Modern Fantasy and Medieval Romance: A Comparative Study,” in The Aesthetics of Fantasy Literature and Art, ed. Roger C. Schlobin (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press), 211–25 (222). 25 Cersei is more explicit in the book: “Jaime and I are more than brother and sister. We are one person in two bodies. We shared a womb together. He came into this world holding my foot, our old maester said. When he is in me, I feel … whole.” George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones (London: Harper Voyager, 1996), chap. 45. E-book. 23

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past. The audience is primed to expect, accept, and enjoy the dramatic staging of pride, shame, love, and hatred, although it may not expect the show’s thoroughgoing critique of some of these ethical complexes. Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 film Pulp Fiction gave rise to the catchphrase “I’m gonna get medieval on your ass,” memorably uttered by Ving Rhames playing Marsellus Wallace.26 In 1999 Carolyn Dinshaw recuperated the phrase as a title for her groundbreaking study of the queer middle ages. She concludes: Getting medieval: [is] not undertaking brutal private vengeance in a triumphal and unregulated bloodbath, as Marsellus Wallace threatens in Pulp Fiction […] [but] using ideas of the past, creating relations with the past, touching in this way the past in our efforts to build selves and communities now and into the future.27 Dinshaw problematizes one popular understanding of the medieval past, in particular the equation of authenticity with brutality and excessive violence, calling for more inclusive, open-minded, and questioning approaches to, and mediations of, the Middle Ages.28 Questioning, critiquing, demonstrating possibilities of different diversities in medieval culture is, I think, what Game of Thrones, at its best, does, deploying ideas from the past and about the past to speak powerfully to the present, harnessing a range of radically unfamiliar emotions, calling into question contemporary emotional norms, unsettling our understanding of empathetic and ethical behavior, in order to entertain, to move, and to challenge its global audience.

Pulp Fiction, dir. Quentin Tarentino (Miramax: 1994), , last accessed 20 August 2017. 27 Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1999), 206. 28 Dinshaw’s agenda is currently being taken forward by such politically engaged medievalist websites as The Public Medievalist and In the Medieval Middle, and , both last accessed 26 August 2017. 26

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A Princess of Color amid Whitewashed Medievalisms in Disney’s Sofia the First and Elena of Avalor* Elan Justice Pavlinich History authenticates subjects.1 But history is culturally constructed and authenticates some people while marginalizing others.2 In fact, The Public Medievalist has had no shortage of material for its extensive and ongoing series titled “Race, Racism, and the Middle Ages,” which addresses the “[r]acist and white supremacist ideas about the past [that] have lingered in our culture.” One reason for that unfortunate abundance, as noted by The Public Medievalist, is that representations of the Middle Ages, “can seem natural and normal[, which] makes them a fundamental part of institutionalized racism as it exists today, since the past forms and informs the foundations of the present.”3 Yet, even when these narratives lack historical foundations, they are still capable of generating a mythology that incites people to act, as suggested by white supremacists donning medieval paraphernalia in 2017 while * I am grateful to Karl Fugelso, Kim Golombisky, and the anonymous readers for Studies in Medievalism for their direction. Any remaining errors are my own. 1 Stuart Hall argues that “identity is a ‘production’ which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation […]. Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power.” Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 394–403 (392 and 394). 2 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 176. 3 Paul B. Sturtevant, “Race, Racism, and the Middle Ages: Tearing Down the ‘Whites Only’ Medieval World,” The Public Medievalist, , last accessed 25 May 2017. Studies in Medievalism XXVII, 2018

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protesting the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue from a park in Charlottesville, Virginia.4 These outliers’ image of an all-white European Middle Ages is false, but in their eyes as well as those of many people outside the group, including many of the supremacists’ opponents, that image has gained authenticity from widespread concordant representations in mainstream media. Though medievalisms do not need to be authentic to be influential, that perception can, in turn, help authenticate narratives that inform cultural memory,5 and as part of that power, pervasive historical fictions and inaccuracies among them can misauthenticate subjects and ideologies to the detriment of historical evidence and social justice. Inauthentic depictions can become believable through repetition, and even playful medievalisms intended for children, like those produced by Disney, can have deep and long-lasting political consequences.6 Indeed, through their very appearance of innocence, Disney’s medievalisms may be particularly influential on cultural values, apparent norms, and collective expectations. In light of that power, this essay argues that Disney’s recent television productions Sofia the First and Elena of Avalor are two of the many historical fictions that create a false sense of authenticity through repetition and exposure via mainstream media, and that this authenticity is dangerous insofar as it reifies historical inaccuracies and apparatuses of oppression in cultural memory. These two shows are particularly problematic in their disparity between a white princess who maintains notions of a predominantly white Middle Ages, and a princess of color who challenges these inaccuracies. Furthermore, Sofia is rhetorically authenticated by her intersections with other Disney narratives, as if the Disney heritage itself serves as historical evidence validating the experiences of the white princess. Elena, on the other hand, a princess of color, is subordinated by Sofia and the politics of Disney. The princess of color is excluded from the historical fictions that constitute Disney’s medieval heritage. Limiting the princess of color perpetuates historical inaccuracies, contributing to systems of oppression that whitewash the past and continue to intoxicate the cultural memory. Helen Young, “White Supremacists Love the Middle Ages,” in In the Middle, 16 August 2017, , last accessed 29 August 2017; Paul B. Sturtevant, “Leaving ‘Medieval’ Charlottesville,” in The Public Medievalist, 17 August 2017, , last accessed 29 August 2017; Andrew B. R. Elliott, “A Vile Love Affair: Right Wing Nationalism and the Middle Ages,” in The Public Medievalist, 14 February 2017, , last accessed 29 August 2017. 5 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans, Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 92. 6 Dorothy Kim, “Teaching Medieval Studies in a Time of White Supremacy,” in In The Middle, 28 August 2017, , last accessed 29 August 2017. 4

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A Princess of Color in Disney  45

Preceding the 2013 release of Sofia the First Disney touted the title character, Sofia, as a Latina princess, with, for example, the executive producer Jamie Mitchell identifying Sofia’s mother as Latina because of her dark complexion. But as images of Sofia were made available, some audiences took issue with her light skin and blue eyes, and the Mexican Heritage Corporation, among other critics, objected to what they saw as repeated misuse of the term “Latina” and a failure to take Latinx culture into consideration.7 In response, the general Manager of Disney Junior Worldwide issued a statement via the Sofia the First Facebook page, explaining: Some of you may have seen the recent news stories on whether Sofia is or isn’t a “Latina princess” […]. What’s important to know is that Sofia is a fairytale girl who lives in a fairytale world. All our characters come from fantasy lands that may reflect elements of various cultures and ethnicities but none are meant to specifically represent those real-world cultures.8 Disney generally employs four tropes to excuse media productions from critical inquiry: “It’s only for children, it’s only fantasy, it’s only a cartoon, and it’s just good business.”9 Disney’s official position regarding Sofia is to espouse acultural inspiration; she is deliberately made anomalous so that her representation invites multiple associations that resonate with diverse audiences. But Sofia is not easily assigned to an anomalous realm of fairytale amalgamations. She invites identification with specifically white audiences with a cultural connection to the English Middle Ages. In spite of Disney’s official protestations that their productions are only playful representations grounded in fantasy, Sofia the First signifies an early English country. Geographically, when Sofia’s family travels abroad they must sail across a body of water because they inhabit an island, Enchancia, that is much like the United Kingdom. Focusing on culture, royal visitors from diverse nations differentiate themselves from Sofia’s Anglo-Norman compatriots by their clothing and comportment. Considering Enchancia’s geographic and cultural orientations, Sofia and her people are not Latinx; they are English. Emily Rome, “Sofia the First: Disney’s First Hispanic Princess?,” in Entertainment Weekly, , last accessed 11 July 2017. I employ “Latinx” as a gender-neutral term that includes the feminine Latina and masculine Latino adjectives. 8 Christopher Zara, “Sofia, The Blue-Eyed ‘Hispanic’ Princess, Sparks Controversy; Disney Denies Character’s ‘Latina’ Heritage,” International Business Times, , last accessed 25 May 2017. 9 From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture, ed. Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 4. 7

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Sofia is a white English girl, just like a significant portion of the other Disney Princesses.10 Now, nearly four years after the initial criticism leveled against Disney’s identity politics in Sofia the First, a complementary spinoff series has emerged: Elena of Avalor. Voice actors like Aimee Carrero, who supplies Elena’s spoken words, claim that their Latinx heritage informs their contributions to the show.11 Indeed, most of the characters speak with Spanish accents and intersperse their dialogue with Spanish nouns by, for example, employing the titles “abuela” and “abuelo” and often referring to horchata and tamales, and other Latinx foods. Moreover, Elena’s kingdom features obvious Latinx aesthetic influence in the form of earthy plaster textures combined with vivid colors geometrically arranged in plateresque style, and these nods to Hispanic influence are joined in some episodes by other moral messages that are unusually, and in some cases unprecedentedly, progressive for Disney. For examples, because Elena is not able to reign as queen, Avalor is ruled by a committee that is balanced by gender and age, and in episode seven, “Finders Leapers,” patriarchal dominance is challenged when Naomi, a young woman from a working-class background, wields power successfully in spite of the resistance posed by Esteban, an elder nobleman; the performativity of gender is further exposed when Elena becomes Elezar in episode sixteen, “The Princess Knight”; and the episodes, “Prince Too Charming” and “Royal Retreat,” criticize patriarchal claims to natural resources and the objectification of nonhuman animals for the benefit of capitalism. Yet, though Elena of Avalor signifies a potentially inclusive contribution to the Disney kingdom, the narrative structure that introduces Elena problematically privileges the white princess of Sofia the First. Sofia wears a magical talisman, the Amulet of Avalor, that delivers a blessing or a curse based on Sofia’s actions – like a portable panopticon that enforces good princess behavior. Elena has been trapped within Sofia’s amulet from the beginning of the series, but audiences do not learn of her existence until well after Sofia’s third television season when the spinoff, Elena of Avalor, is introduced. Elena’s princess status, and her subsequent television series, are made possible through the efforts of Sofia, who liberates Elena and restores her to power. The Disney Princess franchise includes Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora (Sleeping Beauty), Ariel (The Little Mermaid), Belle (Beauty and the Beast), Jasmine (Aladdin), Pocahontas, Mulan, Tiana (The Princess and the Frog), Rapunzel (Tangled), and Merida (Brave). Anna and Elsa of Frozen (2013) constitute their own franchise owing to their marketing success, “Disney Princess,” The Disney Wiki, , last accessed 9 August 2017. Out of these thirteen officially recognized princesses, four are English and nine are white. 11 “Disney Introduces First Latina Princess in Elena of Avalor,” ABC News, , last accessed 25 May 2017. 10

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A Princess of Color in Disney  47

Elena, a princess of color, occupies space within the Disney canon, but that space is explicitly created by a white person who assumes primacy – Sofia the First. Not only is Elena subordinated by Sofia, but preceding their interaction Sofia’s people commodify Elena’s kingdom and culture. King Roland, who is Sofia’s stepfather, and his family are seeking a trade partner that will benefit their kingdom. They agree to visit Avalor, Elena’s kingdom, to determine if their goods are acceptable. Sofia convinces her family to make the journey by describing Avalor as “The Great Unknown”: You say you wanna go somewhere new Well, I have just the new kingdom for you A special place that we all can explore So let me tell you about Avalor …[.] [L]et’s get out of our royal home And all set out for the great unknown …[.]12 Sofia regards Avalor as new and unknown despite the fact she cites literature that documents Avalor’s history and despite the fact she possesses an artifact of Avaloran heritage – the amulet she wears literally contains the princess of Avalor. But Avalor lies beyond the scope of Enchancia, and so, from the perspective of Sofia’s English people and the audience following Sofia’s narrative, the history of Avalor begins when it is witnessed and recorded by white English visitors who enter it for profit. The Hispanic people of Avalor are not only denied their own history, they are not granted the same access to the Disney heritage as the English people of Enchancia. Unlike Elena of Avalor, Sofia the First is a self-referential Disney production that integrates princesses from other Disney narratives into the contemporary plot of Sofia the First. When Sofia is in trouble, the Amulet of Avalor delivers a Disney princess who summarizes a subplot from the animated classic in which she originates to help guide Sofia through her present predicament. Over the course of the series, Sofia has been visited by Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Mulan, Tiana, Rapunzel, and Merida (and Olaf of Frozen) thus far. Sofia’s interactions with key characters who span the Disney corpus, most of whom originate in a medieval setting, validate Sofia’s role within the Disney tradition and reify Disney as a narrative authority informing the cultural memory. Recognition and remembrance of these key figures who signify the Disney past also recall the past for some audiences, thus authenticating the contemporary production by eliciting a sense of familiarity and tradition. Furthermore, a John Kavanaugh, “The Great Unknown,” in The Disney Wiki, , last accessed 28 August 2017.

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Disney production citing a Disney production composes a cohesive image of a medieval period that lacks people of color. Comparatively, Elena, the Hispanic princess, is excluded from intersecting with the historical fictions that constitute the Disney heritage in spite of the fact that she inhabits the same fantasy realm as Sofia and maintains a stronger claim to royal status. Sofia is validated by a cohort of mostly white princesses, whereas Elena is rhetorically relegated to a realm of fantasy beyond their clique. Elena and the people of Avalor are not only denied a history within the narrative of Sofia’s intersection with their kingdom, they are also denied integration with the Disney canon with which Sofia regularly communes. Consequently, the Hispanic kingdom, Avalor, is circumscribed by white-dominated narratives within the Disney fantasy of the Middle Ages. Sofia invades and acts in Elena’s kingdom, but Elena does not significantly impact Sofia or her compatriots. The white princess acts; the princess of color is acted upon. Elena’s limited access to epistemic foundations rooted in the Disney heritage contributes to a pattern of disparity in the medieval realm of Sofia and Elena. People of color, like Elena, are separated from sources of knowledge that appear to be maintained by Enchancia, the English kingdom. Although there are 140 kingdoms across the fantasy realm, Enchancia shares a special alliance with Khaldoun and Wei-Ling.13 These kingdoms are mostly inhabited by people of color. Children from Khaldoun, Wei-Ling, and other unnamed kingdoms meet at a school called Royal Prep, where they are trained to become future leaders of their respective kingdoms. Royal Prep is located in Enchancia, and it is governed by the fairy godmothers of Sleeping Beauty: Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather. People of color are required to seek education in Enchancia, rather than their native lands. Future kings and queens are assimilated by an institution that does not authorize their respective cultures. Limiting access to epistemological sources and silencing historical narratives are strategies of oppression employed by the colonizer. Frantz Fanon argues, “colonialism is not simply content to impose its rule upon the present and future of a dominated country”; it also limits the past, severing disenfranchised people from their cultural memory.14 Similarly, Albert Memmi describes a process whereby the colonized are hindered from assimilation and reduced to the circumstances constructed by colonizers. As a result of this isolation they are cut off from their own past and hindered from any future, reduced to abstraction and temporally suspended.15 These strategies of “Wei-Ling,” The Disney Wiki, , last accessed 29 August 2017. 14 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1963), 210. 15 Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 102–3. 13

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A Princess of Color in Disney  49

colonization and oppression continue in mainstream media. Representations of the Middle Ages dominated by white people are a means of colonizing the past by obfuscating authentic histories. Yet, medieval England, the setting for most of Disney’s medievalisms, was inhabited by people of color. Africans serving in Roman forces occupied Britain from about the middle of the first century until the end of the fourth century. Caitlin Green applies oxygen isotope data collected from excavated human enamel to trace individuals to areas beyond the British Isles, confirming that Anglo-Saxon England was a diverse contact zone for people who grew up in Scandinavia, far eastern Europe, North Africa, and southern Iberia.16 Similarly, the contents excavated from Sutton Hoo, a burial mound, reveal Anglo-Saxon England to have been a “colonial contact zone” that culled artifacts from much of medieval Europe,17 and a grave in Ipswich yields material evidence of an African having been buried there in the thirteenth century.18 Finally, literature repeatedly represents people of color wielding power, like King Anguin of Ireland, a Black knight detailed in Arthurian legend,19 and as Maghan Keita argues, “until further archaeological evidence elucidates the obscure history of medieval migration and human trafficking, literary responses must take precedence in suggesting the continued existence of an African presence in Europe, real as well as imagined.”20 Thus, the Sources of drinking water impose specific values of the phosphate oxygen isotope (δ¹⁸Op), which vary according to climate and elevation, but some of the evidence collected from remains in Britain diverges from the normal levels of inhabitants who have lived in that area for the majority of their lives, indicating that these individuals must have originated, or at least grown up, in different climate zones. Caitlin R. Green, “Some oxygen isotope evidence for long-distance migration to Britain from North Africa and Southern Iberia, c. 1100 BC–AD 800,” in Dr Caitlin R. Green, 24 October 2015, , last accessed 31 July 2017; and Green, “Out of the cold far north east? Some oxygen isotope evidence for Scandinavian and central/ eastern European migrants in Britain, c. 2300 BC–AD 1050,” 11 January 2016, , last accessed 30 August 2017. 17 Nicholas Howe, Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 78. 18 “Skeleton of Medieval African Found in Ipswich Sheds New Light on Britain’s Ethnic History,” BBC, 5 February 2010, , last accessed 30 August 2017. 19 The Romance of Tristan, trans. R. L. Curtis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 45 and 47; Thomas Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur (New York: Random House, 1993), 249. I capitalize “Black” because, as Kimberlé Crenshaw observes, Blacks are a specific cultural group and should be signified as a proper noun, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43.6 (1997): 1241–99 (n. 6). 20 Maghan Keita, “What the Bookstore Hid,” in Why the Middle Ages Matter, ed. Celia Chazelle, Simon Doubleday, and Felice Lifshitz (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2012), 130–40 (133). 16

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narrative limitations placed on people of color in Disney medievalisms like Sofia the First and Elena of Avalor shirk historical evidence to maintain the status quo of whitewashed medievalisms. Children’s entertainment seems like innocent fun, and yet, as these medievalisms are absorbed into the cultural memory through such vehicles as Disney’s animated classics, these medievalisms contribute to the cultural memory, authenticate historical fictions, and maintain apparatuses of oppression that erase and exclude people of color. Disney plays a major part in authenticating historical fictions in the cultural memory, and medievalisms disseminated by Disney are extraordinarily pervasive and celebrated in popular culture because Disney controls a significant portion of mainstream media. Indeed, marketing analysts estimated in 2008 that consumers were spending roughly thirteen billion hours per year in contact with Disney media,21 and those numbers have only increased since then, as Disney has recently acquired Pixar, Marvel Entertainment, ESPN, ABC, and Lucasfilm. With such significant control over the cultural memory through which subjects and narratives are authenticated via representation and exposure comes great responsibility, and Disney has released a statement that “[t]he Disney brand has always been inclusive, with stories that reflect acceptance and tolerance and celebrate the differences,” affirming that the company will “continue to create characters that are accessible and relatable to all children.”22 Yet, Disney productions like Sofia the First, which continue to make white English royalty the default subject position within contemporary medievalisms, not only fail to represent an authentic medieval period, they also fail to authenticate that promise to create inclusive media for diverse audiences. This is particularly tragic because Disney’s representations of the Middle Ages are so pervasive in mainstream culture that they are capable of effecting positive change on an enduring and perhaps unprecedentedly large scale. They and other mainstream medievalisms could act as sites for resistance that, to an even greater degree than The Public Medievalist and more-academic outlets, would encourage the cultural memory to authorize marginalized subjects by representing their role, real and imagined, within media that compose broader cultural narratives and associations with postmedieval audiences. Through vehicles that have already proven to be highly entertaining, and perhaps under the direction of an appropriate coalition of standpoints Michael Santoli, “The Magic’s Back: Disney’s Bright Future,” in Barron’s, 26 February 2008, , last accessed 12 June 2017. 22 “Policy and Approaches: Our Stories and Characters,” The Walt Disney Company, , last accessed 11 July 2017. Emphasis added. 21

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and experts, Disney and other popular producers of medievalism could bring greater inclusivity to the cultural memory and, while actually improving on the historical authenticity with which the Middle Ages are represented in mass media, enact positive change in our society and beyond.

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The Medievalizing Process: Religious Medievalism and Constructs of Historical Authenticity Timothy Curran Calling attention to what he identifies as a dearth of theory in medievalism scholarship, Nickolas Haydock addresses the need for studies in “medievalistics,” his term for analyses and theorizations of modern constructions of the historical Middle Ages. These constructions form a set of “contingent representations” that predicates the relationship between past and present on synchronically or diachronically imagined historical continuities, on the one hand, or on alterities that conceptualize the Middle Ages in terms of otherness, on the other.1 Tension between these kinds of contingencies is part and parcel of historicism; it is a necessary state from which negotiations of a past that was or may have been and the present that conceives of it can emanate. This essay theorizes how scholars of medievalism might maintain the tensions between Haydock’s contingent representations without sacrificing the notion of historical authenticity, a concept ever under duress that seems to elude the historicist and challenge discursivity itself. Following up on Richard Utz’s recent clarion calls for religion-based scholarship in medievalism studies,2 this essay makes two claims: first, it posits religious medievalism as the discourse within medievalism that can most effectively accommodate constructs of historical authenticity, and second, it suggests that the literary landscape Nickolas Haydock, “Medievalism and Excluded Middles,” in Studies in Medievalism XVIII: Defining Medievalism(s) II, ed. Karl Fugelso (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2009), 17–30 (17–19). 2 Richard Utz, “Can We Talk About Religion, Please?: Medievalism’s Eschewal of Religion, and Why It Matters,” The Year’s Work in Medievalism XVIII: Medievalism Now (2013): 2–6, and Utz, “Medievalism Studies and the Subject of Religion,” in Studies in Medievalism XXIV: Medievalism on the Margins, ed. Karl Fugelso with Vincent Ferré and Alicia C. Montoya (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), 11–19. 1

Studies in Medievalism XXVII, 2018

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of the nineteenth century was particularly hospitable to the cultivation of religious medievalism. The idea of a lost Middle Ages, whether regrettably misplaced or fortunately displaced, has preoccupied historically minded westerners since the Middle Ages themselves came to an end during the sixteenth century. Some exhumed a rotten medieval body only to accentuate the pure, classical contours of the modern body by contrast, while others, wrapped in the fold of a romantic idealism that necessarily looks forward insofar as it looks back, imagined a utopian medieval body whose harmonious balance might be an antidote to the maladies of modernity. Contemporary social, political, economic, and religious spheres constituted but a few benighted categories of experience that medievalists of all eras believed could benefit from a medieval model, if only the medieval could be properly understood. In my estimation, what separates medievalism in the nineteenth century from that of other periods is a fruitful marriage of two seemingly contradictory approaches: a reverence for the transcendental, the mystical, the fantastical, and the unseen elements of the medieval imagination, combined with a fascination for the material remains, the documentary evidence, and the structural remnants of a medieval world that buttressed its own institutions and very way of life. Admittedly, there is something fundamentally rhetorical in the act of doing historicism, of packaging one’s interpretations of a bygone ethos in ways amenable to one’s contemporaries and suitable to realizing a desired purpose, but those interested parties in the nineteenth century who participated in the discourses of medievalism believed that they were uniquely positioned to measure the authentic medieval pulse. I have become more and more convinced that their confidence in this regard was not entirely misplaced. I do think, in other words, that their historicist approach led to a more accurate – even authentic – resurrection of the medieval spirit than their vindictive or dreamy forebears could have hoped to achieve precisely because of their two-pronged methodology of flesh-and-spirit historicism. I detect a tension in the treatment of religion in nineteenth-century literary scholarship that roughly posits a dichotomy of “past belief” and “modern skepticism.” The poets and artists of the Middle Ages, when they are discussed at all, believed in the religion they espoused, and had little doubt upon what foundation they should build their verse. Romantic and Victorian writers, however, laced their religious draughts with skepticism, irony, parody, or indifference, or replaced the religious element altogether with substitutes more worthy of pursuit in the modern world. There is, of course, no doubt that certain writers made the denigration of religion an object of some of their projects; alternatively, there were certain writers who viewed artistic enterprise primarily as a means of bringing glory to God. The assumption that a skeptic undercurrent pervades nineteenth-century poems, novels, and plays, however, seems to indict these narratives as being complicit

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in extra-literary secularizing efforts instead of recognizing them as bulwarks against such cultural trends. I want to suggest that many writers whose works have been subject to secularizing arguments longed for modern man to believe again – to believe in the transcendental nature of love, in the higher nature of the self, in the sacred mission of public institutions, in the divine capacity of art – and religious medievalism is often the method by which these writers sought to catalyze a rediscovery of faith in public consciousness. Many poets of the Romantic era sought to resurrect aspects of ancient thought they deemed valuable for their creative projects. Romanticism and medievalism share a wish to re-enchant an enlightened world made too rational and common-sensical; both discourses attempt to bring color into the world and make humans feel at home in the universe.3 If Romantic thought can be interpreted as an imaginative fusion of the familiar and the strange, the real and the ideal, the material and the spiritual, and the natural and the supernatural – as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge outlined in their Preface to the Lyrical Ballads – then a common source for Romanticism, Hoxie Neale Fairchild argues, is medievalism, for it recalls a time that freely combined these opposites.4 Robert Ryan asserts that the most significant stimuli for social change in the 1790s were religious rather than political, and it was in the arena of religion that Romantic poets sought to stage their most influential and public revolutions. Criticism abounds that addresses Romantic proclivities toward skepticism, but Ryan counters this trend to suggest that it was their religious belief that had the most profound impact on the social life of their time.5 If it is conceivable to situate Romanticism in contradistinction to Enlightenment rationalism while at the same time acknowledging its sympathy with medieval aesthetics, it must also be possible to identify a fundamentally religious impetus near the heart of the Romantic enterprise. Medieval sacramentalism’s reliance on externals like physical images and ritual practices sanctioned by the doctrine of Incarnation, which embodies the transcendent in the physical world, appealed to many Romantics in their search for the transcendent.6 This effort began, in large part, with Coleridge, whose metaphysical and theological writings offered a rich, attractive theoretical grounding that nourished the revival intellectually and spiritually from its infancy through to its blossoming in the second half of the nineteenth Michael Alexander, Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 13. 4 Hoxie Neale Fairchild, The Romantic Quest (New York: Russell & Russell, 1965), 251, 256. 5 Robert M. Ryan, The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789– 1824 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1–7. 6 Kevin L. Morris, The Image of the Middle Ages in Romantic and Victorian Literature (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 6, 27. 3

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century. The Coleridgean imagination posits that the symbol is an ineffable reality embodied; it is the point at which an encounter takes place, a space of interpenetration where the immanent and transcendent touch; it is an efficacious sign, in that it makes present that which it represents; and, most importantly, it is a matrix within which communication with the divine is made possible.7 Cardinal John Henry Newman considered Coleridge’s work on the imagination a great boon toward the wider acceptance of traditional Catholic principles, despite its obvious doctrinal errors. His “embodied symbolic” figurations at the very least prepared minds for higher things, and in this he rendered a service to the religious revival.8 Robert Southey’s preface to “St. Michael’s Chair” betrays a sympathy – almost a desire – for traditional Catholicism, a faith that “dealt more in exteriors than our own, operating more than our own, through the body, upon the soul; and so leaving, perhaps, a more sensible impression upon the spirits.”9 Wordsworth was more ambivalent, though in his “Essay Supplementary to the Preface” he conceives of an affinity “between religion – whose element is infinitude […] submitting herself to circumscription and reconciled to substitutions; and poetry – ethereal and transcendent, yet incapable to sustain her existence without sensuous incarnation,” a relationship later iterated by John Keble, poet-leader of the Oxford Movement whose pious verse weaved together his Christian audience and the Tractarian cause. The Victorian novel offered a fresh, popular medium through which to communicate pre-Reformation thought and recreate the medieval liturgy in a way that is “new, while it is old.”10 Royal Rhodes makes the case that no Victorian writer was untouched by these issues of theology, whether or not they defined themselves as religious novelists. The Victorian theological novel, which for Miriam Burstein was much more popular and pervasive than is often realized, reconstructs historical narrative in ways that altered and undermined the epistemological assumptions of the contemporary secular historical novel. If the Reformation destabilized history itself, then Catholic history can be seen as British history. These theological novelists interact with the medieval past on one of two levels: some return to the Middle Ages with trepidation to unearth the dreaded “Protestant counter-element” that, while dead, threatens its own Gothic resurgence, but the more positive Catholic recusants appeal to what they saw as a historical faith ensconced in a living J. Robert Barth, “The Symbolic Imagination: Coleridge and the Romantic Tradition,” in Studies in Religion and Literature, ed. John L. Mahoney (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), 5, 25–26, 39–40. 8 James Pereiro, Ethos and the Oxford Movement: At the Heart of Tractarianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 98. 9 Qtd. in Morris, The Image of the Middle Ages, 52. 10 Royal W. Rhodes, The Lion and the Cross: Early Christianity in Victorian Novels (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1995), 25. 7

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history, as opposed to an anachronistic faith that can attack the present as a living-dead.11 Christina Rossetti’s religious verse, what Mary Arsenau calls her “incarnational poetics,” was born of an Anglo-Catholicism shaped by Tractarian theology and aesthetics. For Rossetti, the Incarnation, which restored spiritual significance to the world and in the process makes symbolism possible, elevates poetic symbolism to a potential act of devotion, an image that is consistent with the Tractarian conception of the Church itself as a work of art. In this way Rossetti participated in “a pervasive Victorian revival of typological and sacramental ways of thinking about nature and art.”12 The poetry of Robert Browning likewise teems with religious allusions that reveal an intimate knowledge of sacred doctrine and a profound interest in Catholic matters. Emily Heady, who calls Browning a theologian, points out that in poems like “Fra Lippo Lippi” the doctrine of the Incarnation occupies a space between the high theology generally attributed to the Oxford Movement and the unsanctified pragmatism of the scientific materialists. Heady suggests that the Prior in “Fra Lippo” misunderstands the value Lippo places on the flesh precisely because it is radically orthodox: the fifteenthcentury painter’s incarnational statement of the union of flesh and spirit is meant as a critique on nineteenth-century culture, which too often worked to separate spirit from matter “at the expense of its own orthodoxy.”13 The “sacramental landscape” Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry inscribes demonstrates a fusion of flesh and spirit and of past and present, as vestiges of the Pre-Raphaelites’ medievalistic aesthetic and the clerical influences of Oxford Movement enthusiast Frederick Faber mingle with the theologies of founding Jesuit Ignatius of Loyola, thirteenth-century Franciscan Duns Scotus, and medieval German mystic Gertrude of Helfta.14 Though a great deal of research on Hopkins’s poetry has tried to claim him either for modernism or Victorianism, Franco Marucci argues that he is a thorough medievalist who unearths and adopts buried medieval codes. Victorian codes, which are at variance with what he terms “semantico-symbolic” codes that structure medieval discourse, deny the verticalizing tendency Marucci attributes to medieval semiotics, and Hopkins, developing his philosophy of aesthetics and religion from Coleridge (like so many Victorian religionists did), slowly Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, Victorian Reformations: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820–1900 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), 3, 53–55, 142. 12 Mary Arseneau, Recovering Christina Rossetti: Female Community and Incarnational Poetics (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 33, 102. 13 Emily Walker Heady, “Robert Browning, Theologian: The Incarnational Politics of ‘Fra Lippo Lippi,’” Renascence 67.2 (Spring 2015): 147–60 (147–51). 14 Jill Muller, “Gerard Manley Hopkins and Victorian Catholicism: A Heart in Hiding,” in Studies in Major Literary Authors, ed. William E. Cain (New York: Routledge, 2003), 1–8. 11

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divested himself of Victorian codes until, after 1870, his poetry became as medieval as Dante’s.15 The critical narrative of skepticism in the twentieth century has attempted to write secularism back into nineteenth-century texts. For example, Anthony Harrison’s reading of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem “The Blessed Damozel” participates in an established critical tradition that positions modernity in contradistinction to evacuated medieval codes. For Harrison, Rossetti appropriates medievalizing language parodically in ways that juxtapose the erotic and the religious, an act that destabilizes the language of both the conventional courtly love lyric and traditional Christianity. One of the effects of this linguistic destabilization, he suggests, is a de-sacralization that empties images of sacred meaning.16 This formulation has been often repeated, from Hans Blumenberg’s claim of the total incommensurability between premodern and modern philosophical and semiotic systems to Stephen Greenblatt’s argument for the secularization of medieval forms across the Reformation divide.17 Though referring specifically to romance as a literary genre, Fredric Jameson’s notions of modern secular manifestations of the medieval imagination line up with those of Blumenberg and Greenblatt. Jameson suggests that the fate of romance across historical periods depends upon the use of more acceptable elements to replace older codes that become “dead languages” as society secularizes. Substitutes must be invented to replace antique, magical categories that, for Jameson, are merely so many dead signs – he conceives of this process as one of “secularization and renewal” in which psychological codes supplant medieval structures.18 While Blumenberg, Greenblatt, and Jameson have tended to historicize modern secularizing efforts to the Renaissance, or more specifically to those revolutionary thinkers who shared in Petrarch’s demystification of sacred Franco Marucci, The Fine Delight that Fathers Thought: Rhetoric and Medievalism in Gerard Manley Hopkins (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1994), 104, 112, 118. 16 Anthony Harrison, Victorian Poets and the Politics of Culture: Discourse and Ideology (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 35–36. 17 Referring specifically to the early-modern stage, Greenblatt observes that the attempt to drive the Church into the theater was really an effort to empty out sacred signs, to evacuate the divine presence from religious mystery. In the movement from church to playhouse, the consecrated object is for Greenblatt reclassified and assigned cash value, while the rituals enlisted for the organization and utilization of these objects are rendered empty ceremonies upon their relocation in the modern world. See Greenblatt, “Shakespeare and the Exorcists,” in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University Press of California, 1988), 94–128 (113). Also, see Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983). 18 Fredric Jameson, “Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre,” New Literary History 7.1 (Autumn 1975): 135–63 (142–44). 15

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spaces preserved from Augustine to Aquinas, other critics insist that there is more “detheologizing” work to be done in the twenty-first century. Bruce Holsinger, for instance, advises that scholars of historicism adopt a “detheologizing vision” of sacred liturgy for two reasons: first, it may be the only way to accurately conceptualize the reach of liturgy’s dominating power (that is, once it has been sufficiently “localized, particularized, decentralized and miniaturized”), and second, to reveal its potentiality for historicism by exploding its silent insistence on its own extra-discursivity and atempor­ ality.19 Utz largely echoes Holsinger’s vision: since medievalism is necessarily delimited to discourses of historicity, medievalism as such seems to preclude the sempiternal, which is fundamental to religious discourse. Utz wishes to discover ways to overcome religion’s “contra-historicity” by making it temporal; in doing so he hopes to transfer religion to a discursive plane that is critically workable for the historicist.20 And yet, the transcendental claims of medieval religion may indeed be its greatest boon for solvency in medievalism studies. Historicism seems to admit the possibility of transcendence as it promotes temporal compartmentalization; in other words, it seems to want to stretch historical boundaries and draw attention to the permeability of era-markers, yet it all the while reinscribes these boundaries by insisting on the past’s irretrievable pastness and the inevitability of presentness. I suggest that religious medievalism allows for this both–and historical transcendence through its appropriation of the medieval sacramental body, a profoundly liminal body that admits sempiternality and temporality simultaneously.21 Unification lies at the heart of religious medievalism. Just as medievalism specifically, and historicism more generally, seek to reforge historical continuities severed by an overdetermined periodizing, so does religious medievalism endeavor to overcome epistemological dualism, the preeminent phenomenon of the modern imagination. Dualisms ranging from Cartesian divisions of mind and body to Kantian distinctions between noumenal and knowable realities underwrite many of the dominant philosophical systems inherited by nineteenth-century thinkers. Stringent application of the premodern/ modern binary has, in my view, established the precedent for such divisions, hampered meaningful dialogue between the modern and medieval world, and encouraged the fragmentation of ­historical continuity into ­restrictive, Bruce Holsinger, “Liturgy,” in Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 295–314 (298–99). 20 Utz, “Can We Talk About Religion, Please?,” 2–6 and “Medievalism Studies and the Subject of Religion,” 11–19. 21 Foucault suggests that though the modern has fought since its beginnings to overcome this mutually inhering dichotomy, what the medievals called significatio – a universal symbolic system in which everything was granted a signifying potential – persists far into the modern era. See Gerhart B. Ladner, “Medieval and Modern Understanding of Symbolism: A Comparison,” Speculum 54.2 (April 1979): 223–56 (225–28). 19

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independent periodicities. Modern texts that engage in religious medievalism do so to expose the consequences of modern dualism and participate in a process of re-joining that re-enchants a rationalistic epistemology devised, it may be argued, expressly to preclude unitive possibilities of transcendence. If medievalism in toto can be seen as a modality that processes loss, I conceive religious medievalism as a discursive apparatus meant to compensate for loss of the sacred, loss that manifests, for instance, in the substitution of absence for presence, or in the autonomization of matter at the expense of incarnational metaphysics. But in this formulation, to “lose” the sacred is merely to fragment its foundations, hence the loss that religious medievalism encounters is never absolute. Sacred operations underpin the dualistic modern imaginary: they persist, though they are always altered; they work, but never as intended; and while they often appear perverse, and at times even grotesque, they are not beyond saving. It is in this sense that the modern assumes characteristics of the Gothic. Religious medievalism is a corrective mechanism by which gothicized modernity may be overcome: it shores up the “polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens”22 that is the alienated consequence of modern dualism, integrating multiplicity into one spiritualized body. I identify the body of Christ – the central organizing principle of medieval devotion whose powerful plasticity promised to extend outwards and touch the body of the individual worshipper even as it enveloped the bodies of the faithful into one corpus – as the cynosure of nineteenth-century religious medievalism. It is the spatio-conceptual locus through which and in which reformers hoped to join what the modern had separated. The medieval sacramental body offers a non-dualistic alternative that retroactively undermines and mends Enlightenment bifurcation, reminds modernity of the potential for unity it has lost, and acts as the means by which the healing process may, at the very least, commence. For nineteenth-century religious medievalists, narratological acts of historical remembering become acts of re-membering, which reinscribe the dynamic contours of the sacramental body into the poem’s or novel’s linguistic structure and deploy this body in ways that can accomplish authorial objectives more effectively than scientific materialism, on the one hand, or mind–body dualist psychology, on the other. Religious medievalism affords literary texts the spiritual and semiotic power to not only appropriate but activate medieval symbolic categories and turn the bodies therein into medieval bodies. This medievalizing process is a transformative, sanctified embodiment that grounds modern quests to find spiritual consolation. The remedy for what religious medievalists saw as abstracted modern stagnation, I suggest, is the premodern religious body, a body that captures Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Tales, ed. Roger Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 53.

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the complexity of human experience as it makes that complexity possible in the first place. Thus, the medievalizing process is materially grounded: reenchantment takes place through narrative acts of bodily inscription, and the body so inscribed is the historicized body of Christ. The image of Christ’s body in the medieval imagination was complexly material and immaterial, flesh and spirit, both the body that suffered and died on the cross and the collective body of Christ that is the Church. It is a nexus of diversity that, like a language, unlocks a wide range of possibilities for meaning; as such, Christ’s body exists in – and is constitutive of – a complex web of associations fraught with oppositions that defer any possible final signification.23 And yet, though the efficacy of Christ’s body as mediating symbol depends upon such ambiguation, this body nevertheless boldly achieves the union of sign and referent: it is that which it signifies. This has the effect of intensifying the binaries previously mentioned: the body of Christ is profoundly material (the very flesh of the Godhead) as it is profoundly immaterial (the representation of the collective body of Christ on earth). The indissoluble nature of the material body conceptualized by medieval theologians and lay believers alike depends upon a deeply corporeal, incarnational framework, an eschatology the core of which proclaims that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. The corpus of medieval theology itself reflects the abstruseness of the symbol with which it was ultimately preoccupied. The body of Christ as exemplified in the Eucharist – and, by extension granted through the Incarnation, in the bodies of saints and their relics, in the materiality of holy images, in bodies engaged in mystical practices of affective piety – was subject to constant reconstruction and reinterpretation throughout the Middle Ages. But this is perhaps to be expected, for the conceptual power of this dynamic body lies precisely in its ability to be, to be something else, and to be anything, simultaneously. Recent scholarly emphasis on material criticism presents an opportunity for a timely reassessment of nineteenth-century efforts to re-theologize a world in which the body had been de-theologized. Though the transmission of information from the Middle Ages always varies depending on the specific cultural needs of the moment – and, indeed, the specific personal needs of the writer – works that engage in the kind of religious historicism described here share fundamental narrative trajectories that deploy constructs of historical authenticity strategically, in ways that their authors imagined or wanted medieval theology to signify. The medievalizing process offers a means of formulating a re-enchantment model that cuts into and works to undermine modern secularist paradigms. It provides access to a world in which the body is once again afforded a transcendental capacity to overcome Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (Chicago: University Press of Chicago, 2001), 30.

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dualism in ­spiritualizing mere matter. Whether modern bodies inhabit a pseudo-medieval world that must remember itself or a recognizably modern world wherein the medieval has been perverted, what pulsates at the heart of each unstable body therein is an embattled process of recovering the totalized and totalizing body of Christ and inculcating that body into itself so that it might be made whole. Utz reminds us of Leslie J. Workman’s claim that all representations of the medieval are constructions of the modern. Andrew Cole and D. Vance Smith, however, argue in their edited collection The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages that the intellectual and political history of the Middle Ages actually gives coherence to modern theorizing by providing it with a language. Stripped of this language, the modern would not be able to describe itself as modern. They are interested in the “ways in which critical discourse periodizes itself as modern by citing, adopting, expanding [and] revising putatively medieval modes of inquiry,”24 which in several key ways “adopts” and “expands” Frederick Roden’s thesis that medieval language, symbol, and ritual practice mold categories that have been understood by many since the Renaissance as peculiarly modern.25 Religious medievalism resists dualisms that pit the real against constructions of the real. Historical claims to authenticity are constructs in their own right, hence constructivism does not preclude authenticity any more than attempts to capture the historical real transcend the act of construction. Religious medievalism (in true medieval fashion) maps a middle way between the two: the modern draws from authentic religious codes that spiritualized the medieval world in the hope that their reinscription may enchant its own.

Andrew Cole and D. Vance Smith, “Outside Modernity,” in The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages: On the Unwritten History of Theory, ed. Andrew Cole and D. Vance Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 1–36 (2–4). 25 Frederick S. Roden, “Medieval Religion, Victorian Homosexualities,” in Medievalism and the Quest for the “Real” Middle Ages, ed. Clare A. Simmons (London: Frank Cass, 2001), 115–30 (115–16). 24

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II Other Responses to Medievalism (and Authenticity)

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The Breaking Point: Alain de Benoist’s Critique of Medieval Nominalism Daniel Wollenberg Individualism and the Middle Ages When was the “individual” born? To be just a little more precise: when did the concept emerge of an autonomous free agent whose identity is primarily grounded in being a rational human rather than in communal groups? Responding to this question can reveal its twin: the birth of modernity itself, when the individual became free of all-consuming communities and selfconscious of oneself as an individual rather than merely a member of larger social groups. It is no surprise that the medieval period has been central to attempts to locate the origins of the individual. In the last century and a half, there have been two prevailing narratives about the individual and the medieval. Put simply, the first narrative is that the modern conception of the individual is rooted in the medieval period: that medieval Christianity fostered the ideal of the individual soul and thus prioritized individual relationships with God. The second narrative (also put simply) is that in the Middle Ages the autonomous individual was either a totally unknown concept or at best a very hazy one. The first narrative offers a theological conception of the individual, and the second narrative constructs its conception along social and political lines. An example of the first narrative can be characterized by the turn-ofthe-century progressive education reformer John Dewey, who spoke of the “spiritual roots” of the modern ideology of individualism as being derived from medieval religion, which “asserted the ultimate nature of the individual soul and centered the drama of life about the destiny of that soul.”1 Even if John Dewey, Individualism Old and New (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1999), 37.

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it appears as if the individual was obscured and subsumed beneath layers of entrenched communal institutions, Dewey argues that the Church ultimately desired the salvation of every individual’s soul, and thus the notion of the value of every individual was born. An example of the second narrative – that no conception of the individual was known or even possible in the medieval period – can be characterized by Robert Nisbet, a leading figure of twentiethcentury conservative sociology. Following Jacob Burckhardt, Nisbet argues that the autonomous individual in the Middle Ages was an “indistinct” notion that was filtered and mediated through layers of larger communities. For Nisbet, “[T]he group was primary. It was the irreducible unit of the social system at large.”2 People were defined by their status as members in such communities rather than by any claim to being autonomous individuals. As political philosopher Charles Taylor puts it, drawing a sharp line between what he characterizes as the magical Middle Ages and the modern world of science, “[L]iving in the enchanted, porous world of our ancestors was inherently living socially.”3 By “porous,” Taylor means the premodern self that was not a “walled off” space. There was no dividing line between individual agency and impersonal forces. Thus we have two approaches to individualism and the Middle Ages: on the one hand, that the medieval Church was the root and bedrock of modern individualism; and on the other hand, that the Middle Ages was a time before such individualism was conceived and that the period harbored no such concept. Both perspectives have been deployed as a medium for explaining decline and fall: that modernity and its concurrent belief in individualism today signifies the breakage of the spiritual foundations that once grounded Western civilization. An attempt to reconcile these two narratives of the individual has come from the fringes of the political right. As one of the leading intellectual voices of the contemporary European far right, Alain de Benoist spearheaded France’s Nouvelle Droite (New Right, ND), a political philosophy rather than a political party or a paramilitary group. Launched in 1968 when de Benoist founded and led GRECE (Groupement de Recherche et d’Études pour la Civilisation Européenne), a think tank for cultural nationalists, the ND explicitly seeks to transcend and reconcile positions from both the left and the right. In the 1960s, de Benoist and the ND were sympathetic with white supremacist circles and colonialism, and in the 1970s they engaged biological racism.4 But since the 1980s de Benoist and the ND have moved increasingly Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2010), 74. 3 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007), 42. 4 Tamir Bar-On, Rethinking the French New Right: Alternatives to Modernity (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 16. 2

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further away from white supremacist and fascist extremes toward a kind of right-wing Gramscianism, attempting to wrest control of the dominant values, beliefs, and attitudes of Europeans away from the left.5 A number of his ideas and opinions have shifted over time, and de Benoist explicitly disavows being considered left or right.6 But beyond de Benoist’s anti-globalism and anti-Americanism, his nativist and nationalist agenda clearly marks him as a figure of the far right. De Benoist has tried to distance himself from the French extreme right by insisting that the ND is not racist or fascist, but he supports a “Europe for Europeans” and posits a European federation opposed to both capitalism and socialism, and in which the “native” or “indigenous” peoples of Europe stake their claim to legitimacy on their collective memory of a shared history and culture.7 De Benoist idealizes the Middle Ages as a time of group solidarity and the period from which the notion of the individual emerges. He embraces what he sees as medieval communitarian ties, and he contrasts those ties with modernity’s problematic prioritization of individual identity and rights above the concerns and needs of the larger community. European identity is rooted in the long, primordial traditions of the Greek, Roman, Germanic, and Nordic peoples, which distinguish Europeans from other parts of the world and serve as a guide for navigating and altering the present. Europe’s cultural traditions are its bulwark against globalization and the free market. The “authentic,” “indigenous” peoples of Europe, for de Benoist, all have the right to defend and preserve their cultural identities. De Benoist echoes Dewey’s concept of the “spiritual roots” of modern individualism by arguing that Augustine launched the notion of every individual’s personal relationship with God. Yet, despite modern individualism being rooted in Augustinian thought, de Benoist also believes that individualism was little more than a fledgling concept in medieval Europe and that the period enjoyed an enviable sense of group consciousness, kinship, and fidelity. De Benoist holds William of Ockham, the fourteenthcentury English Franciscan friar, philosopher, and theologian, responsible for being the primary cause of the dissolution of the organic harmony of the medieval social whole. De Benoist’s blaming of Ockham arises out of a Bar-On, Rethinking, 14–15. “As for me, it has been more than a quarter of a century since I stopped considering myself belonging to any family of the Right, and since I stopped showing solidarity with it […]. I’ll add that I don’t recognize myself as belonging to any family of the current Left.” It is telling, however, that these words appear in an online journal published by the white supremacist “alt-right” National Policy Institute. Alain de Benoist, “The intellectual vacuity of the Old Right,” Radix, 23 December 2013, , last accessed 31 July 2017. 7 Raphael Schlembach, Against Old Europe: Critical Theory and Alter-Globalization Movements (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 95. 5 6

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matrix of ­conservative thought over the last century. Although the debate over whether Ockham is indeed responsible for the destruction of scholastic thought and the medieval world dates to at least the 1930s, de Benoist’s revival of the “Ockham as destroyer” theme is novel for its application to fringe political discourse. For de Benoist, Ockham is responsible for starting the process wherein the individual became detached “from his natural attachments” and wherein modernity came to be characterized as “the process by which local and kinship groups, and broader communities, are gradually broken down to ‘liberate the individual,’ and dissolve all organic relations of solidarity.”8 De Benoist has essentially blamed William of Ockham and the medieval philosophy of nominalism for catalyzing the disintegration of homogenous, organic communities by insisting that the world consists only of individuals. Important inquiries such as the “origins” of the individual and individualism or the exploration of the subjectivity of the individual hero in medieval romance have been covered extensively across numerous disciplines and would be impossible to fully tackle in this essay. Here I seek to introduce how William of Ockham has come to be identified by a leading contemporary far-right thinker as a catalyst for decline and fall who played a key role in ushering in modern individualism. Because the European New Right, piloted by de Benoist, seeks to venerate certain social structures of the medieval period as a premodern model, Ockham’s thought acts as a breaking point between the medieval and modern worlds. For de Benoist, these worlds are separated primarily by the turn from communalism to individualism. Given that Ockham is the figure most closely associated with nominalism, which has been linked with individualism over the past century, Ockham has come to represent a dividing wall between past and present. Why Ockham? Ockham did not consciously destroy anything. Considering that he has been associated with the destruction of the synthesis of faith and rational thought, it can be disorienting to find some who do not consider Ockham a political figure at all and others who consider him to have been an orthodox Catholic thinker.9 He is certainly “enigmatic” at the very least.10 Alain de Benoist, “Critique of Liberal Ideology,” The Internet Archive, , last accessed 12 January 2016. 9 For an overview of Ockham’s political thought and impact, see Arthur Stephen McGrade, The Political Thought of William of Ockham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974); see also Takashi Shogimen, Ockham and Political Discourse in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 10 McGrade, Political Thought, 2. 8

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We know little about Ockham’s life, especially his early life, beyond a select few significant dates and pivotal events.11 He was presumably born in the place near London associated with his name, but we do not know exactly when, probably 1280–85, and we do not quite know when or why he died, probably in 1347 or 1349 – possibly as a result of the Black Death, though the cause of death is not known. His writings suddenly cease around then. We know nothing of his family. He was certainly a Franciscan friar, and he was certainly at Oxford, where his thought was highly influential in his lifetime. At Oxford, Ockham was very far along toward a doctorate but never received the degree. In 1323, he was summoned to the papal court at Avignon by Pope John XXII, and by 1327 he faced fifty-six charges of heresy, a case that was not successfully prosecuted. The evidence levied against Ockham centered on Franciscan tenets, particularly their vow of poverty, rather than his philosophical views, which were probably not considered especially radical.12 At the core of the case against Ockham was the concept of apostolic poverty: whether the Franciscans’ renunciation of property and their vow of poverty was in fact an imitation of Jesus and the apostles’ views on property.13 In 1328, Ockham determined that the Pope’s arguments were in error and that the Pope was therefore a heretic for persisting in error. Ockham fled Avignon under cover of night, for which he was excommunicated, and lived out the remaining twenty years of his life at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Louis of Bavaria in Munich. In the six and a half centuries since his death, Ockham’s place in history has taken on a monumental, though disputed, importance compared to his stature in his own lifetime. Rondo Keele explains the disparate takes on Ockham’s significance: Some people claim, and not without reason, that Ockham invented the western idea of church–state separation. Some people style him the first modern philosopher, or an analytic philosopher out of his time, or the man who brought the harmonious medieval union of faith and reason to an end in Europe. Some people think him a champion of the scientific approach to life. Some claim he was practically a skeptic.14 It was only in the postmedieval period that Ockham took on increased political significance. According to John Morrall, the neo-Thomists of the A brief synopsis of Ockham’s life can be found in Sharon M. Kaye and Robert M. Martin, On Ockham (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2001), and Rondo Keele, Ockham Explained: From Razor to Rebellion (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 2010). 12 For a synopsis of John XXII’s quarrel with Ockham and with the Franciscan order, see John Kilcullen, “The Political Writings,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ockham, ed. Paul Vincent Spade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 302–20. 13 Paul Vincent Spade, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ockham, 3. 14 Keele, Ockham Explained, 3. 11

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late nineteenth century were responsible for making Ockham into a villain out of step with Catholic orthodoxy.15 As will be discussed below, Morrall was attempting to rescue Ockham’s legacy from his modern detractors not by re-evaluating Ockham’s political thought, but by disassociating Ockham from political thought altogether. Along with Philotheus Boehner, Morrall’s contemporary from the mid-twentieth century, Morrall does not think that we can link Ockham’s philosophical thought with his political thought. Boehner and Morrall argue that there is a “discontinuity” between Ockham’s philosophical and political thought, and that we ought not to generate his political theories based solely on his philosophy.16 As Franciscan writers themselves, Boehner and Morrall were attempting to totally de-politicize Ockham rather than make a case for why his politics are not responsible for destruction and decay. Most of Ockham’s treatises written in the last twenty years of his life while in Munich have been gathered in a multi-volume collection known as Opera Politica, though the value of these collected works as a gauge of Ockham’s political thought is actually fairly minimal.17 There are no core organizing political theses or principles in the treatises, and, as McGrade wryly remarks, it is “a strange political work [referring to the treatise Opus Nonaginta Dierum] that spends 200 pages on the question, whether a person can licitly eat a piece of bread without having any legal rights in it.”18 Ockham’s worth as a political thinker comes, then, from his earlier work, which is not explicitly political but which has political implications. For example, on the question of whether we can have knowledge of substances in themselves, Ockham writes: I do not know God in Himself in this life, nor any substance […] when I know God in this life, I know Him in a concept which is common to Him and to other things, so that the term of the act of knowing is some one thing and not a plurality, and is common to many things.19 What Ockham is saying is that we can only know God through general concepts (i.e., words), which apply to many things. Thus we know nothing of the specific nature of God; all that we have done is generalize about God’s John B. Morrall, “Some Notes on a Recent Interpretation of William of Ockham’s Political Philosophy,” Franciscan Studies 9.4 (1949): 338. 16 Morrall, “Some Notes,” 349. 17 Guillelmi de Ockham Opera Politica, vol. I, ed. J. G. Sikes, H. S. Offler, and R. F. Bennett; vol. II, ed. J. G. Sikes and H. S. Offler; vol. III, ed. H. S. Offler (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1940, 1963, 1956); vol. IV, ed. H. S. Offler (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1997). 18 McGrade, Political Thought, 3. 19 William of Ockham, Philosophical Writings: A Selection, trans. Philotheus Boehner (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1990), 110–11. 15

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nature through concepts that can equally apply to other substances or beings. In making the case against being able to have any knowledge of things-inthemselves, Ockham ends up showing that we cannot have any intuitive knowledge of God. While a postmedieval commentator could potentially take this as evidence for Ockham’s theological skepticism and even agnosticism, ultimately Ockham emphasizes the significance of faith in lieu of knowledge and reason, and in this sense he is making a fairly orthodox point here. It was Ockham’s nominalism, though, that has come to mark his thought as radical and controversial. As the word implies, nominalism holds that we use words, or names, to serve as signs for patterns, and that therefore universals have no real existence.20 In the late medieval debate concerning universals between realists and nominalists, realists held that universals have a real existence in the world independent of thought; that the properties of things have some sort of real and substantial existence independent of the human mind.21 This is akin to Plato’s theory of forms. Plato argues that there is a non-material realm in which the ideal form of every thing exists, where a sort of “blueprint” of ideal objects exists. Very few medieval philosophers followed Plato on this issue, preferring to side with Aristotle’s view of universals. Aristotle did not think that the blueprint of an ideal red balloon exists in some non-material realm. Instead, Aristotle simply says that universals are those properties that all like things have in common: all red things have redness in common. And redness is inseparable from things that are red. Redness, for Aristotle, actually exists in the world. What a medieval nominalist would say is that, yes, there is a concept of redness, but it exists in the human mind and is nothing more than a word we place on things we observe to be alike. We see properties that certain trees have in common and call them palm trees. But for a nominalist like Ockham, that is the most that we can say: that it is human thought and human language that see patterns in things, when in reality, nothing has anything in common and every single thing in the universe is totally distinct and separate from one another. “[E]very universal is one singular thing” and “nothing is universal except by signification, by being a sign of several things,” Ockham writes in his Summa Totius Logicae (1323);22 the concept Late medieval philosophy was deeply affected by the problem of universals. Put simply, things in the world are particulars and universals are those things’ qualities; for example, a red balloon has the universal qualities of redness and ovalness and rubberness and so on, even if the balloon in front of our eyes is an individual object. All of the shared properties of all things of the same class are considered universals. 21 Hugo Keiper, “Introductory Essay: A Literary ‘Debate Over Universals’? New Perspectives on the Relationship Between Nominalism, Realism, and Literary Discourse,” in Nominalism and Literary Discourse: New Perspectives, ed. Hugo Keiper, Christoph Bode, and Richard Utz (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 6. 22 William of Ockham, Philosophical Writings, 33. 20

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of trees is a singular thing even though it signifies multiple individual things. Universals cannot exist separately from individuals; they only exist insofar as singular individuals exist and have no life of their own. One of Ockham’s explanations for this idea is that if there is a universal that exists in every person – in other words, if there is a human essence from which individuals are composed – then Christ would have something of the damned (Judas) in him, and that, for Ockham, is absurd.23 He does admit, though, that universals are conventional signs; that is, they are mental categories but they have no reality. They do not exist outside of the mind. Universals are essentially just words, or “thought-objects,” that help us make sense of the world but that have no real existence.24 Yes, Ockham would say, red balloons all seem to have certain universal properties in common. But this is simply human perception; at their core, they are different objects. We really just perceive sameness, when, in reality, all things are distinct. “An infinite number of singulars” is connected by language and in the mind by “some specific likeness between these individuals,” Ockham writes.25 But every individual thing remains unique. Ockham’s major breakthrough here was pointing to the need to reinterpret statements about universals. Universal statements point to language and mental processes, not reality. They tell us about language and the mind rather than the world as it exists.26 The implications of such an approach are great: we cannot make assumptions that anything has anything in common with anything else in reality. A rose is only like any other rose because we can think of a rose’s constituent parts with words (thorns, stem, green, red, and so on) and we put those wordconcepts together to form the idea of a rose. Two roses are only alike insofar as we have a common name that we can give to both things. If we cannot have direct and full knowledge of every single thing that God has created on Earth, then likewise we cannot understand the nature of God through reason and intuition. We can only understand God through faith and revelation.27 Ockham’s philosophy helped pave the way for the concept of a universe that is no longer rationally and divinely constructed and ordered. Instead, it is the human mind that wants to see arbitrary things placed together as a class. In short, the implications of Ockham’s thought fostered a disconnection between theology from philosophy. This approach was considered in Ockham’s lifetime to be the via moderna – the “new way.”

25 26

William of Ockham, Philosophical Writings, 36. William of Ockham, Philosophical Writings, 43. William of Ockham, Philosophical Writings, 45. See Claude Panaccio, “Semantics and Mental Language,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ockham, 53–75. 27 David Knowles, The Evolution of Medieval Thought (New York: Vintage, 1962), 323. 23 24

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Ockham in the Twentieth Century The debate over whether Ockham was indeed a “destroyer” of scholasticism and even of the Middle Ages as a whole can be traced back to Georges de Lagarde, whose La naissance de l’esprit laïque au déclin du moyen âge appeared in 1934. An early and prominent proponent of the “Ockham as destructor” narrative, Lagarde argued that Ockham is the philosopher primarily responsible for the instantiation of the modern secular social and political order. For Lagarde, Ockham promoted an anarchic and disorderly vision of the Church.28 According to Takashi Shogimen, Lagarde casts Ockham and Ockhamist nominalism as the “intellectual prerequisite for the collapse of the late medieval Church” and a precursor to the Reformation.29 Lagarde was sharply critiqued in the late 1940s by John Morrall, who refuted Lagarde’s reading of Ockham as a destructive voice against the Church by arguing that there is a “discontinuity” between Ockham’s philosophical thinking and his political thinking, and that the two ought not to be confused.30 For Morrall, Ockham does not represent a radical and destructive break with the past; in fact, he remained throughout his life “an interpreter and defender of the achievements of the past.”31 One of Morrall’s contemporaries, Boehner, also attempted to show that the so-called “political doctrines of Ockham” are not political doctrines at all, in order to revive Ockham’s standing as a crucial Franciscan theologian.32 Ockham’s political significance again came to the fore in the 1950s and 1960s with the work of the French scholar Michel Villey and the medieval historian Brian Tierney, important voices on the history of natural rights who focused on Ockham’s importance to the history of rights theory, and with the work of Michael Wilks, who considered Ockham’s thought from the broader scope of the history of individualism and political theory. Both Villey and Wilks regard Ockham as a disruptive force and, especially in the case of Wilks, a destructive force.33 Unlike Morrall and Boehner, Villey argues that Ockham’s ideas on individual rights were indeed radically innovative and destructive. For Lagarde and Villey, Ockham was the father of subjective-rights theory. Even if Ockham never quite articulated a clear theory of individual rights, his nominalism was linked to his ideas about Georges de Lagarde, La naissance de l’espirit laïque au déclin du moyen âge, 5 vols. (Louvain and Paris, 1956–70), 5: 164. 29 Shogimen, Ockham and Political Discourse, 11. 30 Morrall, “Some Notes,” 349. 31 Morrall, “Some Notes,” 369. 32 Philotheus Boehner, “A Recent Presentation of Ockham’s Philosophy,” Franciscan Studies 9.4 (1949): 453. For a discussion of Lagarde’s “destructor” theory and its proponents and critics, see Shogimen, Ockham and Political Discourse, 10–14. 33 For a discussion of Wilks’s work, see pp. 00–00. 28

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subjective rights by locating the individual as the source of right.34 According to Villey, Ockham was the originator of the idea of subjective rights because his nominalism, which held that only individual things had real existence, led to an individualistic political theory.35 Villey held that Ockham’s nominalism was responsible for developing an original concept of rights as the power of individuals, which was a major break from classical concepts of right.36 Villey’s work informs de Benoist’s understanding of Ockham and human rights, as we will see. More recent scholarship, however, has generally moved away from Villey’s idea about Ockham and individual rights. Brian Tierney contends that Ockham’s ideas on subjective rights were not innovative and can be found in prior canonistic writings as early as the twelfth century. For Tierney, Ockham’s philosophy and political theory are not incongruous, but they are not necessarily connected either.37 For Tierney, Ockham derived his thoughts on natural rights and natural law from reason, based on the view that individuals are “rational, free, and morally responsible” for their actions.38 But this was not a major break, reflecting medieval ideas about natural right that can be found as early as the twelfth century, and Ockham did not produce a coherent system of thought about natural rights. For Tierney, Ockham was not revolutionary or destructive. Ockham drew on what he understood to be traditional laws of the Church to defend his own views.39 Even if Ockham might no longer generally be viewed as a radical innovator on the particular subject of individual rights, Ockham has emerged in some twenty-first-century accounts as a type of classic liberal thinker and a proponent of republicanism.40 Ockham tends to be seen today as a proponent of the separation of church and state and a defender of the rights of individuals.41 For German historian Jürgen Miethke, Ockham’s philosophy holds that the “individual is free and responsible for his individual prac-

See Annabel S. Brett, Liberty, Right, and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), esp. 50–51. 35 Brian Tierney, “The Idea of Natural Rights – Origins and Persistence,” Northwestern Journal of International Human Rights 2.1 (2004): 4, , last accessed 10 July 2017. 36 See Michel Villey, “La genèse du droit subjectif chez Guillaume d’Occam,” Archives de la philosophie du droit 9 (1964): 97–127, esp. 120–27. 37 Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law, 1150–1625 (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press for Emory University, 1997), 32. 38 Tierney, Idea of Natural Rights, 193. 39 Tierney, Idea of Natural Rights, 201. 40 See Shogimen, Ockham and Political Discourse, 232–62; see also Jonathan Robinson, “Ockham, the Sanctity of Rights, and the Canonists,” Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law 31 (2014): 147–204, esp. 201–4. 41 Shogimen, Ockham and Political Discourse, 31–32. 34

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tice,” and he “indefatigably insists on, calls for, and demands liberty.”42 This broader scope of Ockham as a radical innovator for individual liberty and right sometimes takes on negative, even dark, connotations. In the 1960s, Michael Wilks revivified Lagarde’s position on Ockham as a destructive force, disagreeing with Boehner and Morrall by arguing that nominalism and realism had political implications that could not be ignored, and that Ockham’s philosophical views on nominalism aligned with assumptions about the fundamental character of political society. In Wilks’s account of Ockham’s thought, Ockham dissociated God and causality. By insisting that nothing can be proven about God with natural reason, and that it is a waste of time to speculate on merely hypothetical causes of actually existing things, Ockham showed that humans and God were two different, unrelated things, and that society could be studied without reference to God. For Wilks, this doctrine of Ockham’s was “devastating” because it “destroyed the conception that political society was a Church, and substituted for this idea a purely naturalistic societas humana.”43 Human society should be theorized and organized according to real-world principles and not toward divine ends, a theory that for Wilks did nothing less than transform the very notion of society itself by reducing “all existence to individual existence.”44 The Church, for Ockham, became nothing more than a collection of its individual members. It was thus no longer a kind of abstract universal ideal. The common good of the Church became the collective sum of the good of its individual members. The human individual became more than a mechanism of the community; the individual became an end in him/herself. For Wilks, Ockham replaced God with the individual human at the center of the universe, and the needs and rights of individuals became the supreme criteria for government. Wilks concludes that “[a]t bottom Ockham was an anarchist” because of his insistence that truth must be determined by every individual and not simply taken for granted on authority.45 Locating the “birth” or “origins” of the individual with Ockham and his thought as a profound breaking point between orthodoxy and radicalism, past and present, medieval and modern, has become somewhat commonplace since Wilks, even if most scholars do not attempt to “blame” Ockham as being some sort of massively destructive force. In a book dedicated to the political thought of Ockham, Arthur Stephen McGrade concludes that Ockham was a political thinker but in a constructive, positivist, and rational Jürgen Miethke, “The Concept of Liberty in William of Ockham,” Théologie et droit dans la science politique de l’etat modern 147.1 (1991): 93, 90, , last accessed 10 July 2017. 43 Michael Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 90. 44 Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty, 93. 45 Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty, 109. 42

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way; he did not mean to destroy but to promote better ways of governance. Ockham was an important political figure because his thought was an “authentic religious protest” that dealt with politics intelligently and progressively.46 Even when Ockham “went political” from the 1330s by addressing problems in secular affairs and considering basic problems in political theory, McGrade shows that he remained dedicated to the ideals of truth, justice, and piety and desired above all to advance institutional stability and effectiveness in the secular and ecclesiastical realms.47 The conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet has called Ockham a challenge to “the reality of social wholes, or communities,” but concludes that the community remained dominant in medieval thought even after Ockham.48 For Nisbet, it was only after the sixteenth century that the individual becomes increasingly detached from kinship, Church, and other communal associations. Those who do not work extensively on Ockham’s thought have tended to offer more forceful readings of his work. In his 2008 study of theology and secularism between the later medieval and modern periods, Michael Allen Gillespie notes that by rejecting the scholastic synthesis of reason and revelation, Ockham “undermined the metaphysical/theological foundation of the medieval world.”49 The “question” that acts as a harbinger for the dawning of modernity was the nominalist conception of God as inexplicable and ultimately unknowable, producing a worldview stemming from the “anxiety and insecurity” engendered by having a capricious and quixotic divinity.50 Gillespie might not call Ockham an anarchist per se, but in Gillespie’s account  the world that Ockham envisioned was indeed an anarchic and disordered world that dissociated God and nature and that insisted on the centrality of the individual. For Gillespie, the modern world begins with the rejection of the political, cosmological, and theological vision of the Middle Ages, rooted in the nominalist rejection of the orderly cosmos and divinity posited by scholasticism.51 It is this more aggressive reading of rejection and uncertainty that de Benoist advances. Alain de Benoist’s Ockham Alain de Benoist’s critique of Ockham is not by any means an isolated or eccentric reading, but an echo of this narrative that I have briefly traced about the rupture between medieval and modern. Attempts to link Ockham McGrade, Political Thought, 231. McGrade, Political Thought, 229. 48 Nisbet, Quest, 74. 49 Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 22. 50 Gillespie, Theological Origins, 15. 51 Gillespie, Theological Origins, 45. 46 47

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with the onset of a destructive modernity do not originate with de Benoist and have not come solely from the far right. Where de Benoist diverges from earlier adherents of the “Ockham as destructor” narrative is his deployment of the narrative to condemn what he sees as the problems engendered by progressive liberal modernity. De Benoist writes, “One of liberalism’s oldest roots is medieval nominalism,” which held that there is only the particular “and that human societies are made up only of individuals.”52 Liberalism53 assumes that “man is not by nature a social being” but instead enters society by way of a rational social contract. The individual is “an atom” divorced from all social or cultural contexts, and the primacy of communities, peoples, and cultures is dismissed. Liberal thought is thus hostile to collective identities. The evolution from the devaluation of a “social whole” and the emergence of “individual holders of individual rights” bound by a rational social contract is marked by Ockham’s thought, which “held that nothing exists but particular beings.”54 For de Benoist, the sovereignty of the people must be privileged over the sovereignty of the individual, and he promotes the notion of the common good as common interests over individual interests, as opposed to common good as a collective sum of the individual goods of all persons. Modernity’s emphasis on the protection of individual liberties “poses an intrinsic threat of disassociating the collective.”55 Political philosopher Larry Siedentop has recently proposed that after the sixteenth century the nation-state came to be perceived as a federation of rights-holders, and that rational agency is the only requirement for equal concern and respect. We see ourselves and others as individuals with rights, not as members of a family or guild. For Siedentop, an “equality of status” is derived from everyone being individual agents capable of rational choice.56 In a similar vein as Siedentop, de Benoist critiques the modern nation-state as being at its core a loose association of self-interested individuals. In de Benoist’s thought, modernity is juxtaposed with medieval Europe before the fourteenth century, a period he outlines as enjoying close kinship and group solidarity. The Western invention of the concept of modernity, characterized primarily by individualism, entailed a breaking away from medieval communitarian ties. In lieu of individual identity were hierarchical Alain de Benoist, interview with Brian Sylvian, “European Son: An Interview with Alain de Benoist,” trans. Brian Sylvian and Mikayel Raffi, The Occidental Quarterly 5.3 (2005): 7–27 (14). 53 De Benoist here uses “liberalism” in the European sense of free-market capitalism and individualism. 54 De Benoist, “Critique.” 55 Alain de Benoist, “The Current Crisis of Democracy,” trans. Russell A. Berman, Telos 156 (2011): 7–23 (6). 56 Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014), 6. 52

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ties of fealty: “In medieval societies the prevalent value is loyalty. Therefore, the question is not ‘who am I?’ but ‘to whom am I loyal?’”57 In this reading of the medieval period, group loyalty was at the foundation of the Middle Ages, and such communal fealty limited hostility between the state and social classes. Whereas in the medieval period the communal good was promoted, modernity’s reverence for individualism renders it “intrinsically antagonistic to collective identities because such identities are an obstacle to the march of progress towards a unitary mankind.”58 Along with modernity came the dissolving of the communal good that is produced by organic social networks. In Manifesto for a European Renaissance, a polemical pamphlet co-written by de Benoist and Charles Champetier that summarizes some of the core positions of the ND, it is argued that modernity, characterized primarily by individualism, has “old roots.” For de Benoist and Champetier, modernity “represents a secularization of ideas and perspectives borrowed from [medieval] Christian metaphysics,” in that individualism stemmed from the “notion of individual salvation and […] an intimate and privileged relation between an individual and God.”59 Because the medieval Church acknowledged that every subject had a soul and was therefore capable of salvation, an emphasis on the moral equality between people developed in the Middle Ages, even if a full-fledged notion of the individual was not yet conceived. The writers link Augustine with the privatization of individuality, in which each individual conscience forms a personal relationship with God, though it was not until Descartes that the individual becomes an independent being disengaged from the world who must find meaning from within.60 De Benoist spins a narrative that is an amalgam of two interwoven lines of thought on the late Middle Ages: one, that Ockham and nominalism were great destroyers, and the other, that what was destroyed was a world that was intrinsically better than the modern world. This type of “where-it-all-wentwrong” narrative has been endemic to anti-Enlightenment thought since at least the nineteenth century, if not earlier. G. K. Chesterton, for instance, reflects on the “revolution in human society” between the first Crusade and the last Tudor, and laments its story “of how our populace gained great things, but today has lost everything.”61 This strain of hand wringing and weeping for a glorious lost past is boilerplate for right, conservative, and/or Alain de Benoist, “On Identity,” trans. Kathy Ackerman and Julia Kostova, Telos 128 (2004): 10. 58 Alain de Benoist, “‘We Are at the End of Something’: A conversation with Alain de Benoist,” American Renaissance, 22 November 2013, , last accessed 31 July 2017. 59 Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier, Manifesto for a New European Renaissance (London: Arktos, 2012), 11. 60 De Benoist, “On Identity,” 11. 61 G. K. Chesterton, A Short History of England (New York: John Lane, 1916), 11. 57

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anti-Enlightenment thought. The case that Ockham was a great destroyer and is responsible for the downfall is not unique to de Benoist. What is unique is how de Benoist has woven once-scholarly arguments about Ockham into far-right political rhetoric. Whereas earlier adherents of the “Ockham as destroyer” narrative such as Lagarde, Villey, and Wilks insist on the relevance of Ockham on theological grounds, de Benoist largely de-theologizes Ockham’s thought and insists on his relevance on purely political grounds. Lagarde, Villey, and Wilks are thoroughly familiar with Ockham’s work, but at no point is it clear that de Benoist has read Ockham firsthand. Making fleeting reference to the Franciscan property-rights controversy, de Benoist notes Ockham’s (and nominalism’s) insistence on the supremacy of the divine will rather than divine order for natural law, in order to show that Ockham believed that there was no intrinsic meaning in the world.62 He then turns to Villey to bridge the gap between this small snippet of Ockham’s theology and rendering every individual a rights holder who is the center of the legal world. De Benoist directly quotes philosophers such as Cicero, Augustine, Hobbes, and Hannah Arendt, but he does not quote Ockham. His main sources on Ockham appear to be the work of Villey and Louis Dumont, and Dumont’s views on Ockham in turn draw on Villey’s account.63 Each of these scholars places momentous weight on Ockham as, in Dumont’s words, “the herald of the modern turn of mind.”64 Like some modern rights-theorists who, in the words of Jonathan Robinson, “get along fine without consulting Ockham even though they may get some of the details wrong,”65 de Benoist receives Ockham’s thought through layers and filters and condenses complex, ongoing debates on the history of legal and political theory into keywords: individualism, atomism, modernity. For de Benoist, individualism is a “peculiarity of Western history,” and is opposed to the “holist view” in which man is defined by “what he inherits and in reference to his social-historical context.”66 Individualism abstracts the individual from his cultural and social contexts. Ockham’s nominalism led eventually to the modern conception of communities, peoples, cultures, and nations as being just “sums of individual atoms” that have no inherent value; the only thing of value in the modern world, according to de Benoist, is the individual. The autonomous subject is considered a primarily nonsocial being. In this view, humans have natural rights independent of any social or Alain de Benoist, Beyond Human Rights: Defending Freedoms, trans. Alexander Jacob (London: Arktos, 2011), 31. 63 See Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), esp. 62–66. 64 Dumont, Essays on Individualism, 63. 65 Jonathan Robinson, William of Ockham’s Early Theory of Property Rights in Context (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 4. 66 De Benoist, “Critique.” 62

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political organization that are not granted by governments but that must be protected by them. This places individuals at war with one another, because everyone has the right of freedom to act in his private interests, forming a “competitive market” of battling individuals. In short, de Benoist is opposed to the concept of universal human rights, a concept that can be intellectually traced through William of Ockham’s philosophy, which marked the end of the medieval era and instantiated the modern era by making individual things, and not greater political and social contexts, the primary force in the world. For de Benoist, the sovereignty of the people must be privileged over the sovereignty of the individual. He promotes the notion of the common good as common interests over individual interests, as opposed to common good as a collective sum of the individual goods of all persons. Modernity’s emphasis on the protection of individual liberties “poses an intrinsic threat of disassociating the collective.”67 Medieval society, for de Benoist, promulgated and “stressed most fervently the notion of common good.”68 The Middle Ages, then, becomes an idealized representative of that which was stable, organic, and effective before the fissures of modernity. Unlike medieval society, which prioritized the common good, the modern nation-state values individual identity and destroys the significance of membership in the collective, according to de Benoist.69 His characterization of medieval society’s reciprocity of interest, fellowship, and love is made to serve as the framework for a vision for modern communities. According to Nisbet, the progressive liberal hails these circumstances and applauds the “emergence of the individual from the ancient confinements of patriarchal kinship, class, guild, and village community,” reveling in Renaissance, Reformation, Revolution, and Enlightenment. But for the anti-Enlightenment thinker, who values “coherent moral belief, clear social status, cultural roots, and a strong sense of interdependence with others,” these same events are not seen as liberating but as destructive, resulting in moral and cultural confusion and disruption of communal contexts.70 Nisbet locates the Middle Ages as a time in which cultural life flowed from “family, guild, village community, and monastery,” and where “social wholes” or communities were values above all else.71 The restoration of a lost unity has been the aim, according to Zeev Sternhell, of all anti-Enlightenment thinkers.72 Thus, de Benoist’s critique of Ockham is not by any means an isolated voice, but an echo of what has been a fairly commonplace reading of the rupture between medieval and modern. De Benoist, “Current Crisis,” 6. De Benoist, “On Identity,” 36. 69 De Benoist, “On Identity,” 36. 70 Nisbet, Quest, 70. 71 Nisbet, Quest, 74. 72 Zeev Sternhell, The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, trans. David Maisel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 42–43. 67 68

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A Nominal World Richard Weaver, an influential figure in the American conservative movement of the first half of the twentieth century, also located a “fall” with William of Ockham; like de Benoist after him, Weaver emphasized the philosophical and political implications of Ockham’s thought more than the specifics of his thought itself. Weaver’s account of Ockham is characteristically histrionic: Ockham’s “seemingly innocent” attack on universals was the “powers of darkness […] working subtly.”73 The fourteenth century was a historic juncture whose best representative is Ockham, who denied that there was any truth higher than and independent of man, and denied the reality perceived by the intellect and embraced the reality perceived by the senses. For Weaver, after Ockham belief in the existence of transcendentals was left behind and every individual became the center of his/her own universe. It comes as no shock to arrive at the end of Weaver’s major work, Ideas Have Consequences, and read his dramatic takedown of our modern chaotic world and his hope for a return “to the kind of poetic-religious vision which dominated the Middle Ages,” and for the “chivalry and spirituality of the Middle Ages” to combat “the waning day of the West” – all of this medieval pageantry and passion being before Ockham, of course.74 With Ockham, “Western man made an evil decision”: every person became his/her own “priest” and “professor of ethics,” and the consequence has been political and ethical anarchy.75 For Weaver and some other American traditionalist conservatives of the mid-twentieth century, the problem with modern liberalism is that it does away with universal absolutes such as good and evil, honor and courage, and freedom and democracy. In lieu of these timeless, universal absolutes, modern liberalism adulates relativism. The modern world is, in short, a nominal world. In the twenty-first century, the European New Right embraces communal values and rejects the nominalism of the modern world via its core notion of the “right to difference.” The “right to difference” is a euphemism. It purports to promulgate the right of a people – all peoples – to their particular culture, traditions, and state, but ultimately seeks to reject multiculturalism and diversity while superficially claiming to reject resentment and ostracization of the other.76 It has been rightly called “cultural racism” by Tamir BarOn.77 Under the guise of accepting and defending the “right” of all peoples Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences: Expanded Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948; repr. 2013), 3. 74 Weaver, Ideas, 182, 186. 75 Weaver, Ideas, 2–3. 76 Alain de Benoist, “Identity and Difference,” trans. Lucian Tudor, Internet Archive, , last accessed 18 March 2016. 77 Bar-On, Rethinking, 17. 73

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to self-determination and self-expression, the right to difference draws thick borders between culturally and ethnically homogenized states. Such states would, in de Benoist’s estimation, resist the forces of Americanization and globalization by promoting the good of communities, which would be a bulwark against self-promoting individualism at all costs. De Benoist and the ND embrace a universal and total adherence to the political state and its cultural community, defend its “right” to claim its own traditions and history, and reject multiculturalism and diversity. The concept of the right to difference is far from obscure or trivial. It cuts to the core of the problems of immigration, nativism, and diversity that undergird the current migrant crisis across Europe and, increasingly, the United States. While France’s far-right National Front party is explicitly anti-immigrant, the ND distances itself from such rhetoric by arguing that the core problem of modern Western nations is not immigrants, but a disconnect between past and present and a subsequent loss of collective identity. Against atomizing individualism, the ND declares the necessity of organic communities based on historic and ethnic identities. It proposes that a community’s way of life is the medium through which an individual belongs to humanity.78 As such, ND theorists reject the concept of human rights. Diversity and multiculturalism are founded on the notion that all individuals are inherently equal. Human rights presume that all humans are first and foremost anthropologically individual and naturally nonpolitical and nonsocial. For the ND, human rights aim to promote self-interest above communal concerns and are thus a tool for the West to “colonize” all peoples.79 Identity is derived from belonging to a people – its history, tradition, and memory – not from simply being a person. The ND seeks to construct a new rights paradigm that privileges the collective rights of ethnic groups, which supersede individual rights.80 The rights of the whole – a homogenized people whose identity is rooted in a shared sense of history and ethnicity – trump the rights of each citizen. Ockham and nominalism loom so large for de Benoist because he associates the destruction of corporate, communal identity and the rise of individualism with nominalist thought. For de Benoist, it is strictly from the corporate collective that the individual derives identity and rights. This is not an argument that Ockham makes. De Benoist never explicitly quotes William of Ockham in order to make his case for Ockham’s historical significance, because Ockham’s actual thought is, in a way, beside the point. His historical Charles Lindholm and José Pedro Zúquete, The Struggle for the World: Liberation Movements for the 21st Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 61. 79 Lindholm and Zúquete, Struggle, 56. 80 Tamir Bar-On, “Fascism to the Nouvelle Droite: The Dream of a Pan-European Empire,” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 16.3 (2008): 341. 78

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significance is grounded on the applications to which modern commentators have put him, linking his thought with the foundations of liberal and progressive secularism.81 Ockham has come to represent a symbol of destruction, dissipation, and loss, a symbol that has an obvious appeal to those on the right, especially the far right, seeking renewal, return, recovery, and rediscovery. With Ockham came modernity; with modernity came individualism; with individualism comes the rejection of history, roots, and traditions. Although Ockham was summoned to Avignon by Pope John XXII and ultimately excommunicated, living out his final days in exile in Munich at the court of the Emperor, his thought would probably not have been considered wildly radical in his day or at least in the century afterwards. His philosophy, notably, was never condemned as heretical by the Church. He was excommunicated for fleeing Avignon without papal permission. In Oxford, his popularity waned after his death, though his philosophy remained important at Paris. It is only in the modern period, starting in the nineteenth century and lasting today, that Ockham has become an outsized figure of the later Middle Ages, taking on an aura of significance that he might not have warranted in his own day. It has been moderns looking back who see in Ockham what they want to see – as often happens when we look backwards.

Siedentop, Inventing, 313.

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“This Most Historic of Locations”: Performing Authentic Nationhood at Hastings and Morgarten* Matthias D. Berger Medieval Battlefields and National Authenticity In this essay, I will explore performances of what logic suggests cannot be performed at all: authenticity. More specifically, I am interested in anniversary events that recently took place on two Western European medieval battlefields, the British Hastings and the Swiss Morgarten. At these sites, I will argue, medievalism and nationalism intersected with practices of cultural heritage and national politics to create places richly layered in meanings of rootedness and abiding identity in the twenty-first century. The comparison of these Swiss and British sites, though perhaps not an immediately obvious one, is fruitful for at least three reasons. The first is methodological and has to do with the fact that, without exception, nationalisms claim exceptionalism. By juxtaposing countries greatly differing in size, (geopolitical) history, and cultural traditions, I can put such claims to uniqueness into perspective when dealing with negotiations of national identity. Secondly, both Hastings and Morgarten have traditionally been accorded comparable status as a founding event of the respective nation. They therefore offer a means to interrogate the medievalist foundations of some recent forms * I wish to thank Rory Critten and two anonymous readers for SiM for kind and thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this essay. The essay is based on research conducted in the course of my ongoing PhD project, “United under One Banner?” in which I explore twenty-first-century cultural, social, and political medievalisms that negotiate national identities in Britain and Switzerland. This essay represents part of a thesis chapter on medievalist places in the two countries. Studies in Medievalism XXVII, 2018

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of British (or, more properly, English) and Swiss nationalisms. The strong nexus of medievalism, war, and nationalism is well-established. As Linas Eriksonas has pointed out, European national histories have stressed military conflict at least since Walter Scott popularized the idea of “national history narrated as a series of key battles” with his Tales of a Grandfather: Being Stories Taken from Scottish History.1 In battle narratives, truth and clarity emerge from moments that are, quite literally, on a knife edge. Whether recounting glorious triumph or tragic defeat, such narratives have both underpinned claims to national destiny and, since the nineteenth century, fulfilled the need of different nationalisms (including British and Swiss nationalisms) for “authentic” cultural and political roots in the Middle Ages.2 Andrew Lynch has described the affinity of this quest for national origins with what he calls the “ideology of war” and noted that “the medieval” has become more strongly identified with war than any other period.3 The battles of Hastings and Morgarten differ substantially in the degree to which their respective nation-making character has been overstated. The clearly momentous Hastings faces, in Morgarten, a rather sparsely documented and relatively minor encounter whose fame grew only in later centuries. While I can presuppose at least some general knowledge regarding the battle of Hastings, a brief account of the battle of Morgarten may be in order here. From the thirteenth century, tensions flared periodically between the rural community of Schwyz (in today’s Central Switzerland) and the House of Habsburg over pasture land belonging to Einsiedeln Abbey, which was under the legal protection of the Habsburgs, its Schirmvögte. In 1314, smallholders from Schwyz sacked the abbey and took its inhabitants hostage. Duke Leopold I of Habsburg intervened, although the exact cause and military aim of his campaign remain unclear. The defenders from Schwyz feared for their “imperial immediacy,” that is, the privileged constitutional status Linas Eriksonas, “Towards the Genre of Popular National History: Walter Scott after Waterloo,” in Narrating the Nation: Representations in History, Media and the Arts, ed. Stefan Berger, Linas Eriksonas, and Andrew Mycock (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 117–32 (127). See also Stefan Berger, with Christoph Conrad, The Past as History: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Modern Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 88. Scott’s Tales were first collected in a posthumous five-volume edition in 1836 and went on to become, in variously titled editions, “the most popular Scottish history book between 1828 and 1915” (Eriksonas, “Towards,” 129). Walter Scott, Tales of a Grandfather: Being Stories Taken from Scottish History, 5 vols., The Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott: Vols. XXII–XXVI (Edinburgh: Cadell, 1836). 2 See for instance Pam Clements, “Authenticity,” in Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, ed. Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), 19–26 (20). 3 Andrew Lynch, “Medievalism and the Ideology of War,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, ed. Louise D’Arcens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 135–150 (140f. and 135). I would go as far as to say that, in medievalism, only a (latently) violent Middle Ages is an “authentic” Middle Ages. 1

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of a community placed under the Emperor’s direct authority, free from any local lordship. On 15 November 1315, fighters from Schwyz achieved a surprise victory against Leopold.4 The “Pact of Brunnen,” also known as the Morgartenbrief, documents an alliance formed in the aftermath of the battle by Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden. As of the late fifteenth century, the “Pact” was read as the founding charter of the – since enlarged – “Old Confederacy” (until, that is, the so-called “Federal Charter” from 1291 stole its crown in the late nineteenth century).5 Morgarten would go on to be reinterpreted as the first battle of the so-called “wars of liberation” against encroaching neighbors.6 Increasingly mythicizing accounts amplified on the few nearcontemporary sources, now telling of an Alpine people raining rocks and logs on haughty invaders. The difference between Hastings and Morgarten is thus that between a pitched battle and an ambush, between conquest and successful defense, and between an undisputed watershed event and a regional military episode later stylized as the birth of a nation. A certain common-sense affinity for particular basic national narratives may be ascribed to each. Whereas Hastings is easily made to tell the story of two nations meeting on an equal footing, Morgarten fits narratives of a small nation standing up to a more powerful neighbor. Interestingly, under the influence of medievalism-wielding national-­conservative forces (see below), this David-and-Goliath constellation increasingly finds expression in a Swiss self-image that sees the nation under siege by a hostile European environment. Such divergent affinities notwithstanding – and this is the third advantage I see in comparing Hastings and Morgarten – the two battlefields as places serve similar functions under modern nationalism. For if medieval battles are cornerstones of traditional national histories, medieval battlefields are powerful symbols of centuries-long national continuity. Memory scholars such as Aleida Assmann have highlighted the ability of place to authenticate and stabilize cultural memory, and thus to embody group identity. Assmann points out that, “[w]hile historiography focuses on change and ­development, the Thomas Maissen, Geschichte der Schweiz (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2015), 33f. Roger Sablonier, Gründungszeit ohne Eidgenossen: Politik und Gesellschaft in der Innerschweiz um 1300 (Baden: Hier und Jetzt, 2008), 154–60. 6 See for instance Guy P. Marchal, Schweizer Gebrauchsgeschichte: Geschichtsbilder, Mythenbildung und nationale Identität, 2nd edn. (Basel: Schwabe, 2007), esp. 84–171, and Thomas Maissen, Schweizer Heldengeschichten – und was dahintersteckt (Baden: Hier und Jetzt, 2015), esp. 72–91. For a recent politicized, national-conservative reiteration of the founding myth that integrates the battle into a master narrative of the early military genesis of Switzerland, see Peter Keller, Markus Somm, and Jürg Stüssi-Lauterburg, “Die Schweizer Schlachten: Wie die alten Eidgenossen für ihre Freiheit kämpften, Weltgeschichte schrieben, sich gegenseitig die Köpfe einschlugen, die Neutralität entdeckten und eine Friedensnation bildeten,” 2013, 2nd rev. edn., Die Weltwoche, Special Issue 83 (2015). 4 5

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interest in place emphasizes aspects of continuity in change, of permanence […] and retention.”7 Battlefields like Hastings or Morgarten are prototypical lieux de mémoire, or “memory sites,” even though Pierre Nora’s conceptual framework also includes more abstract focal points of memory to account specifically for national memory.8 According to Assmann, battlefields enshrine a normative national past in quasi-religious fashion: “The sanctification of places through the shedding of the blood of martyrs is not only a Christian tradition but also one that was adopted by political nations which, within a secular framework, made the same claim for their soldiers.”9 At such sites, Assmann writes, “time collapses in a symbolic reclaiming and re-enactment and an unmediated, embodied access to the past seems possible.”10 Both Morgarten and Hastings can be, and indeed recently have been, interpreted as physical manifestations of the alleged exceptionalism of each nation, an exceptionalism perhaps best described as “unique continuity.” The term is commonly applied to Anglophone views of the medieval past, in which the Norman Conquest was the “last successful invasion of Britain,” and gave rise to a nation that subsequently evolved more or less independently from continental Europe.11 Notions of a Swiss “special case” initialized in the Middle Ages equally stress unbroken continuity – apart from that one time the French invaded in 1798, of course.12 Morgarten, in this essentially nineteenth-­century view, is the first in a string of Swiss victories that safeguarded the nation’s freedom and allowed for unique constitutional developments that even now set Switzerland apart from the rest of Europe. I would argue this sense of insularity based on “knowledge” of an uninterrupted national past stretching back to the Middle Ages links current nationalisms in the two countries. Hence the importance of the two battlefields as physical memory sites: the permanent reminders of those heroic deeds of old become places at which to tap into ancient national identity. Aleida Assmann, “How History Takes Place,” in Memory, History, and Colonialism: Engaging with Pierre Nora in Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts, ed. Indra Sengupta, foreword by Hagen Schulze (London: German Historical Institute London, 2009), 151–65 (155f.). 8 Les lieux de mémoire, ed. Pierre Nora, 3 vols. (Paris: Edition Gallimard, 1984–92), and Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire,” Representations 26 (1989): 7–24. See also Assmann, “How History Takes Place,” 151. 9 Assmann, “How History Takes Place,” 160. 10 Assmann, “How History Takes Place,” 159. 11 Siobhan Brownlie, Memory and Myths of the Norman Conquest (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2013), 41. For the notion of “unique continuity,” see for example Richard Utz, “Coming to Terms with Medievalism,” European Journal of English Studies 15.2 (2011): 101–13 (105). 12 For the marginal and highly ambivalent place of the French invasion of Switzerland and the imposed unitary state of the Helvetic Republic (1798–1803) in national memory, see for instance Marchal, Schweizer Gebrauchsgeschichte, 174. 7

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It is necessary to highlight the processual nature of such interactions with place. According to the cultural geographer Tim Cresswell, places are never established, but operate through reiterative everyday and cultural practice.13 The supremely contested nation is a place in this sense.14 As Cresswell points out, conscious attempts to imbue a place with “a sense of pride and belonging” often take the form of “heritage,” “where a sense of rootedness in the past and in place is provided for the consumption of locals and tourists.”15 In this essay, I will thus explore some practices with which the Swiss and English battlefields are made to suggest, pars pro toto, the rootedness of twenty-first-century national identity in the Middle Ages. Specifically, the focus is on on-site practices timed to coincide with significant anniversaries. As Eviatar Zerubavel has pointed out, “periodic fusion with the past” in anniversaries provides yet another powerful mnemonic “bridge” that helps create the impression of continuity necessary for stable collective identities.16 Hence, the battlefields of Hastings in 2016 and of Morgarten in 2015 presented themselves as places of seemingly unmediated, national medievality. They combined, respectively, memories of medieval battles traditionally marked as watershed moments in English and Swiss history and identity formation with the tangible “sameness” of place and the quasi-synchronicity of a 950th and a 700th anniversary. This multiple national coding all but screams “authenticity.” With the myriad ways in which medievalism has channeled the Middle Ages in mind, Pam Clements has suggested four intertwined meanings of the notoriously slippery concept of “authenticity.” For her, the authentic can be understood to mean “historical accuracy,” “the original,” “the authorized version,” and “believability or verisimilitude.”17 In what follows, I will not restrict myself to any one of these meanings, as they clearly intersected and interacted on the battlefields. Rather, I will treat Clements’ tetrad as a useful heuristic for teasing out different claims to authenticity made on behalf of these sites. Irrespective of which senses of authenticity prevail, however, the overdetermined national signification of both battlefields courts the paradox of authenticity described by Jonathan Culler: “The paradox, the dilemma of authenticity, is that to be experienced as authentic it must be marked as authentic, but when it is marked as authentic it is mediated, a sign of Tim Cresswell, Place: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 68–70 and 116. Cresswell defines “place” as “space invested with meaning in the context of power” (19). “Space” and “location,” in contrast, belong to a “realm without meaning” (16), being mere sets of coordinates. I adopt this basic distinction in my essay. 14 Cresswell, Place, 141. 15 Cresswell, Place, 95. 16 Eviatar Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 46f. (emphasis in the original) and 40. 17 Clements, “Authenticity,” 19. 13

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itself, and hence lacks the authenticity of what is truly unspoiled, untouched by mediating cultural codes.”18 In other words, signposting the national authenticity of a medieval battlefield inevitably results in its forfeiting that authenticity, whereas not signposting it at all has the same effect.19 I aim to show some of the different ways in which Hastings and Morgarten are affected by this dilemma, how different practices of place-making intersect at these sites, how national meanings tussle with regional and local ones, and how heritage tourism complicates all these meanings. Hastings is a prime example of national heritage tourism, hosting commercialized events of an interactive yet highly stage-managed sort that suggest more of a cultural than a political nationalism and display only comparatively weak links to regional and local identity. Morgarten, on the other hand, has almost equally strong connections to national politics and to regional and local identity, but clearly struggles against the taint of “myth” in its bid for broader cultural relevance in the twenty-first century. Performing Nationhood I: Hastings, 2016 Battle Abbey in today’s small town of Battle in East Sussex memorializes the battle of Hastings of 14 October 1066, when the Norman Conquest of England took its course. The site is currently managed by the English Heritage Trust. A popular tourist destination, Battle Abbey boasts, among other things, a visitor center, a new gatehouse exhibition on “stories of the abbey in the years after 1066,” a rooftop viewing-platform, a wooden-sculpture trail, and a “hands on history” section with “fun activities for the kids.”20 As is clear from this list of attractions, English Heritage is in the business of processing historical knowledge to accommodate a lay, outsider’s view. At Battle Abbey, we encounter the tension between a place that promises authentic access to the medieval past on the one hand and a location whose accuracy has been contested vigorously of late on the other.21 Battle Jonathan Culler, Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 164. 19 For the idea of “signposts,” “signifiers,” or “tropes” that “create enough of a sense of verisimilitude for audiences to accept a work as ‘medieval,’” see Clements, “Authenticity,” 23f. For a related discussion of period markers creating “authenticity-effects” specifically in medievalist cinema, see Sarah Salih, “Cinematic Authenticity-Effects and Medieval Art: A Paradox,” in Medieval Film, ed. Anke Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 20–39. 20 Quoted from the “Things to See and Do” page of the English Heritage online guide: “1066 Battle of Hastings, Abbey and Battlefield,” English Heritage, , last accessed 1 July 2017. 21 There have been vocal if unconvincing claims for two sites to compete with the accepted site at Battle Abbey. The local historian Nick Austin maintains that the nearby town of 18

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Abbey remains, as English Heritage understandably insists, the far most likely location. Nevertheless, authenticity – in all its senses except possibly “believability” – is hardly a straightforward affair there either. For one thing, the commemorative stone slab marking the spot where Harold allegedly expired now rests in its third, supposedly more accurate, location.22 More to the point, the area used as the battlefield (called the “main arena” by English Heritage) is not really the battlefield, which was likely overbuilt by the abbey.23 The different senses of authenticity interacted in complex ways during the standout event of the Hastings anniversary in 2016: the huge, hour-long battle re-enactment of 15 and 16 October.24 The re-enactment, which on a smaller scale is an annual event, was embedded in a whole host of on-site attractions that strove for greatly varying degrees of immersive realism. These included living history-style camps, combat technique, horsemanship, and falconry demonstrations, “early music” concerts, and a sizeable medieval market, where almost anything from hand-forged arrowheads to plastic helmets was sold to conspicuously modern-day visitors. The re-enactors who populated the area for the weekend, by contrast, sported painstakingly assembled period gear and displayed other aspects of lovingly reconstructed material culture. Here, accuracy, or at least thick verisimilitude, reigned supreme. In this context of visibly oscillating claims to accuracy and verisimilitude, re-enactors are on record enthusing over the authenticity of place, noting how “atmospheric” it is particularly at dusk and dawn, when the modern-day crowd is gone. At the same time, they express reservations about the accuracy of current (authorized!) knowledge of the battlefield’s location. Alluding to Crowhurst is the true site. See Nick Austin, Secrets of the Norman Invasion, 2nd ed. (2010; rev. Crowhurst: Ogmium Press, 2012), and his “The Secrets of the Norman Invasion Blog,” Wordpress, , last accessed 26 July 2017. Meanwhile, John Grehan, another local historian, claims the battle for Caldbec Hill, a mile to the north of the accepted location. See John Grehan and Martin Mace, The Battle of Hastings: The Uncomfortable Truth (Barnsley: Pen & Sword Books, 2012). For a journalistic account of the debate, see Jasper Copping, “One in the Eye for History: Experts Still Fighting over the Site of the Battle of Hastings,” The Daily Telegraph, 13 January 2013, , last accessed 3 September 2017. 22 Maev Kennedy, “Battle of Hastings Memorial Stone Moved to Reflect New Research,” The Guardian, 14 July 2016, , last accessed 3 September 2017. 23 Kennedy, “Battle of Hastings Memorial Stone.” The abbey ruins today arguably function as a metonymic marker of “originary” authenticity on behalf of the unassuming battlefield, not unlike the memorial that stands in for the more elusive battlefield of Morgarten (see below). 24 I witnessed the re-enactment of 15 October, to which date I will be referring in what follows.

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the aforementioned debate, one re-enactor explicitly allows for an element of “conjecture” regarding “which of all these slopes in the area was the actual battlefield.”25 The aporia of embattled yet efficacious authenticity thus persists at Hastings, lending support to Cresswell’s claim that “place […] need not have any fixed location at all.”26 Assmann notes that in memory sites, narrative and place reinforce and mutually authenticate each other.27 With re-enactment, performance is thrown into the mix. At Hastings, exactly 1066 re-enactors (according to the English Heritage advert) and a good fifty horses waged “war” following a strict script. Narrative intervened in the performance and co-created historic place: the re-enactment was accompanied by a running commentary as well as short audio drama parts and medievalist film music, all transmitted by loudspeakers posted around the main arena.28 There are several points to make here. On the one hand, multimedia conventions drawn from televised sporting events (commentary on visible action) and medievalist cinema (orchestral musical accompaniment) were clearly felt by the organizers to heighten, rather than detract from, the authenticity of the show of medieval warfare. This points not only to the strong intermediality to which contemporary medievalisms resort to achieve believability, but more specifically, in the case of recognizable film music, to the way medievalisms have long “form[ed] their own influences, rather than pointing backwards to any medieval sources.”29 Medievalist film music, in this case, became a signifier of authentic medievality in its own right. It should be noted, however, that for some in the audience, commentary and music clearly achieved the opposite effect. Jarring the illusion of authenticityas-verisimilitude, a sense of incongruity risked turning audience involvement in authenticity into hilarity. On a narrative level, the commentary made up for the inevitable representational deficits of re-enactors prodding gingerly at one another with blunted spearheads. Health and safety regulations applied, and unsurprisingly, the “shedding of the blood of martyrs” I have mentioned was replicated only Both comments are quoted from a Sky News Facebook livestream retrieved from YouTube: “Sky News Facebook Live: Battle of Hastings – Rebecca Williams,” YouTube video, 11:10, 15 October 2016, , last accessed 3 September 2017. The reporter, Rebecca Williams, also mentions “an incredible atmosphere,” but specifically referring to the Anglo-Saxon camp where she is interviewing re-enactors. This again suggests secondary, performative authenticity in addition to that of the physical place. 26 Cresswell, Place, 37. 27 Assmann, “How History Takes Place,” 159. 28 See also Siobhan Brownlie’s brief account of the 2010 re-enactment in her Memory and Myths of the Norman Conquest, vii–viii. 29 Andrew B. R. Elliott, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017), 31. 25

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metonymically. Again, the narrative authenticity-effect cut both ways whenever the discrepancy between impassioned narrative and tame performance became too obvious. Perhaps more importantly, the commentary forged the (to a general audience) potentially incomprehensible maneuvering into a coherent plot and emotively brought home the significance of the battle. It is from this commentary that I have drawn my title: echoing the sentiment voiced by the re-enactors, the speaker pleaded authenticity by invoking “this most historic of locations” on “this most historic of dates.”30 The identity thus authenticated at first seemed firmly “Anglo-Saxon.” The commentator blurred the boundaries between the audience and the AngloSaxon re-enactors by urging the audience to cheer on “Harold, your king, come here to defend English rights against those foreign invaders.” He then encouraged the crowd to join in the “English” chant of “ut, ut, ut!” to “[s]end these Normans and Frenchmen back the way they came.” The appropriation of the Anglo-Saxons as part of a transhistorical England, and the othering of the Normans, was indeed taken up by a crowd readier to cheer the Anglo-Saxons. By the end of the battle, however, the commentator encouraged them to cheer for the Norman conquerors. Even though the somewhat unruly crowd cheered and booed in equal measure, the narrative framing the re-enactment was precisely that of the Conquest as the last successful invasion of Britain. By extension, Hastings becomes the forge of a recognizable English identity, into which the Normans get fully absorbed. English Heritage, ultimately, presents the performers as re-enacting an older version of the national self, irrespective of whether they are re-enacting Normans or Anglo-Saxons. On the “evidence” of place and date, this is a traditional affirmation of strong and stable national identity since 1066.31 Given the immediate context in 2016, I was particularly interested in the way the battle was made to speak to the present politically. Perhaps unsurprisingly, English Heritage eschewed political commentary of any kind. I did overhear “King Harold” – science lecturer Kendall Kinrade in real life – telling a reporter that the Conquest could be described as heralding a long period of English orientation toward Europe, as well as being a military catastrophe for the English. Downplaying the symbolism of the 950th anniversary of the battle in the year of the Brexit vote, he joked that he preferred having a referendum on the future of the country to settling things on the battlefield. What perhaps struck me most about the event as a whole in this context was quite As with “place,” “date” was used in a loose sense that encompassed both the year (1066) and the approximate day (in the case of this re-enactment, 15 rather than 14 October). 31 This seems to be established practice at these re-enactments. Compare Brownlie’s comment on the 2010 re-enactment: “the commentator follows the example set by Walter Scott in Ivanhoe in setting up initially a strong antagonism between Saxons and Normans, but ending the re-enactment commentary with a tale of acceptance of the new ruler and reconciliation” (Memory and Myths of the Norman Conquest, 129). 30

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how many spectators, re-enactors, and vendors came from all over Europe: French, German, Italian, and several eastern European nationalities were represented.32 In fact, an unnamed English re-enactor in an interview with Sky News took it for granted that this jubilee re-enactment would be “historic for [the many foreign re-enactors] too.”33 For all the second-hand xenophobia in the commentary and the crowd’s sporting event-like partisanship, the claims to authentic age-old identity did not translate into exclusionary links made to Brexit. And so the most memorable Brexit-related comment came from a wag in the crowd, who announced to a friend that a “Frexit” was imminent as the Normans were repulsed at the shield wall. For many in the audience of approximately 16,000, this was clearly primarily a family outing and an exotic spectacle. The re-enactors, for their part, not only visibly relished the dressing-up and the workout, but were pleased to find an eager audience on whom to impart specialist knowledge of medieval material culture. In their case, prestige accrued from the stewardship of multiple aspects of authenticity: from knowledge of cultural origins, from the display of historical accuracy in their “kit,” and from being aware of authorized knowledge of the events of 950 years previously – and of challenges to such knowledge. Conversely, some very English Normans I encountered showed a responsible didactic impulse when they explained to a gaggle of children that all the animosity was just for show and that no one got harmed. Despite the strong national meanings coaxed from the battlefield, then, the various participants clearly had very diverse motives (familial, educational, athletic, spectatorial, consumerist) for taking part in the commemoration. This certainly complicates, though does not negate, the emplaced show of authentic national identity pushed by English Heritage. Performing Nationhood II: Morgarten, 2015 Even more than at Hastings, significance of place contends with obscurity of location in the case of Morgarten. A hamlet called Morgarten is part of the small lakeside town of Oberägeri in the canton of Zug. Yet, as the battlefield has proved impossible to localize exactly, both Zug and Schwyz have claimed “ownership” of the battle in the past. This bred bad blood when Zug erected a battle memorial in their hamlet in 1908 to rival the far older battle chapel in Sattel in the canton of Schwyz.34 For the seventh centenary in 2015, however, Brownlie describes having a similar reaction at the involvement of French re-enactors on the Anglo-Saxon side in the 2010 re-enactment (Memory and Myths of the Norman Conquest, 195). 33 Quoted from “Sky News Facebook Live: Battle of Hastings – Rebecca Williams.” 34 Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, s.v. “Morgartenkrieg,” , last accessed 21 July 2017, and s.v. “Oberägeri,” , last accessed 22 July 2017. 32

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both cantons for the first time in history celebrated the battle together.35 A supracantonal organizing committee undertook various projects under the motto “Adventure of History” (“Abenteuer Geschichte”) to heighten the profile of the anniversary. Authenticity of place took center stage: a new visitor information center was opened in 2015 in Sattel, close to the cantonal border, just next to the officially “oldest wooden building in Europe,” the “Schwyzerhaus” (originally built around 1170), which was reconstructed for museum purposes in the same year.36 Moreover, a thematic “Morgarten Path” since connects the parish church of Sattel and the Oberägeri memorial.37 Most prominently, the committee organized a three-day public festival in June in the environs of the memorial, which featured a sizeable Swiss army show and airshow, a medieval market, folk-music concerts, fireworks, and a ritual procession. The festival had strong political undertones. The official ceremonial act included a speech by Federal Councilor Ueli Maurer of the conservative Swiss People’s Party (SVP). Speaking close to the memorial, he accused the community of historians of dismissing the medieval origins of Switzerland as mere invention. The historians’ caviling, Maurer claimed, was not academic in nature but politically motivated.38 Maurer’s speech was part of a concerted national-conservative attempt in 2015 to capitalize on this and other historical anniversaries, such as those of the battle of Marignano (1515) and the Congress of Vienna (1815), to reanimate the discredited complex of Swiss national myths for Euroskeptic and party-political ends. This included a succession of articles and editorials in publications friendly to the SVP cause as well as several speeches and public debates with well-known historians. As at Hastings, the battle of Morgarten is commemorated annually on a smaller scale. The yearly acts of remembrance (also part of the 2015 celebrations, of course) include a firearm marksmanship competition in Oberägeri and a public reading in Sattel of the so-called Schlachtbrief (“battle epistle”) composed in 1940, which commemorates the event and the “Swiss” casualties in a religious vein. See “The Annual Act of Remembrance” page on the official website of the Morgarten Trust: Morgarten – Abenteuer Geschichte, , last accessed 21 July 2017, and Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, s.v. “Gedenkfeiern,” , last accessed 22 July 2017. 36 “Reconstruction of the Historic Schwyzerhaus of 1170,” Morgarten – Abenteuer Geschichte, , last accessed 21 July 2017. 37 “Gedenkfeiern mit spezieller Wirkung,” Morgarten – Abenteuer Geschichte, , last accessed 21 July 2017. 38 The speech was published shortly afterwards as “Was uns Morgarten heute noch bedeutet: Die Rede von Bundesrat Ueli Maurer anlässlich des Jubiläumfestes ‘700 Jahre Schlacht am Morgarten’ vom 21. Juni 2015 beim Morgarten-Denkmal” in the 26 June 2015 issue of the party newspaper of the SVP’s Zurich branch, retrieved from “Zürcher Bote,” SVP des Kantons Zürich, , last accessed 21 June 2017. 35

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The SVP has, in fact, long worked toward turning the medievalist liberation narrative into “party-nationalism.”39 It is in this context of a memory site occupied, as it were, by the conservative right that we have to consider the media stir created by the news that, earlier in 2015, a metal-detector search of the suspected battlefield area had yielded finds (including some silver pfennigs, two daggers, several knives and belt buckles) dating at least in part from the time around 1315.40 The tabloids were quick to sensationalize this as proof positive that the battle had taken place, conveniently ignoring the fact that historical scholarship had never doubted this in the first place.41 Maurer in his speech similarly speculated that not even these archeological finds would sway the critics, “in [whose] view all our history is just a patriotic delusion.”42 A more level-headed expert evaluation later found that the pieces failed unambiguously to pinpoint the battle site.43 The main point here, however, is that attempts by both politicians and the media to shore up the national significance of the battle had recourse to what some might consider the highest form of authenticity: that of what Clements refers to as “the original.”44 Such recourse all but bypassed questions of interpretation and flouted the version of history authorized by recent historians, a version thus demoted to the status of inadequate authenticity. Maurer’s appeal to “original” objects amounts to little more than intellectual subterfuge and political point-scoring against the straw man The term is from Thomas Zaugg, Blochers Schweiz: Gesinnungen, Ideen, Mythen (Zurich: Verlag Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 2014), 117f., my translation. For the way the SVP has co-opted national medievalism, see Guy P. Marchal, “Medievalism, the Politics of Memory and Swiss National Identity,” in The Uses of the Middle Ages in Modern European States: History, Nationhood and the Search for Origins, ed. R. J. W. Evans and Guy P. Marchal (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 197–220, and Marchal, “Die Schweizer und ihr Mittelalter: Missbrauch der Geschichte?,” Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte 55.2 (2005): 131–48. 40 The search was instigated by the Morgarten Interest Group and Swiss national television, in whose science show “Einstein” the finds were first presented to the public. For an archeological evaluation, see Anette JeanRichard, Stefan Hochuli, and Eva Roth Heege, “Sensation oder Medienhype? Resultate der archäologischen Prospektion im vermuteten Schlachtgelände von Morgarten,” retrieved from Morgarten – Abenteuer Geschichte, , last accessed 14 April 2017. 41 See for instance “Archäologen begeistert: ‘Das ist nahe einer Sensation!,’” Blick (18 June 2015). 42 Maurer, “Was uns Morgarten heute noch bedeutet,” 1, my translation. 43 JeanRichard, Hochuli, and Roth Heege, “Sensation oder Medienhype?,” 23. 44 Clements, “Authenticity,” 19. For an analogue in the use of archeological finds for authenticity-effects in documentary films, see Miriam Sénécheau, “Der Fund als Fakt? Zur Rolle und Funktion archäologischer Funde in Dokumentarfilmen,” in Echte Geschichte: Authentizitätsfiktionen in populären Geschichtskulturen, ed. Eva Ulrike Pirker, Mark Rüdiger, Christa Klein, Thorsten Leiendecker, Carolyn Oesterle, Miriam Sénécheau, and Michiko Uike-Bormann (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010), 93–110. 39

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of the unpatriotic historian. Actual historian Valentin Groebner later commented dryly that “[t]he expert as the enemy” was an “interesting aspect of national memory culture.”45 At the very least, this episode indicates the continued ability of a politicized Morgarten to mobilize and consternate in equal measure. For the remainder of this section, I will again focus on an instance of performance-dominated place-making: the open-air play Morgarten: Der Streit geht weiter (“Morgarten: The Fight Goes On”), also promoted as the Morgarten-Spektakel (“Morgarten Spectacle”).46 Running from 7 August to 12 September, the performance had live musical accompaniment and featured a cast of lay actors. Significantly, it was staged in front of the memorial and marketed as taking place in the “original location.” The memorial, then, fully stands in for a place whose location remains unknown. It must be highlighted that, in contrast to the Hastings re-enactment, claims to authenticity did not entail attempts at accuracy or mimetic realism here, as was witnessed especially by the largely tokenistic and often fantastical costume choices for the play’s medieval scenes. The plot of Morgarten is driven by the jester who once served Leopold of Habsburg. In 2015, he wakes from a 700-year slumber at Morgarten with a baffling memory gap regarding the battle. He successively remembers events due to the “sameness” of the land. Past and present play out literally in parallel: the minimalist set design consisted almost solely of three staggered wooden stages opposite the seating rows. On the one hand, the jester and a troupe of fellow fools from all over the centuries revisit events leading up to the battle in 1315. On the other hand, they watch an organizing committee struggle to suitably celebrate the battle in the twenty-first-century present. In the event, a singing contest between choirs from the rival cantons of Zug and Schwyz gets out of hand amid conflicting ideas on whether to commemorate Morgarten in a patriotic vein or more critically. The medieval and modern timelines converge as the two choirs start a fight while the medieval Swiss and Habsburgs do likewise in the background. The jester intervenes, freezing the mirror scenes mid-combat. Invoking the fool’s license, he turns to the audience and asks whether Swiss identity would be compromised if we knew the battle did not take place. Morgarten closes with both choirs yodeling in unison. Valentin Groebner, “Mittelalterliche Jubiläumsschlachten: Was sind die Ursprünge der Schweiz?” retrieved from Valentin Groebner’s University profile page, , last accessed 14 August 2016. My translation. 46 I attended the performance of 9 September 2015. I am grateful to Urs Zürcher from production management for making video footage of a complete performance (of an unspecified date) available to me. My observations are thus based on both memory and a video recording of the show. 45

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The play very much revolves around the permanence of place and the timelessness of identity. Initially, the seemingly unbridgeable divide of 700 years is stressed by comments on the scarcity of evidence of the battle. But as the full title indicates, insistent performative parallelization of medieval and modern events, behavior, and, eventually, even costume all suggest history as unbroken continuity. Present identities appear to be almost entirely continuations of past ones. This sense of timelessness is authenticated by references to, and the use of stage as, the “original” site. Time is mapped onto space, and as the jesters wander from the fourteenth to the twenty-first century, the “authentic” place marked by the memorial becomes an unproblematic gateway between the medieval past and the present. Awareness of Morgarten-as-myth is signaled throughout, however. The jester, a suitably skeptical figure, wonders aloud whether battles ought to be celebrated at all, and points to the tampering and self-fashioning inherent in historical narratives. Choir members performatively prove his point by displaying the whole gamut of competing attitudes toward the battle, from feting it as a founding event of the Swiss nation to rejecting all the patriotic fuss. Self-reflexivity regarding a place-based process of remembering is furthermore symbolized by the memorial, which was veiled and used as a projection surface for the show. Several miniature copies of the memorial scattered across the grounds served the same purpose. Authenticity of place and history, though explicitly asserted throughout, is thus at the same time knowingly undercut as plural and malleable. However, in what we could call a meta-mythical move, the play ultimately suggests that Morgarten unites the nation because it is largely a blank projection surface.47 A telling scene shows the jesters spontaneously joining in an oath of solidarity taken by the fourteenth-century Confederates they have been observing, which is clearly modeled on the nationally charged “Rütli Oath.” Here, all skeptical distance collapses as the fools participate in affirmative re-enactment and national ritual. This comments obliquely on the fact that the real audience from all over (German-speaking) Switzerland were themselves taking part in ritual commemoration by attending a Morgarten play, however irreverent, on “historic” ground. In fact, in this reading, the audience made the ground historic – that is, authenticated it – in the first place through their very participation in the events. Authenticity in this case tends toward Clements’ third sense as “the authorized version.” Actors and audience together performed and displayed the process of (re-)authorization For meta-mythical memory, which co-opts the critical and self-reflexive stance typical of historical scholarship to reinforce rather than diminish the power of the remembered past to prop up group identities, see Stephanie Wodianka, Zwischen Mythos und Geschichte: Ästhetik, Medialität und Kulturspezifik der Mittelalterkonjunktur (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 214–16.

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of a historical event, a process best characterized, perhaps, as one of knowing yet efficacious invention of tradition. Such manufactured authenticity was, again, mirrored in the use of the monument: at the close, an image of the monument itself was projected onto the veiled monument. In Morgarten, the simulacrum thus achieves a paradoxical “authenticity” of its own and, it appears, will do nicely for national identity. Ironic in tone yet ultimately affirmative, the play thus echoed, if in a less dogged manner, conservative politicians like Maurer, who all year had insisted on the national importance of medievalist myths as myths. Conclusion: Heritage, Politics, and Medievalist Nostalgia At these anniversary celebrations, medieval battles worked together with the permanence of place to authenticate national identities. More specifically, on-site festivities in both the English and the Swiss case performatively and narratively framed a place in national and medievalist terms, producing various kinds of authenticity in the process. We should note some differences, however, regarding the ability of the two places also to speak to regional or local identities. Hastings clearly is a regional memory site as well as a national one: both before and during so-called “Hastings Week,” there were many other festive occasions, large and small, in what the tourist business calls “1066 Country.” Some had little to no connection to the battle, but were nevertheless aligned by organizers with the battlefield commemoration. An example of loose association was the ROOT 1066 Festival of Contemporary Arts, which took place in Hastings from 3 September to 16 October. Besides clearly 1066related material, it also included explorations of local identity more broadly with such diverse exhibitions as the Hastings Museum and Art Gallery’s “The Story of Hastings in 66 Objects” and “Hastings Speaks: A Day in the Life of a Town,” for which locals “from all walks of life recorded their day using words, images, digital media and conversations.”48 The torchlight procession, bonfire, and fireworks display that took place on 15 October courtesy of the Hastings Borough Bonfire Society had even less to do with the battle, but naturally figured in the battle-dominated “Hastings Week” brochure.49 In Quoted from pages 8 and 34 of the festival brochure, as retrieved from Root 1066 – An International Festival of Contemporary Arts, , last accessed 24 April 2017. 49 The Sussex bonfire festivals commemorate the foiled Gunpowder Plot and the Protestant martyrs of the Marian Persecutions. See “Sussex Bonfire Tradition,” Hastings Borough Bonfire Society, , last accessed 20 July 2017. I thank Clare Simmons for pointing out to me that the bonfire event at Battle traditionally takes place in early November to mark Guy Fawkes Night. This appears still to be the case today. The way the earlier Hastings bonfire event has been incorporated into a week of commemorations 48

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this latter case, the authenticity attributed to place swims out of its medieval focus to extend to, and draw additional authenticity from, traditions wholly unrelated to the battle. In an escalation of Culler’s paradox, a memory site here accretes to it an overabundance of premodern meanings and risks dispelling a sense of authenticity that, perhaps, it protests a little too much. It must be said, however, that the battlefield itself more consistently valorizes national than regional or local identity, even – or perhaps especially – at a re-enactment drawing such an international crowd. The Morgarten battlefield, on the other hand, while also predominantly staged as a national memory site, has stronger local and regional meanings. Even more than Hastings, Morgarten is a peg onto which all kinds of regional heritage have been hung. The festival, for instance, was unashamedly provincial in its line-up of musicians, and the procession prominently featured associations of local farmers.50 I cannot imagine this holding too much interest even for many French- or Italian-speaking Swiss, let alone for foreign v­ isitors – except perhaps as a touristy display of the hackneyed kind of Swissness that so embarrasses many urban Swiss. The play, too, was directed at a narrow audience of Swiss dialect-speakers; only the Habsburg characters spoke standard German. In combination with the outlandish costumes worn by Leopold and his entourage, this linguistic “foreignness” marked them as a vaguely inauthentic other. The cast of lay actors exclusively from Central Switzerland further bolstered Morgarten’s – and Morgarten’s – regional credentials. We should note, however, how easily things slip from the regional into the national in the so-called Waldstätte (a term collectively referring to the early confederates of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden), whose sense of independence and self-conception as the “original Switzerland” sat side-by-side at the memory site of Morgarten. For instance, the proudly parochial procession also hosted delegations from other cantons (some of them in medieval garb), which served to flaunt the national dimension of “one’s Morgarten.” I have already touched on differences in explicit political appropriation. Whereas Morgarten was used unapologetically as a stage for high politics, Hastings was not. There are historical reasons why the strong (conservative) political showing at Morgarten would be widely perceived as an integral and authentic aspect of the memory site rather than an instance of inadmissible instrumentalization. Facile parallels between Swiss military resilience then ­ edicated to the battle of Hastings, however, to me suggests distinctly local claims to d authentic heritage that clearly do not shy away from more or less tacit commemorative syncretism. The motive of keeping heritage tourists in Hastings a little longer is likely to play a part in this. 50 The procession celebrated a fascinating layering of sub-national authenticities, as Central Swiss societies in medieval-style garb followed on the heels of modern-day military bands from regional regiments, which in turn were preceded by a parade of vintage farm-tractors owned by local aficionados.

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and now are a stock feature of Morgarten medievalism. Moreover, as I have mentioned, the Swiss militia army – both the hobby horse of Maurer’s SVP and an enduring, controversial issue of national politics – was a prominent presence at the festivities. This political dimension of Morgarten is thoroughly internalized by the local community and embraced as an opportunity to present to the nation a local and regional take on Swissness. But clearly, the greater degree to which Hastings is caught up in cultural heritage tourism also plays an important part in its careful de-politicization. To a far greater extent than Morgarten, the place is a well-established, all-year tourist attraction and needs to accommodate people from all over. Perhaps the decidedly global(ized) cultural strategies of authentication such as the musical invocations of (English-language) medievalist cinema during the reenactment can be interpreted as evidence of a nationalism that is acceptable only in cultural, not in political, form. In this staged performance of the nation, any protestations of patriotic sentiment are enwrapped in entertainment, consumerism, and gestures toward knowledge transfer. Still, it bears remembering that, while cultural heritage is rarely narrowly instrumental politically, it is never altogether apolitical.51 As the heritage scholars Yudhishthir Raj Isar, Dacia Viejo-Rose, and Helmut K. Anheier have pointed out, matters of authenticity, ownership, and representation raise intrinsically political questions: “Whose heritage is it? Whose voice is more authentic, or more legitimate in claiming the right to ‘interpret’ a site? Who has the right to publicly remember and be remembered?”52 And so the more participatory nature of the commercial event at Hastings is still absorbed, despite the absence of a top-down political agenda, by the small-c conservative use of a medievalist place whose national significance today is far from “natural” or self-evident. As I have suggested above, neither battlefield is immune to Culler’s paradox of authenticity. Authenticity, although marked to excess, is more or less transparent as artifice, and hence as the sum of so many “authenticityeffects,” at both sites. Assmann calls the place of memory “a ‘here and then’” that “can only be half authentic” because it lacks “the solid bond between here and now.”53 Perhaps, but visitor numbers and media coverage tell another See William Logan, Ullrich Kockel, and Máiread Nic Craith, “The New Heritage Studies: Origins and Evolution, Problems and Prospects,” in A Companion to Heritage Studies, ed. William Logan, Ullrich Kockel, and Máiread Nic Craith (New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 1–25 (16). 52 Yudhishthir Raj Isar, Dacia Viejo-Rose, and Helmut K. Anheier, “Introduction” to Heritage, Memory and Identity, ed. Helmut Anheier and Yudhishthir Raj Isar, with guest ed. Dacia Viejo-Rose, Cultures and Globalization 4 (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2011), 1–20 (5). 53 Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 323. 51

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story. They suggest that the Middle Ages physically half-present at these sites today go at least some way toward answering many people’s desire to experience authentic history. Indeed, the visitors of Morgarten and Hastings were willing to put up with a good deal of inauthentic simulacra in their search for such authenticity. That this suggests a fair measure of tolerance also of the kind of essentialism that comes with notions of “authentic identity” rooted in place seems evident enough. As academics in the humanities, we may find such essentialism objectionable. But then, we are members of an academy for which a certain degree of cosmopolitanism, or at least a willingness to break camp, is increasingly desirable if not a requirement. Perhaps we are not ideally placed intuitively to comprehend the sense of uprooting that is at the heart of what Cresswell has described as the “general [modern] condition” of “creeping placelessness.”54 Yet if it is also true, as Culler argues, that “[o]ne of the characteristics of modernity is the belief that authenticity has been lost and only exists in the past,” I would argue it is exactly to places such as Hastings or Morgarten that we may want to look as scholars of medievalism.55 These battlefields teach us how the warlike Middle Ages of national history offer easy authenticity rooted in place, and thus cater to cultural, social, and political nostalgias all at once.

Cresswell, Place, 76. Culler, Framing the Sign, 160.

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Kingdoms of Infinite Space: Three Responses to the Kingis Quair* Lotte Reinbold In August 1868, the Pre-Raphaelite artist and poet William Bell Scott decided to propose an edition of the first Scottish dream-poem, the Kingis Quair, for publication. For several years, he had been decorating Penkill Castle in Ayrshire with a series of murals that depict key scenes from the poem. Each summer, beginning in June 1865, Scott visited the house, the home of the Boyd family, and continued this grand undertaking. The murals still survive today, but, as Scott was to discover, fresco painting in the Scottish climate presents a number of difficulties. Each summer when he returned to continue his work, he discovered that damp had permeated the thick walls of the castle, causing the murals to crumble away. After numerous attempts to remedy the pernicious effects of the climate, Scott was eventually forced to conclude that he was fighting a losing battle. He lamented, “I think the advantage of fresco is pretty much given up. I fancy we shall never take to fresco again in this country, unless it be on carefully prepared interior walls.”1 A printed edition of the poem, then, accompanied by etchings produced in preparation for the frescoes, would provide a more lasting form of the images, placed alongside the context of the dream poem itself. Yet, in a twist of fate that will prove sadly familiar to many scholars, Scott found that he had been beaten to it. About to ask Walter Skeat for permission to view Skeat’s revised version of the poem, Scott learned that the Scottish Texts Society was to publish it.2 * I would like to express my thanks to Dr. Kylie Murray and Professor Helen Cooper for their support and insightful comments on this essay. 1 William Bell Scott, “Mural Decorations at the Mansion of Sir Walter Trevelyan, Bart., at Wallington,” a paper read at the meeting of the Royal Institute of British Architects, 2 December 1867. Via Vera Walker, “The Life and Work of William Bell Scott, 1811– 1890,” unpublished dissertation, University of Durham (1951), 209. 2 William Bell Scott, “Essay on the King’s Quair,” in Illustrations of the “King’s Quair” of James I of Scotland (Edinburgh: privately printed by T&A Constable at the University Studies in Medievalism XXVII, 2018

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Worse was to come. Scott’s next idea was to produce a ­modernized version of the poem, believing that many potential readers of the poem were dissuaded by its linguistic and grammatical difficulty. Just as he had completed his task, a modernized version produced by William MacKean appeared in print (1886). Eventually, Scott resolved only to publish his etchings, alongside a brief, introductory essay. It is this privately printed volume that survives today.3 Scott’s introductory essay to his etchings of the Kingis Quair conveys a sense of personal disappointment that his particular project failed to break new ground. Scott’s struggle to find an original contribution to the publication history of the Kingis Quair speaks of a sustained interest in the Kingis Quair beyond his own: a desire not only to see it in print, but to see it read and appreciated by a wide audience. It is precisely this widespread interest in the poem that this essay addresses. The Kingis Quair has stimulated responses from a range of authors and artists, spanning multiple genres and time-periods. This essay examines three of these responses, spanning a period of more than two hundred years: the satirical travelog by Washington Irving, The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (1819–20), the etchings of W. B. Scott (1868), and a fantasy novella by Diana Wynne Jones, “The True State of Affairs” (first published 1995). All three of these works relate to ideas of temporality in James’s poem: what it means to be a prisoner of one’s own time, how the medieval relates to the modern, how the voices of the past speak still, and require an answer. Moreover, all three responses find in the Quair something of relevance both to our understanding of the medieval, and the particular historical circumstances in which the response was composed; within the nutshell of the poem, tied to a particular, and to some extent obscure, moment in Scottish history, there is boundless capacity for new invention and self-assertion, infinite space. I argue that all three works treat the poem as a mirror upon the world in which they respond, using its evocation of timeless desire in the distant past as an impetus for a more urgent self-analysis. This is a timely subject. As I write, the “medieval” is being grossly misinterpreted, adopted by far-right hate groups as a vision of ancient “purity,” as a type of historical blueprint or even justification for the worst and cruelest persecutions of the human race. Now more than ever, we must look to the past and to how we have responded to it in our own literature; not to glorify or erase, but to question, to challenge, and to understand. Press, 1887), 7. Scott mistakenly writes that the Early English Text Society published an edition, but it was in fact the Scottish Texts Society. 3 Scott’s decision to privately publish the book means that it had a very limited print run of 110 copies. Many surviving copies are dedicated to significant literary figures: the edition recently acquired by Cambridge University Library, number 97, was dedicated by the artist to Alfred Lord Tennyson.

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The poem itself survives in only one manuscript copy, Bodleian Library MS Arch. Selden B.24. The manuscript is a late fifteenth- or early sixteenthcentury “household book,” a compilation of English and Scottish verse that contains a number of works by Chaucer, and some, like Lydgate’s Complaint of the Black Knight, erroneously attributed to him.4 The Kingis Quair, however, is positioned at the core of the manuscript from folios 192r to 211r, and attributed to its most likely author, King James I of Scotland.5 This emphatic identification of the poem’s author can be traced back to the poem itself, though the manuscript postdates James by at least fifty years. The poem encompasses a dream vision recounted by an imprisoned figure. Captured at sea when he was a child, he is confined to a tower cell, where he reads Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and contemplates the nature of his imprisonment. Gazing from his window, he sees a beautiful woman walking in the gardens below. Instantly, he falls deeply in love with her, the strength of his passion making his imprisonment even harder to bear. Weeping, the dreamer falls into an uneasy sleep at his window. He dreams that he is within a dazzling crystal temple, the Temple of Venus, filled with lovers petitioning Venus, with mixed success. There, he meets Venus and asks her for advice on his romantic suit. Venus expresses her limitations while the dreamer is imprisoned, but sends him to Minerva, the Goddess of Wisdom, for advice. Minerva advises the dreamer to focus upon the ethical, moral aspect of his love and to foreground this above amatory desire.6 Finally, the dreamer meets the goddess Fortune, next to her Wheel upon which men continually rise and fall. Fortune warns the dreamer, in Boethian style, that her nature is to be eternally changeable, sometimes raising up and as often casting down. But the dreamer, trusting in the permanence of his love, and, in particular, its foundation in ethics and wisdom rather than just amatory desire, climbs willingly upon the The description of the codex as a “household book” was coined by Julia Boffey in “Bodleian  Library, MS Arch. Selden. B. 24 and Definitions of the ‘Household Book,’” in The English Medieval Book, ed. A. S. G. Edwards, Vincent Gillespie, and Ralph Hanna  (London: British Library, 2000), 125–34. For a full list of contents, see Julia Boffey  and A. S. G. Edwards, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and the “Kingis Quair”: A Facsimile of Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Arch. Selden B.24 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), 1–3. 5 On the construction of the manuscript, see Julia Boffey, “The Kingis Quair and the Poems of Bodleian Library MS Arch. Selden. B. 24,” in A Companion to Early Scottish Poetry, ed. P. Bawcutt and J. Hadley Williams (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), 63–74, and Boffey and Edwards, “Introduction,” Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 1–28. See also T. S. Miller, “Chaucer Abroad, Chaucer at Home: MS Arch. Selden B4 as the ‘Scottish Ellesmere,’” Chaucer Review 47.1 (2012): 25–47. 6 On Venus’s advice, see Sally Mapstone, “Kingship and the Kingis Quair,” in The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray, ed. Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 52–69. 4

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wheel. As he climbs, Fortune pinches him sharply upon the ear, waking the dreamer from his sleep. Though it seems that his dream has ended, a turtledove comes to his cell, bearing a note promising him success in his romantic suit and written upon a sprig of gillyflowers. The closing stanzas of the poem reveal that the dreamer and the lady were married, and that the poem is being written from a perspective of maturity, having overcome significant hardship and adversity. All is well. There is much that is seemingly autobiographical about the poem. James I was indeed captured at sea by the English and held as a prisoner for much of his early life, though the “strayte ward and […] strong prisoun”7 that confine the dreamer owe more to the imprisonment of Boethius in the Consolation of Philosophy than any historical actuality.8 Additionally, there is the fact that MS Arch. Selden B.24 contains a handwritten colophon in a sixteenth-century hand facing the beginning of the poem and attributing it to James: “Heirefter followis the quair maid be King James of Scotland the first callit the kingis quair and maid quhan his majestie wes in Ingland.”9 However, this evidence alone does not conclusively demonstrate James’s authorship. As well as the fact that the only surviving manuscript of the poem was created after James’s death, MS Arch. Selden B.24 is, as I have already observed, rife with misattributions: a fact made more troubling by the knowledge that it is the only surviving witness to the poem. Nonetheless, it seems reasonable to conclude that the poem was indeed written by the Scottish monarch during the period of his imprisonment, rather than by an impersonating figure; as Kylie Murray observes, “Recent scholars generally accept that while not conclusively by James, the poem is clearly to be understood as being about him.”10 Alessandra Petrina concludes, “It is more critically correct to attribute the poem to James, treating narrator, subject and author as one person, than to conjure up a completely obscure James I of Scotland, The Kingis Quair, in The Kingis Quair and Other Prison Poems, ed. Linne R. Mooney and Mary-Jo Arn (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2005), line 169. 8 James was briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London, but spent much of his imprisonment at Windsor Castle, where he was allowed relative freedom. For details of James’s imprisonment, see E. W. M. Balfour-Melville, The English Captivity of James I, King of Scots (London: G. Bell and Sons for the Historical Association, 1929), and Michael Brown, James I (Edinburgh: Canongate Academic, 1994). 9 Louise Fradenberg suggests that the heading may have been written by a member of the St. Clair family, for whom the manuscript was produced. “The Scottish Chaucer,” in Writing After Chaucer, ed. Daniel J. Pinti (New York and London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1998), 167–76 (172). 10 Kylie Murray, “Out of My Contree: Visions of Royal Authority in the Courts of James I and James II, 1424–1460,” in Medieval and Early Modern Representations of Authority in Scotland and the British Isles, ed. Kate Buchanan and Lucinda H. S. Dean with Michael Penman (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 214–34 (215). 7

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and supremely brilliant poet who decided to write this masterpiece and to attribute it to somebody else.”11 The enduring interest in the poem is surely attributable to this autobiographical element, the poem providing a rare insight into the heart and mind of the nascent monarch.12 Yet until relatively recently, much of the poem’s critical attention has been focused on the poem’s relationship with its Chaucerian and Boethian influences and upon its conventional elements, rather than the particular character of its narrator.13 It is true, too, that dreampoems other than the Kingis Quair have received contemporary responses and reworkings. Chaucer’s House of Fame has been particularly influential: to list just two examples, Alexander Pope’s poem “The Temple of Fame” (1715) was directly influenced by Chaucer’s original, and contemporary poet Douglas Oliver rewrote the poem in his long narrative work “The Video House of Fame” (2003). However, this essay argues that the interest shown in the Kingis Quair by Crayon, Scott, and Wynne Jones is more significant than a desire simply to update or revisit a medieval poem. Rather, it is an interest founded in the belief that the Kingis Quair in particular represents a lively and significant sparking point for concerns about nationalism, literary heritage, and the artistic self. A Man in Time: The Travels of Geoffrey Crayon It was the good fortune of James, however, to be gifted with a powerful poetic fancy, and to be visited in his prison by the choicest inspirations of the muse. Some minds corrode and grow inactive, under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the poet to become tender and imaginative in the loneliness of confinement. He banquets upon the honey of his own thoughts, and, like the captive bird, pours forth his soul in melody.14 Washington Irving’s gently satirical travelogue The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent features a surprisingly tender moment in which the eponymous Alessandra Petrina, The “Kingis Quair” of James I of Scotland (Padua: Unipress, 1997), 30. See Mapstone, “Kingship and the Kingis Quair,” and Murray, “Out of My Contree.” Murray argues that the Carthusian seal associated with the poem demonstrates that he was largely understood to be its author, and that the poem sparked a Scottish dream-vision tradition that continued until the seventeenth century. 13 See, for example, John MacQueen, “Tradition and the Interpretation of the Kingis Quair,” Review of English Studies 12.46 (1961): 117–31; Ian Brown, “The Mental Traveller – A Study of the Kingis Quair,” Studies in Scottish Literature 5.14 (1968): 246–52; and Vincent Caretta, “The Kingis Quair and the Consolation of Philosophy,” Studies in Scottish Literature 16.1 (1981): 14–27. 14 Washington Irving, “A Royal Poet,” in The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, ed. Susan Manning (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 77. 11 12

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Geoffrey visits Windsor Castle. A long-time admirer of the Kingis Quair, Geoffrey sees a suit of armor and is transported into a reverie: The suits of armour hanging up in the hall, richly gilt and embellished, as if to figure in the tournay, brought the image of the gallant and romantic prince vividly before my imagination. I paced the deserted chambers where he had composed his poem; I leaned upon the window and endeavoured to persuade myself it was the very one where he had been visited by his vision; I looked out upon the spot where he had first seen the Lady Jane. It was the same genial and joyous month; the birds were again vying with each other in strains of liquid melody; every thing was bursting into vegetation, and budding forth the tender promise of the year. Time, which delights to obliterate the sterner memorials of human pride, seems to have passed lightly over this little scene of poetry and love, and to have withheld his desolating hand.15 Geoffrey paces the halls where he imagines the imprisoned prince to have paced; he gazes down into the garden below, untouched (he fondly believes) by time’s ravages. James’s dream has such power for Geoffrey that it moves him to a kind of dream of his own, a celebration of a particular golden moment when his experience and the experience of an imprisoned medieval king seem to seamlessly overlap: I have visited Vaucluse with as much enthusiasm as a pilgrim would visit the shrine at Loretto; but I have never felt more poetical devotion than when contemplating the old tower and the little garden at Windsor, and musing over the romantic loves of the Lady Jane and the Royal Poet of Scotland.16 Geoffrey’s experience at Windsor Castle is, for him, one of temporal continuity. As he walks the halls of Windsor, he is acutely aware of the weight of history. He relates the story of James’s capture and imprisonment, as the Kingis Quair itself details, but provides the conclusion that the poem cannot, particularly James’s difficulties in ruling a divided Scotland that had been kingless in his eighteen-year absence from 1406 to 1424: his failed attempts to win over the hearts of his estranged subjects; the revolt of his nobles; and his violent assassination by Sir Robert Stewart. Yet, for Geoffrey, there is no contrast between the fictionalized narrative of the Kingis Quair and the events of history. Rather, both are blurred together into a “romantic tale of former times.” Even James’s assassination becomes a testament to his wife’s devotion Irving, “A Royal Poet,” 85–86. Irving, “A Royal Poet,” 86.

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to her husband, a final, desperate celebration of the great passion that first united them: “His faithful queen, rushing to throw her tender body between him and the sword, was twice wounded in the ineffectual attempt to shield him from the assassin; and it was not until she had been forcibly torn from his person, that the murder was accomplished.”17 The Sketch-Book is itself a narrative with some historical significance. Published in installments in America during the years 1819–20 and then almost immediately serialized in British literary magazines, it blends Washington Irving’s short fictions, such as Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, with more general descriptions of English life, and the travels of the pseudonymous Geoffrey. It was one of the earliest popular works of American literature in England, yet (or, perhaps, because) much of the book is given over to loving contemplation of English life and ways. The persona of Geoffrey Crayon is almost a physical embodiment of nostalgia, a yearning for a kind of Englishness that never quite was. He describes the pleasures of the English countryside, spins sentimental tales about its noble poor, and condemns the flashy nouveaux riches. Nonetheless, the visit to Windsor Castle stands out in the Sketchbook. What is most important to Geoffrey in “A Royal Poet” is the feeling that nothing has changed between the medieval and the present day; that he and the imprisoned prince could somehow inhabit the same space, almost at the same time. However, in Carolyn Dinshaw’s perceptive reading of “A Royal Poet,” it is this very nearness that is troubling: He and James are communicating; they are both there, they are at one – almost, that is. For between the pacing of the selfsame chambers and the gaze upon the glorious spot, Crayon must work to convince himself of authenticity, presence, union. His effort is registered in that anomalous phrase in this otherwise rapturous sketch: I endeavored to persuade myself. I labored to believe that it was the very same window as that in which James had gazed on his lady for the first time; the admission of effort opens a suggestion of failure. I wanted to believe, Crayon might as well have said, that the future king and I, the inspired lover and I, were so near. But I didn’t. This hitch at the heart of Geoffrey Crayon’s passionate reenactment at Windsor attests to something of his ineradicable alienness, even to himself. Despite the intensely contrived reenactment framework, Geoffrey Crayon remains out of sync both with the present and also with the past he so desires. James is not after all there with him. The past and its ghosts are finally elusive.18 Irving, “A Royal Poet,” 85. Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 141–42.

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Geoffrey is an unreal figure, a character not of any time, striving to be one with a historical past that he has hopelessly romanticized – a past that never really was. Here, the work’s double nationality as both American and English literature adds an interesting layer of difficulty. For an English reader, “A Royal Poet” represents a sentimental vision of a distant part of English and Scottish history. But for an American reader, almost certainly unaware of James I or the Kingis Quair before reading “A Royal Poet,” Geoffrey’s vision of Windsor Castle seems a more straightforward historical account: an imprisoned king is already the stuff of romantic history, let alone one who is moved by his imprisonment to compose works of poetry. The gap between Geoffrey’s endeavor to persuade himself and his endeavor to persuade his readers lends the medieval past an air of hazy unreality. Like Geoffrey himself, the scene both is and is not. Irving looks to the medieval to lend his work an authoritative tone, a sense of communing with one’s spiritual and literary forefathers. But in writing for a readership for whom this is not historical past, much of this effect is lost: fact and fiction are blurred together. If “A Royal Poet” exemplifies Geoffrey’s alienation from his sense of the past, then it surely also demonstrates the distance between fictional and historical selves. The dreamer in the Kingis Quair clearly represents James I, even if he does not emphatically identify himself as such, as the brief history of the dreamer’s imprisonment seems designed to spark recognition in the reader. Yet, at the same time, he is a fictional construct, his dream a literary device rather than an account of a real experience.19 We might draw the same connection between Washington Irving and Geoffrey Crayon. Irving adopted “Geoffrey Crayon” as his pseudonym for later works, and there is a clear link between Irving, striving to find success as a writer in an unfamiliar and often unhospitable country, and his more genteel and favorable literary counterpart. Both James and Irving use a fictionalized version of themselves to try to write their own history. For Geoffrey, his experience in the real, physical location of Windsor Castle acts as a kind of portal, transporting him to the much-desired past. Yet, for the reader, Geoffrey’s desire to read past and present as a continual whole paradoxically highlights the gap between the two, between truth and fiction. It is Geoffrey’s sense of the continuity of past and present, of historical account and literary confabulation, that paradoxically highlights the fictionality of James’s own account, his desire to figure himself as part of the past that reveals the fundamental untruthfulness of both works. In “A Royal Poet,” the Kingis Quair is blurred into a vision of a time that never quite was, related by a figure who does not exist, on a journey that he never took. What Geoffrey really discovers is the power of the dream at On the play between autobiography and fictionality in the portrayal of the dreamer, see Elizabeth Elliott, Remembering Boethius: Writing Aristocratic Identity in Late Medieval French and English Literatures (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).

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the heart of James’s poem, the idea that literature can be a device that takes us from our proper, waking selves into a realm of possibility beyond the constrictive parameters of time. Yet, just as the dreamer must awake, Geoffrey cannot quite remain in his reverie of the past. No matter how fondly Geoffrey imagines the history of Windsor Castle and its imprisoned prince penning his great romance, time moves inescapably on. A Former Age – William Bell Scott and the Pre-Raphaelite Self There is much to be said in unqualified praise of the poem. There is no other of a similar character in our language for a long period following its production, so perfect in structure, so restricted to itself, and possessed of so much unity and directness of speech.20 Much like Geoffrey Crayon, William Bell Scott begins his narration of the Kingis Quair by asserting its supreme virtue: its perfection of design and structure, its simplicity of language and ease of pronunciation, its unparalleled nature. Scott reads the Kingis Quair as a monument in the history of literature, set apart from all else by what he terms its “good composition.” Scott’s use of an artistic term to describe the poem is deliberate. He asserts: That power of giving an apparently natural prominence to the leading performers on his canvas and to the objects demanding attention in conveying his meaning, leads the painter to self-denial and temperance, that have rarely been practised by poets.21 The Kingis Quair is set apart, a more artistic model of writing. Naturally, Scott’s praise of the poem’s artistic qualities also has the unspoken effect of justifying his decision to illustrate it – and, indeed, elevating his own artistic work. Poetic and artistic endeavor become one object, an effect that would only have been increased had Scott succeeded in his original aim of publishing his etchings alongside the poem itself. However, rather than appearing as illustrations without context, Scott’s illustrations reimagine and refocus the Kingis Quair, creating a new piece of art through their interpretation of the poem. Moreover, unlike Crayon or Irving, for Scott, the poem is a source of nationalistic pride. Though Scott moved to London in later life, he was born and raised in Edinburgh. By praising the Kingis Quair so highly, and producing his own etchings of the poem, Scott traces back a line of artistic ancestry, not only to a medieval past, but to a medieval Scottish past, establishing himself as James’s artistic successor and heir. Scott, “Essay on the King’s Quair,” 9. Scott, “Essay on the King’s Quair,” 9.

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The Illustrations of the “King’s Quair” of James I of Scotland (1868) consists of six plates, loosely depicting key scenes from the poem. First, there is a small vignette depicting Love, in a highly Pre-Raphaelite style. The first illustration of the poem is entitled “Old Windsor – Early Morning.” In the foreground, it depicts the captive Prince, musing at his desk as he gazes out of the window. The morning watch marches below his window, emphasizing his imprisonment, and the turrets of Windsor Castle stretch into the background. The next plate depicts the dreamer’s beloved, Joan Beaufort, walking in the garden below the tower with two attendant ladies.22 In the background, Love takes aim at James, framed by the tower window. The plate is entitled “Lady Jane Listens to the Nightingale,” but the emphasis is on a different bird: a turtledove, in the top right corner of the image, noticed only by the little dog that Jane holds on a leash (Fig. 1). The next plate moves into the dream itself. James himself is not visible, and perhaps we are intended to see the scene through his eyes: a surprising and innovative movement directly into the heart of the dream. The image depicts the Court of Venus. Venus sprawls on a bed in the background, while a surprisingly orderly line of petitioning lovers stretches into the foreground to the right. The image is completed by a group of lovers in the center. The lovers depicted in the image are oddly stiff and formal, inclining toward each other to present one another with garlands or serenade their partners in a way that feels entirely unlike the confused hubbub of the Court in James’s poem: Me thoght I sawe of every nacioun Loveris that endit thair lyfis space In lovis service, mony a mylioun.23 One reason for the formality of the lovers in the center could be the representative quality of the images. Vera Walker observes that in the frescoes, some of the figures are painted after people Scott knew: Christina Rossetti and William Michael Rossetti appear in this scene, and Scott himself appears in the next fresco, in the semblance of Good Hope.24 In addition, I wonder whether the figure in a rather unusual peaked cap to the left of the image is modeled after Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was a close friend of Scott’s (Fig. 2). If he is not an exact portrait, he certainly bears a strong physical resemblance, furnished with Rossetti’s long, curling hair, mustache, and goatee, and it would seem reasonable to depict D. G. Rossetti in this scene alongside his siblings. The identification of the figures in this scene can be related back Joan Beaufort is referred to as “Jane” by both Geoffrey Crayon and William Bell Scott. James I, The Kingis Quair, lines 541–43. 24 See Walker, Life and Work, 211. Sadly, the scene depicting Bell Scott is not shown in the etchings. 22 23

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Fig. 1: William Bell Scott, “Lady Jane Listens to the Nightingale.” Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

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Fig. 2: William Bell Scott, “The Court of Venus.” Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library (photo: author)

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to the poem itself. Vera Walker notes that, in the frescoes, the figures are identified by captions bearing their initials, though this is not the case in the etchings.25 As he enters the Court of Love, the dreamer observes that many of the lovers he sees before him are figures from literature and mythology. They bear their stories literally written above their heads, just like an initialed figure in a fresco: “quhois aventure and grete labour / Above thair hedis writin there I fand.”26 In Scott’s rendering of this scene, great lovers from literature are replaced by his friends and intellectual counterparts. Rather than their romantic destinies above their heads, they bear only their initials: mythologizing them without defining them. They are worthy to be counted among the great lovers at the Court of Love, and yet their destiny is their own, unfixed and unwritten. The fifth plate represents something of a divergence from the text. Entitled “Lady Jane Sending Off The Dove,” it depicts Lady Jane, illuminated in a shaft of light from the window, preparing to send the turtledove to James bearing a message of love. This scene does not occur in the poem, and the dove that James receives is a symbol of providence, rather than a specific token from a lover. Finally, the sixth plate depicts James receiving the dove. Like Lady Jane in the previous plate, he is illuminated in a shaft of light that falls through the window of his cell, recalling the light that overwhelms James as he is transported into his vision, “all sodeynly a lyght / In at the wyndow come quhare that I lent.”27 In the background of the image, however, is a locked and barred door: a reminder that although the love of Lady Jane represents a spiritual freedom, he has yet to attain his liberty. As a whole, the engravings are a sensitive and well-executed representation of some of the poem’s more memorable scenes, as well as one of Scott’s invention. What is not at all apparent in the illustrations, however, is that the Kingis Quair comprises a significant dream element. James is never shown sleeping, and the more dream-like elements of the poem, such as Fortune’s Wheel or the meadow James crosses filled with wild animals, are not depicted. Instead, Scott renders the poem as a charming, sentimental old tale, in a reading not unlike that of Geoffrey Crayon. His interest is in the love affair above all else, and the engravings are carefully rendered to create a kind of romantic narrative that the poem only suggests: James falls in love with the lady and seeks the advice of Venus, and Jane returns his affections and sends him a symbol of her love. Scott is not interested in the poem’s moments of otherworldly strangeness, its blurred overlap of dreaming and waking worlds, or even the autobiographical self-assertion of a man who

Walker, Life and Work, 211. James I, The Kingis Quair, lines 547–48. 27 James I, The Kingis Quair, lines 512–13. 25 26

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would be king.28 Instead, as in “A Royal Poet,” he seeks to create a beautiful image of a former world, even as the passage of time causes his images to crumble away. And yet, Scott’s reading of the poem and its representation of the past is not entirely like “A Royal Poet.” Geoffrey Crayon highlights the fictionality of the poem’s imagined past by trying to believe that it exists still, that he could turn a corner in Windsor Castle and meet the imprisoned prince, waiting for a sign from his lady. Scott, by contrast, seeks to reformulate the text, to make it more Pre-Raphaelite. For Scott, the Kingis Quair is a nostalgic vision of a former time, but also a site of interpretative possibilities, a way of preserving the Pre-Raphaelite movement by enshrining it in the poetry of James, whom he imagines to be one of the movement’s imaginative forebears, as well as his own nationalistic one. There is something pleasingly medieval about Scott’s desire to depict himself and his friends in the etchings and frescoes of the Kingis Quair. It is a way of making the work intimate and personal, of depicting particular friends in Penkill Castle, a site that had become a kind of meeting-place for Pre-Raphaelite artists and their friends: Christina Rossetti wrote that “Even Naples in imagination cannot efface the quiet fertile comeliness of Penkill in reality.”29 Yet, at the same time, this selffiguring is reminiscent of medieval dream-poems like The Garland of Laurel (first printed 1523), in which John Skelton depicts not only himself meeting Chaucer and Gower but also his works being entered into the Book of Fame, to be preserved for all eternity. In a neat reversal of Geoffrey’s desires, Scott brings together a fictional past and his own present, and quite literally draws himself into James’s narrative: rather than wishing to meet the imprisoned prince and belong in his story, Scott makes him part of the Pre-Raphaelite narrative instead. This sense of using the Kingis Quair as a starting point for new poetic creation can also be detected in Scott’s essay on the poem, which precedes the plates in his book. He writes at length about the influence that the poem had upon the writing of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Rossetti’s poem about the assassination of James, “The King’s Tragedy” (1881): I may add here a few words regarding “The King’s Tragedy” and its author, the friend who spent with us at Penkill the autumn months of 1868, when I completed the latest of these pictures, as well as the same months of the following year 1869. These visits were most important periods of Rossetti’s poetical life, not because he was then introduced The Kingis Quair is compelling because it has a number of false starts, moments in which the dream seems about to start but does not. See in particular line 197, when the dreamer bewails his imprisonment, and line 316, when he falls into an ecstasy of love. 29 Mackenzie Bell, Christina Rossetti: A Biographical and Critical Study (London: Thomas Burleigh, 1898; repr. New York: Haskell Books, 1971), 51. 28

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Kingdoms of Infinite Space  117 to King James, his poem and history, although “The King’s Tragedy” is perhaps his noblest work, but because he was then suffering under the most alarming conviction that he was going blind, which suggested and enabled us to work upon his mind, so that he again turned to poetry with all his powers, which for a number of years he had forsaken.30

Scott describes how he and Alice Boyd, his long-term companion and laird of Penkill, convinced Rossetti to publish his poems, that they might outlast their poet should he indeed be losing his sight. Though he denies that the Kingis Quair was of particular importance to Rossetti, Scott emphasizes the excellence of “The King’s Tragedy” and suggests that it was the particular time Rossetti spent at Penkill, just as he was completing the images, that had this effect upon Rossetti’s poetic output. Moreover, the very fact that Scott dedicates the final three pages of his short essay on the poem to Rossetti would suggest that he saw a link between Rossetti’s poetic inspiration and his own work on the Kingis Quair, between the romantic vision of a former age, and Rossetti’s desire to be remembered in the future. For Scott, what the Kingis Quair represents is posterity. In glorifying the work, emphasizing its autobiographical elements and making the romance between Jane and James its heart, Scott creates a model for how he wishes his work, and the work of his Pre-Raphaelite associates, to be remembered: as a shining vision of a former age, the supreme realization of “good composition,” changeless and eternal. Travels in Time: Diana Wynne Jones’s The True State of Affairs We turn now to a treatment of the Kingis Quair that not only transposes it into another genre of literature, but another universe. Diana Wynne Jones was a prolific writer of fantasy literature. Wynne Jones’s novels are filled with references to the literature of the Middle Ages. Some are more nods than prolonged engagements; in the novel The Dark Lord of Derkholm (1998), two griffins are called Kit and Calotte, after the dreamer’s wife and child in Piers Plowman. In other texts, a knowledge of medieval literature can help the reader to get a handle on the plot – though, in typically deft, Wynne Jonesian fashion, the allusion is usually revealed to the reader with the triumphant conclusion of the narrative and not before, as in Hexwood (1993) when it emerges that half the characters are actually figures from Arthurian legend. Married to the prominent medievalist John Burrow, Wynne Jones wrote in a lecture given at a medieval congress held in the University of Nottingham, I have a strong sense that everything I do write is deeply influenced by what I perceive as the Middle Ages. […] What I want to say is yes, I do Scott, “Essay on the King’s Quair,” 17.

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know really where I’m getting it from, and it is intentional, and very grateful I am too.31 It is the Kingis Quair that triggers Wynne Jones’s most direct and sustained response to medieval literature, though this response, until now, has been largely overlooked, both by scholars of medieval literature and by scholars of fantasy literature. The True State of Affairs is a novella written early in Wynne Jones’s career, and later published in a collection of her short stories and occasional writings, Minor Arcana (1996). It takes the form of a diary written by Emily, a teenage girl, imprisoned as a hostage of war in a castle. Emily has, through circumstances that remain unclear to both Emily and the reader, somehow managed to travel to the Kingdom of Dalemark, a quasi-medieval society. Dalemark is in the grip of a violent civil war between the North and South, and Emily has been mistaken for Hilda, a Southern princess. After some time, she becomes aware that in the courtyard visible from her prison window, she can see a man: Asgrim, another political prisoner, and the leader of the rebels. The two begin to exchange secret notes through one of the jailers. These notes are at first just friendly, but the tone swiftly becomes romantic and then philosophical, with Asgrim asking Emily questions about the nature of truth and with him sending her enigmatic poetry. Just as their relationship deepens, the civil war reaches its peak. Asgrim is rescued by the rebels and retakes his position at the head of the army. He never returns for Emily. In her introduction to Minor Arcana, Wynne Jones describes how she was inspired to write The True State of Affairs: It has an oddly learned origin. I had been reading The Kingis Quair, which is a true story by King James I of Scotland, about the time he was in prison. Staring out from his cell, he fell in love (courtly love) with a girl he only ever saw in the distance. Of course it all stopped when he was released. It occurred to me to wonder what the girl felt about it, so I wrote the story.32 This is a strange interpretation of the Kingis Quair, particularly as the poem makes it quite clear that, rather than abandoning the lady with whom he falls in love, the dreamer marries her. It is immediately apparent that, unlike Geoffrey Crayon or William Bell Scott, Wynne Jones does not read the Kingis Quair as a romantic tale of a love realized between a future monarch and his bride-to-be, but as a narrative of selfishness and abandonment, a testament to Diana Wynne Jones, “Inventing the Middle Ages,” in Reflections (Oxford: David Fickling Books, 2012), 163–70. 32 Wynne Jones, “Introduction,” Minor Arcana, 11–12. 31

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the lengths that men will go to for power. Particularly interesting is the idea of courtly love that Wynne Jones takes from the poem, and how this idea is reflected in her response. For Wynne Jones, courtly love is something that is fundamentally a performance, a kind of dissembling, without true feeling at its heart. Indeed, Emily says as much in her penultimate diary entry, as she reflects on Asgrim’s abandonment: I suspect that my ignorance of the country and its language has led me to be taken in by a nice play – a sort of courtly love. I am sure of it. Asgrim never once called me thou. It was all ceremonious and respectful and distant. And the verses he wrote made it clear, from the start, that what he wanted to feel was a something-else, metaphysical, large and abstract, that only ever, at the most, included me along with the rest of his world. […] I think he never meant to be dishonest. I’m sure he imagined I knew the conventions. But all this talk of Truth. Even in this land it means more than one thing – reality, fidelity, integrity, knowledge of your ideal – but then they only have the one word for all these things. Did Asgrim know, for a moment, that he was playing with this word? I think I knew, but I hid it from myself. I thought he meant fidelity, but now I see it was the only thing he didn’t mean. He used Truth for all the others, impartially. And I understood him to that extent, but wouldn’t see it.33 Emily’s abandonment causes her to realize that love cannot be removed from reality; that metaphysical questions and vague statements, however sincere they may sound, can be falsehoods. Yet this can be read as a criticism of the Kingis Quair too. The dreamer never speaks to the lady with whom he falls in love, and his achievement of her affection is, likewise, removed from reality, related only as a fait accompli. Both Crayon and Scott embroider the narrative to give the sense that the love between the dreamer and the lady is a fully-fledged, reciprocal relationship: Crayon in his inclusion of Lady Jane’s desperate attempt to prevent the assassination of her husband, and Scott in his invented scene of Jane sending a dove to James. In actuality, the Kingis Quair is dedicated to a discussion of James’s love alone, and his realization that he must govern his amatory desire in order to be an effective governor of his kingdom. In the decidedly unsentimental universe of Dalemark, rocked by civil war and punctuated with petty cruelties, Wynne Jones imagines a crueler, less idealistic world, in which intentions and actions do not always align, and love cannot conquer all, and in which the desire Wynne Jones, The True State of Affairs, 286.

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for power and prominence ultimately outstrips even the most passionate of romantic sentiments. The True State of Affairs is a response to a medieval poem, recast as a timetravel story in the fantasy genre and reinterpreted for a different readership, in terms of both its modernity and its intended age. Rather than simply retelling the story, Wynne Jones asks her readers to question the assumptions fundamental to its success: that love will always prevail, that intention and meaning are the same, and that truth is the same thing as honesty. Perhaps it seems odd that her medium for doing so is a novella written in response to a medieval poem that many of her readers are unlikely to have encountered. Then again, perhaps this lends Wynne Jones’s own work a double valency. For those readers who have yet to encounter the Kingis Quair, Wynne Jones’s novella serves as an introduction and a warning: do not take all that you see at face value. For those who know the poem, the True State is a meditative reflection, asking us to challenge the assumptions the poem has instilled in us. Of all three of the responses that I have discussed in this essay, it is Wynne Jones’s rendering of the poem that is most removed from its source material, and, yet, it is The True State of Affairs that interrogates James’s poem most thoroughly and that looks with clear-sighted scrutiny at the poem, not in order to argue that it is part of a glorious former age or to establish itself as its spiritual successor, but to ask what it is that we have seen in the poem and why. Conclusions The Kingis Quair is a poem of its time, and a poem in time. The poem itself has clear Chaucerian analogues, as well as being influenced by the Consolation of Philosophy. It is part of a genre of medieval literature, dream-poetry, that has no modern counterpart. It depicts a monarch with whom many modern readers will be unfamiliar, on a densely allusive and allegorical quest. And yet, as these works attest, it has outlived these temporal trappings and found itself renewed, transformed. It sparked a Scottish dream-vision tradition set apart from the English tradition that continued until at least 1603 and has inspired a wealth of responses that there is simply not space to include in this essay, from J. Henry Griesbach’s operetta Windsor Castle, or, The Prisoner King (1838), to Rona Munro’s play The Key Will Keep The Lock (2004).34 Clearly, the poem is significant for more than its pleasant vision of a former age. Both Geoffrey Crayon and William Bell Scott are pleased by the poem, by its combination of character and aspect, compelled by its probable auto On the Scottish dream-vision tradition created by the Kingis Quair, see Kylie Murray, The Making of the Scottish Dream-Vision (Oxford: Oxford University Press/British Academy Monograph Series, forthcoming 2017).

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biographical element. Unlike Chaucer’s House of Fame, it is a complete work, the dream neatly framed by the final revelation that the dreamer’s suit has been successful.35 Indeed, it is this very neatness that compels Wynne Jones to imagine the opposite, to instil a note of doubt and to ask whether people really behave as they do in stories, and what Jane might have thought of the whole business. Yet it seems to me that the Kingis Quair has produced this wealth of responses not only for its own virtues, plentiful though they are, or through a fortunate line of transmission, but because of how it can be used to discuss our relationship with the past, with the relationship between temporality and the narratives that we craft for ourselves. All three works look to the past embodied in the Kingis Quair and seek to find their place in it, whether this is by walking the grounds of Windsor Castle and imagining what might have been, or writing their own artistic history in the depiction of the poem, or reimagining the poem’s central premise to question its assumptions. What they show us is that the medieval past is not a self-contained, golden age, but one rife with complexities and ambiguities, that medieval literature can inspire us not only to listen and imagine, but to answer back.

William A. Quinn suggests that the poem originally had two endings: one for 1424 when Joan and James married, and another intended for a tenth wedding anniversary or similar occasion: see William A. Quinn, “Red Lining and Blue Penciling the Kingis Quair,” Studies in Philology 108.2 (2011): 189–214.

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Vincent van Gogh, Dante, and the Studio of the South Aida Audeh You’ll see him soon, this young man with the Dante-like face […]. He’s quite distinguished in appearance, and he’ll become so in his paintings […]. Ah well, thanks to him – at last I have a first sketch of that painting I’ve been dreaming about for a long time – the poet. He posed for it for me. His fine head, with its green gaze, stands out in my portrait against a starry, deep ultramarine sky; his clothing is a little yellow jacket, a collar of unbleached linen, a multicoloured tie. He gave me two sittings in one day.1 – Vincent to Theo, from Arles, 3 September 1888 (Letter 673) With this, Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh (1853–90) described his painting, Portrait of Eugène Boch (Plate I), as the expression of his ideal Artist/Poet: “this young man with the Dante-like face.” Central to his plans for the community of painters he wished to found at the Yellow House in Arles in 1888, the Dante-like Artist/Poet was to be joined, in Vincent’s utopian vision for his “Studio of the South,” by modern-day equivalents of Dante’s compatriots All Van Gogh correspondence quoted in this essay is to be found at , where the letters have been thoroughly catalogued, translated into English from their original language (Vincent wrote in Dutch and French), and annotated by scholars at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. The Van Gogh Museum notes that Vincent’s letters often contain minor errors in spelling and grammar. These are corrected in the English translations quoted in this essay. “Tu le verras sous peu ce jeune homme à mine Dantesque […]. Il est bien distingué d’extérieur et il le deviendra je crois dans ses tableaux. […] Eh bien, grâce à lui – j’ai enfin une première esquisse de ce tableau que depuis longtemps je rêve – le poète – Il me l’a pose. Sa tête fine au regard vert se détache dans mon portrait sur un ciel étoilé outremer profond, le vêtement est un petit veston jaune, un col de toile écrue, une cravate bigarrée. Il m’a donné deux séances dans une seule journée.”

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Petrarch and Boccaccio, hence completing the triumvirate commonly known then, as now, as the Tre Corone.2 Perhaps the most prolific period of his life as an artist, source of many of his best-known works, site of his ill-fated collaboration with Paul Gauguin and infamous episode of self-mutilation, Vincent’s Studio of the South has been the subject of several studies and exhibitions.3 And while the Portrait of Eugène Boch and other paintings originating from Vincent’s Studio of the South endeavor – including The Bedroom and the Poet’s Garden series – have been analyzed extensively in art historical literature, their relationship, and that of the utopian artists’ community they embodied, to Vincent’s conception of Dante and the Tre Corone have not been explored within the context of the layered meanings brought by their historical origins and their larger nineteenth-century reception. Further complicating our understanding, Vincent’s conception of these poets was influenced by his voracious reading and his propensity to synthesize information in original ways. Thus, Vincent’s Tre Corone, including Dante of course, were layered additionally with meanings drawn from such disparate sources as Carlyle, Lavater, Cochin, and the Bible, to name but a few, and formed the basis of his grandiose ideas regarding the role of the artist in society, artists’ need for collaboration and community, and the nature of art itself. He put these ideas into practice in his elaborate plans for his Studio of the South that consumed him throughout 1888 and until his death in July 1890, the failure of that dream still occupying his mind. Within Vincent’s plans for the Studio of the South, described in great detail in his letters and materialized in his paintings of that time, are multiple The three would be Vincent, Gauguin, and, Vincent hoped, Émile Bernard. For discussion of the possible origins of the term Tre Corone, see Martin Eisner, Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature: Dante, Petrarch, Cavalcanti, and the Authority of the Vernacular (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). For discussion of the meaning of the laurel crown, see Sara Sturm-Maddox, “Dante, Petrarch, and the Laurel Crown,” Petrarch & Dante: Anti-Dantism, Metaphysics, Tradition, ed. Zygmunt Baranski and Theodore J. Cachey (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2009), 290–319. 3 Scholarship on Vincent van Gogh is abundant. I list here a few of these sources of particular relevance to the subject of the Studio of the South and works he completed during this period. Most important is Van Gogh’s Bedrooms, ed. Gloria Groom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name organized by the Art Institutue of Chicago with assistance from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Also important and useful are Douglas W. Druick and Peter Kort Zegers, Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2001); Ronald Pickvance, Van Gogh in Arles (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1984); Eliza Rathbone et. al., Van Gogh Repetitions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); and Van Gogh in Perspective, ed. Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974). There is also an excellent series of essays by Evert van Uitert in Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art published between 1978 and 1982. Also fascinating is Bernadette Murphy, Van Gogh’s Ear: The True Story (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016). 2

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references to Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio as models for the collaborative relationship of artists he wished to found in Arles, the site he had chosen for the modern rebirth of painting he imagined creating with Gauguin as the new Petrarch.4 What he did not seem to realize and, sadly, what occurred in Arles upon the arrival of Gauguin, is that, contrary to the mythic Tre Corone of the nineteenth century, the actual relationship between the Italian poets was anything but the harmonious and mutually supportive collaboration Vincent intended for his Studio of the South. Unwittingly, in those fateful few months of partnership in Arles, Vincent recreated with Gauguin the actual jealousies, rivalries, and tensions of the Tre Corone. These conflicts with Gauguin, and resulting failure to realize his utopian artistic collaboration, precipitated Van Gogh’s mental breakdown in December 1888 and subsequent confinement in asylums at St. Remy and, finally, Auvers-sur-Oise, where he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1890. This essay will focus on the core of this endeavor – Vincent’s idea of the Artist/Poet modeled on his perception of Dante. Vincent’s perception of the Tre Corone in relation to his Poet’s Garden series will be treated in a subsequent essay. Boch and Dante Vincent began with great hopes for his Studio of the South with his first substantial work inspired by the endeavor: his portrait of Boch. The 3 September 1888 letter describing the “Dante-like” Boch was not the first occasion on which Vincent had mentioned the Belgian artist in his correspondence. Vincent had met Eugène Boch (1855–1941) in June 1888 in Arles and, as his frequent references to the artist in his letters indicate, his liking for the young man increased with time.5 Boch, whose family founded the successful porcelain production now known as Villeroy-Boch, had spent a few weeks living near Arles with American artist Dodge MacKnight (1860–1950) and through him met Vincent. Vincent was at first not particularly impressed with the two artists, but did remark on Boch’s unusual demeanor as early as 8 or 9 July 1888 (Letter 637), writing to Theo, “He’s a lad whose outward appearance I like very much. Face like the blade of a razor, green eyes, and distinction with all that.” He further remarked to Theo in the same letter Vincent refers to the new art he wishes to spearhead as forming in the south – in Arles and/ or in the “tropics” as Gauguin often asserted. In at least two letters he uses the word “renaissance” to describe this movement: a letter to Theo dated 27/28 October 1888 (Letter 714) and a letter to Bernard dated 1 November 1888 (Letter 716). Vincent alludes to Gauguin as the new Petrarch – “new poet of the south” – in a letter to Gauguin of 3 October 1888 (Letter 695). 5 Vincent mentioned Boch in several letters to Theo from June through September 1888. He also wrote to Boch, who had left Arles by that time, in October 1888. 4

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that Boch’s refined and sensitive features made MacKnight seem “very coarse beside him.”6 Similarly, in a letter to his sister Willemien written between 9 and 14 September 1888 (Letter 678), after having painted his portrait, Vincent described Boch’s appearance in the painting as “something of a poet […] refined and nervous.”7 Vincent’s concept for the Portrait of Eugène Boch as Artist/Poet seen in relation to the Studio of the South takes definitive shape in a letter to Theo of 18 August 1888 (Letter 663). In the letter Vincent joins the identity of Artist/Poet as archetypal cultural figure with his own innovations as a painter, materializing his vision, thus raising the stakes on the symbolic meaning attached to this work.8 He ties all of it to the difficulty in maintaining an artist’s career in contemporary society and the need for financial support – what his communally funded Studio of the South was meant to address. The letter is worth examining at length for the variety of ideas Vincent packs into it. Vincent begins by describing the effects of Arles’ strong sunlight upon his work as a painter, urging him to distance himself from the influence of the northern painters of Paris – the Impressionists – and rediscover the saturated palette of the Romantic Eugène Delacroix9 (1798–1863) who, in the 1830s, had traveled to Spain and North Africa and painted the people and environment he encountered there: “C’est un garcon dont l’extérieur me plait beaucoup, figure en lame de rasoir, yeux verts, avec cela de la distinction. McKnight [sic] parait très vulgaire à côté de lui.” 7 “J’en ai un pour commencer, le portrait d’un jeune impressioniste Belge, je l’ai peint un peu en poète, la tête fine & nerveuse se détachant sur un fond de ciel de nuit d’un outremer profound avec les scintillements des étoiles.” 8 The equivalence of painter and poet has been said to originate in fact with Villani’s History of Florence and discussion therein of Giotto’s supposed portraits of himself and of Dante. The Villani reference is credited as well with establishing the link between portraiture and fame – the achievement of a kind of immortality through art. The rise of self-portraiture and group portraiture of poets rose at the time of Petrarch, in fact, and marked artists’ rise in social position among elites. Thus Vincent’s equation of Boch and Dante as Artist/ Poet, and subsequent replacement of the Boch portrait with self-portraits in the later two Bedroom paintings in context of his plans for his Studio of the South, can be seen in relation to a long development that itself is traceable to Dante, Petrarch, and their milieu. See James Hall, The Self-Portrait: A Cultural History (London: Thames & Hudson, 2014). For the relation of painting and poetry in art theory over time, see Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967). 9 Van Gogh mentions Delacroix often in his correspondence, and counted him among the strongest influences on the development of his own work. In these discussions Vincent frequently cites Delacroix’s career-making Barque of Dante (1822) as particularly influential. Delacroix’s interest in Dante, and the importance of his Barque to the development of French art of the nineteenth century, is well documented. See James H. Rubin, “Delacroix’s Dante and Virgil as a Romantic Manifesto: Politics and Theory in the Early 1820s,” Art Journal 52.2 (Summer 1993): 48–59. See also generally Patrick Noon and Christopher Riopelle, Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art (London: National Gallery and Minneapolis: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2015). 6

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Plate I: Vincent van Gogh (1853–90), Portrait of Eugene Boch (1855–1941), 1888 (oil on canvas), Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France (photo: Bridgeman Images)

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Plate II: Ernst Josephson (1851–1906), The Water Sprite, 1883, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (photo: Erik Cornelius/Nationalmuseum)

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Plate III: Vincent van Gogh, The Bedroom, 1888 (oil on canvas), Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (photo: Bridgeman Images)

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Plate IV: Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait, 1889 (oil on canvas), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA (photo: Bridgeman Images)

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Plate V: Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait, 1889 (oil on canvas), Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France (photo: Bridgeman Images)

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Plate VI: Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait, 1889 (oil on canvas), Private Collection (photo: Bridgeman Images)

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Plate VII: Max Ernst, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1945 (photo: Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg. Photographer: Achim Bednorz vom Ullmann Verlag, Potsdam). ©Max Ernst c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2017

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Plate VIII: Matthias Grünewald, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, from the Isenheim Altarpiece, 1515 (photo: musée Unterlinden). ©Musée d’Unterlinden, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais

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Van Gogh, Dante, & the Studio of the South  127 Well, I know one shouldn’t be discouraged because utopia is not coming about. It’s just that I find that what I learned in Paris is fading and that I’m returning to my ideas that came to me in the country before I knew the Impressionists. And I wouldn’t be very surprised if the Impressionists were soon to find fault with my way of doing things, which was fertilized more by the ideas of Delacroix than by theirs.10

He goes on to describe his turn toward use of color that, while based upon observation of nature, is allowed to stray from it for the sake of expression and to describe in detail his plans for the Portrait of Boch as an example of his innovative approach. As he describes the painting he also describes his ideal Artist/Poet as a dreamer, following his own nature, whose proper milieu is infinity, his inspired vision haloed against the dark sky: Because instead of trying to render exactly what I have before my eyes, I use colour more arbitrarily in order to express my ideas forcefully. […] I’m going to give you an example of what I mean. I’d like to do the portrait of an artist friend who dreams great dreams, who works as the nightingale sings, because that’s his nature. This man will be blond. I’d like to put in the painting my appreciation, my love that I have for him. I’ll paint him, then, just as he is, as faithfully as I can to begin with. But the painting isn’t finished like that. To finish it, I’m now going to be an arbitrary colorist. I exaggerate the blond of the hair, I come to orange tones, chromes, pale lemon. Behind the head – instead of painting the dull wall of the mean room, I paint the infinite. I make a simple background of the richest, most intense blue that I can prepare, and with this simple combination, the brightly lit blond head, against this rich blue background achieves a mysterious effect, like a star in the deep azure.11 “Enfin je sais qu’on ne doit pas se décourager parceque l’utopie ne se realize pas. Il y a seulement que je trouve que ce que j’ai appris à Paris s’en va et que je reviens à mes idées qui m’etaient venues à la campagne avant de connaître les impressionists. Et je serais peu étonné si sous peu les impressionists trouveraient à redire sur ma facon de faire a plutot eté fecondée par les idees de Delacroix que par les leurs.” 11 “Car au lieu de chercher à render exactement ce que j’ai devant les yeux je me sers de la couleur plus arbitrairement pour m’exprimer fortement. […] Je vais te donner un exemple de ce que je veux dire. Je voudrai faire le portrait d’un ami artiste qui rêve de grands rêves, qui travaille comme le rossignol chante parceque c’est ainsi sa nature. Cet homme sera blond. Je voudrai mettre dans le tableau mon appreciation, mon amour que j’ai pour lui. Je le peindrai donc tel quel, aussi fidèlement que je pourrai – pour commencer – Mais le tableau n’est pas fini ainsi. Pour le finir je vais maintenant être coloriste abritraire. J’exagère le blond de la chevelure, j’arrive aux tons oranges, aux cromes, au citron pale. Derrière la tête – au lieu de peindre le mur banal du mesquin appartement je peins l’infini. Je fais un fond simple du bleu le plus riche, le plus intense que je puisse confectioner et par 10

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And after describing his vision for this work, and his concept of the ideal Artist/Poet, he brings into view his struggles with material conditions in Arles, but states that he has no choice but to do so as it is in his own nature to be a painter. He again puts forward the idea he had batted around for months that there should be a way for artists to be insured an adequate material existence in order for them to devote their attention to their work. His own plans for the Studio of the South hinged on the concept of shared profits of the works produced there by his community of artists – works that Theo would sell for them in Paris and whose profits would be distributed equally among all residents of the Yellow House regardless of whose works had sold.12 He alludes to it here only briefly through the suggestion that “society” should support artists to avoid their being “overburdened” by such cares: I must tell you now that, materially speaking, these days are extremely hard [in Arles]. Whatever I do, living is pretty expensive here […]. So I assure you that if by chance you sometimes sent me a little more money that would benefit the paintings, but not me. Myself, I only have the choice between being a good painter or a bad one. I choose the former. But the things needed for painting are like those of a ruinous mistress; you can do nothing without money, and you never have enough of it. And so painting should be done at society’s expense, and the artist shouldn’t be overburdened by it.13 About two weeks later, as noted in the letter dated 3 September (Letter 673), the “Dante-like” Boch sat for Vincent. While the link between Boch and Dante is explicitly stated only once in Van Gogh’s correspondence, we can take his frequent references to “the poet” when describing Boch and this painting to refer to that original concept.14 Thus the portrait of Boch – not cette simple combinaison, la tête blonde eclairee sur ce fond bleu riche obtient un effet mysterieux comme l’étoile dans l’azur profond.” 12 Vincent goes on at length about this plan in several of his letters. He also disagreed vehemently with Gauguin, who had proposed an alternative to Vincent’s idea influenced by his own experience in the banking industry. See especially the letter of 15/16 June 1888 (Letter 625) for Vincent’s criticism of Gauguin’s proposal. 13 “Je dois maintenant te dire que ses jours ci sont materiellement d’une excessive dureté. La vie quoi que je fasse est assez chère ici […]. Aussi je t’assure que sit u m’envoyais par hazard un peu plus d’argent quelquefois cela ferait du bien aux tableaux mais pas à mois. Je n’ai que le choix moi entre être un bon peintre ou un mauvais. Je choisis le premier. Mais les necessities de la peinture sont comme celles d’une maîtresse ruineuse, on ne peut rien faire sans argent et on n’en a jamais assez. Aussi la peinture devrait s’exécuter aux frais de la société et non pas l’artiste devrait en être surchargé.” 14 Further complicating this construction, it has been suggested that Vincent had Gauguin in mind when he conceived of the idea for a portrait of the Artist/Poet. Vincent, the argument goes, substituted Boch as model because he was there in Arles, available, and had

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the person, but what is symbolized by his refined physical features and dignified comportment as expressed in the painting – represents for Vincent, as he imagines his utopian artists’ community, the Artist as visionary Poet in the model of Dante.15 Dante as Poet/Genius and Poet/Hero Vincent was not alone in his admiration for Dante. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, Dante in the nineteenth century was a mythic figure such that the poet and his writings had come to mean many things to many people by the 1880s and 1890s.16 But what exactly did Dante mean for Van Gogh as he conceived of his utopian artist community in Arles? Once again, the artist’s correspondence is revelatory. The first mention of Dante in the known letters of Van Gogh occurs in October 1880. On the 15th of that month, Vincent, writing to Theo from Brussels, discusses Dante in the context of his ongoing studies from Charles Bargue’s Cours de dessin.17 Vincent notes in the letter that among the sketches agreed to sit for him, while Gauguin was hundreds of miles away in Pont Aven. However, Vincent’s ideas tended to change rapidly, and, once a new idea took hold of him, there was no turning back. Vincent may indeed have had Gauguin in mind, initially, but his letters suggest that Boch’s very specific features, and their resemblance to what Vincent knew of Dante’s appearance and character, impressed themselves on his thoughts with increasing intensity and frequency. Thus, Boch’s sensitive and dignified Dante-like features substituted for Gauguin’s coarser and darker face (recall that Vincent in the letter of 18 August specifically described his intended poet as “blond” – and while Boch was not a tow-head, he was much fairer than the swarthy Gauguin), and Vincent’s mind turned to Dante, and later encompassed Petrarch and Boccaccio, as his ideas for the Studio of the South took shape. 15 Vincent believed portraiture to be the art form of the future, and discussed his views in these terms frequently in his correspondence. Particularly significant is his belief that portraiture should definitively not be concerned with capturing exact likeness, but with finding the essence of an individual or a type of person so that it becomes an expressive medium for the artist rather than an exercise in accurate rendering. See letters of 3 September 1888 (Letter 673) and 1 or 2 November 1888 (Letter 716) especially for Vincent’s comments regarding portraiture. 16 On Dante’s reception in the nineteenth century, see Dante in the Long Nineteenth Century: Nationality, Identity, and Appropriation, ed. Aida Audeh and Nick Havely (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Dante in the Nineteenth Century: Reception, Portrayal, Popularization, ed. Nick Havely (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011); and, more generally, see Dante, the Critical Heritage, 1314–1870, ed. Michael Caesar (London: Routledge, 1989). 17 Charles Bargue, Cours de dessin. Avec le concours de J.-L. Gérôme (Paris, 1868–70) was a series of drawing examples published by Goupil & Cie as loose leaves. Volume 1, Modèles d’après la bosse, which consisted of seventy plates, concentrated on the drawing of plaster casts, while Volume 2, Modèles d’après les maîtres, consisted of sixty-seven drawn copies after great masters. There are several mentions in Vincent’s letters of his ongoing studies out of the Bargue volumes in 1880 and 1881, particularly. His continued interest is evident in his requests to Theo to send him a copy of Bargue’s Exercises au fusain in letters from

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Fig. 1: Charles Bargue (1826/27–83), Fragments de Têtes – Nez, Cours de dessin 1ere partie, modèles d’après la bosse, pl. 3, 1868, lithographie, épreuve avant la lettre, inv.90.1.1.594 (1), Collection Musée Goupil, Bordeaux, ©Mairie de Bordeaux (photo: B. Fontanel)

he has completed he has “done one of the head of Dante which is somewhat like an etching” (Letter 159).18 He comments that “it’s not as easy as it May and June 1890, just prior to his death in July of that year. It is important to note that Jean-Léon Gérôme, Bargue’s collaborator in publication of the Cours, was the creator of an important Dante-based painting that was available in print form as well, titled Dante méditant dans le jardin des Cascine à Florence. Gérôme’s work conflates several legends drawn from Dante’s biography in a historically inaccurate genre painting. As an instructor of painting, Gérôme encouraged interest in Dante as subject or source of art among his many students, including Lecomte-DuNouy and Eugène Deully. Lecomte-DuNouy also assisted in providing illustrations for the Bargue publication. On French Salon painters’ interest in Dante, see Aida Audeh, Rodin’s “Gates of Hell” and Dante’s “Divine Comedy”: An Iconographic Study (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 33–46. 18 “Il est vrai aussi que pour les exercises au fusain & les modèles d’apr`s la bosse de Bargue, je les ai pourtant dessinés là, soit dans le petit cabinet soit dehors dans le jardin, mais maintenant que j’en suis aux portrait d’après Holbein &c. de la 3me partie du Cours de dessin cela n’allait plus. […] J’ai aussitôt repris mon travail ici, c.à.d. la 3me partie des Bargue, & ai une chamber beaucoup plus convenable que le petit cabinet, dans un petit logement Bd

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Fig. 2: Charles Bargue (1826/27–83), Têtes de profil – Dante, Cours de dessin 1ere partie, pl. 34, 1868, lithographie, inv.90.1.1.620 (1), Collection Musée Goupil, Bordeaux, ©Mairie de Bordeaux (photo: B. Fontanel)

seems,” indicating he must have expended quite some effort on it. While the actual sketch Vincent completed has not been located, it is clear that the source for it must have been one of three Dante images in the Bargue Cours de dessin (Figs 1–3).19 While Figure 3 is clearly based on Raphael’s portrait du midi. […] J’en ai fait entre autres un de la tête du Dante, qui ressemble en quelque sorte ùne eau forte. Mais c’est pas si facile que cela ne semble.” The Van Gogh Museum notes that, in this letter, Vincent’s mention of the third part of Bargue’s Cours de dessin actually refers to the second part. He mistakenly took Bargue’s Exercises au fusain to be the first part, though it appeared independently. 19 The inclusion of Dante images in Bargue’s drawing courses is interesting in itself, as the Bargue books were created in part to raise the level of “taste” (goût) among France’s skilled artisans (workers in decorative and industrial arts – commercial design) through education along the lines of the state-run French Academy of Painting and Sculpture (the Académie), which had its roots in the classical tradition championed in France since the period of Louis XIV. See Gerald M. Ackerman and Graydon Parrish’s annotated reproduction of the Bargue Cours (Paris: ACR Editions, 2011), 4–17. That the profile of Dante should be included in this effort is testament to the frequency with which he was depicted in French art of the nineteenth century.

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Fig. 3: Charles Bargue (1826/27–83), D’après Raphael Sanzio (1483–1520), Portrait de Dante, Cours de dessin 2eme partie, pl. 32, 1869, lithographie, inv.96.1.1.177 (1), Collection Musée Goupil, Bordeaux, ©Mairie de Bordeaux (photo: B. Fontanel)

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of Dante within the Disputa fresco in the Vatican’s Stanza della Segnatura, Figures 1 and 2 are based on the so-called “Dante Death Mask” held by the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.20 Now considered an artist’s creation rather than a posthumous cast of the poet’s face, the Death Mask was, in Vincent’s day, widely believed to be an accurate rendition of Dante’s distinctive features, thus forming the basis of the many depictions of Dante in art and popular culture in the nineteenth century.21 Reproductions of the Dante Death Mask were common in artists’ studios of that time, held alongside other plaster casts and molds of canonical works of art with which it was felt all artists should be familiar. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam holds in its collection one of these reproductions, which was purchased either by Vincent or Theo from L. Latouche, a popular and oft-frequented artist supply shop and gallery on the rue de Lafayette in Paris (Fig. 4).22 It is certain, then, that Vincent was familiar with the well-known profile of Dante through the Bargue course and the Death Mask reproduction he or Theo had purchased. On traditions of portraiture representing Dante, see Richard Thayer Holbrook, Portraits of Dante from Giotto to Raphael (London: Philip Lee Warner, 1921) and Frank Jewett Mather, The Portraits of Dante (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1921). The year 1921 marked the sixth centenary of Dante’s death and thus prompted a number of publications dedicated to the poet, such as these devoted to portraiture. See also Rachel Owen, “The Image of Dante, Poet and Pilgrim,” in Dante on View: The Reception of Dante in the Visual and Performing Arts, ed. Antonella Braida and Luisa Calè (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 83–94. 21 Dante’s importance as inspiration for French artists of the nineteenth century has been explored in several of the present author’s publications, notably “Dante in the Nineteenth Century: Visual Arts and National Identity,” in Dante in France: A Special Issue of La Parola del Testo, ed. Russell Goulbourne et al. (Rome: Zauli Editore, 2013), 85–100; “Dante’s Ugolino and the School of Jacques-Louis David: English Art and Innovation,” NineteenthCentury Contexts 35.4 (2013): 399–417; “Gustave Doré’s Illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy: Innovation, Influence, and Reception,” in Studies in Medievalism XVIII: Defining Medievalism(s) II, ed. Karl Fugelso (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), 125–64; “Images of Dante’s Exile in 19th-century France,” Annali d’Italianistica 20 (2002): 235–58; and “Dufau’s La Mort d’Ugolin: Dante, Nationalism, and French Art, ca.1800,” in Dante in the Long Nineteenth Century, 141–63. 22 See Berthold Köster and Erik Tjebbes, “Van Gogh’s Plaster Models Examined and Restored,” Van Gogh Museum Journal 1997–1998 (1998): 69–75. The Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam has in its collection several plaster figures owned by Vincent, including the Death Mask of Dante. The mask, when cleaned by museum staff, was found to have been painted. Dante’s headgear was identified as originally a dark reddish-brown. A small paper label inside of the mask indicates the name of the shop in Paris from which it was purchased. Specifically, the label reads “Articles de Peinture – L. Latouche – 34, r. de Lafayette.” Vincent mentions the Latouche shop in Paris in at least one letter to Theo, sent from Arles on 23 June 1888 (Letter 630). The Van Gogh Museum notes, regarding this mention in Letter 630, that Latouche’s shop, in addition to selling fine colors and modern paintings, was also engaged in framing and lining, and exhibited the work of the Impressionists in its windows. 20

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Fig. 4: Anonymous, Dante’s Mask, n.d., Plaster, 21 x 16 x 12.5, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent Van Gogh Foundation)

A distinctive feature of the Death Mask and images based upon it such as those in the Bargue Cours is the aquiline nose, with its prominent bridge and downward trajectory at its tip.23 Long associated with visual portrayals of The profile of Dante, with its prominent nose, may have been included in the Bargue Cours specifically to exercise the artist’s ability to portray irregular features. See Ackerman and Parrish’s annotated reproduction of the Bargue Cours, 109.

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Dante, this characteristic profile most likely originated with descriptions of his appearance found in his earliest biographies.24 Examination of the Boch portrait with reference to the “Dante-like” face of its subject recalls the profile view of the Dante Death Mask found in the Bargue Cours and in the reproduction of the mask in the Van Gogh collection. Most particularly this resemblance is apparent in the notable aspect of the aquiline nose Vincent has emphasized through the three-quarter turn of the head and noticeable highlights on its bridge. Vincent further turns the viewer’s attention toward the unique and refined shape of the prominent nose in the portrait of Boch as Artist/Poet by narrowing the jaw.25 In addition, Vincent has taken care to highlight most brightly the forehead of his sitter, making it stand out considerably, as he described in his letter to Theo of 18 August 1888, from the dark blue of the starry sky behind him. Vincent’s emphasis on nose and brow correspond to physiognomic associations with poetic genius described in the writings of Swiss physiognomist Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801).26 Vincent referred to Lavater’s work in his correspondence. His discovery of Lavater, in fact, coincides with his work with the Bargue Cours from which he sketched Dante as reported in his letter of 15 October 1880 (Letter 159). Just two weeks later, in a letter of 1 November 1880 (Letter 160), he notes to Theo, I’m making headway with the examples of Bargue, and things are progressing. […] I had great pleasure lately in reading an extract from the work of Lavater and Gall. Physiognomie et phrénology. Namely character as it is expressed in facial characteristics and the shape of the skull.27

The primary source for information regarding Dante’s appearance is Boccaccio’s biography of the poet, La Vita di Dante. In this, Boccaccio described Dante as “of midde height […] he walked somewhat bent over, with a grave and gentle gait. […] His face was long, his nose aquiline, and his eyes rather big than small. His jaws were large, and his lower lip protruded. […] His expression ever melancholy and thoughtful.” Boccaccio, quoted in Holbrook, Portraits of Dante, 16–17. 25 A photograph of Boch ca. 1888 included in Pickvance, Van Gogh in Arles, 169, makes clear that Vincent has distorted the features somewhat to exaggerate the eagle-like form and prominence of his model’s nose. 26 Lavater’s influence on culture of his time and after was substantial. See Physiognomy in Profile: Lavater’s Impact on European Culture, ed. Melissa Percival and Graeme Tytler (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005). See also Alfred David, “An Iconography of Noses: Directions in the History of a Physical Stereotype,” in Mapping the Cosmos, ed. J. Chance and R. O. Wells (Houston, TX: Rice University Press, 1985), 76–97. 27 “Met de voorbeelden van Bargue vlot ik & vordert het. […] Met veel genoegen las ik dezer dagen een uittreksel uit het werk van Lavater & Gall. Physiognomie & phrenology. n.l. het karakter zooals dat zich uitdrukt in gelaatstrekken & Schedelvorm.” 24

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The Van Gogh Museum has identified the text Vincent references as Alexandre Ysabeau’s summary of the theories of Lavater and Gall (Paris, 1862).28 These theories had quite an impact on Vincent, who engaged in lengthy discussion with Theo in a letter of 11 November 1883 (Letter 405) regarding their respective characters in relation to them. Thus we can assume he knew the text well and that it continued to be on his mind long after his initial mention of it in the 1 November 1880 letter, particularly with regard to what it might have suggested to him regarding his study of the Dante Death Mask images in the Bargue Cours mentioned just two weeks before. The Ysabeau summary contains a specific passage on Génie poétique that begins with the assertion that poetic genius is inborn, a “gift of nature,” as Vincent also considered the vocation of being an artist (18 August 1888, Letter 663), and which can be recognized primarily by a forehead that “does not resemble that of any ordinary man.”29 Further, a more general statement regarding the importance of the forehead in physiognomic analysis notes that “the skin that covers the forehead must be visibly more luminous than other parts of the face” in order to express “nobility of sentiments and a vast intelligence.”30 The brightly highlighted forehead of Vincent’s portrait of Boch as embodiment of the Artist/Poet type modeled on Dante can be taken as expression of this theory, not only functioning to make the “refined and nervous” head stand out from deep night sky like one of the glittering stars, as Vincent described, but also to symbolize the inspired nature of his dreams and visions. The death mask of Dante contained no grand forehead that, in depictions of the poet, was typically hidden by his famous cap. Vincent’s portrait of Boch is not meant to be a likeness of Boch or Dante, but symbolic of the character or type of the Artist/Poet whom Van Gogh imagined as central to his artist community in Arles. Further, Lavater and Gall as summarized by Ysabeau devote substantial discussion to the meaning of various shapes of noses in relationship to character, intelligence, and morality. Generally, they assert, a long and pronounced bridge of the nose, whether straight or curved (in convex manner), denotes

Alexandre Ysabeau, Lavater et Gall. Physiognomonie et phrenology rendues intelligibles pour tout le monde (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1862). 29 Ysabeau, Lavater et Gall, 249. “Génie poétique. Tout le monde sait qu’on naît poète, et que tout l’art du monde, toute l’application possible, toutes les etudes les plus persévérantes ne sauraient donner le génie poétique à celui qui n’en est pas doué naturellement. […] Le front d’un grand poète ne ressemble pas à celui d’un homme ordinaire.” 30 Ysabeau, Lavater et Gall, 34–35. “Enfin Lavater résume de la manière suivante l’exposé des conditions d’un front, selon lui, parfaitement beau, exprimant la noblesse des sentiments et une vaste intelligence: […] La peau qui le recouvre doit être sensibilement plus claire que celle des autres parties due visage.” 28

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abilities that are “out of the ordinary.”31 Further, a nose whose point visibly descends (as does Dante’s as portrayed in the Death Mask featured specifically in profile in the Bargues Cours) denotes “great intelligence” as well as a tendency toward “melancholy,” both of which were frequently associated with Dante from his earliest biographies through to portrayals in nineteenthcentury text and art.32 Vincent’s portrait of Boch emphasizes the strong and convex bridge of the nose, in common with Dante, but not so specifically the markedly downward point of the nose, as he is not creating a likeness of the Italian poet. Rather in this Vincent seems to refer to the “distinction and nobility” and “spiritual” qualities represented by the “most rare” nose whose point is horizontal rather than inclined upward (as a snub nose is “most common, least distinguished, and indicating the least intelligence”) or visibly downward as in the case of the Dante Death Mask.33 Vincent’s understanding of Dante was also influenced by the works of Scottish author Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), most importantly his On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History, which devotes a chapter to Dante as Poet-Hero. Vincent copied out a passage from it as early as 1875 and references the book directly in a letter of 12 or 13 October 1883 (Letter 395): I read a very good book by Carlyle, Heroes and hero-worship, full of nice things, like for instance We have a duty to be brave, although this is usually wrongly regarded as something exceptional. It’s also true in life that the good is such a high light that it goes without saying that we can’t reach that. If we set our spectrum lower and nonetheless try to remain bright and not lapse into lifelessness, this is the most reasonable thing to do, and makes life less impossible.34 We can assume Vincent was familiar with Carlyle’s chapter on Dante titled the “Hero as Poet.” Among many resonances that can be found in Ysabeau, Lavater et Gall, 41–42. “Quand la partie du nez comprise entre sa racine et sa pointe, ce qu’on nomme en physiognomonie l’épine du nez, est large, qu’elle soit droite ou courbée, elle denote des faculties peu ordinaires.” 32 Ysabeau, Lavater et Gall, 55. “Les nez dont la pointe s’abaisse sensiblement. Ils dénotent, avec une intelligence étendue, des dispositions à la satire et à le mélancolie.” 33 Ysabeau, Lavater et Gall, 55. “Les nez dont la partie inférieure présente une ligne sensiblement horizontale. Ce sont ceux qui réunissent le plus de beauté et de sens spiritual, à la distinction et à la noblesse; ce sont aussi les plus rares. Les nez dont le contour inférieure se relève. Ils sont plus communs, moins distingues, et indiquent moins d’intelligence.” 34 “Ik las een zeer mooi boekje v. Carlyle, Heroes & heroworship, vol aardige dingen als bijvoorbeeld We have the duty to be brave, al wordt dit meestal als iets bijzonders beschouwd ten onregte. Het is in’t leven ook zoo dat het geode zoo’n hoog licht is’t als vanzelf spreekt we daar toch niet bij kunnen. Stellen we onze gamma lager en trachten toch helder te blijven en niet in het doode te vervallen, is het meest raisonable en maakt het leven minder onmogelijk.” 31

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Vincent’s ideas and those expressed in On Heroes, one that is most pertinent with regard to the Portrait of Boch as Artist/Poet/Dante concerns Carlyle’s extended discussion of Dante as “painter”: “Consider, for example, to begin with the outermost development of his intensity, consider how he paints. He has a great power of vision, seizes the very type of a thing; presents that and nothing more.”35 Carlyle goes on to describe Dante’s character in relation to his “painting”: It is strange with what a sharp decisive grace he snatched the true likeness of a matter […]. The very movements in Dante have something brief; swift, decisive, almost military. It is of the inmost essence of his genius this sort of painting. […] For though this of painting is one of the outermost developments of a man, it comes like all else from the essential faculty of him; it is physiognomical of the whole man. Carlyle describes then the qualities of nobility and intensity inherent in all aspects of Dante and his “painting,” which is, finally, tied to a great morality: Dante’s painting is not graphic only, brief, true, and of a vividness as of fire in dark night; taken on the wider scale, it is everyway noble, and the outcome of a great soul. […] For the intense Dante is intense in all things; he has got into the essence of all. […] Morally great, above all, we must call him; it is the beginning of all. And, perhaps most illuminating in relation to Vincent’s portrayal of the “Dante-like” Boch against the starry sky – taking particular note of the single large star in the upper left corner of the canvas – Carlyle, in describing Dante’s experience of exile, writes: By degrees, it came to be evident to him that he had no longer any resting place, or hope of benefit, in this earth. […] [Writing the Divine Quotations from Carlyle are taken from Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History, ed. David R. Sorenson and Brent E. Kinser (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2013). This text is based on the first edition of Carlyle’s book (London: James Fraser, 1841). Carlyle discusses Dante and Shakespeare as PoetHeroes in Lecture III, found on pages 77–103 of the Sorenson/Kinser edition. Vincent could read English and had lived in England for some time, so it is probable that he read Carlyle in the original. Carlyle’s discussion of Dante as painter is found on pages 87–89. On Carlyle’s interest in Dante generally, see C. P. Brand, Thomas Carlyle and Dante, Lecture Delivered to the Carlyle Society, Session 1984–85. Occasional Papers, No. 11 (Edinburgh: Carlyle Society, 1985). See also Julia Straub, “The Transatlantic Dante in the Nineteenth Century: Literary Authority and Reception Histories,” in Traveling Traditions: Nineteenth-Century Cultural Concepts and Translatlantic Intellectual Networks, ed. Erik Redling (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2016), 79–93.

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Van Gogh, Dante, & the Studio of the South  139 Comedy] must have been a great solacement to Dante, and was, as we can see, a proud thought for him at times, that he, here in exile, could do this work; that […] no man or men could hinder him from doing it, or even much help him in doing it. He knew too, partly, that it was great; the greatest a man could do. “If thou follow thy star, se tu segui la tua stella” – so could the Hero, in his forsakenness, in his extreme need, still say to himself: “follow they star, though shalt not fail of a glorious heaven [sic]!”36

Significantly, Carlyle quotes from Dante’s Inferno, canto XV, in which Dante has encountered his own mentor, Brunetto Latini, sentenced to eternal punishment among the round of those Violent Against Nature (i.e., those guilty of what were considered in Dante’s day unnatural sexual practices). The larger passage from which the quote is taken concerns Brunetto’s prophetic assurance to Dante to “follow his star” in spite of those who will, because of jealousy, seek to destroy him. Brunetto assures Dante that he will receive the recognition – “the glorious haven” – that is his due: If thou follow thy star thou canst not fail of a glorious haven […]. But that thankless and malignant folk […] shall become, for they welldoing, thine enemy […]. Thy fortune holds for thee such honour that the one party and the other shall be ravenous against thee, but the grass shall be far from the goat […]. Inferno XV, 55–7237 Dante responds with an affirmation of artist’s power to transcend death through mentorship or influence of artists who came before him, a sentiment shared by Vincent and expressed several times in his correspondence. Dante writes: Were all my prayers fulfilled […] you had not yet been banished from humanity; for in my memory is fixed, and now goes to my heart, the dear and kind paternal image of you when many a time in the world you taught me how man makes himself immortal. Inferno XV, 79–85 This particular passage from Dante then, quoted by Carlyle, is a fitting caption to the Portrait of Boch as it represents Vincent’s aspirations for his artists’ community where he hoped such inspiration would occur for himself Carlyle, On Heroes, 84–85. All quotations from Inferno are taken from Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy 1: Inferno, trans. John D. Sinclair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961).

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and for generations of artists beyond his own. Vincent expresses this in his letter of 9 or 10 July 1888, a day in which he went to visit Boch and MacKnight at their home just outside of Arles. In the letter Vincent joins the immortality of the arts with the symbolism of the stars in eerie prophecy of his own death that would occur just two years later by his own hand: Painters – to speak only of them – being dead and buried, speak to a following generation or to several following generations through their works. Is that all, or is there more, even? In the life of the painter, death may perhaps not be the most difficult thing. […] Why, I say to myself, should the spots of light in the firmament be less accessible to us than the black spots on the map of France. Just as we take the train to go to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to go to a star. […] To die peacefully of old age would be to go there on foot.38 A “Dantean” Water Sprite In addition to the references in the Bargue Cours and Carlyle’s On Heroes, to understand the associations Vincent layered on to Dante and “Dante-like” as he approached his Portrait of Boch we are fortunate to have his own statements to Theo regarding the question of what constitutes the “Dantean” in art. In a letter of 30 December 1884 (Letter 477), Vincent responds to Theo’s use of this term to describe depiction of the Water Sprite, a character derived from Norse mythology and portrayed by the Swedish artist Ernst Josephson (1851–1906) in a painting of the same name (Plate II) owned by Theo.39 “Les peintres – pour ne parler que d’eux – etant morts et enterrés, parlent à une generation suivante ou à plusieurs generations suivantes par leurs oeuvres. Est ce là tout ou y a-t-il meme encore plus. Dans la vie du peintre peutêtre la mort n’est pas ce qu’il y aurait de plus difficile. […] Pourquoi, me dis je, les points lumineux du firmament nous seraient elles moins accessibles que les points noirs sur la carte de France. Si nous prenons le train pour nous render à Tarascon ou à Rouen nous prenons la mort pour aller dans une étoile. […] Mourir tranquillement de vielillesse serait y aller à pied.” 39 Josephson painted several versions of this work. Josephson gave a preparatory oil painting for the finished work to Theo van Gogh in 1884, which was eventually given by the Van Gogh family to the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. In a letter of 2 May 1885 (Letter 499), Vincent expresses regret that a newer version of Josephson’s Water Sprite (the Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde version of that year) was rejected by the Paris Salon judges. Josephson himself suffered a fate similar to Vincent’s: generally outcast from his fellow artists, attempting to change the course of his national art from the dominant influence of French Impressionism and, in doing so, anticipating directions of later Symbolism and even early twentieth-century art, with appreciation for his work coming primarily after his death in poverty and isolation. See Michelle Facos, “A Controversy in Late Nineteenth Century Painting: Ernst Josephson’s The Water Sprite,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 56.1 (1993): 61–78. Facos argues that, among other possible sources, the artist may have based the head of the water sprite (which is male) on Auguste Rodin’s sculpture Head of Sorrow, 38

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Vincent argues passionately against application of the term “Dantean” to describe the folkloric figure traditionally considered malevolent: I’m curious to see that painting you got, sooner or later. I don’t exactly understand the legend itself – what it’s getting at. Why I don’t is because you say: the figure [of the Water Sprite] is Dantean – yet – it’s the symbol of an evil spirit that lures people into the abyss. Surely the two can hardly go together, since the sober, austere figure of Dante, entirely filled with indignation and protest at what he had seen happen – in protest at the atrocious medieval abuses and prejudices – is certainly one of the most upright, most honest, most noble that are conceivable. In short – people said of Dante, “there is the one who went into hell and returned” – something very different to go in oneself and come out again than to lure others in satanically. Consequently – one can’t have a Dantean figure play a satanic role without a huge misconception of character. And the silhouette of a Mephistopheles is mightily different from Dante’s. […] Giotto painted Dante, and with much emotion as you know, for you’re familiar with the old portrait. From which I draw the conclusion that Dante’s expression, however sad and melancholy, is essentially an expression of something infinitely good and tender. I therefore can’t imagine Satan or Mephistopheles as Dantean at all. So all the more reason why I’m curious to see what it look like in the painting.40 itself derived from his Dante-inspired Gates of Hell but also exhibited independently in 1882. On Rodin’s interest in Dante as he created his Gates of Hell, see the present author’s “Rodin’s Gates of Hell and Dante’s Divine Comedy: The Literal and Allegorical in the Paolo and Francesca Episode of Inferno 5,” in Dante in the Nineteenth Century, 181–98; “Rodin’s Gates of Hell: Sculptural Illustration of Dante’s Divine Comedy,” in Rodin: A Magnificent Obsession (London: Merrell Holberton Publishers, 2006), 93–126; “Rodin’s Gates of Hell and Dante’s Inferno 7: Fortune, the Avaricious and Prodigal, and the Question of Salvation,” in Studies in Medievalism XXII: Corporate Medievalism II, ed. Karl Fugelso (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), 115–52; “Rodin’s Three Shades and their Origin in Medieval Illustrations of Dante’s Inferno XV and XVI,” Journal of Dante Studies 117 (1999): 133–69; and “Rodin’s Gates of Hell and Aubé’s Monument to Dante: Romantic Tribute to the Image of the Poet in 19th-century France,” The Journal of the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University [continuation of The Stanford University Museum of Art Journal] 1 (1998–99): 33–46. 40 “Ik ben wel nieuwsgierig vroeger of later dat schij te zien dat gij hebt gekregen. De Sage zelf begrijp ik nu niet precies – wat men er mee wil. Daarom niet, omdat ge zegt: het figuur is Dante achtig – doch – het is symbool van een kwaden geest die de lui in den afgrond lokt. – Zeker kan zulks moeielijk zamengaan daar het sobere, strenge figuurtje van Dante, geheel doordrongen van verontwaardiging en protest tegen wat hij had zien gebeuren – in protest tegen de gruwelijke middeneeuwsche misbruiken en vooroordeelen – zeker een der opregtste, eerlijkste, nobelste is die denkbaar zijn. Kortom – van Dante zeiden de lui ‘voilà celui qui va en enfer et qui en revient’ heel iets anders er zelf in te gaan en weer uit te komen

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The references Vincent makes to Dante reveal the direct influence of Carlyle who, in On Heroes, wrote in terms that suggest a significant impact on Vincent as he conceptualized his Studio of the South. Carlyle, discussing a portrait of a youthful Dante in the Bargello Palace in Florence at that time attributed to Giotto, emphasizes the contradiction of harshness founded on sweetness and nobility of soul – a description of the poet that would likely have rung very true to Vincent, the isolated, frequently mocked artist desperate for an artists’ community within which to work and find acceptance for himself and his new approach to painting: To me it is a most touching face; perhaps of all faces that I know, the most so. […] I think it is the mournfulest face that ever was painted from reality; an altogether tragic, heart-affecting face. There is in it, as foundation of it, the softness, tenderness, gentle affection as of a child; but all this is as if congealed into sharp contradiction, into abnegation, isolation, proud hopeless pain. A soft ethereal soul looking out so stern, implacable, grim-trenchant, as from imprisonment of thick-ribbed ice! Withal it is a disdain of the thing that is eating out his heart, – as if it were withal a mean insignificant thing, as if he whom it had power to torture and strangle were greater than it. The face of one wholly in protest, and life-long unsurrendering battle, against the world. Affection all converted into indignation: an implacable indignation; show equable, implacable, silent, like that of a god!41 Carlyle discusses the legend of Dante in Verona – he who “went into Hell and returned” – in context of the necessity of pain and suffering for cultivation of virtue and achievement: I give Dante my highest praise when I saw of his Divine Comedy that it is, in all senses, genuinely a song. […] The essence and material of the work are themselves rhythmic. Its depth, and rapt passion and sincerity, makes it musical; – go deep enough, there is music everywhere. […] Dante’s World of Souls! It is, at bottom, sincerest of all Poems; dan ’t satanieke anderen er in lokken. Gevolgelijk – een dante achtig figuur kan men niet een satanieke rol laten spelen zonder enorme misvatting van karakter. En ’t silhouet van een Mefisto is magtig anders dan van Dante. […] Giotto schilderde Dante en met veel gevoel zooals ge weet want ge kent ’t oude portret. Waaruit ik conclusie trek, de expressie van Dante, hoe triest en melankoliek, is essentieel een uitdrukking van iets oneindig goeds en teers. – Satan of Mefisto stel ik me dan ook gansch niet Dante achtig voor. Doch reden te meer waarom ik wel nieuwsgierig ben eens te zien hoe het op ’t schij in elkaar zit.” 41 Carlyle, On Heroes, 82–83. The attribution to Giotto has been questioned, and largely discredited, by Ernst Gombrich. See Gombrich’s “Giotto’s Portrait of Dante?,” The Burlington Magazine 121.917 (August 1979): 25–34.

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Van Gogh, Dante, & the Studio of the South  143 sincerity, here too, we find to be the measure of worth. […] It came out of the author’s heart of hearts. […] The people of Verona, when they saw him on the streets, used to say, “Eccovi l’uom ch’è stata all’ Inferno, See, there is the man that was in Hell!” Ah, yes, he had been in Hell; – in Hell enough, in long severe sorry and struggle; as the like of him is pretty sure to have been. Commedias that come out divine, are not accomplished otherwise. Thought, true labour of any kind, highest virtue itself, is it not the daughter of Pain? […] In all ways we are “to become perfect through suffering.”42

The biblical concept of “perfection through suffering” referenced by Carlyle also permeates Vincent’s correspondence, and is as near to a personal philosophy of life as we can identify for the artist. Vincent’s dogmatic pursuit of a Christ-like perfection – first as a preacher/missionary, then as an artist – was, in his lifetime, intimately linked with well-known episodes of physical and mental suffering on his part. Those who knew Vincent personally spoke of his use of self-punishment in the form of denying himself food and even a warm bed at night when he was disappointed in his own performance or behavior.43 One quote from Vincent’s correspondence on the relationship of the outcast artist’s pain to achievement of artistic perfection will have to suffice to bring this point home. In a particularly long letter to Theo he wrote in Cuesmes, Belgium, 22/24 June 1880 (Letter 155) – where he decided to devote his life to art – Vincent links the life of the artist with suffering, exile, and, ultimately, a saint-like vocation or calling, much as Carlyle had written of Dante: Without wishing to, I’ve more or less become some sort of impossible and suspect character in the family, […] somebody who isn’t trusted […] so I’m inclined to believe it is beneficial and the best and most reasonable position to take for me to go away and to remain at a proper distance, as if I didn’t exist. What moulting is to birds, the time when they change their feathers, that’s adversity or misfortune, hard times, for us human beings. […] But what’s your ultimate goal, you’ll say. That goal will become clearer, will take shape slowly and surely, as the croquis becomes a sketch and the sketch a painting, as one works more seriously, as one digs deeper into the originally vague idea, the first Carlyle, On Heroes, 86–87. Carlyle’s equation of poetry and music finds resonances in many of Vincent’s letters, including: 26 August 1888 (Letter 669), 3 September 1888 (Letter 673), and 12 November 1888 (Letter 720). Vincent took music lessons in Eindhoven from a local organist who apparently found him mad for comparing the notes of the musical scale to colors and refused to continue teaching him. See letter to Theo of 18 September 1888 (Letter 683), n. 29. 43 See Gloria Groom, “The Empty Room,” Van Gogh’s Bedrooms, 29–32. 42

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fugitive, passing thought, unless it becomes firm. You must know that it’s the same with evangelists as with artists. […] Try to understand the last word of what the great artists, the serious masters, say in their masterpieces; there will be God in it. Someone has written or said it in a book, someone in a painting.44 The sacred nature of the Artist/Poet is shown quite literally by the halo of yellow-orange Vincent places around the head of Boch, affirming Carlyle’s view of the Poet as Prophet.45 Quite naturally, then, Vincent identifies the portrait of Boch with Dante as representation of the Artist/Poet and, as such, a central figure in his plans for the Studio of the South. But as his discussion with Theo in the 22/24 June 1880 letter demonstrates, it is also clear that he, himself, identifies with this role, and thus with this portrait, as the community’s founder. Vincent’s placement of the Portrait of Boch in a prominent place in his own bedroom on the second floor of the Yellow House is testament to the centrality of this figure, and Vincent’s self-identification with it, for the Studio of the South.46 Boch, Dante, and Vincent in The Bedroom Vincent represented his sleeping chamber in the Yellow House in three versions of The Bedroom.47 The original version (Plate III), now at the Van “Involontairement je suis devenu plus ou moins dans la famille un espèce de personnage impossible et suspect, quoi qu’il en soit quelqu’un qui n’a pas la confiance, en quoi donc pourrais-je en aucune manière être utile à qui que ce soit. C’est pourquoi qu’avant tout, je suis porté à le croire, c’est avantageux et le meilleur parti à prendre et le plus raisonnable que je m’en aille et me tienne à distance convenable, que je sois comme n’étant pas. Ce qu’est la mue pour les oiseaux, le temps où ils changent de plumage, cela c’est l’adversité ou le malheur, les temps difficiles pour nous autres êtres humains. […] Mais quel est ton but définitif, diras-tu. ce but devient plus défini, se dessinera lentement et surement comme le croquis devient esquisse et l’esquisse tableau, à fur et à mesure qu’on travaille plus sérieusement, qu’on creuse davantage l’idée d’abord vague, la premiere pensée fugitive et passagère, à moins qu’elle devienne fixe. Tu dois savoir qu’avec les évangelistes cela est comme avec les artistes. […] Cherchez à comprendre le dernier mot de ce que disent dans leurs chef d’oeuvre les grands artistes, les maîtres sérieux, il y aura Dieu là-dedans. tel l’a écrit ou dit dans un livre et tel dans un tableau.” 45 Carlyle wrote, “Poet and Prophet differ greatly in our loose modern notions of them. In some old languages, again, the titles are synonomous; Vates means both Prophet and Poet: and indeed at all times Prophet and Poet, well understood, have much kindred meaning.” Carlyle, On Heroes, 78–79. For thorough analysis of Vincent’s spirituality, see Naomi Margolis Maurer, The Pursuit of Spiritual Wisdom: The Thought and Art of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin (Cranbury, NJ, and London: Associated University Presses, 1999). 46 Gloria Groom, “Van Gogh’s Search for Home: Chronolog,” in Van Gogh’s Bedrooms, 17–27. 47 The literature on the Bedroom series is vast. For a thorough source, see Groom’s catalog for 44

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Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, represents Vincent’s bedroom most closely to its original appearance and was painted contemporaneously with his residence there and his hopes and ongoing plans for his Studio of the South. Its creation has been dated to mid-October 1888, prior to Gauguin’s arrival on the 23rd of that month.48 The second and third versions (at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Musée d’Orsay, respectively) were painted after Vincent’s falling out with Gauguin and subsequent breakdown of December 1888. These two later versions were in fact painted from memory undertaken from his isolation at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence and, as such, express the failure of his utopian aspirations for an artists’ community in Arles. The changing portraits on the wall alongside the bed demonstrate Vincent’s initial hope for the plan’s success and the realization of its failure in which the Portrait of Boch plays an essential role. In the original version of The Bedroom of October 1888, the Portrait of Boch as Artist/Poet hangs on the long wall alongside Vincent’s bed, within view as he would have laid his head on the pillow each night. Vincent’s letter to Boch of 2 October 1888 (Letter 693), about two weeks before Vincent painted the first version of The Bedroom, confirms that this was in fact the location of the work and that it was placed there with the Studio of the South in mind: I’ve at last furnished the house and that I immediately furnished a bedroom for Gauguin as well, or for whoever will come. The house is much more cheerful now that it’s furnished. […] Your portrait is in my bedroom, with the one of Milliet the Zouave that I’ve just done.49 As Vincent describes, next to Boch’s portrait was that of Vincent’s friend Paul-Eugène Milliet.50 The two portraits together represented for Vincent the contemplative Artist/Poet and the Active Lover/Adventurer – a balance of the Art Institute of Chicago’s recent exhibition on the series: Van Gogh’s Bedrooms (2016). Gauguin had departed from Pont-Aven on Sunday afternoon 21 October and arrived in Arles at 5 a.m. on Tuesday, 23 October 1888. Vincent’s letter to Theo of 25 October 1888 (Letter 712) announces Gauguin’s arrival. 49 “j’ai enfin meublé la maison et que j’ai de suite meublé une chamber à coucher pour Gauguin aussi ou pour quiconque viendra. La maison est bien plus gaie maintenant qu’elle est meublée. […] Votre portrait est dans ma chamber à coucher avec celui de Milliet le zouave que je viens de faire.” 50 Milliet was a second lieutenant in the third regiment of the Zouaves, infantrymen in the French army originally composed primarily of Algerians. Vincent knew him by mid-June and began teaching him to draw. He began working on Milliet’s portrait in late September and was finished by early October. Vincent framed the portraits of Milliet and Boch in oak, and hung them both in his bedroom in the Yellow House. Vincent described Milliet’s easy-going and confident masculinity in several letters to Theo written in September 1888. See Pickvance, Van Gogh in Arles, 172. 48

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personality types at least obliquely referential to the Vita Contemplativa/Vita Activa binary associated with religious devotion since the Middle Ages.51 It has been suggested that the active Milliet was intended by Vincent as a gesture of welcome to the worldly Gauguin who, owing to the inconvenient architecture of the Yellow House, was forced to pass through Vincent’s bedroom each day to get to his own; thus Gauguin, upon arrival in late October, was to see the dreamy, contemplative Artist/Poet in the form of Boch and the confident, active Lover/Soldier in the form of Milliet as counterparts to Van Gogh and himself.52 In the later versions of The Bedroom, the Portrait of Boch on the wall next to the bed is replaced by Vincent’s representations of self-portraits that resemble known paintings, while the virile Milliet’s portrait is replaced by representations of portraits of women. The portraits of women have not been identified or found, nor have the women themselves been identified with any certainty. It is known that Vincent painted the second version of The Bedroom and sent it, along with the original, to Theo for safekeeping in 1889 and painted the third version (the smallest in size) for his mother and sister, also in 1889. Version two of The Bedroom (Art Institute of Chicago) (painted by 5 September 1889) features Vincent’s self-portrait in place of the Portrait of Boch. The intended audience for this painting was Theo – the brother who knew intimately of Vincent’s struggles to become an artist, to achieve his aspirations for the Studio of the South, and of their failure. The self-portrait that served as model for that depicted in this version may have been SelfPortrait (Plate IV).53 Vincent here depicts himself as the Artist/Poet with his palette – claiming the spot initially represented by the Dante-like Boch. But in contrast to the Portrait of Boch, originally in that location and symbolically holding the central position in the artists’ community of his dreams, Vincent as Artist/Poet is isolated in a swirling blue mass of paint that seems to begin and end with his own palette, his thumb thrusting through somewhat awkwardly. The once bright forehead of Boch is in Vincent greenish, troubled, and the eyes, looking as Boch’s do out of the canvas into the viewer’s space, are saddened, narrowed, while Boch’s give the impression of higher inspiration and positive energy. Alternatively, the painting referenced in the second version of The Bedroom may have been Self-Portrait (Plate V). No palette is included. Only the general shape of an aquiline nose, quite gracefully articulated, and a somewhat narrowed jaw to emphasize its prominence, seem to Louis van Tilborgh, “The Bedroom,” in Van Gogh’s Bedrooms, 51–67. For discussion of the contemplative life vs. the active life in Dante’s work, see Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante’s Vision and the Circle of Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 154–73. 52 Van Tilborgh, “The Bedroom,” 51–67. 53 Groom, Van Gogh’s Bedrooms, 137. 51

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link these two self-portraits to each other and back to the original thought of Lavater’s “Poet-Genius” and Carlyle’s “Poet-Hero” Dante seen in the Portrait of Boch. Vincent, in a letter to Theo of 5/6 September 1889 (Letter 800), describes these two portraits, painted in his chamber in Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, in terms of a sense of loss of self-knowledge or identity: People say – and I’m quite willing to believe it – that it’s difficult to know oneself – but it’s not easy to paint oneself either. Thus I’m working on two portraits of myself at the moment […]. One I began the first day I got up, I was thin, pale as a devil. It’s dark violet blue and the head whiteish with yellow hair, thus a colour effect. But since then I’ve started another one, three-quarter length on a light background.54 Whether the sober Vincent with palette, or the self-portrait against the light background, he pairs himself in the second version of The Bedroom with a female figure – perhaps symbolic of his lost chance at bourgeois normalcy through family, or perhaps a reference to the archetypal muse of artists and poets. While the reason for this pairing is not known, it is clear that Vincent no longer imagines nor portrays a community of men in the Yellow House, though he himself retains some features of the Artist/Poet presented here in the isolation of his chamber in the empty house. The third version of The Bedroom (Musée d’Orsay) (painted by 28 September 1889) presents a clean-shaven Vincent, very likely in reference to what may have been Vincent’s last known self-portrait (Plate VI), again paired with an unknown female in an unknown, probably fictional, portrait. In this, the Dante-like aquiline nose in Boch’s portrait and Vincent’s previous self-portraits is replaced by the peasant-like thick, snub nose (which Lavater associated with commonness, less distinction, and lesser intelligence), and the delicate forehead is replaced as well by a thickened, heavy, and squarish one with noticeable stress lines. Vincent’s eyes in this self-portrait show a marked sadness – larger than normal and downturned at the outside corners. The background is no longer in reference to the starred sky of the Artist/ Poet, nor even to the dynamic self-referential blue swirls of the self-portrait with palette. Now it is just a dull nondescript yellow-green. Vincent seems “On dit – et je le crois fort volontiers – qu’il est difficile de se connaitre soi-même – mais il n’est pas aisé non plus de se peindre soi-même. Ainsi je travaille à deux portraits de moi dans ce moment […]. l’un je l’ai commencé le premier jour que je me suis levé, j’étais maigre, pâle comme un diable. C’est bleu violet foncé et la tête blanchâtre avec des cheveux jaunes donc un effet de couleur. mais depuis j’en ai recommencé un de troisquarts sur fond clair.”

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to refer to himself as he was in the beardless days of his youth – perhaps an apt reference for a portrait intended for his mother and sister in Holland but seemingly no longer representative of the character of an Artist/Poet. Vincent’s letter to his sister, Willemien, of 19 September 1889 (Letter 804) reveals that the artist’s concern was still for achieving some sort of legacy or remembrance, but it was no longer to be achieved within a community of artists as he imagined for the Studio of the South represented in the original Bedroom by the presence of the Portrait of Boch. It is his family for whom he seems to have concern: Lately I’ve done two portraits of myself, one of which is quite in character […]. I myself still find photographs frightful and don’t like to have any, especially not of people whom I know and love. These portraits [photographs], first, are faded more quickly than we ourselves, while the painted portrait remains for many generations. Besides, a painted portrait is a thing of feeling made with love or respect for the being represented.55 The Beginning of the End The three versions of the Bedroom confirm the place of the Portrait of Boch within Vincent’s plans for the Studio of South. When it was clear to Vincent that no such community would come to fruition, when his dreams for founding this community had died, the Portrait of Boch no longer had a place in his Bedroom. But in October 1888, when he lived in that bedroom and first painted it, the Portrait of Boch in place above the bed, the ideal Dantelike Artist/Poet was central to his plans for the Studio of the South and a significant element of the larger décoration, most importantly the Poet’s Garden series inspired by the model of Tre Corone, he planned for the Yellow House.56 The portrait of Boch represented the ideal artist and, like Vincent “J’ai dernierement fait deux portraits de moi dont l’un est je crois assez dans le caractère […]. Je trouve toujours les photographies affreuses moi et je n’aime pas à en avoir, surtout pas des gens que je connais et que j’aime. Ces portraits-là d’abord sont fanés plus vite que nous mêmes tandis que durant bien des générations le portrait peint reste. Un portrait peint d’ailleurs est une chôse sentie faite avec amour ou respect de l’être représenté.” 56 Substantial research has been done on Vincent’s décoration for the Yellow House – his cohesive plan to furnish the house using mostly paired paintings in his and Gauguin’s bedroom. See Roland Dorn, “Vincent van Gogh’s Concept of ‘Décoration,’” in Vincent van Gogh: International Symposium (Tokyo: The Tokyo Shimbun, 1988), 375–403. See also Roland Dorn, Décoration: Vincent van Goghs Werkreihe für das Gelbe Haus in Arles (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1990). Vincent’s letter to Theo of 2 May 1889 (Letter 767) makes clear that he had dismantled the décoration by that point and shipped off to his brother most of the paintings that had been in his and Gauguin’s bedrooms, including the Portrait of Boch and at least two of the Poet’s Garden paintings. 55

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himself, may have been better off in isolation, for the problems for the Studio of the South began conceptually with the Poet’s Garden as representation of the artist community Vincent envisioned and actually on 23 October 1888 with the arrival of the “new” Petrarch, Paul Gauguin.

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Surrealist Medievalism: A Case Study* Tessel M. Bauduin For a movement conventionally counted among the (modern European) utopian avant-gardes, Surrealism was rather obsessed with the past. The array of historical figures one encounters in Surrealist sources is quite broad, and changed over time, but among the well-known persons claimed in one way or another as Surrealist predecessors are Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Isidore Ducasse/Comte de Lautréamont, Lewis Carroll, and the Marquis de Sade, as well as artists such as William Blake, Francisco Goya, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hieronymus Bosch, and Paolo Uccello. A less specific, but no less tangible sense of nostalgia for a past runs through the many different media that Surrealism produced as well. Overall, the Surrealist interest in the (European) past ran the whole gamut from late classical gnostic coins to modern Art Nouveau architecture, but figuring prominently in Surrealist sources are the nineteenth century and the Middle Ages. The last is of course very much an invented middle ages; that which Surrealism considered medieval or ascribed to the medieval extends well into what would today be qualified as early modern, and was furthermore frequently seen through the lens of the nineteenth century. This essay will examine Surrealism’s medievalism, a subject that, while not understudied, has hardly been exhausted either. The literary works of André Breton (1896–1966), one of Surrealism’s main theoreticians, have been well studied, and attention has been drawn to his favoring of medievalizing motifs and topoi such as the (ruined) castle, grail and other quests, philosopher’s stones, chivalrous love, and the serpent-woman Mélusina of French ­medieval

* My thanks to Karl Fugelso and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and feedback. Research for this essay was made possible by generous funding from NWO, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. Studies in Medievalism XXVII, 2018

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legend.1 Another important Surrealist theoretician was Georges Bataille (1897–1962), Breton’s foremost frenemy and a trained medievalist and numismatist. His contributions to medieval and medievalism studies have been analyzed by Bruce Holsinger, among others.2 That these two central figures carried the flag of medievalism in their work and imparted their interest to their respective circles and the movement overall is clear. That a middle ages – in the form of visual art or literature, tropes, thought, paradigms, or historical or legendary figures – hold a special place in Surrealism’s heart generally appears beyond dispute too.3 Still, studies of the medievalism of other Surrealists or of the widely diverging forms Surrealist medievalism and its reception trajectories can take are few. Here I will attempt to address the issue by painting the outlines of Surrealist medievalism specifically in relation to the appropriation, construction, and also creation of visual art. In particular, this essay presents one extended case study that serves to illustrate the width and depth of Surrealist medievalism, as much as the variety in routes of transmission of medieval art and medievalizing tropes: the reception of late medieval/early modern painter Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece (ca. 1512–16), from the 1920s to 1945. Periodicals and their influential role in mediating medieval culture will form a recurring theme, as will the pertinent role played by art critics Isabella Conti, “D’André Breton aux enchantements de Bretagne: Les mythes arthuriens en marge du surréalisme,” in Les Mythes des avant-gardes, ed. Vérnique Léonard-Roques and Jean-Christophe Valtat (Clairmont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2003), 347–56; Alain Corbellari, “Le merveilleux Breton (littérature médiévale et surréalisme),” in Une étrange constance. Les motifs merveilleux dans les littératures d’expression française du Moyen Âge à nos jours, ed. Francis Gingras (Quebec: Les presses de l’université Laval, 2006), 219–28; Suzanne Lamy, André Breton: hermétisme et poésie dans Arcane 17 (Montréal: PUM, 1977), passim but, for instance, 94–99; and Daniel Zamani, “In Search of the Holy Grail – Medieval Tropes and the ‘Occultation of Surrealism’ in the Work of André Breton, ca. 1928–1957,” unpublished dissertation, University of Cambridge (2017). 2 Bruce Holsinger, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 26–56, and Jean-Pierre Le Bouler, “Georges Bataille, le Moyen Âge et la chevalerie: de la thèse d’École des chartes (1922) au Procès de Gilles de Rais (1959),” Bibliothèque de l’école des chartes 164.2 (2006): 539–60. 3 Indeed, to move outside of the sphere of scholarship for the moment, a relationship that appears most obvious to many amateur audiences is that between late medieval/ early modern masters such as Hieronymus Bosch (1450–1516) and Surrealists such as Salvador Dalí (1904–89). That the works of these artists and their “bizarre” iconography is comparable, even the same, is apparently so self-evident that it can be noted in newspapers or blogs without any further qualification or contextualization, despite considerable differences. This became apparent, for instance, in media coverage of the 2016 quincentennial anniversary exhibition of “Jeroen Bosch in Den Bosch, the Netherlands,” in which Dalí and Surrealism in general were frequently mentioned; e.g., , last accessed 6 September 2017. This, in turn, reiterates what can be found in many popular sources on art. 1

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who influenced Surrealism’s discourse considerably, not least with regard to its medievalism. Apart from the “what” and “how” of Surrealist medievalism and routes and forms of transmission, reception, and appropriation, there is also the question of “where.” The short answer is: France. The penchant for things and images medieval was not entirely but still largely limited to the Parisian or at least francophone Surrealists. Surrealists in Prague, the Netherlands, or Japan, for instance, had their own obsessions with particular pasts for sure, but not so much with a medieval past. The Surrealist medievalism discussed here is primarily propagated in Francophone Surrealist milieus as well as, but only partly and driven by French sources, in Britain and the U.S. Thus it is already established that we are faced with a medievalism propagated in and directly related to French Surrealism. This is not to imply that the geographical reach of said middle ages was limited to France; on the contrary, Scandinavian Viking treasure, Irish psalters, and Netherlandish and Italian old masters form part of the Surrealist medieval repertoire. Overall, however, it was European, which leads me to a further point. The Surrealist middle ages are primarily defined as premodern: a time before the revival of classicism, before the Enlightenment, and before the advent of bourgeois culture and norms. The premodern period was perceived as a time when magical or analogical thinking still prevailed, when imagination and (experienced) reality or inner and outer worlds frequently and seamlessly coincided. From the Surrealist perspective, European medieval culture shared this premodern mindset to a large extent with non-European, non-western cultures, something that will not be explored here further but should still be noted. The Surrealists were fervently anti-colonialist and took every occasion to attack French imperialism, but this hardly precluded them from cultivating their own attitudes of primitivism and exoticism.4 A very similar attitude was applied to medieval heritage, and, indeed, occasionally Surrealist interaction with the (deep) past comes close to a form of time exoticism. Before turning to the case of the Isenheim altarpiece, which will be used to also shed more light on similar or diverging trajectories of the reception of other medieval (and medievalist) heritage, some observations on Surrealism’s relationship to and constructions of history, and a brief discussion of Surrealism’s sources, will be offered below. For French Surrealism’s primitivism, exoticism, anti-colonialism, and politicized aestheticism of non-western art, see Martine Antle and Katherine Conley, “Introduction: Dada, Surrealism, and Colonialism,” South Central Review 32.1 (2015): 1–7; Maria Kunda, “The Politics of Imperfection: The Critical Legacy of Surrealist anti-Colonialism,” unpublished dissertation, University of Tasmania (2010); Sophie Leclerc, “The Surrealist Appropriation of the ‘indigenous’ arts,” Arts & Societies, 23 November 2006, , last accessed 6 September 2017; and Louise Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic (London: Routledge, 2003), 61.

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Fig. 1: “Erutarettil,” Littérature 11–12 (1923): 24–25 (photo: author)

Surrealism and History The Surrealist approach to history can be qualified as overall quite utilitarian; the past functioned as an inexhaustible treasure trove of quirky forgotten intellectuals, outmoded genres, and inspiring visual languages to be employed for surrealist ends. History was utilized in attempts to self-define and to legitimate claims to power.5 As Kirsten Strom has detailed, the Surrealists appropriated historical figures “as a strategy for validating and buttressing their own [Surrealist] project” and, secondly, for “the self-conscious construction of a Surrealist group identity based upon [shared] principles,” also a validation strategy.6 The Surrealist discourse offers several overt visual and literary instances of the latter. Max Ernst’s painting Au rendez-vous des amis (1922), for example, includes, in addition to a roster of Dadaists, many of whom would soon become Surrealists, portraits of the Italian painter Raphael and the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky, on whose knee Ernst is perched. In addition, in the left background, a grouping of indistinguishable heads behind Hans Arp and Raphael suggests a line of people – friends, predecessors? – stretching into the background and perhaps also backwards in time. In 1923 the group published “Erutarettil” (littérature spelled backwards), a collage of names (Fig. 1),

Kirsten Strom, Making History: Surrealism and the Invention of a Political Culture (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002), 8. 6 Strom, Making History, 3. 5

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in their literary–political periodical Littérature.7 Keeping with their main focus on literature at that time, the list primarily includes names of poets and writers. Several names would later disappear from Surrealist lists; others, such as Rimbaud and Lautréamont, would prove evergreens. The medieval and early modern presence consists of the fourteenth-century Parisian scribe and famed alchemist Nicolas Flamel, the sixteenth-century polymath and reputed magician “Corneille” Agrippa von Nettesheim, the mythical magician and generally esoteric figure Hermes Trismegistus, and the fourteenth-century Spanish theologian and mathematician Ramon Llull, who was mainly of Surrealist interest because of his mathematical mechanism (the Llullian circle) for creating absolute knowledge, as well as on account of his reputation of also having been an alchemist. In other words, these four are magician-alchemists and hence are grouped together,8 which furthermore results from the Surrealist view of magic and alchemy as essentially medieval  sciences.9 The inclusion of authors  of gothic novels, such as Matthew Lewis, Ann Radcliffe, and Charles Maturin, produces further medievalist – a doubly mediated medieval, even – overtones. Even before Surrealism was formally incorporated in 1924 with the publication of Breton’s first Manifesto, therefore, the Surrealists were already clearly and explicitly claiming specific historical figures, some of them from a deep medieval and/or mythical past, as part of their group. Indeed, they showed a marked penchant for constructing and controlling history by means of lists; another example is that which appeared on the back cover of a catalog of books, presenting the categories “Lisez” and “Ne lisez pas,” Read/Don’t Read. The names of Llull, Flamel, and Agrippa appear under “Read.”10 In his Manifesto, Breton included a list of historical figures who, rather than appropriated as such, are qualified as Surrealist in some aspect of their life or work – “Swift is Surrealist in malice, Sade is Surrealist in sadism”11 – thereby making a proviso that would not often be seen. Here also, for the first time, painters are mentioned; however, they are still relegated to a footnote, and the one medieval artist among the “painters of the past” is Uccello “Erutarettil,” Littérature 2.11–12 (1923): 24–25. Positioned alone, on the facing page, is the Dutch Renaissance humanist Erasmus, who is probably included on account of his Praise of Folly (1509–11). Tythacott, Surrealism, 61. 9 Such views found their culmination in Breton’s massive illustrated tome on magic (and) art, written late in life (and published 1957), which falls outside of the scope of this essay; André Breton, “L’Art magique,” in Oeuvres Complètes, 4 vols., ed. Marguerite Bonnet et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 4: 47–289. 10 Back cover, Les livres surréalistes ainsi que les publications surréalistes sont toujours en vente à la librairie José Corti (Paris, 1923), reproduced in Elizabeth Cowling, “An Other Culture,” in Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, ed. Dawn Ades (London: Hayward Gallery, 1978), 451–68 (456). 11 André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 1–47 (26–27). 7 8

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(1397–1475).12 Only when Breton and others resolved the question whether surrealist painting could exist, later in the 1920s, did the visual arts rise to prominence13 – but then, to dominate. The understanding of the visual arts as the prime expression of Surrealism was consolidated in the 1930s and quickly found its way to sources about Surrealism, such as A Short Survey of Surrealism (1935) by the British poet and aspiring Surrealist David Gascoyne (1916–2001). Gascoyne reiterated and reinforced the predecessor-discourse by devoting his first chapter to “Ancestors of Surrealism,”14 which focused on nineteenth-century poets and de Sade. In a later chapter, however, the pedigree is extended much further backwards in time and expanded to painters: Surrealistic painting is not the monopoly of those artists who have devoted their whole energies to a systematic exploration of surrealist means of expression in the plastic domain […]; for surrealistic art has existed at all times and in all countries. Uccello, Bosch, Breughel [sic], Callot, el Greco, Goya, Blake, certain pre-Raphaelites […], to mention only a few, may all be regarded as surrealist artists.15 Thus, where in 1924 Breton’s footnote only mentioned Uccello, by 1935 also Bosch and Bruegel, to keep it to the late medieval artists, had become closely associated with Surrealism as a matter of course. The making of lists and genealogies was not unique to Surrealism. To some extent the Surrealists were taking part in what was not only a trend in elite milieus, but a cultural practice more broadly. In western culture generally, the fashion for creating national(ist) canons of the supposedly greatest writers, artists, thinkers, etc., had set in during the nineteenth century. As Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt has explored in her excellent study Stammbäume der Kunst, charts and genealogies quickly came to play a role in the arts. The structural ordering in visual models of past developments, be they further away, or in the very recent past, such as Alfred Barr, Jr.’s famous model of the development of cubism and abstract art, was an integral part of the disciplines of art history and art criticism.16 Such was the case, too, in the Breton, “Manifesto,” 27; the others mentioned are Modern painters. This extreme condensation hardly does right by the complexities of this difficult process that touched upon the core question of what Surrealism was, analyzed in Kim Grant, Surrealism and the Visual Arts: Theory and Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), specifically Parts Two and Three. 14 David Gascoyne, A Short Survey of Surrealism (London: Shenval Press, 1936 [1935]), 1–22. 15 Gascoyne, A Short Survey, 104–5, emphasis in original. Further down the page Gascoyne does distinguish surrealist art (“with a capital S”) in the narrower sense. 16 , last accessed 6 September 2017; Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, Stammbäume der Kunst. Zur Genealogie der Avantgarde (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2005), 114–60. 12 13

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avant-garde movements; the practice of listing visually all current members of a group can be found in Dada, for instance.17 It was also done in Futurism, where furthermore the canon of art history played a prominent part in the lists, tables, and trees drawn up by Futurist leaders Boccioni and Marinetti.18 Medieval art or artists do not figure in Futurist or Dadaist genealogies, however, and it does seem that the singling out of specific medieval figures and works, rather than generalized statements about art from certain periods, was mainly Surrealism’s preserve. The Surrealists distinguished themselves further in their idiosyncratic ordering of and cherry picking from history, and their undifferentiated mixing of the distant and the recent past. Gascoyne’s comment about surrealist art of “all times,” with Uccello, Bosch, Bruegel, and others as examples, shows that, over time, the Surrealists not only used history to validate the Surrealist project, but also, I find, to exemplify it – for themselves, but also for their audiences. Appropriating Bosch, who was going through his own phase of growing critical and public interest and acclaim in the 1930s, seems a typical example of that.19 The appropriation of persons as much as art works and objects from the past also acted to create and more importantly control a Surrealist aesthetic and political field. Specifically, it served to position or reposition Surrealism itself within the contemporary discourses in which it was subsumed or implicated: popular culture, or the western, semi-institutional art discourse shaped by critics, art historians, and curators. This therefore concerns only partly the discourse generated by Surrealism itself. An interesting aspect of the history of Surrealism itself is that it was canonized, even historicized, while it was still in full swing, a process that began in the late 1930s and reached a formal marker with the publication of Histoire du surréalisme in 194520 – while French Surrealism continued, arguably, to 1966, and longer in other countries. At the same time, both the embourgeoisement of Surrealism, and the proliferation of its visual language in popular culture, advertising, and design also set in during the late 1930s. All three of these developments around and about Surrealism required intervention from within it. Controlling the shape and content of the Surrealist project and Surrealist aesthetics therefore formed preeminent Surrealist concerns. History, including a medieval past, figured prominently in this process of adjusting – from the inside – the discourse about Surrealism. An aspect in which the role of outsiders is particularly relevant is the inscription of a medieval interest within Surrealism by influential critics and curators; Schmidt-Burkhardt, Stammbäume, 219–30. Schmidt-Burkhardt, Stammbäume, 187–211. 19 As further traced in Tessel M. Bauduin, “Bosch als ‘surrealist’: 1924–1936,” Ex Tempore 35.2 (2016): 84–98. 20 Maurice Nadeau, Histoire du surréalisme (Paris: Seuil, 1945). 17 18

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this process also took place during the 1930s. In his introduction to the influential anthology Surrealism (1936), the British art critic Herbert Read (1893– 1968) claimed, for instance, that “the art of the Middle Ages, except in so far as occupied with the mass-production of ecclesiastical symbols, was wholly of a superrealist [i.e., surrealist] character.”21 He noted “more than a surface resemblance” to medieval and surrealist arts, and singled out “[m]edieval sculpture, and above all medieval manuscripts” as offering “a wealth of material which it would be only too easy to call surrealist.” Promising to “not draw on this material, because I respect the difference of intention,”22 Read in fact did draw a direct line between contemporary surrealist art and medieval art. Read’s anthology enjoyed a wide reception and informed several other influential publications. In this way medievalism became an integral aspect of the discourse about Surrealism, as much as a Surrealist concern in itself. Sources Several Surrealists engaged directly with medieval thought, art, or objects by reading medieval poetry or prose, perusing manuscripts or coins in Parisian libraries, or studying art and objects in private collections, museums, galleries, or exhibitions. For instance, in 1935 the Musée de l’Orangerie hosted the high-profile show De Van Eyck à Bruegel, which offered ample opportunity for seeing Flemish, Netherlandish, and German primitifs.23 At the same time, the interaction with the Middle Ages was also, and more frequently, a mediated one, by means of periodicals, newspaper and magazine articles, reviews, and (pseudo-) scholarly illustrated studies on art and related subjects. An example of the latter is Le Musée des sorciers, mages et alchimistes (1929), a compendium on magic and sorcery by Émile-Jules Grillot de Givry (1874–1929).24 Le Musée is exuberantly illustrated, featuring 365 plates and 10 hors-textes in color, and not shy in its selection of the Surrealism, ed. Herbert Read (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), 57. Read, Surrealism, 57–58. 23 De Van Eyck à Bruegel (Paris: Musée de l’Orangerie, 1935). 24 Émile-Jules Grillot de Givry, Le Musée des sorciers, mages et alchimistes (Paris: Librairie de France, 1929). Le Musée discusses topics ranging from witchcraft and magic to tarot cards and other means of divination, physiognomy, and palmistry, and alchemy, as well as considering the great names of esoteric history such as Agrippa, Paracelsus, Flamel, and Fludd. Le Musée’s information on and diagrams of alchemy in particular certainly served many Surrealists well; Robert J. Belton, The Beribboned Bomb: The Image of Woman in Male Surrealist Art (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1995), 207; M. E. Warlick, Max Ernst and Alchemy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 94–95. The English edition – Grillot de Givry [no first name given], Witchcraft, Magic & Alchemy, trans. J. Courtenay Locke (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1971 [1931]) – has copies of all the images (in bad quality) from the French original, downsized, cropped, rearranged, and incompletely captioned, and is therefore not suitable for analysis in relation to Surrealist art. 21 22

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more salacious images of (nude) witches, possession, magical ceremonies, and alchemical intercourse. Demonology – including scenes of hell, the temptation of Anthony, and witches’ Sabbaths – is a recurring topic. Reviewed almost immediately by Surrealist ethnographer Michel Leiris (1901–90) in the semi-Surrealist periodical Documents, it further circulated in Parisian Surrealist groups and had an impact for years to come, not least through its many reproductions of paintings, woodcuts, and etchings by (or attributed to) Bosch, Bruegel, Martin Schöngauer, Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein the Younger, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Lucas Cranach the Younger, and Hans Baldung Grien, among many others.25 Le Musée also includes several reproductions of medieval portal sculpture from prominent cathedrals (Autun, Bourges, Lyons) of the eleventh to the fourteenth century. These are without exception demonological scenes with a flair for the grotesque. The Surrealists publicly and loudly rejected the Church, certainly in the early years, but could of course hardly insulate themselves from Catholic – and, more broadly speaking, Christian – culture and art. On the contrary, their interest in medieval art virtually guaranteed a continued encounter with Christian iconography. However, it should be kept in mind that, with regard to the visual arts, works were received and appropriated primarily on the basis of their form and style, sometimes on the apparent contradictions, especially paradoxes of fantasy and reality, or d ­ ream-logic seen to be evinced by elements of iconography or content. For instance, issue seven (1929) of Documents – of which Georges Bataille had become the main editor – reproduced several half- and full-page images of segments from the bronze church-doors (eleventh–thirteenth century) of San Zeno in Verona, showing Old and New Testament scenes. The ­anonymous author, who was probably Bataille, writes in the brief ­accompanying article  that “We insist here on the marvellous brutality of these compositions, which are not regulated by any formula, which do not show any need to embellish or suppress the abominable vulgarity of human occurrences.”26 Thus the main attraction of the medieval art selected here was style and, besides strangeness of form, the (supposed) human vulgarity of the content. One of the objectives of the editors of Documents was that the Michel Leiris, “‘A propos du Musée des sorciers,’” Documents 2 (1929): 109–14, and Warlick, Max Ernst, 30–33. Scholars of Ernst – including Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Victor Brauner, to name but a few – have noted the considerable impact of Givry’s Musée and its plates upon these Surrealist artists’ work. Ara H. Merjian, “‘Genealogical gestation’: Leonora Carrington between Modernism and Art History,” in Leonora Carrington and the International Avant-Garde, ed. Jonathan P. Eburne and Catriona McAra (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 39–56 (48–50). Several Surrealists were also on personal terms with Givry; Ades, Dada and Surrealism, 246. 26 Anon., “Les Portes de San-Zeno de Vérone,” Documents 7 (December 1929): 373–76 (373; my translation and emphasis). 25

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Fig. 2: Page-spread from Documents 5 (1929): 286–87 (photo: author)

r­ eproductions and images would “speak for themselves.” The primary visual impression that readers of the periodical would have was considered paramount.27 Accordingly, the fifth issue presents a half-page reproduction of a crucifixion-page from a medieval Irish Psalter (ninth or tenth century), with only a very minimal description, printed alongside a reproduction of a painting by Paul Klee (1879–1940) (Fig. 2).28 The following page-spread has a similar juxtaposition, now of a Klee and a South Russian coin or medal of “modernate periodicity”. The main objective of such visual juxtaposing seems to have been to affect the reader’s stylistic associations, while furthering the (aesthetic) discourse about forms of primitivism, both in contemporary avant-garde and medieval or ancient art. Arguably, one might perceive a political and/or blasphemous subtext here too (with Klee’s central Eva van den Boogaard, “Documents: banaliteit gevierd in een modernistisch tijdschrift,” TS: Tijdschrift voor Tijdschriftstudies 32 (December 2012): 181–90 (189). More on Documents can be found in Eric Robertson, “‘A shameless, indecent saintliness’: Documents (1929–1931) and Acéphale (1936–9),” in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Volume III, Europe 1880–1940, part I, ed. Peter Brooker et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 244–64. 28 Anon., “Psautier Irlandais de Dover,” Documents 5 (October 1929): 285–86. It is now known as the Southampton Psalter (St. Johns College, Cambridge). 27

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Fig. 3: Page-spread from Minotaure 10 (1937): 64–65 (photo: author). From: Chants exploratoires: Minotaure. La revue d’Albert Skira, 1933–1939 (Geneva: Cabinet des estampes du Musée d’art et d’histoire, 2008): xliv–xlv

figure being identified as “clown” and the right central figure being Christ). Something similar is presented in a page-spread from the Surrealist art glossy Minotaure, which contrasts – or compares, perhaps? – a page with part of a collage of international Surrealist publicity material from the 1930s, “Le Surréalisme autour du monde,” with a photograph of a sculpture of two shepherds from Chartres’ north portal (ca. 1194–1250), both without any accompanying text (Fig. 3).29 Leaving aside the question whether the intention of these pages is to offer political, stylistic, or even aesthetic critique (or a combination), the point is that these Surrealist periodicals, whose audience included other Surrealists, provided a podium for medieval art through their reproductions. Surrealists did not need to have medievalist training or visit museums to come into contact easily with often visually arresting, medieval art. What is more, readers encountered unusual, non-canonical medieval art. For instance, Documents, to limit it to that periodical, featured elevations and ground plans of Romanesque churches, photographs and reproductions of Viking ships and metal work, Ottonian metal work, carved ivory bookcovers, early medieval vessels from the Nagyszentmiklós treasure, gothic Sicilian wall-decorations, manuscript illuminations, and paintings by Piero Minotaure 10 (1937): 64–65; the collage “Le Surréalisme autour…” on 62–64.

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di Cosimo, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and the Cranachs.30 The possible avenues of Surrealist reception of medieval art are therefore not only manifold; that art itself was determinedly pluriform, too.31 Grünewald via Picasso and Zervos Another avenue again of mediation was through the agency of someone not part of the Surrealist in-crowd: critics, curators, art dealers, or other artists who were held in a certain esteem by Surrealism, such as Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). The French Surrealist reception of Grünewald (ca. 1470–1528) and his Isenheim altarpiece, mainly its central panel (first opening) of the Crucifixion, started with Picasso. This case serves as an example of the often occurring double or even triple mediation of medieval heritage in Surrealism, here specifically both a work and a particular aesthetics mediated through the work of another. Furthermore, it exemplifies the divergent trajectories that appropriation of medieval/early modern art could take in Surrealism. Thirdly, it highlights the role of agents outside of Surrealism with regard to the movement’s medievalism as much as its association with the medieval. Picasso was one of Surrealism’s great living heroes. During the 1930s he moved in close proximity to Surrealist circles and was on good terms with certain Surrealists in particular. The first issue of the Surrealist periodical Minotaure (1933) included among many reproductions of his art three pages entitled: “Crucifixions. Suite de dessins de Picasso, exécutés d’après la Crucifixion de Grünewald (Musée de Colmar) (inédits)” (Fig. 4).32 A reproduction of Grünewald’s central panel, the drawings’ source, was not included. Picasso had made the eight ink-drawings between 19 September and 7 October 1932, and they are in particular variations upon the form of Josef Strzygowski, “‘Recherches sur les arts plastiques’ et ‘histoire de l’art,’” Documents 1 (April 1929): 22–26; F. Adema van Scheltema, “La Trouvaille d’Oseberg,” Documents 3 (June 1929): 121–29; Wilhelm Kästner, “Un atelier d’orfevrerie à Essen vers l’an 1000,” Documents 5 (October 1929): 240–47; Jean Babelon, “L’Évangeliare de Saint-Lupicin à la bibliothèque nationale,” Documents 1 (April 1929): 59; Anon., “Le Trésor de Nagy-SzentMiklosz,” Documents 6 (November 1929): 320–23; Maria Accascina, “Les Peintures du Palais Chiaramonte à Palerme,” Documents 2.7 (1930): 383–88; Michel Leiris, “Notes sur deux figures microcosmique des XIVe et XVe siècle,” Documents 1 (April 1929): 48–52; Georgette Camille, “Piero di Cosimo,” Documents 2.6 (1930): 329–35; C. E., “Paysage de Lorenzetti,” Documents 2.1 (1930): 49–50; and Ralph von Koenigswald, “Têtes et crânes,” Documents 2.6 (1930): 353–58 (354). Note the roster of excellent international (art) historians and specialists who wrote for Documents. My thanks to Julia Krikke, who inventoried this material and graciously allowed me to make use of her notes. 31 Something similar could be said, although to a lesser extent, for medieval literature. To provide just one example, thirteenth-century “incoherent” poetry or fatrasie was published in the Surrealist periodical La Révolution surréaliste 6 (1926): 2–3. 32 Minotaure 1 (1933): 30–32. 30

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Fig. 4: “Crucifixions. Suite de dessins de Picasso, d’après la Cruxifixion de Grünewald (Musée de Colmar) (inédits),” Minotaure 1.1 (1933): 30–31 (photo: author). From: Minotaure. Nos. 1–13. 1933–39 (Geneva: Skira, 1981 [facsimile reprint])

Christ and those directly surrounding him.33 Later, when discussing these drawings with Brassaï, Picasso noted how he loved Grünewald’s altarpiece and how much he struggled to interpret it; one may note this struggle in the aggressive variations of Christ’s body and its deconstruction into boneforms.34 While it is posited as probable that Picasso saw the actual Isenheim altar in 1932, it is not certain; in his atelier, at least, Picasso had black-andwhite reproductions at hand.35 An analysis of all the drawings can be found in Susan Grace Galassi, Picasso’s Variations on the Masters: Confrontations with the Past (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 66–86. 34 Brassaï, Gesprekken met Picasso, trans. Marijke Jansen & Jelle Noorman (Amsterdam: de Arbeidspers, 1988 [1964]), 35–36. Discussion of these drawings may be found in: Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, “The Essence of Agony: Grünewald’s Influence on Picasso,” Artibus et Historiae 13.26 (1992): 31–47 (passim); Herschel B. Chipp, Picasso’s “Guernica”: History, Transformations, Meanings (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989), 112; and Anne Baldassari, Bacon – Picasso: The Life of Images (Paris: Flammarion, 2005), 148–50. Also see Andrée Hayum, The Isenheim Altarpiece: God’s Medicine and the Painter’s Vision (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 141. 35 Wolfgang Minaty, Grünewald im Dialog: 500 Jahre Isenheimer Altar in Kunst, Literatur und Musik (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2016), 33, and Hayum, The Isenheim, 146. Cf. Galassi, Picasso’s Variations, 211 n. 39. 33

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Those reproductions of the Isenheim altarpiece had been provided to Picasso by Greek-French art critic and publisher Christian Zervos (1889– 1970). Zervos was the founder, main editor, and graphic designer of the successful and leading art periodical of the time, Cahiers d’Art, which focused in particular upon “primitive” and archaic art on the one hand, and modern and contemporary art on the other. This followed from the notion shared by many in forward art milieus that “primitive” art of the distant western past, “primitive” art of non-western peoples, and modern and contemporary art that was radically different from conventional academic art – such as Fauvism, Cubism, and Expressionism – were much akin and a natural fit to be concurrently discussed. Hence also Zervos’ interest in art of the European primitives or, more properly, primitifs: fifteenth- and sixteenth-century masters from northwestern Europe; Grünewald, too, was qualified as primitif in this sense. Zervos would publish his monograph Matthias Grünewald: Le Retable d’Isenheim in 1936, one of only a few French studies of the altarpiece at that time. The study was already in preparation in the early 1930s, and Zervos, who was well-acquainted with Picasso, shared his images of the altarpiece with him, as the latter’s sketchbooks indicate.36 Matthias Grünewald consists of a brief introductory essay by Zervos and fifty-one black-and-white reproductions, including twenty of (details of) the Crucifixion. Zervos calls the Isenheim altarpiece one of the most unique creations in art history and a significant source of inspiration for artists at that moment,37 an important statement one can consider a self-fulfilling prophecy, for many contemporary artists of the time read Cahiers d’Art and its associated publications closely, and Zervos had both an extensive network and considerable social standing in the art world. If Zervos hailed the “actuality of Grünewald” and found his “poetics” in line with the aesthetic concerns of the time,38 then indeed contemporary artists would take Grünewald and/or the Isenheim altarpiece as inspirational and exemplary. David Gascoyne, for instance, wrote a poem about the Isenheim Crucifixion (“Ecce Homo,” published in 1942) after encountering it in Zervos’ 1936 publication, and apparently expressed his admiration for Grünewald several times in the immediate years after 1936.39 In addition, Zervos dedicated the monograph to Picasso and Surrealist poet and art collector Paul Éluard (1895–1952), which may have led many readers to associate the altarpiece with contemporary art and Surrealism specifically, although Zervos does not explicitly draw that parallel himself.40 Christian Zervos, Matthias Grünewald: Le Retable d’Isenheim (Paris: Cahiers D’Art, 1936). Apostolos-Cappadona, “The Essence,” 34, 40, and 47 n. 5. 37 Zervos, Matthias Grünewald, i–ii. 38 Zervos, Matthias Grünewald, i, see also viii. 39 Minaty, Grünewald, 35, 64 n. 85. 40 Apostolos-Cappadona, “The Essence,” 40. Zervos, Matthias Grünewald, i. 36

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For all that Minotaure can be considered a Surrealist art periodical and Cahiers d’Art not, one can hardly underestimate the important role Cahiers performed within as much as for Surrealism. Surrealist art and literature frequently featured in it, as well as critical pieces about Surrealism; indeed, in the 1920s, Cahiers was mainly quite critical of Surrealism, although things changed toward a more positive appreciation in the 1930s. Regardless of its (negative or positive) tone, through its copious illustrations of Surrealist art Cahiers – which had a larger distribution than any of the Surrealist periodicals at the time, and was also read globally – was singularly responsible for creating considerable awareness of the movement and its artists.41 Its engagement with Surrealism became more pronounced in the 1930s, and the art and literary works of many Surrealists and related artists were reproduced throughout its many issues.42 The social circles of Zervos and the Surrealists partly overlapped, as well. While in this particular case Picasso acted as the primary agent for drawing the Surrealists’ attention to Grünewald in the first instance, it was bolstered and maintained by Zervos and his publications, which, concurrently, encouraged audiences to associate Surrealism with Grünewald. Other Sources on Grünewald Grünewald’s altarpiece might have been known in Surrealist circles already. In German art and particularly Expressionism and art criticism concerning Expressionism, the Crucifixion had already extended a certain influence. A flood of books on it after World War I raised further awareness of it throughout many art historical milieus as well as more generally,43 sources that possibly reached some Surrealists or their circle. There is a French route, too, for previous transmission of Grünewald to Surrealism: French Symbolism, a milieu in which the altarpiece certainly found favor, and in particular the work of the author Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907), a recurring favorite on Surrealist lists and a revered predecessor. Huysmans was also a medievalist, and many of his later works, very successful at the time, are semi-scholarly descriptions of medieval art, music, symbolism, and thought, presented as novels.44 Huysmans’ decadent occult novel Là-Bas (1891) – which was certainly on the Surrealist reading list, not Kim Grant, “Cahiers d’Art and the Evolution of Modernist Painting,” The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 1.2 (2010): 216–27 (218, 222). 42 Grant, “Cahiers,” 221–22. 43 Ann Stieglitz, “The Reproduction of Agony: Toward a Reception-History of Grünewald’s Isenheim Altar after the First World War,” Oxford Art Journal 12.2 (1989): 87–103 (93–94, 98–99). 44 Elizabeth Emery, “J.-K. Huysmans, Medievalist,” Modern Language Studies 30.2 (2002): 119–31 (123–26, 127–30). 41

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least for its gothic noir qualities – includes a passage where the main character Durtal encounters a crucifixion of “Mathaeus [sic] Grünewald” in Karlsruhe, which has an overbearing emotional power and particular mental effect upon him.45 Huysmans would turn to the Isenheim altarpiece in Trois églises et trois primitifs of 1908, a collection of art-critical pieces. Notable here is Huysmans’ prominent inclusion of the term primitif for late medieval and early modern European artists, a phrase that had only recently been widely popularized by the ground-breaking 1902 exhibition Les primitifs flamands in Bruges and the various other exhibitions and publications that followed it. One of the primitifs Huysmans discusses is the Isenheim altarpiece, providing both a history and iconographical analysis of it. He qualifies it as very German,46 and focuses primarily upon the “repellent” corporality and similarly horrible qualities of the painting’s iconography and color. Still, Huysmans’ books did not include reproductions, which would only be easy to come by when Grünewald rose to modest international fame in the 1920s and 1930s. Another revered Surrealist predecessor can also be qualified as a medievalist: the romantic poet and author Victor Hugo (1802–85).47 In his case, his diary of spirit communications was of special interest to the Surrealists.48 Yet even though it is not the medievalist works of Hugo (or of other revered authors, such as Louis Maeterlinck) per se that caught the Surrealists’ attention, it is still pertinent that a contingent of medievalist authors, dilettante or not, formed a central part of the Surrealist pantheon. This tallies with the case of another favorite author, the historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874). The Surrealists hardly cared for his multi-tome histories of France, but were deeply fascinated by his semi-historical La Sorcière of 1862, which (mainly in book I) not only locates the origins of witchcraft and sorcery in the Middle Ages, but also identifies the figure of the witch – as woman – with nature, associates her with pre-Christian values, and constructs her as rebelling against the oppressive regimes of church and state: music to Surrealist ears.49 I find it very Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas (Paris: Tresse & Stock, 1891), 9. See also Huysmans, “The Karlsruhe Crucifixion,” trans. Robert Baldick, in Grünewald: The Paintings (London: Phaidon Press, 1958), 7–9 (9). Hayum, The Isenheim, 128–33. 46 And “à la fois naturaliste et mystique, sauvage et civilise, franc et retors”; Huysmans, Trois églises et trois primitifs, 5th edn. (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1908), 158–213 (206). See also Huysmans, “The Grünewalds in the Colmar Museum,” in Grünewald, 10–25. Hayum, The Isenheim, 135–39. 47 Patricia A. Ward, The Medievalism of Victor Hugo (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975), and Janine R. Dakyns, The Middle Ages in French Literature 1851–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), passim but chaps. 1 and 6 for Hugo, chap. 3 for Michelet, chap. 9 for the Symbolists. 48 Vincent Gille, “La Cime du rêve,” in La Cime du rêve. Les surréalistes et Victor Hugo (Paris: Maison de Victor Hugo, 2013), 20–40. 49 Jules Michelet, La Sorcière (Paris: E. Dentu, 1862). Further chiming with Surrealist interests are the distinct Sadean themes and the suggestion of connections between hysteric 45

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probable that the contingent of historians, medievalists, and occult authors on the Surrealist reading list would have, to a considerable degree, shaped the perception of the medieval period of many French Surrealists and made them receptive to medieval and medievalist concepts, symbols, and form. Grünewald: Full Appropriation While a fire of Surrealist interest may have been sparked by Picasso’s “Grünewald suite”50 of drawings, it was a slow burn at first. Apart from Gascoyne’s poem, the only other early reference was by French Surrealist writer René Crevel (1900–35), also in 1936.51 In my view, the unquestionable appropriation of Grünewald by the center of French Surrealism occurred only in 1942, but then loudly and clearly. The American avant-garde periodical View, closely allied with the Surrealists in exile, published a special issue on Max Ernst that included “Max Ernst’s Favorite Poets and Painters of the Past” (Fig. 5).52 This word-cloud avant la lettre clearly plays on “Erutarettil,” published two decades earlier. Apart from the fact that this montage reflects one Surrealist’s constructed past (rather than the group’s), the main difference is that by now the painters are allotted fully half of it. Almost all of them are fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century artists: besides “Gruenewald,” other northern masters such as “Breughel,” Bosch, Albrecht Altdorfer, the elder Cranach, and Hans Baldung Grien, the Swiss painter-engraver Niklaus Manuel Deutsch, and Italians Uccello, Giovanni Bellini, Vittore Carpaccio, Piero della Francesca, Cosimo Tura, Carlo Crivelli, Francesco del Cossa, Piero di Cosimo, even Leonardo da Vinci.53 This formal appropriation of Grünewald was bolstered by a similar one women and witches. La Sorcière stretches the definition of a history considerably, and both it, and its role in modern feminism, are neither easy nor uncontroversial. Linda Orr, “A Sort of History: Michelet’s La Sorcière,” Yale French Studies 59 (1980): 119–36 (119, 122–23, 128). 50 Galassi, Picasso’s Variations, 86. 51 René Crevel, “Discours au peintres,” in Le Querelle du réalisme (Paris: Éditions sociales internationales, 1936 [posthumously]), 149–57 (154). In a typical trajectory of mediation through layers of sources, the passage by Crevel about Grünewald was, in turn, cited by Walter Benjamin in a letter that year: Minaty, Grünewald, 33, and Walter Benjamin, “Letter from Paris (2). Painting and Photography,” in Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 3: 1935–38, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknapp Press, 2002), 236–48 (243). Benjamin had already seen the Isenheim in Colmar as a student and later kept a reproduction in his work spaces; Hayum, The Isenheim, 127–28. 52 View 2.1 (“Max Ernst Issue,” April 1942): 14–15. View: Parade of the Avant-Garde. An Anthology of View Magazine (1940–1947), ed. Charles Henri Ford, compiled by Catrina Neiman and Paul Nathan (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991): 32–45. 53 The only modern painters are Vincent Van Gogh, Rousseau, and Giorgio de Chirico.

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Fig. 5: “Max Ernst’s Favorite Poets and Painters of the Past,” View 2.1 (April 1942): 14–15 (photo: author)

from Breton, who together with Ernst formed the core of the Surrealist group in exile in New York. In his brief essay “Autodidacts called ‘naïves,’” also dated 1942, Breton discussed the late nineteenth-century artist Henri Rousseau and his importance as a root of a new development in art, namely a form of primitivism. Rousseau, he wrote: renewed that primitivism which has, one might almost say, vouchsafed us its previous, variegated heritage ranging through the whole field of the works of Giotto, the Masters of Avignon, Uccello, Fouquet, Bosch and Grünewald. Tracing a direct line back to these masters, Rousseau possesses the remarkable power of making nearly all the intermediate painting appear faded […].54 Obviously, all artists mentioned by Breton share their being positioned here as primitifs, directly related to the home-grown “primitive” artist Rousseau. Giotto, Jean Fouquet, and the Masters of Avignon are only rarely mentioned André Breton, “Autodidacts called ‘naïves’” [1942], in Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: MFW Publication, 2002), 291–94 (291).

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in Surrealist sources. Bosch had by now become a name that could not not be mentioned in relation to Surrealism. Uccello is the all-time favorite. He was paid the singular honor of being the only non-nineteenth-century painter mentioned in the first Manifesto. His panel The Miracle of the Profaned Host had been called out by Breton in his novel Nadja (1928), where a section of it was reproduced.55 Roughly the same section had already been reproduced and briefly discussed by Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) in 1926. In 1929, Surrealist poet Philippe Soupault (1897–1990) even devoted a short monograph to the artist.56 It should be noted that, at this time, Uccello was little known and generally considered second-tier; he was thus a typically Surrealist – because rather obscure – find, even as the Surrealists further enjoyed reading him against the grain of established art history.57 Something similar is true for the Italian Baroque painter Arcimboldo (1526/7–93). He was not only rescued from oblivion by the Surrealists; their interest may well have positively influenced the growing scholarly study of him. With most of the earlier artists associated with Surrealism now so canonical, even famous, it is sometimes hard to appreciate the uniqueness of certain cases of Surrealist reception.58 Coming back to Breton’s 1942 essay, Grünewald too was duly listed, after  Bosch. Not in exile but still part of the Surrealist milieu in New York, the  painter Arshile Gorky (1904–48) also commented on him – “I like Grunewald [sic]” – in 1942, as did Surrealist artist André Masson (1896–1991) in 1943.59 In other words, Grünewald and his Isenheim altar seem to have been topics of interest and discussion among the émigré artists and their surrounding group in the U.S. during the years of war in the early 1940s. Without a doubt, Breton’s increased emphasis upon primitif painters in relation to Surrealism was in large part a response to curator and MoMA-director André Breton, Nadja, rev. edn. (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 109–10. Breton writes that he was introduced to the painting (i.e., a reproduction) through a letter from Aragon. Around the same time he also paid Uccello lip service in his seminal essay Le Surréalisme et la peinture (1928); André Breton, “Surrealism and Painting,” in Surrealism and Painting, 1–48 (8). 56 Antonin Artaud, “Uccello, le poil,” La Révolution surréaliste 8 (1926): 22–23; Philippe Soupault, Paolo Uccello (Paris: Les Éditions Rieder, 1929); and Adélaïde Russo, “La Médiation dans la critique artistique de Philippe Soupault: Paolo Uccello et William Blake,” in Philippe Soupault, Le Poète, ed. Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron (Paris: Klincksieck, 1992), 160–82 (169–80). 57 Soupault, for instance, takes to task both Vasari and Bernard Berenson, two (renowned) authors of the few extant sources on Uccello at that time, about their apparent misunderstanding and misreading of Uccello’s visionary work; Russo, “La Médiation,” 172–73. 58 A case in point is Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont (1846–70), whom really nobody had heard of before being unearthed by Surrealism. 59 Minaty, Grünewald, 34. 55

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Alfred H. Barr, or to be more precise, to Surrealism as Barr had positioned, even constructed, it in the late 1930s. In 1936 Barr had opened Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, the first large-scale exhibition about Surrealism in the U.S., with an initial room of predecessors that included northern European masters such as Bosch and Bruegel and Italian quattrocento art.60 These were all positioned as medieval by Barr, as by many of his contemporaries, even as he also promoted them as proto-Surrealists and linked them directly, by means of the supergenre “fantastic art,” to contemporary Surrealism: Fantastic subject matter has been found in European art of all periods. The art of the middle ages, with its scenes of Hell […] and the Apocalypse […] and occult marvels, seems from a rational point of view to have been predominantly fantastic. Most of this subject matter was of a traditional or collective character, but the Dutch artist Bosch […], working at the end of the Gothic period, transformed traditional fantasy into a personal and original vision which links his art with that of the modern Surrealists.61 The association of Surrealism with early modern northern painting started tentatively in the late 1920s, intensified in the second half of the 1930s, and was formalized from within Surrealism around 1942. I would argue that this is in large part to be attributed to the public visibility and influence of works such as Read’s Surrealism, and Barr’s exhibition, its catalogue, and the many reviews devoted to that show. It seems hardly coincidental that when Surrealists such as Ernst and Breton arrived in the U.S. in 1940–41 – where they would have encountered an understanding of Surrealism strongly shaped by Barr and only slightly congruent with how they themselves had created and positioned it62 – the overt claiming of northern old masters such as Bosch and also Grünewald suddenly set in. And this appropriation was not only acted out in words, but also visually: Ernst made a list and later a painting, to be discussed below, and, in addition to “Autodidacts,” Breton composed a visual essay. This essay, “De la survivance de certains mythes et de quelques autres mythes en croissance ou en formation,” consists of two images and a citation each per page, arranged under major mythical themes.63 A selection of late See , last accessed 6 September 2017. Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, ed. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., 3rd edn. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1946), 9. 62 As I have explored in Tessel M. Bauduin, “Fantastic Art, Barr, Surrealism,” Journal of Art Historiography 17 (December 2017): 1–23. See also Sandra Zalman, Consuming Surrealism in American Culture: Dissident Modernism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), chaps. 1 & 2. 63 Published on occasion of the exhibition First Papers of Surrealism (New York: Coordinating Council of French Relief Societies, 1942); Breton, Oeuvres complètes, 4 vols., ed. Marguerite Bonnet et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 3: 127–42. 60 61

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Fig. 6: André Breton, “Le Graal,” 1988 (photo: author). From: André Breton, De la survivance de certains mythes et de quelques autres mythes en croissance ou en formation (Paris: Terrain Vague – Losfeld, 1988 [1942]): no page numbers

medieval masters dominates the first few pages: a detail of the paradise-panel of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, a detail of an etching by Baldung Grien, and a detail of a painting of Icarus then ascribed to Bruegel. The page dedicated to the theme of the “The Grail” includes a Tarot card of the ace of cups and a reproduction of a 1930 Crucifixion by Picasso (Fig. 6). Here we find further medieval(ist) resonances. The small and relatively unknown Picasso painting incorporates, or so Ruth Kaufmann has argued, at least two references to a French eleventh-century Apocalypse from Saint-Sever, a manuscript closely based upon the original Spanish manuscript by Beatus of Liebana from the eighth century.64 Six images from the Saint-Sever Apocalypse had been reproduced in Documents by Bataille, who had clearly selected the Ruth Kaufmann, “Picasso’s Crucifixion of 1930,” The Burlington Magazine 111: 789 (September 1969): 553–61 (557–58). Find a critical qualification of Kaufmann in C. F. B. Miller, “Bataille with Picasso: Crucifixion (1930) and Apocalypse,” Papers of Surrealism 7 (2007): 1–24.

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more visually arresting ones.65 Thus we are presented with a page on a topic with strong medieval resonances, the grail, and featuring a Picasso painting on a major Christian theme, the Crucifixion, which cites eleventh-century manuscript illuminations based on an eighth-century manuscript, mediated through a periodical from the 1930s,66 and further adorned by a tarot design, which – despite being, in its occult function, a nineteenth-century ­innovation – has medieval overtones too, not least because tarot and other “playing” cards as such appear to be a late medieval invention.67 This not only shows the considerable impact illustrations in periodicals could have, but also underlines how deep and layered the medieval resonances can run in Surrealism, as much as how transient and not always easy to perceive and decipher they can be. Ernst: Grünewald and Cranach Ernst’s claiming Grünewald so visibly in 1942, in his montage of names, should not be taken as an indication of him learning about the artist only then. Indeed, he and Klee, both of whom were German by origin and had joined the Surrealist movement in France, knew the artist and his most famous work already. Klee, for instance, wrote in his diary in 1906 that Grünewald terrified him (“erschreckte mich furchtbar”),68 and Ernst painted a crucifixion on paper in 1913 that was inspired by a Grünewald Crucifixion.69 Many years later in 1970, in an interview with Der Spiegel, Ernst noted that of course German painting also knew its geniuses (“in der deutschen Malerei gab es natürlich auch Genies”), namely Grünewald and Altdorfer.70 Yet Ernst was quiet about Grünewald in the 1920s and ’30s, returning to him and his altar Georges Bataille, “L’Apocalypse de Saint-Sever,” Documents 2 (May 1929): 74–84. Bataille, who knew this manuscript from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, where he worked, praised the “homely” and direct style of the illuminations and (apparent) optimism and geniality of the violence and horror represented. 66 Breton of course scrutinized all issues of Documents – because it was edited by his ideological enemy Bataille – but it is unknown if he was aware of Picasso’s citations of the Apocalypse. 67 In 1940–41 Breton undertook serious study of playing cards and tarots. Giovanna Constantini, “Le Jeu de Marseille: The Breton Tarot as Jeu de Hasard,” in Esotericism, Art and Imagination, ed. Arthur Versluis et al. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2008), 91–111. 68 Minaty, Grünewald, 22, 147. 69 Minaty, Grünewald, 43. The painting is Max Ernst, Kreuzigung, oil on paper, 1913, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Frédérique Goerig-Hergott, Otto Dix – le retable d’Issenheim (Colmar: Musée Unterlinden 2016), 121. Ernst would briefly comment on Grünewald in “Vom Werden der Farbe,” a 1917–18 article on page 67 in volume 8 of Der Sturm, as noted in Minaty, Grünewald, 108. 70 Minaty, Grünewald, 43, 157. 65

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only in the early 1940s – during the war. It can hardly be coincidental that, in “Ernst’s Favorite Poets and Painters” of 1942, the names of Grünewald and other German artists of the period, in addition to those of several German poets and writers, feature so prominently; one can speculate that this was prompted by feelings of concern over his country of origin as much as by a desire to reclaim artists and writers who had (partly) been subsumed by fascist ideologies about “pure” German art and culture. More to the point is Ernst’s painting Temptation of Saint Anthony of 1945, which resonates strongly with Grünewald’s Temptation panel (3rd state of the Isenheim) of the same subject (Plates VII and VIII).71 The temptation of Anthony was a favorite subject of many Surrealist artists, explored in their own creations as much as admired in the work of fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury painters, where it was often an excuse for grotesque or droll scenes. In some Surrealist Temptations we also may find drôllerie and humor, but not in this painting, which can be taken as a meditation on the horrors of war and the destruction of Europe.72 Paraphrasing a panel from the Isenheim altar seems particularly apropos: the altarpiece had a conflicted history during and immediately after World War I, by 1919 becoming a rallying point for wounded veterans and a symbol for Germany’s suffering.73 Taking as his source a part of this altar may point to Ernst’s own Temptation of Anthony being a symbol for anguish too, even as the particular subject – the temptation of Anthony – is already an allegory on suffering.74 Ernst’s citation of a panel of Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece fits further with his visual exploration of motifs of other early modern German masters of the period that can be traced to his work of the late 1930s, when, in the face of rising tensions and political disaster, he turned to German art. An example is La toilette de la mariée (1939–40).75 Among its influences, we can count the nudes of Cranach the Elder, as Hopkins has argued.76 Ernst might have known Cranach from his studies as a young man and other sources, but the artist was put firmly upon the Surrealist map in 1936, when an illustrated article on him by a French art critic appeared in Minotaure: Thomas Gaehtgens, “Max Ernst and the Great Masters,” in Max Ernst: A Retrospective, ed. Werner Spies and Sabine Rewald (New York: Metropolitan Museum, 2005), 37–50 (47). See also Heike Hagedorn, Das Sprachgewebe der Bilder. Max Ernst und Mathis Grünewald. Biographische Konsellation und Werk-Konfiguration (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995). 72 The direct impetus of this painting’s subject was a painting contest on the subject of The Temptation of Anthony. Ernst won. 73 Stieglitz, “The Reproduction.” 74 Hayum, “The Meaning and Function of the Isenheim Altarpiece: The Hospital Context Revisited,” The Art Bulletin 59.4 (1977): 501–17 (507). 75 See it at , last accessed 6 September 2017. 76 David Hopkins, “Max Ernst’s ‘La toilette de la mariée,’” The Burlington Magazine 133. 1057 (April 1991): 237–44 (238). 71

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“Realité et mythologie des Cranach.”77 Comprising only two pages of text, the article further includes seven pages with sixteen reproductions of works by/­attributed to the Cranachs (both the Elder and Younger). It is followed by an essay in English by Edward James about early sixteenth-century portraits from Vienna, featuring a Cranach the Elder and two portraits by the Younger, as well as four portraits by Holbein.78 James (1907–84), a British poet and influential patron of Surrealism, positions the Cranachs as predecessors of Surrealism, noting that: He [Cranach the Younger] possessed certainly a stronger degree of that quality of fantasy which the most awoken of our generation admire the most today because it arises out of the scarcely chartered [sic] and mysterious realms of sleep, and which in this periodical, Le Minotaure, one is accustomed to refer to as “surrealism.”79 The high, small apple-breasts of Ernst’s bride in La Toilette, her lanky body, with long legs and a defined, almost sculpted, slightly distended belly, as much as the bride’s backwards leaning position (all of it echoed, furthermore, by the small figure in the painting on the wall) resonate with Cranachian nudes.80 The erotic innuendo of the pointed arrow held by the stork or heronlike bird on the lower left, warded off by the bride’s pudica gesture, is in sync with Surrealism’s obsession with sexuality, but also in line with some of the younger Cranach’s erotic insinuations. Something similar may be said of the little grotesque homunculus in the lower right-hand corner; while obviously a typically Surrealist, sexualized hybrid, with four breasts (a citation of a photograph by Man Ray81), a pregnant belly, and male genitals, its position is reminiscent of the putti one may find in many Cranach paintings. The bride is attended or perhaps attacked by another Cranachian nude woman, with wild, apparently windblown hair, a mannerist neck, and arms thrown in the air. Hopkins identifies her as a witch and draws a direct link between her and witches with windblown hair and arms akimbo in etchings by Baldung

Maurice Raynal, “Realité et mythologie des Cranach,” Minotaure 10 (October 1936): 11–19. 78 Edward James, “The Marvel of Minuteness,” Minotaure 10 (October 1936): 20–24. 79 James, “The Marvel,” 24. 80 Several other modern and avant-garde artists besides Ernst engaged with Cranach’s works and in particular his nudes; see Beat Wismer, “Cranach und die Moderne. Anmerkungen zur Cranach-Rezeption in der Kunst seit der frühen Moderne,” Lucas Cranach der Ältere. Meister – Marke – Moderne, ed. Beat Top of Form Wismer, Gunnar Heydenreich, and Daniel Görres (Munich: Hirmer Verlag GmbH, 2017), 82–91. 81 Man Ray, Untitled, 1924. Hopkins, “Max Ernst’s,” 242. 77

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Grien.82 Reproductions of such etchings, also by Dürer, can be found in Grillot de Givry’s Musée.83 From the relatively light scenes of Cranach, Ernst moved to Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece, which was, throughout its modern reception, perceived as horrendous and “dreadful.”84 In his 1945 Temptation, Ernst has reversemirrored Grünewald’s panel of the Temptation of Anthony in several ways. To start with, in his composition of the central figure’s body, the knees bend away from each other, his left one noticeably so, and one arm grasps toward the lower right corner (for the beholder), while, in terms of color, Ernst dressed his central figure in vibrant red, rather than the blue coat over red undersleeves of Grünewald’s figure. The body of Ernst’s Anthony-figure is much more contorted, with the head almost entirely turned upside down. The left hand (close to the center of the canvas, near the bottom) is turned upside down too, palm outward, in another inversion of Grünewald’s Anthonyfigure, whose right hand, in the same place in the composition, is closed and regularly positioned. The main monsters on the right in Grünewald’s painting make their appearance in a very similar place and positioning in Ernst’s Temptation, although the long-legged bird standing upright on the right has a much more pronounced beak – full of teeth with which it bites Anthony in the arm – and a beetle-like carapace body. A secondary monster in Grünewald is transformed into a gaping maw with talons. The ruins of a building in Grünewald’s Temptation are also repeated, although repositioned. Ernst has further retained the painting’s tripartite division into foreground, middle ground, and background, with a partially overcast sky. The center of Ernst’s Temptation is dominated by overgrown temple ruins, with tangled roots covering – even consuming – a (statue of a?) nude female body. This part of the painting teems with potential images, not least a possible, rather frog-like, face in the ruined wall. To the viewer’s right of the vertical center Ernst has placed a nude female stylite with open arms, an inversion of and perhaps ironic commentary upon Grünewald’s salvation god-figure residing in the clouds, positioned in his panel to the left of the center.85 In the Grünewald, Anthony is under attack; in the case of Ernst’s Hopkins, “Max Ernst’s,” 244. E.g., Givry, Musée, figs. 24–29. 84 Alfred Barr, Jr., cited in Dennis Crockett, “The Most Famous Painting of the ‘Golden Twenties’? Otto Dix and the Trench Affair,” Art Journal 51.1 (Spring 1992): 72–80 (77). 85 The many potential images, specifically faces, that Ernst has added to this painting increase both its fascinating quality and the feeling of creeping horror. As is the case with potential images, they appear differently (or not at all) to different people, and it is hard to prove if all of them were put there by the artist on purpose. With Ernst, though, being a master of potential images and life-time experimenter with techniques for creating such images (such as the decalcomania used in this painting), we can be pretty sure many of them were painted on purpose. The quintessential study of this subject is Dario Gamboni, Potential 82 83

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painting, Anthony is surrounded by the “hysteric” and threatening landscape86 and appears to have already succumbed to a tide of horrific monsters that sweep over him as he is “defeated beyond hope of rescue.” 87 It is a truly horrendous scene, the oppressive atmosphere enhanced by Ernst’s choice of a horizontal layout, an inversion of Grünewald’s vertical and therefore more uplifting panel format. In Conclusion As I hope to have made clear with this case study and several related examples, medieval art was received in Surrealism, and appropriated by Surrealists, in a variety of ways. While one can join those paying lipservice to the recurring medieval topoi in leading Surrealists’ work or to the seeming congruencies between paintings by Bosch and leading Surrealists, this appears to me too facile and also insufficient. Surrealist medievalism is neither a simple story nor a straightforward trajectory. With a sizeable contingent of (amateur) medievalists among their favored authors, the French Surrealists were primed from the outset for a fascination with the medieval. The rise of the visual arts in Surrealism was accompanied by a rise of interest in (late) medieval and early modern art as well. This came about rather quickly, from the humble beginnings of a minimal mention of Uccello in a footnote in 1924, to Gascoyne listing as a matter of course Bosch, Bruegel, and others as ancestors of Surrealism in 1935. Transmission of medieval heritage could happen directly but was more frequently mediated by illustrated studies and periodicals. Indeed, medieval and early modern art, objects, legends, and poetry, as well as scholarly studies about medieval art, were given a podium in Surrealist periodicals. As I have shown further, other artists and Surrealists, but also writers, thinkers, art critics, and curators, and furthermore books and art works, all not necessarily from the Surrealists’ own time or discourse, could also function as intermediaries. The Grünewald case makes clear that reception of medieval heritage, and subsequent appropriation, could happen along several often parallel tracks: through earlier reception in Symbolism or Expressionism, through a childhood in Germany, through the agency of an influential artist (Picasso), aided and given additional weight by the agency of an authority in the contemporary art milieu (Zervos); as a response (Breton) to art-critical and also curatorial association of Surrealism with primitifs and with the medieval (Read and Barr); and/or in response to the dire political circumstances of the time (Ernst). In keeping with Surrealism being a Images: Ambiguity and Indeterminacy in Modern Art (London: Reaktion Books, 2002). Samantha Kavky, “Max Ernst in Arizona: Myth, Mimesis, and the Hysterical Landscape,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 57/58 (Spring/Autumn 2010): 209–28 (221–22). 87 Gaehtgens, “Max Ernst,” 47. 86

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multi-medial platform, the media of appropriation were also pluriform: lists, poetry, polemical writing, visual essays, and painting. Taking the reception of other forms of medieval art and culture in Surrealism also into account, this makes, in the end, for a transnational, transdisciplinary, inter-medial, and multiform Surrealist middle ages.

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III Early Music (and Authenticity) in Films and Video Games

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Introduction Alexander Kolassa The uses and representations of early music in the context of popular culture have, until recently, received relatively little attention in academic contexts.1 In a forthcoming collection, Recomposing the Past: Early Music on Stage and Screen (2018), the REMOSS (Representations of Early Music on Stage and Screen) Study Group has sought to redress this lack by bringing together a wide range of perspectives to examine the impact of early music beyond its traditional academic audiences.2 Contemporary popular culture offers a highly stylized and eclectic – often contradictory – view of history that, crucially, is of increasing importance to the popular understanding, reception, and experience of history, and of early music. Indeed, early music – that is, musics predating the common-practice period and typically associated with the European Middle Ages and Renaissance – finds its biggest audience in our popular film, television, video-game, and new-media landscape. That landscape is, with likely few exceptions, from where the future performers, researchers, and advocates of these traditions will emerge. It is unsurprising, then, that we would be drawn to the work of Studies in Medievalism and its community of scholars working on medievalist and neomedievalist subject matter. After all, Studies in Medievalism responds to many of the same animating questions and issues: the recognition, for example, of history as artifice, of its legacies for our popular and public imaginations, and of the way that these legacies intersect our understanding of past and present alike all seem highly salient. The contested concept of authenticity, as this volume will attest, also presents problems and possibilities for those who want to understand how the past functions today. To this extent, the REMOSS group has been particularly interested in the e­ xamination of A notable exception is John Haines, Music in Films on the Middle Ages: Authenticity vs. Fantasy (New York: Routledge, 2014). 2 REMOSS is based at Birmingham Conservatoire; we operate a blog that can be accessed here: . 1

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the temporally discontinuous (or out of place) – anachronisms, for example – that have pervasive traditions in the vocabulary of historical film or television. Early-music scholars have strong opinions, unsurprisingly, about the supposed inaccuracies that litter our medieval cinematic canons. It is at authenticity’s outer reaches, however, that the past speaks most effectively to the present. Finally, the question of the medieval itself looms large here, as readers of this volume will appreciate. Medieval music has a strong modern appeal, but medieval music, as we know it, is, by necessity, the product of many layers of interpretation because its practices and notations are foreign to those of the common-practice period. Its stylized performance today, contingent as it is on the present as much as the past, is bound up with all the issues central to medievalism studies. As the period that best embodies the kinds of historical distance from which the present can be negotiated, and whose enduring images and ideas extend porously beyond its historiographical limits, the medieval has become our most recurring subject matter, and “medievalism” has been the most apt term for what we have described. The three essays that follow were developed from a REMOSS symposium at Birmingham Conservatoire in the summer of 2016, where our contributors sought to widen the project’s scope through the rubrics of medievalism. Early music retains its relevance, of course, but the broader interactions of imagined and parallel pasts with music and with sound on a medievalist (or neomedievalist) canvas is its primary focus. Notions of authenticity and music are exploded here across multi-media platforms, and across horror movie histories (Whittaker), science-fiction video games (Cook), and world cinema (Kolassa). The sound of medievalism has hitherto been little explored, and these contributions seek to connect and widen those interdisciplinary discussions.

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Beyond (the) Halo: Chant in Video Games* Karen M. Cook In the 1990s, the so-called chant craze provoked a number of thoughtful responses in scholarship. Reacting to the recent releases of plainchant albums by Ensemble Organum and the Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos (the famous Chant album, the cover of which featured hooded monks staggered in mid-air against a bright blue, cloud-swirled sky), Katherine Bergeron observed that they provided a good opportunity to examine “the whole phenomenon of chant as music in the modern imagination; and the various guises in which it appears; and the contexts in which it has acquired value and meaning.”1 A few years later, Linda Schubert looked at film as one such context, focusing on the use of the well-known “Dies irae” chant within modern cinema. She concluded by saying that: Now that film music is better established as a field of scholarly study, and chant has found a place in the popular music scene, it is time to think about how the two sometimes interact, and what the characteristics of this relationship are. It is time to recognise and enjoy the creative ways in which music a thousand years old has been used in an art form unique to the twentieth century.2

* The author would like to thank Ryan Thompson, the members and attendees of the REMOSS study group (April 2016) and the AMS Ludomusicology study group (November 2016), and members of Overclocked Remix (http://ocremix.org, ongoing) for their thoughtful feedback on previous stages of this research. 1 Katherine Bergeron, “The Virtual Sacred: Finding God at Tower Records,” The New Republic (27 February 1995): 29–34 (29). 2 Linda Schubert, “Plainchant in Motion Pictures: The ‘Dies irae’ in Film Scores,” Florilegium 15 (1998): 207–29 (225). Studies in Medievalism XXVII, 2018

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Since these articles were written, the presence and functions of plainchant (and related musics) within film has continued to be analyzed. James Deaville and K. J. Donnelly, for example, have built upon Schubert’s work to further explore the use of chant as a symbol of evil, violence, fear, and death, while more recently John Haines treats chant as one of several key signifiers of the medieval.3 While there is much more still to be said about the intersections of chant and cinema, at some twenty years later, there is yet another modern context to consider for plainchant: video games. Little has been articulated to date about plainchant in video games. This is due to any of several reasons, all of which strike at the heart of what plainchant is thought to be. If plainchant demands vocality, then a large swath of game music is eliminated from scrutiny owing to technological constraints or preferences in orchestration. Separating historical or traditional texts, melodies, and performance practices from modern variants and interpretations is in many ways difficult and does not always speak to a nuanced understanding of chant as it is commonly recognized in contemporary, especially popular, culture. What might be considered from a musicological standpoint as (real) plainchant occurs in video games only minimally, and from a liturgical standpoint it could be argued that none occurs at all. The few instances in which examples of historical plainchant are manipulated in a game’s soundscape, and the numerous instances in which newly composed music emulates plainchant, are thus all the more interesting.4 Given the exponential growth of the field of ludomusicology over the last decade or two, then, it is quite easy to reword Schubert’s final call to action as the main thrust of this essay: Now that video game music is better established as a field of scholarly study, and chant has found a place within the popular, concert, and screen music scenes, it is time to think about how the two sometimes interact, and what the characteristics of this relationship are. It is time to recognize and understand the creative ways in which music a James Deaville, “The Topos of ‘Evil Medieval’ in American Horror Film Music,” in  Music,  Meaning & Media, ed. Erkki Pekkilä, David Neumeyer, and Richard Littlefield,  Acta Semiotica Fennica XXV, Approaches to Musical Semiotics 11, Studia  Musicologica Universitatis Helsingiensis 15 (Helsinki: Semiotic Society of Finland, University of Helsinki and International Semiotics Institute at Imatra, 2006), 26–37; K.  J.  Donnelly, “Demonic Possession: Horror Film Music,” in The Spectre of Sound: Music  in Film and Television (London: British Film Institute, 2005); and John Haines, Music in Films on the Middle Ages: Authenticity vs. Fantasy (New York: Routledge, 2014). 4 By taking into account types of music identified in popular culture as chant or that seek to emulate chant, I aim here to provide a counterpoint to Tim Summers’s statement that “Gregorian chant has not been extensively appropriated by Hollywood or games […].” See Summers, “Analysing Video Game Music: Sources, Methods and a Case Study,” in Ludomusicology: Approaches to Video Game Music, ed. Michiel Kamp, Tim Summers, and Mark Sweeney (Bristol, CT: Equinox, 2016), 8–31 (17). 3

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thousand years old has been used in an art form unique to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In many ways, this essay acts as a sort of prolegomenon to a larger study of chant as a musical topic within literature and modern media, which would include all types of stage and screen productions. Indeed, much of the analyses herein could, and do, apply to other audio-visual media. And yet, as ludomusicological work to date has aptly shown, music often operates differently in a video game than it does in other media. A person typically watches a film passively, in a linear, one-directional fashion, whereas video games require the player to actively participate and are often non-linear, allowing the player much more control over the orders and durations of events. Whereas music can create a sense of atmosphere or provide crucial narrative information in all media, in video games the music can also suggest to the player a reaction or strategy; moreover, it can be triggered or created by the players themselves. Video games are thus a medium particularly well-suited to revealing how, as Bergeron puts it, chant operates “as music in the modern imagination.” A Brief History of Plainchant Plainchant – often called plainsong, Gregorian chant, or just chant – is a genre of liturgical music belonging to the Roman Catholic tradition.5 The term “Gregorian” is something of a misnomer, stemming from plainchant’s mythological creation by Pope Gregory I (d. 604); the early church had multiple traditions for chant, some likely derived from pagan and Jewish practices, but during Charlemagne’s reign in the early ninth century many of these traditions were consolidated, creating the traditional repertory today known as Gregorian chant. This repertory both represents and is governed by the liturgical calendar. Daily, weekly, and yearly cycles of texts are taken from the Psalms on the one hand and on the other from a number of New Testament scriptures detailing the life of Jesus. These texts are set to a series of recitation formulas or a vast number of chant melodies, and are sung thus in their proper place within either the Mass or the Divine Hours. For a long time, these chants were passed down orally, through constant repetition within their liturgical contexts. Around the time of Charlemagne’s reign, or shortly thereafter, we begin to see markings representing general melodic contours in manuscripts containing the chant texts, probably written down as a reminder for something already known. Such markings persisted Useful histories of chant include David Hiley, Western Plainchant: A Handbook (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Hiley, Gregorian Chant, Cambridge Introductions to Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Richard L. Crocker, An Introduction to Gregorian Chant (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).

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for quite some time, and it was not until centuries later that notation specifying more precise pitch was deemed necessary. None of the notation offers much in the way of rhythm, though, or other elements of performance practice such as tempo, voicing, vibrato, or ornamentation. As a result, modern approaches to chant performance are numerous, although the approach taken on recordings by the monks of Solesmes – largely all male, unaccompanied, without vibrato, with slightly accented syllables and slightly tapered phrases – has become the most recognizable. Chant, in short, plays a particular liturgical role that prohibits it from being “chant” in other, non-liturgical circumstances. And yet, its melodies (and later, other characteristics) have been borrowed and manipulated for a wide variety of reasons and purposes ever since the Middle Ages themselves. In the medieval and Renaissance periods, it was common to build new sacred works around a foundational chant; such a chant might operate as a cantus firmus, a sort of fixed line, perhaps audibly recognizable, perhaps not, on or against which the rest of the composition was constructed. In later works, chant might be paraphrased, used in multiple voices of a new work as a primary element from which to generate new material, or quoted at various points within a new composition. In each of these cases, the original chant interacted in some fashion with the new music and frequently with new or added texts. Chant thus provided a means of understanding or interpreting the new composition. After the Reformation, chant underwent a change in public perception, to a degree, although this change had begun some centuries earlier with the formulation of the idea of the Dark Ages. The rituals of the Catholic Church, plainchant included, were seen by some as antiquated, corrupted, even perverted.6 Latin, as one of the chief signifiers of these church rituals, was particularly suspect (the nonsense phrase “hocus pocus,” frequently connoting a magical spell, is believed by many to be a parody of the Latin “hoc est corpus,” indicating the transubstantiation of the Eucharist). While plainchant continued to be used liturgically within the Catholic Church, other liturgical genres also continued to develop in both Catholic and non-Catholic traditions. Plainchant became a signifier, at this point, of Catholicism, oldness or old-fashioned-ness, and ritual, but also of superstition, magic, and perversion. As the Mass moved from the church to the concert hall, chant went with it; the Requiem Mass was a particular favorite of eighteenth-century composers onward, which in no small part aided in the popularity and recognition of the “Dies irae” chant.7 Even before Berlioz’s famous Symphonie fantastique, many See in particular Haines’s chapter on chant in Music in Films on the Middle Ages, especially at 112–13. 7 Linda Schubert provides an excellent history of the use of the “Dies irae” in her previously cited article. 6

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composers, particularly of German descent, were using or emulating chant in secular instrumental and operatic works, often to symbolize darkness, the supernatural, or the occult.8 In the early twentieth century, many musicians borrowed themes or even entire previously composed works as background music for the new genre of silent film; the “Dies irae” was recognizable enough to be used in darker, sinister, or violent contexts, and has continued to be used as such in both film and video game soundtracks ever since.9 Film soundtracks throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have also borrowed other examples of plainchant, as John Haines has demonstrated, to characterize a person or place as Christian or, more generally, spiritual, as supernatural, fantastical, or magical, or as medieval.10 Chant entered modern popular consciousness in other ways as well. Up until Vatican II, plainchant was used as part of the liturgy of the Catholic Church, and in some churches continues to be used today. Despite this uninterrupted usage, it has also been treated as a genre of medieval music, and as such was a focal point for performers in the early music movement, scholars, and antiquarians as early as the sixteenth century. The most famous of the chant reformers were the Benedictine monks of Solesmes, who in the nineteenth century approached extant chant manuscripts with scientific vigor and attempted a complete reconstruction of the tradition.11 While the Solesmes style as captured on recordings of the early twentieth century was cemented as the sound of chant in the popular imagination, attention given to historical performance practice by the early music movement led to new approaches by groups such as Gothic Voices and Anonymous 4. Especially after the decree of Vatican II that other kinds of sacred music were acceptable in addition to or instead of plainchant, chant thus became a symbol of now outdated ritual and of the general sacred past. As the century drew to a close, medieval music, and chant especially, found a wider home in popular culture, perhaps as Paula Higgins has suggested owing to anxieties about the approaching millennium and global political and economic tensions.12 Chant was sampled on the single “Sadeness (Part I)” by Enigma, which became an international hit in 1990­–91, and the See Deaville, “The Topos of ‘Evil Medieval.’” See Schubert, “Plainchant in Motion Pictures,” esp. 211f, and Karen Cook, “Beyond the Grave: The ‘Dies irae’ in Video Games,” Sounding Out! (18 December 2017), sound studiesblog.com. 10 See Haines, “Chant,” in Music in Films on the Middle Ages. 11 For more on this reform, see Katherine Bergeron, Decadent Enchantments: The Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), and Katharine Ellis, The Politics of Plainchant in fin-de-siècle France, RMA Monographs series 20 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013). See also David Hiley, chapter 5, in Gregorian Chant. 12 Paula Higgins, “From the Ivory Tower to the Marketplace: Early Music, Musicology, and the Mass Media,” Current Musicology 53 (1993): 109–23. 8 9

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aforementioned album Chant by the Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos, released in 1994, sold over six million copies. As Jennifer Bain has shown, much of the marketing strategies for chant mimicked those for New Age music, labeling chant as spiritual, meditative, relaxing, timeless, universally accessible, and even healing.13 The Sound of Chant Chant in today’s popular culture is thus an amalgam, a varying ­combination of historical plainchant, with its ritual and liturgical overtones, and the resonances of its musical and cultural associations collected over the course of centuries of appropriation. All of these resonances, whether historical, scholarly, popular, or parodic, have contributed to the modern sound(s) of chant. In this respect, there is a difference between what chant is, as transmitted and described by its notation, and what chant sounds like. Liturgical plainchant is monophonic and modal, almost always in Latin (the primary exception being the Greek “Kyrie eleison”); it often has a limited pitch range, occasionally contains repeated notes, and can run the spectrum between entirely syllabic and extremely melismatic. Its notational tradition offers little to no guidance on any other aspects of its performance. As stated before, the Solesmes style is still the sound most associated with chant: sung in unison by an all-male ensemble, without vibrato, calmly, at a gentle pace and quiet volume, with slight rhetorical accent given to words and phrases. The later contributions of groups such as Gothic Voices and Anonymous 4 created a space in chant performance for female voices, either in octaves with men or in an all-female ensemble. Lastly, many chant recordings place the music within a reverberant acoustical space, imitating that of a large church or cathedral. Yet in many of the contexts in which chant has been borrowed or adapted, this list of characteristics is less one of requirement and more one of possibility, wherein any might be manipulated or even ignored. Redirecting the conversation back to video games, take for example Civilization IV (2005), one of the numerous world-building games in the Sid Meier series. In the game, the player will progress through a number of different historical eras. When the medieval period is triggered, a list of early music compositions, ranging from Josquin des Prez and Johannes Ockeghem to Diego Ortiz and Michael Praetorius, begins to play in the background. Amid Jennifer Bain, “Hildegard on 34th Street: Chant in the Marketplace,” Echo: A MusicCentered Journal 6.1 (2004), , last accessed 7 September 2017; also Bain, “Hooked on Ecstasy: Performance ‘Practice’ and the Reception of the Music of Hildegard of Bingen,” in The Sounds and Sights of Performance in Early Music: Essays in Honour of Timothy McGee, ed. Maureen Epp and Brian Power (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 253–73.

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this wash of choral polyphony and instrumental dances are three instances of plainchant: the Alleluias “Deus judex justus” and “Laudate Deum omnes,” and the invitatory antiphon “Regem cui omnia vivunt.”14 Each of the chants plays in its entirety, and aside from the pealing of a church bell in one track, each is as expected: monophonic, a cappella, for men’s ensemble (though in one instance antiphonal with a boys’ choir, in another with solo male singer), with a slightly reverberant acoustic. These chants, along with the other compositions in the soundtrack to the medieval period, play in the background, regardless of what the player is doing in the game. They are not connected with any religious or liturgical object or place in the game, nor do they characterize any particular civilization or geographical setting. Instead, they serve to reinforce a general sense of oldness and the medieval. In comparison, examine the track “Inquisitor Fight” from the game Sacred 2: Fallen Angel (2008).15 A pounding, percussive rhythm against a low, static, rumbling bass line plays throughout, erupting at the end into the growl of a heavy-metal or rock guitar and drumset. Layered on top of the track floats a serene chant, completely out of rhythmic and metric sync with the synthesized accompaniment. What is used here is not a complete chant at all, though, but words and melodies excised from the well-known “Pange lingua” chant: “gloriosi,” “mysterium,” and so forth. As the character of the track changes, the choir switches to an “Alleluia,” and then concludes in the heavy-metal portion with an “Amen.” What was important in constructing this moment in the soundtrack was not the Latin text per se, certainly not in any liturgical or grammatical sense, but rather the sound of chant itself; the modal monophony, the sound and color of the men’s voices, and the lack of any inherent rhythmic pulse create a musical paradox with the accompaniment that, I argue, enhances the overall narrative of the game and the tension in this particular scenario. A less straightforward example is the opening theme to the popular video game Halo (2001–), which inspired the title for this essay.16 It begins with the ringing of a gong and a low drone, over which an all-male ensemble intones a modal melody in a Solesmes style, with no vibrato, tapered phrases, and slight rhetorical lengthening of notes. There are no words, however; they perform the entire melody on an open vowel. The ensemble returns about two minutes into the piece, this time breaking into harmony against a driving, more rock-oriented accompaniment, before repeating the opening theme once more in relative silence. ; ; , all last accessed 7 September 2017. 15 , last accessed 7 September 2017. 16 , last accessed 7 September 2017. 14

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In 2016, the composer Marty McDonnell gave an interview in which he discussed the composition of the Halo theme.17 He states that, given the direction to sound “ancient, mysterious, and epic,” he decided to create a “legitimate monk chant melody” loosely modeled on the Beatles’ song “Yesterday.” Despite knowing this, the author of the article begins by stating that “Halo’s theme is built on gothic monk chants.” Plainchant, for O’Donnell, is thus recognizably imbued with and able to impart the qualities of oldness, mystery, fantasy, sacredness, even the alien, not only for him but also for his expected listeners. He was apparently correct in that assumption, given how frequently this track is often identified by fans of the game, and even by media such as Rolling Stone magazine, as chant.18 The Halo Wiki even has an entry for Gregorian chant, which states that such music “is often used as the theme music for the Halo Installations in the Halo series, likely alluding to the strong religious connotations they possess for the Covenant, who regard them as relics left behind by their gods, the species that built them.”19 In contemporary media such as video games, then, chant can be any number of things. It can be an exact replica of historical, liturgical plainchant, samples of plainchant embedded into a new musical composition, or even newly composed music designed to emulate any or all of the traditional characteristics of plainchant. Texts, for example, could be in Latin, or in a fantasy language such as Orcish or Elvish, or could even simply be an open vowel. Melodies could be harmonized in medievalist perfect fifths, or in tonal harmony, or in imitation of the modernist practices of Arvo Pärt or John Tavener; they could be rhythmicized or given dynamic shape in the manner of Carl Orff’s “O Fortuna” from Carmina Burana; they could be played out against popular, rock, or heavy-metal musics.20 In almost every instance, plainchant acts as an exoticism. Its distinct musical style usually marks it as “other” to whatever other music is at play, and as such is often used to denote the “otherness” of a particular character, scene, or world. Yet at the same time, its familiarity acts as a signifier of the past, medieval or not, and of a generic sense of religion if not specifically of Catholicism. It is to the host of extra-musical connotations that plainchant represents in video games that I turn now.

Cassidee Moser, “How the Beatles Influenced the Halo Theme Song,” IGN, 23 March 2016, , last accessed 7 September 2017. 18 See also Summers, “Analysing Video Game Music.” 19 “Gregorian Chant,” Halo Nation, , last accessed 7 September 2017. 20 The tropes of the textless choir and the Orff-esque compositional style are so prominent within modern media that the spatial constraints of this essay forbid me from going into too great a depth with them. 17

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Chant Tropes In general, chant is used in video games to signify the following tropes: the medieval, past, or a sense of ancientness; Christianity, Catholicism, or the more general sacred or spiritual; a general sense of peace, tranquility, or healing; the fantastical, supernatural, or magical; or the superstitious, violent, evil, Satanic, Occult, or death. These tropes or characteristics are by no means exclusive, and frequently occur in tandem with one another within the same video game. The history, as well as the marketing, of plainchant clearly links it as a genre to the Middle Ages, despite it being a continuous practice that remains in use today. Games such as Medieval 2 (2006), Civilization IV, or Empire Earth (2001), which focus in part or in sum on the Middle Ages, thus use plainchant to reinforce a general sense of the medieval that is already present in the game’s narrative or strategy. In another fashion, games such as The Witcher 3 (2015), set in a mythical world, use plainchant to suggest the interpretation of that world as equivalent to or reminiscent of the medieval West. Lastly, games such as Assassin’s Creed (2007–) use plainchant to characterize the game’s setting as belonging to a particular time and place, in this case twelfth-century Jerusalem. Given the historical link between plainchant and the Catholic Church, it should come as no surprise that chant in video games often represents Christianity. Music emulating plainchant is used in games such as The Da Vinci Code (2006) during scenes in one of the numerous real-world Christian churches or chapels, or again in Assassin’s Creed to signify the Knights Templar. While some video games explicitly reference either the Catholic Church or a Christian setting of some sort, it is much more frequent for video games to develop a generic religious or spiritual setting or a newly created religion unique to that game world (as in the aforementioned Halo). Chant is therefore found in several of the tracks for the religious–philosophical puzzle game The Talos Principle (2014) or for God of War 3 (2010), a game loosely based on Greek mythology in which the player controls Kratos, son of Zeus. Several of the temples throughout games such as the Baldur’s Gate (1998­­­–), Bloodborne (2015–), and The Witcher (2007–) series feature some sort of chant-like music. In certain cases, such as in several of the Legend of Zelda (1986–) games, chant is heard specifically in temples that offer sanctuary from enemies and a place of rest or healing. Fantasy or science-fiction video games are certainly a notably popular genre of game, and chant is used quite frequently within them. In addition to the games already mentioned, newly composed music emulating chant is found throughout the Spyro the Dragon (1998–) series, in several iterations of the popular Final Fantasy (1987–) series, and even in the menu music for Castlevania: Rondo of Blood (1993) and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (2007),

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all creating or implying an exotic, fantastic world far removed from the modern day. Closely related is the use of chant in situations that are violent, deadly, or demonic. As mentioned earlier, chant is sampled in battle music in Sacred 2: Fallen Angel, but also symbolizes Hades and the underworld in God of War 3, the vampire Dracula in many games in the Castlevania (1986–) series, and the Shadowlord in NieR: Gestalt & Replicant (2010). Moreover, many video games use the “Dies irae” chant, though few do so with explicitly Christian overtones. The famous chant is found in games ranging from the medievalist Gauntlet Legends (1998) and Final Fantasy IX (2000) to Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (1992), all to represent villains or even the undead.21 At this point, I have explored to an extent what chant sounds like, or rather what it can sound like in order to be perceived as chant, and a number of tropes or associations that such music is used to signify. What remains to be discussed in this essay is a holistic sense of how chant works within these games – a combination of Schubert’s interest in how chant is used to create meaning and Bergeron’s desire to look at the meaning chant receives. To that end, I wish to focus on a small number of games as case studies, exploring the interactions between their types of game play, their general plot and setting, and the compositional and ludological approaches to chant that each employ. The Da Vinci Code The well-known novel by Dan Brown (2003) spawned both a top-grossing film and a video game in 2006; in fact, the film and the game were released on the same day, though each was modeled independently on the book. The Da Vinci Code is a third-person action and puzzle game in which the player controls the two main protagonists from the book, Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu, in a search for the Holy Grail. The game is linear, and the player will work their way through the different levels and areas one at a time, mimicking the overall narrative of the book. As they play, they will search for clues and solve puzzles, explore areas, and engage in combat with enemies. The book and game are set in the modern world, replete with historical locations and references to real organizations such as the Catholic Church and the Knights Templar, but are heavily fictionalized, including new characters and invented societies. Given the constant religious overtones of both the narrative and the settings, the composer Winifred Phillips stated that she felt obligated to “pay homage to the long musical history of the Catholic Church.”22 For her, this meant composing a series of choral compositions Cook, “Beyond the Grave.” Winifred Phillips, A Composer’s Guide to Game Music (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 104­–5.

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for which she first prepared her own texts and then had them translated into Latin.23 These choral pieces occur throughout the game. While their primary purpose is, perhaps, to support or heighten the ­player’s awareness of the various settings in the game as sacred Catholic spaces, as Phillips states, they create other meanings as well. Given that the Templars are a focal point of the plot, and that many of these locations are supposed to have histories dating back to the time of the Templars themselves, the use of chant-like material plays upon the preconceived notion that chant is timeless, continuous, and medieval. Moreover, as the plot of the book and game rests upon the idea that heirs to the Templars have been working in secret all along in order to preserve the Holy Grail, this newly composed chant-like music both represents, and renews chant with, the trope of secret, inscrutable ritual. Such compositions also serve more complex, even sinister, purposes. In the case of “Temple Church,” the track that plays during Robert and Sofie’s escape from the twelfth-century London church built by the Knights Templar, the character of the track changes when Robert engages in combat with Silas, a monk belonging to the secret Opus Dei organization who has killed several people in his quest to find and eliminate the protagonists.24 A militant spoken-word text is recited over a sparse, percussive piano, string, and synth accompaniment, building to an abrupt end. At that point, much like in Sacred 2: Fallen Angel, the accompaniment provides a steady metric pulse and rhythmic accent underneath what sounds very much like plainchant. An all-male ensemble singing in unison, with dark tone color, no vibrato, tapered phrases, and the slightly muddy edges of acoustic reverberation, singing in what could be perceived as Latin, the chant floats in mid-air, completely out of sync with the pulsating accompaniment. The presence of chant here articulates a number of interrelated characteristics: the religious nature of Silas the monk, the secrecy of his order, and the warlike violence that he and the Templars both threaten. As the scene takes place in the underbelly of the Temple Church, it also signifies both the sacred, Catholic, medieval past connected with the building itself and the mystery, even danger, of hidden depths. Lastly, chant’s connection with the “evil medieval” instills and reinforces a sense of fear and danger in combat with Silas. While the mere presence of chant in this track serves to support the interpretation of this scene as sacred, ancient, medieval, ritualistic, mysterious, and dangerous, the tension between the chant and its accompaniment adds Other game composers have also taken similar approaches; one particularly interesting example is that of Rebecca Kneubuhl and Gabriel Mann, who set Latin poems by Ovid in a chant-like style for the soundtracks to The Legend of Spyro trilogy, , last accessed 7 September 2017. 24 , last accessed 7 September 2017. 23

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further nuance. The purportedly acoustic, low-tech ambience of the chant, its modality, its arhythmic stretch, even its vocality all act in stark contrast to the digital, modern, highly metric, accented, yet static accompaniment.25 This interplay sets up and subconsciously enhances a reading of this scene, and in fact the whole plot, as an example of the tensions between the medieval and the modern, blurring the boundaries between the real and the fictitious. The artificial nature of the synthesized accompaniment nods to the alternative universe in which the novel is set. I argue, however, that it is the presence of the chant that queers a sense of time and place, marking the Temple Church as both then and now, there and here, a continuous part of real-world history and also of the fictional, mythologized past–present world of the novel. Baldur’s Gate In contrast to the alternative version of the real world presented in The Da Vinci Code, the world within the Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale series is completely fictional. The games in these series all take place within The Forgotten Realms, a particular fantasy campaign setting from Dungeons & Dragons. All are role-playing games in which the player creates a protagonist and works in a multitude of ways, both optional and required, toward the main game-goal. The Forgotten Realms are a sword-and-sorcery type of medievalist world, making use of fantasy tropes such as clerics, mages, orphans, castles, bards, and a plethora of humanoid and non-human creatures. Religion, or at least deities and their followers, are a central element in these games; temples dedicated to a variety of gods are scattered throughout the land, some offering healing, others quests or even foes to be conquered. None, however, requires the main character to worship or otherwise align with a particular deity; instead, the temples act in a fashion similar to inns or other shops, where one can obtain the necessities for continuing the game. Chant-like music is often used in the soundtracks for these temples, the various styles of which characterize them as sacred, old, safe, or perhaps dangerous or even evil. One type of temple, however, is of particular interest in this essay. Several temples are dedicated to the deity Helm, a lawful neutral god from the human pantheon. In the track “Helm’s Temple,” composer Michael Hoenig creates a digital composition both reminiscent of chant and including samples of historical plainchant.26 The track begins with a swell of (what sounds like digitally rendered) male voices performing a modal chant on an open vowel, harmonized in both perfect and dissonant intervals. A few seconds in, this Linda Schubert discusses the possible connotations of high-tech versus low-tech with regard to chant-recording production in “Plainchant in Motion Pictures,” 208. 26 , last accessed 7 September 2017. 25

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harmonized section gives way to a male ensemble monophonically singing the melisma on the word “haec” from the Easter chant “Haec dies.” The harmonized ensemble returns, singing the words “Agnus Dei,” before concluding with a cadential formula on the word “Amen.” The timbres of the sections are similar enough to give the appearance of the same ensemble performing throughout, only digitally manipulated through some sort of synthesizer to produce the new harmonic parts. The main melodies for “haec” and “Amen,” and quite possibly also for “Agnus Dei,” are derived from historical plainchant repertories, though clearly here these phrases have been excised from their original contexts. As in Sacred 2: Fallen Angel, what was valued here was not any sort of textual or grammatical coherence but the sonic resonance of chant itself. The slow, gentle pace, dark tone color, modality, lack of rhythmic or metric vitality, and generic sense of linguistic difference help to characterize this temple as a sacred, old space, one that provides healing and aid. Yet the digital rendering of chant here also conveys a sense of foreignness and fantasy, the high-tech production subtly accentuating the pre-industrial, magical nature of the Forgotten Realms and the distance, even disinterest, between the player-character and the deities in this world. Zombies Ate My Neighbors Another kind of digital manipulation speaks not only to the symbolic meaning of chant within a particular video game but also to the technological constraints that gave rise to its use. The humorous shoot-’em-up video game Zombies Ate My Neighbors (1993) is the earliest game under consideration in these case studies. Made for the Super NES and Genesis consoles, it can be played by either one or two people, who control two fictitious protagonists in order to rescue their neighbors from zombies and other stock horror-movie creatures such as demonic babies and aliens. The final boss is Dr. Tongue’s Giant Head, and as the player enters the final room, the famous opening notes of the “Dies irae” chant begin to play.27 Previously composed music, especially classical or art music, was somewhat frequently used in early video games, in no small part because of the ready translation of certain genres such as Baroque keyboard music to the small number of channels available to early systems.28 The technological , last accessed 7 September 2017. See also my discussion of this game in Cook, “Beyond the Grave.” 28 Good overviews of this phenomenon are given in Karen Collins, Game Sound (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), and William Gibbons, “Blip, Bloop, Bach? Some Uses of Classical Music on the Nintendo Entertainment System,” Music and the Moving Image 2.1 (Spring 2009): 40–52. 27

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c­ apabilities of the Super Nintendo in the 16-bit era were rapidly expanding, but the inclusion of vocals in video game music was only just beginning at the time that Zombies was released. Voice synthesis in games had begun to be used as early as 1982, but even by 1993, vocals in music were generally restricted to theme songs for the opening menu or closing credits. Still, even had voice inclusion been technologically possible, it would not have been necessary or even desirable in Zombies. Here, it is not the vocality of chant that is required to create a particular atmosphere, as in the other case studies thus far; it is instead the familiarity, and the implications, of this particular melody (which just so happens to be plainchant) that set the scene for the final battle. In using the “Dies irae” at this point in the game, Zombies both draws on and reaffirms its symbolism. As previously stated, and as summarized by Schubert and others, this chant has long been associated not just with death through its presence in the Requiem Mass but also with battle, violence, evil, the supernatural, and the occult. Thus, to use this particular chant to symbolize battle against a presumably evil villain is perfectly sensible. Yet it is not just any battle for which this chant is used; it is the final battle against Dr. Tongue, the evil scientist behind the creation of the legions of zombies and other monsters against whom the player has fought for the whole game. In fact, the player has faced Dr. Tongue before, though with different music. The reservation of the “Dies irae” for the final meeting between player and archenemy thus marks this battle as important and weighty, and its ritual overtones from the Requiem Mass even lend this moment with a sense of culmination or purpose, a sort of musical teleology symbolizing the end of the game as well. In turn, the excitement and conclusiveness of this battle reify the “Dies irae” as a symbol of battle, death, and finality. The sound of the chant as it appears here also plays on a host of tropes relating to the 1950s-era horror films that the game parodies. As Donnelly has explained, horror films developed their own musical symbols to instill and express a sense of fear in their audience. One such symbol is chant, or even many kinds of “pseudo-Christian church music.”29 Other stylistic and timbral characteristics that permeate horror films include low-pitched strings performing a slow, melodically static theme; drones of all sorts; unresolved dissonances; the Gothic organ; tremolo, especially as played on or near the bridge of stringed instruments; extremes of range; and stingers, or short musical bursts. In the track in question, “Curse of the Tongue,” the music begins with a single sustained perfect fifth, itself a signifier of the medieval, in a lower register, using a digital timbre reminiscent of a reedy, vibrato-heavy pipe organ. This low drone is sustained throughout the first two phrases of the chant, moving in parallel motion at its cadence points. Meanwhile, the Donnelly, “Demonic Possession,” 89.

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chant itself is placed in a much higher register, digitally rendered to imitate a fast vibrato or tremolo, and its high, shrieking timbre is reminiscent of the “stabbing strings in the shower scene in Psycho.”30 The lower drone begins to accompany the chant melody in parallel motion in the second large section of the chant, doubling the melody in octaves. As the main body of the chant concludes, a low-pitched percussive element counts off a particular tempo and meter, introducing the rest of the newly composed track, which is reminiscent of hard rock or heavy metal. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time The last case study in this essay is perhaps the most vague, and yet one of the most interesting. In Zombies Ate My Neighbors, the vocality of chant was unnecessary because the chant melody itself, in this case, was so recognizable as to render the specifics of the text unnecessary. The melody itself was enough to impart to the player its centuries of collected symbolic resonance. In the other case studies thus far, though, vocality of chant has been an imperative, even when what is vocalized – the specifics of text and grammar – are unimportant. In Ocarina of Time (1998), we find a peculiar blend of the two. This iteration of the numerous Legend of Zelda games is another fantasy action-adventure game in which the player, controlling Link, explores an open-world version of Hyrule across multiple time periods. Scattered throughout Hyrule are numerous temples, five of which have a particular sage that Link is required to awaken in order to save the land. The last, the Temple of Time, stands apart from the others, as it is the gateway between Hyrule and the Sacred Realm. Its music is also unique in the game’s soundtrack, for it is the only one of the game compositions that seems to emulate the human voice.31 Like the rest of the tracks in the game, “Temple of Time” was newly composed by Koji Kondo, and consists solely of digital music, without either live instruments or human voices. Even without voice or text, the temple theme clearly evokes plainchant: the melody is modal, fairly quiet, gentle, and more slowly paced; it is set in a lower register reminiscent of an all-male ensemble; and, while it has a loose sense of pulse and metric organization, it is not overly rhythmic. Moreover, its acoustic is fuzzy, imitating the sound of reverberation within such a building as the Temple of Time. All of these elements are characteristic of plainchant, and might have been sufficient unto themselves to indicate that genre to a knowledgeable audience. Yet the timbre of the track also suggests the human voice. Different pitches within the melody Donnelly, “Demonic Possession,” 105. , last accessed 7 September 2017.

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seem to carry different implied vowels, some more open, some more pinched and nasal. Also, the acoustic reverberation in combination with these implied vowels creates overtones reminiscent of those produced through singing. This track is certainly not the only synthesized composition to emulate the human voice; see, for example, several instances of music within Final Fantasy VI (1994).32 However, in each of those cases, such as the character Celes singing opera or Kefka laughing, the music appears to be emanating diegetically from the character in question. The syncing of the synthesized sound with the actions of those characters enables the player to interpret that sound as vocality. The music performed in the Temple of Time, on the other hand, is unclear in that regard, as there is no character or creature there to produce such a sound. It seems to emanate from someone off-screen, or even from the Temple itself. There is no on-screen referent to suggest that the player understand this music as vocal; rather, such a suggestion is built into the sound of the excerpt itself. Dialogue is a crucial part of Ocarina of Time, yet aside from the character Navi’s persistent “Hey!” none of the dialogue is actually spoken aloud. Characters wave and express sentiment through facial and bodily motion, but all text is printed on screen for the player to read. In this fashion, the music within the Temple of Time is even more revealing. It emulates plainchant through its approach to modality, rhythm, range, and reverberation, and suggests vocality through vowel sounds and overtones. Yet it simultaneously, and deliberately, subverts the expectations of vocality by appearing not to have manifested from any visible character or source. This track thus supports the player’s interpretation of the Temple of Time as ancient and spiritual but also insinuates that, in the fantastical realm of Hyrule, this Temple is a place of supernatural mystery. In a manner of speaking, this approach distances the track from any overtly Christian implications; there is neither a recognizable chant melody such as the “Dies irae” nor any Latin text to remind of Catholic liturgy. This may well have been deliberate on the part of Kondo and the game’s designers, as they have a company policy to avoid religious material in their products. In fact, they altered one of the tracks for the Temple of Fire after they realized that a sample they had used contained an Islamic prayer.33 The imitation of plainchant might be acceptable, but the use of actual plainchant is not. This track thus pushes the boundaries the farthest as to what chant in video games For a discussion of such music within Final Fantasy VI, see William Cheng, “How Celes Sang,” in Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 33 A video interview on the subject, plus a small blurb, is available here: , last accessed 7 September 2017. 32

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might be; a digital, voiceless, textless imitation, a simulacrum, or a new genre for a new medium. Concluding Thoughts In a way, the study of chant as a topic comes close to circular logic. Chant has traditionally had numerous connotations, and, so, when we seek to express any of them, we turn once again to chant. But these connotations that chant communicates are neither givens, nor are they static. Over the centuries, each new context in which chant is used imbues it with another layer of meaning and potentially shifts our understanding of what it has formerly signified. New media genres such as film, television, and video games thus simultaneously play with the resonance of chant’s previous associations and add to its symbolic tool chest. They also add to our understanding of what, exactly, chant is. Of course, plainchant is a fairly fixed genre, fixed in that there are accepted bodies of repertory from specific times and places, with liturgical and historical rules to their emendation. But the idea of chant in modern media is not bound to liturgical or historical plainchant; it is omnivorous, accepting music that samples, remixes, and emulates plainchant in myriad ways, some of which have been explored here. “Like the fractal patterns of nature,” John Diliberto stated, “New Age music isn’t a smooth, definable entity, but a shifting maze of intricate relationships that are constantly similar, yet constantly different.”34 So, too, can we think of chant in the modern imagination. Whether plainchant or chant-like, the music in these video games continues to symbolize a number of tropes: the medieval, the ancient, the Christian, the sacred, the simple, the fantastical, the magical, the violent, the deadly, and the evil. And yet there are consequences, often unintended, to doing so; as James Cook points out in his study of The Witcher 3, “in utilizing iconic aural cues, composers and sound designers […] can conjure up particular cultural and social structures with ease.”35 Cook referred largely here to the kinds of issues of political and social organization within gaming worlds such as that found in The Witcher. Yet it is also applicable to the idea of a chant topic, especially with regard to religion. Given plainchant’s well-known historical origins and liturgical context within the Catholic Church, extrapolating the sounds of chant outward to indicate a general sense of sacredness or spirituality runs John Diliberto, “Navigating the Shifting Terrain of New Age Music: The Evolution of a Genre, from World to Folk, Classical to Space,” Billboard (6 April 1996), 44, 52 (44). 35 James Cook, “Playing with the Past in the Imagined Middle Ages: Music and Soundscape in Video Game,” Sounding Out!, 3 October 2016, , last accessed 7 September 2017. 34

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the risk of monopolizing, even colonizing, those notions for Christianity. In his chapter on chant in medievalist films, for example, Haines explores his idea of “dubious” chant as that used to depict non-Christian, non-Western, or otherwise non-human characters.36 He includes here the chanting of the Koran in numerous films negatively depicting Muslims as violent, demonic, or (at best) exotic, but other examples could include images of the orientalized Jewish cantor, the adoption of African, Asian, Native American, or other minority group musical traits or languages for naive or pejorative purposes, and so forth. The potential for problematic interpretation escalates when chant is used as the signifier for both Christianity/sacredness and the medieval past. The stereotype of the Middle Ages being wholly Christian is a pervasive one, and linking one type of religious music with that era runs the risk of reifying that stereotype. Moreover, it serves to more firmly place plainchant in the past, denying it the very history and continuous usage that connects it to many of the other connotations for which it is used. However, there is not an easy solution to this dilemma, for from the perspectives of signifying either the past or the sacred, religious music from other traditions might not be as immediately recognizable, and moreover it could be assumed that other current musical practices are to be linked exclusively with the medieval past, thus denying them their histories as well. There is no one solution to these problems, and my raising awareness of them should be taken as a note of caution, not censure. But if we are to understand what chant means in the modern imagination, we must be aware of the propensity within that modern imagination to view the past as a (medieval, Christian) monolith. Perhaps, by broadening our definition of chant – not of historical plainchant necessarily, but of what the contemporary public interprets or claims as chant – we might find that the monolith is but one of chant’s various guises.

Haines, “Chant”; see also Jack Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (New York: Olive Branch Press, 2001).

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A Plague of Medievalism upon You All: Medievalism, Music, and the Plague Adam Whittaker The Black Death, the first and most severe plague of a global pandemic lasting from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, was one of the most terrifying moments in European history. Great swathes of the population were killed by this unrelenting pestilence, with estimates suggesting that between 62% and 75% of the population died from the disease in some regions of Tuscany, for example.1 Such a profound event had well-documented social and political consequences that shaped the foundations of the burgeoning early-modern world, and helped bring about significant changes in the social strata underpinning societal functions. It also equipped the modern world with the original outbreak narrative, which has continued to haunt the European consciousness for the centuries that have followed. This undoubtedly terrifying period, dominated by the Black Death and immortalized in historical documents and filmic media, has become the backdrop for countless depictions, both factual and fictional across a range of media. In short, the Black Death symbolizes one of the most important medievalist tropes over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, creating an image of the medieval world as one that is preoccupied with the apocalypse, prone to descending into superstitious and ritual acts, and preoccupied with death itself, all in fear of God. It is a bleak site with great potential for narrative expediency, and is a furrow that continues to be ploughed in a range of films and, most strikingly, in recent video-game series reliant on the outbreak narrative.2 Music plays an integral role in these depictions, acting as a key John Aberth, A Knight at the Movies (New York: Routledge, 2003), 197–256. The Resident Evil/Biohazard series is a prime example of this. See Robert Mejia and Ryuta Komaki, “The Historical Conception of Biohazard in Biohazard/Resident Evil,” in Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), chap. 21.

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device in the medievalization3 of filmic and media spaces and offering some interesting insights into our modern perceptions of the sound of the past, especially that associated with the end times. This essay examines approaches toward the scoring of the musical past in two films set during the first wave of the Black Death – taken in this article as the fourteenth-century bubonic plague epidemic – and considers the wider function of sound in these filmic narratives, their uses of pre-existent or period-style newly composed pastiche music, and the layering of medievalism at play in their atmospheric soundscapes. Such an examination offers a way to engage with changing trends in medievalism across time and, importantly, the creation of a soundworld of disturbing otherness, emphasizing the alterity of this historical period as though “the past is a foreign country,” to borrow L. P. Hartley’s famous phrase.4 Two films will be used as case studies for this analysis: Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal) and Christopher Smith’s Black Death (2010). Both take quite different approaches to scoring the same visual symbols; they are drawn from different genres; and critical opinion on the films is contrasting. However, underlying the atmospheric soundscapes designed to evoke the plague are much the same historical, perhaps medievalist, musical tropes, played out through changing forms of medievalism across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Thus, what do we, as a modern audience, think the plague-times sounded like, and how did we reach these conclusions? Before we explore these films in detail, the broader tradition of apocalyptic medievalism needs to be outlined. It is well documented that the past, especially that which is deemed to be medieval, is often used as a site to create a fictional world. The vast majority of fantasy literature is constructed in a faux-medieval world, and the reasons for this are both complex and multifarious.5 Representations of apocalyptic events, whether this be an epidemic of a disease or the obliteration of the human race through deadly weapons, have drawn upon similar themes of medieval history and social codes. Such apocalypticism strips back the social codes of modern society to their supposed bare bones, those developing from the uncivilized Middle Ages, and represents a time that, for Western viewers, is deemed to show a simpler, The concept of medievalization is borrowed loosely from David Matthews’s usage of the term as being applied to physical spaces. See David Matthews, Medievalism: A Critical History (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), 43–114. Here I extend its usage to filmic and media spaces. 4 L. P. Hartley, The Go Between (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953). David Lowenthal explores this theme in much greater detail, see: David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 5 Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is a classic case of this, with the land of Middle Earth ­operating as a fictional medieval world, complete with pre-mechanized weapons and transport. 3

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perhaps even primitive, form of modern civilized society: the germs of our collective European pre-capitalist past laid bare for all to see.6 Themes of the apocalypse run throughout biblical sources and were a continual source of interest throughout the Middle Ages, with many people drawing upon these in the plague times. Boccaccio’s Decameron and Dante’s Divine Comedy, to name but the two most famous cases, explore these themes at length, laying some of the narrative foundations for this tradition. Indeed, the Divine Comedy, especially in its description of purgatory, has become something of a roadmap for post-Apocalyptic science fiction, a genealogy that itself draws heavily upon medievalism to construct the prototypical forms of a new society when old social orders are thrown out.7 Thus, the destruction of the world, and its associated probable regression in terms of societal and technological security, is a trope imbued with medievalism irrespective of its historical location. In the case of the Black Death, this strand of timeless medievalism – an inherently presentist notion – is applied to a medieval setting itself, establishing something of a narrative vortex that draws together the historical past and the present day. Bergman’s The Seventh Seal Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal is a particularly good example of such usage, with a medieval setting being used to reflect 1950s cold-war views of the apocalypse and of religious faith: the medieval as asynchronous, simultaneously historical and out of time, a key feature of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s view of medievalism.8 It is arguably one of the most powerful and famous filmic retellings of the terror sparked by the Black Death, leading John Ganim to categorize this as a kind of medieval noir.9 Its evocative imagery The notion of a collective history played out on screen is explored in James Cook, Alexander Kolassa, and Adam Whittaker, “Introduction,” in Recomposing the Past: Representations of Early Music on Stage and Screen, ed. James Cook, Alexander Kolassa, and Adam Whittaker (Routledge, forthcoming). On the broader significance of cinematic medievalism, see Bettina Bildhauer, “Medievalism and Cinema,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, ed. Louise D’Arcens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 45–59. 7 See Peter Johnsson, “Purged by Fire: The Influence of Medieval Visionary Literature on Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction,” The Year’s Work in Medievalism 25 (2010): 116–32. 8 See Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “Intertextuality and Autumn / Autumn and the Modern Reception of the Middle Ages,” in The New Medievalism, ed. Marina S. Brownlee, Kevin Brownlee, and Stephen G. Nichols (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 301–30. Gumbrecht argues that medievalism offers a site where a range of asynchronous ideas and images can come together to form a new synchronous simulacrum. 9 John M. Ganim, “Medieval Noir: Anatomy of a Metaphor,” in Medieval Film, ed. Anke Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 196. 6

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and distinctive style have allowed it to achieve iconic status, even to the extent of parody, demonstrating its significance in and impact on popular culture.10 Although certainly an allegory of Bergman’s own crisis of faith and obsessive fear of death, The Seventh Seal acts as a medievalist mirror to 1950s cold-war society, contemplating a possible apocalypse of its own time, albeit one from nuclear war rather than pestilence.11 Indeed, Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman assert this very same idea, noting that “the medieval framework serves only ‘[a]s a mirror and an alienating device for viewing the mid-century present.’”12 Although the medieval setting certainly does serve to alienate, such an overly reductive view fails to account for the layers of medievalism that are at work in Bergman’s masterpiece,13 and the ways these are manifested musically, something that has, until now, been overlooked in scholarly literature. Derived from Bergman’s own play Wood Painting, The Seventh Seal centers on the disillusionment of a knight, Antonius Block, played by Max von Sydow, who has returned from the Crusades and who encounters the figure of Death on a deserted beach. Bergman problematizes the notion of a heroic knight, instead representing Block as a deeply troubled, perhaps hollow, version of the man he was before he left for the Crusades and the promise of glory: he is a husk of his former self. The film continually invites the audience to question the moral values and social orders that persist despite the existential threat of apocalypse, and the hopelessness of the human condition in its wake. The peripherality of the isolated coastline is significant, demarcating the filmic space and emphasizing Block’s limboesque state, delaying his inevitable demise by distracting Death with a chess match. Engaging Death in this game, Block uses the extra time granted to him to journey back to his castle with his faithful servant, encountering a troupe of actors and other characters along the way. Seeing his homeland ravaged by the plague, and the terror that it sparks in the villages he passes, Block returns to his wife in his castle for a last supper with his traveling companions. The rather bleak and troubling journey is punctuated by musical episodes, imbued with musical medievalisms that offer an insight into 1950s Take, for example, the 1991 film Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, where the figure of Death challenges the film’s main characters to a series of games, including “Battleship” and “Twister,” to restore their lives. 11 On the imagery of Bergman’s films, see Paisley Livingston, Ingmar Bergman and the Rituals of Art (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1982). 12 Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages on Film (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 303. 13 This notion resonates with Richard Utz’s characterization of the Middle Ages as “a semantic site for the fusion of creative and scholarly engagement with the past.” See Richard Utz, “Coming to Terms with Medievalism,” European Journal of English Studies 15.2 (2011): 101–13 (109). 10

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perceptions of the sonic past outside of the Hollywood tradition that dominates most discourse. The imagery for the iconic chess-scene comes from a well-known wall painting by the ecclesiastical painter Albertus Pictor, found in Täby kyrka, in the Uppland province, north of Stockholm. The figure of death is depicted as a skeleton engaging a man in a game of chess, the ultimate game of strategy and a universal symbol that has been attached to countless narrative layers. Take, for example, the point later in the film where Block reveals to Death, disguised as a priest in the confessional, that he is playing a combination of bishop and knight to Death, perhaps symbolic of the combination of military strength and faith that underpinned the feudal system, and their utter futility in the face of the Black Death.14 Although iconic in terms of visual symbol, the chess game serves as a metaphorical rendering of a danse macabre, with the player moving to avoid checkmate, the end of life.15 This undoubtedly evokes a sense of what Erich Auerbach terms “figural reality,” something that can be understood only by seeing that it figures for something beyond itself.16 Indeed, the entire film might be read in this way. The viewer knows from the outset that the significance of the game of chess extends further than the commonly played board-game, and the conceit that Block intends to use this to buy some time is made plain. It is a game of life and death, between light and dark, contrasts that are all too apparent throughout the film and its soundtrack: the chess game is the film world in microcosm. The layers of medievalism and broader symbolism of Bergman’s film have been widely recognized elsewhere. For example, Finke and Shichtman use it as a case study to delineate a breed of apocalyptic medievalism.17 In terms of music, however, the film has received relatively little attention. Thus, a few general points should be noted before exploring significant moments in the soundtrack. Erik Nordgren’s score is heard most often at scene transitions, perhaps revealing a little of the theatrical origins of the narrative, or at least the relatively low-budget scope of Bergman’s masterpiece: this is no Hollywood blockbuster score from the golden age of cinema with infectious melodies that soon become ear-worms. Despite its predominant function as The Black Death almost certainly reduced the power of this system, and presented significant opportunities for social change and renewal, albeit at a great human cost. 15 The danse macabre is one of the most enduring images of the Middle Ages. For a general introduction to this concept, see J. M. Clark, The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Glasgow: Jackson, Son & Co., 1950). The danse macabre was a point of fascination for many nineteenth-century composers, with Camille Saint-Saëns’ famous piece of the same name being an especially good example of the excitement and interest in this as part of nineteenth-century antiquarianism. 16 Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 12–76. 17 Finke and Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations, 288–334, esp. 302–21. 14

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quasi-incidental music to smooth over transitions, there are several particularly important moments in Nordgren’s soundtrack from the perspective of musical medievalism, perhaps even a type of medievalism specific to films on the plague, as a comparison with a recent film, Smith’s Black Death, will demonstrate. The first encounter with musical medievalism in Nordgren’s soundtrack occurs in the opening few minutes of the film, and establishes something of a trope that is reiterated throughout the film, most poignantly at its famous conclusion. As Bengt Ekerot’s terrifyingly cold depiction of Death, which is the character that will haunt the rest of the film, is glimpsed for the first time, unsettling music is heard. The camera moves toward a close-up of Ekerot’s bleach-white face, and low, rumbling male voices can be heard, punctuated by a descending clarinet motif and high-pitched plucked note, probably played on a harp. The music is brought to a sudden stop as the dialogue begins again. Even so, the sound of Death’s power has been established with music of an othering nature. The use of male voices that are so low in pitch that any text becomes indistinct has become something of a musical commonplace in films representing the plague, and is a trope in films depicting medievalist-inflected rituals.18 The low-pitched rumbling male voices, accompanied in this case by oily clarinets, serve to create a musical atmosphere made thick by an inescapable resonance, much like the presence of Death writ large through the spread of the plague. Though emanating from a human source, this vocal music contributes significantly to the personification of Death, and thus does not evoke the spiritual purity we might expect from fourteenth-century vocal music. Instead, it inverts our sense of spiritual purity and plays upon strong associations with religious symbolism that are, in their own ways, simultaneously historicizing and dislocated from a specific period: they are perhaps more medievalist than overtly medieval. Following the model of Isabella van Elferen, perhaps this represents something of a Gothic transgression, moving the listener from the “mundane to the divine or the occult,” and evoking a sense of uncanny spectrality that is a particularly apposite accompaniment to the figure of Death.19 Despite the brevity of this short musical cue, the use of low voices exerts a powerful influence over the soundworld of the film. Ultimately, this dark and foreboding trope follows us to the very end of the film, reaching a poignant climax in the final Dance of Death scene. As we See, for example, the use of Jocelyn Pook’s “Backwards Priests” in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999). The low-pitched chanting of Romanian priests is played backwards, making the chanted text impossible to decipher. I am grateful to Daniel Trocmé-Latter for bringing this to my attention through the REMOSS group. 19 Isabella van Elferen, Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012), 30. 18

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see Block’s companions following Death in a dance-like motion on the cliff edge, with the famously mysterious cloud above them, our ears are confronted with similarly low-pitched male voices. However, on this occasion, the voices provide something more recognizably musical, singing in three-part harmony at an incredibly low pitch, with the lowest voice extending beyond a C two octaves below middle C. A timpani drum beats an ominously steady rhythm, coloring this part of the soundtrack with a dirge-like processional quality. This poignant and bleak imagery, framed by a fortuitously apocalyptic cloud formation, recalls the sparseness of the opening, especially in terms of musical timbre and instrumentation. Indeed, the importance of gloomy weather strikes a chord with Machaut’s mention of storms marking the end of the world in Le jugement du Roi de Navarre, itself featuring the Black Death prominently.20 Those trapped in the fatal dance stand on the precipice between land and sea, life and death, symbolic of a demarcated filmic space inhabited by the plague and the vast unknown void beyond. Jof sees the figures clearly in the distance and provides the narration to this important scene marking the end of Death’s pursuit of his family by association with Block.21 In musical terms, Nordgren’s score draws upon a sense of perceived “otherness” from low vocal music, immersing the viewer in a tragic requiem that is more foreboding than it is sentimental; perhaps its otherness is itself historicizing. The musical procession signals the endless and ongoing march toward death, and marks a notable timbral shift from the blustery orchestral score that accompanies the scene leading up to this point. These two musical passages, both drawing upon the same material, therefore go a long way to establish the soundworld that bookends the film: one of unease and imperceptibility. There is, however, very little that denotes the medieval period about this music in any specific sense. Instead, its historical (perhaps historicizing) components are grounded in traditions of medievalism, using the unfamiliar to evoke a sense of otherness and drawing upon some of the commonly understood signs of the medieval.22 The viewer is situated in a soundworld that straddles the boundaries of history and horror, with Nordgren exploiting the imperceptibility of such low-pitched voices, a sound that would have been unfamiliar to many 1950s audiences used to bright and brash scores that accompanied the vast majority of historical films See R. Barton Palmer and Yolanda Plumley, “Introduction,” in Guillaume de Machaut: The Complete Poetry and Music, Volume 1: The Debate Series (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2016), available at , last accessed 15 June 2017. 21 The symbolic role of Jof and Mia, and their small child, as the biblical figures of Joseph and Mary is clearly apparent, and further intensifies the sense of religious anguish that runs throughout the film. 22 See Finke and Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations, 23–52. 20

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Fig. 1: The troupe of actors engaging in a musical performance, all clad in costumes reminiscent of court jesters, with a medievalist stage backdrop. The Seventh Seal, dir. Bergman, 1957

made in Hollywood.23 The dark and ritualistic dirges are allied with bleak landscapes and questions that reveal Block’s desire for empirical proof of the existence of God, a pursuit that is both futile and irreconcilable. Marking something of a contrast to the soundworld established in these two scenes, around thirty minutes into the film, the troupe of three actors, dressed in costumes resembling those of court jesters or stylized traveling minstrels of the carnivalesque tradition, is seen on stage, playing instruments, dancing, and singing songs (Fig. 1). The audience of a small village looks on at the performance, far from enraptured, and one of the actors receives a blow to the face from some food thrown from the crowd. This is a striking musical performance scene that takes on a significant role in the drama, evoking a whole host of images and sounds associated with the plague, all tinted through the lenses of Bergman’s medievalism. All three actors participate musically in the scene, either through playing a wind instrument, a drum, or singing, being interrupted only occasionally See, for example, Miklós Rózsa’s luscious scores to films such as Quo Vadis (1951, dir. LeRoy & Mann).

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by the sound of extraordinarily loud farm-animals and a little noise from the rather unimpressed audience.24 The style of this music is quite typical for representations of a fourteenth-century soundworld on film in the 1950s, mirroring something of the prototypical “tune and drums” approach to early music performance that was perpetuated from the middle of the twentieth century until at least the 1980s in England.25 The mixture of a historically distant timbre, a thin texture consisting of only melody and percussion, and sound effects of animals that are proximal to the audience serves to medievalize the filmic space and create further historical distance: surrounding the community with animals historicizes them in a Northern medievalist tradition, underpinned by a filthy rusticity and proximity to nature.26 The timbral difference between the music performed on stage and the music heard until this point in the film is particularly distinctive here. It is notably thinner in its timbre, presenting some light relief from the densely apocalyptic vision of the world. The presence of a clear melody played on a straight, wooden wind-instrument reminiscent of a pipe, accompanied by a brisk and repetitive drum pattern, clearly played diegetically, puts musical performance at the center of this scene.27 This is one of only two places where musical instruments are used diegetically throughout the whole film, with these settings being recognizably distant from those of the modern concert-hall tradition, taking place outside, and usually with a raucous crowd to observe. Live musical performance does not therefore account for a large part of the overall soundtrack length, but exerts great power in historicizing a key dramatic point played out on screen. It is at moments like this when the influence of medievalism is felt most clearly, with the audience of peasants lacking the enculturation to respect the work of the performers, or at least not behaving as a post-nineteenth-century concert audience might. A key part of this musical performance is the representation of the milieu While this may simply be a quirk of a relatively low-budget production, the slightly skewed aural perspective certainly serves to heighten the sense of earliness in this setting. The audience is one of the peasants, who were so ill-cultured that they lived with their animals. 25 Similar types of performances can be heard on David Munrow’s early recordings. David Munrow (1942–76) was a virtuoso recorder player and pioneer of early music, producing a number of highly successful recordings and television documentaries in the 1960s and early 1970s. He founded the Early Music Consort with Christopher Hogwood, an ensemble renowned for its exciting and extraordinarily popular performances of early music, and dazzled audiences with his energetic playing style. 26 The appearance of felt hats and chainmail further emphasizes the historical distance here. I am grateful to James Cook for sharing his emerging work on this area with me. 27 The style of performance holds some resonance with John Haines’s idéologème of the singing minstrel, with this becoming even clearer when Jof and Mia begin to sing, accompanied with a repetitive drum pattern and simple strummed chords. See John Haines, Music in Films on the Middle Ages: Authenticity vs. Fantasy (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 88–110. 24

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of its audience. It is significant that instrumental music, often performed in this kind of theatrical way, is featured outside: it is music of the common folk, whose interior spaces are insufficient for musical performance. This is music that is associated with earthy instrumental realism and, quite often, is performed by and for the peasantry. The presence of an outdoor stage adorned with a backdrop steeped in the same medievalist tradition as the wall paintings seen earlier in the film is mixed with costumes and makeup that certainly have resonances with the depictions of traveling performers in nineteenth-century rustic opera verismo.28 Such a carnivalesque performance, especially with the rather over-the-top costumes, would not be out of place in something like Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. This is surely significant from the perspective of medievalism, for the musical past to be filtered through both the filmic lens and through nineteenth-century operatic appropriation could hardly be more medievalist. Following Jonas’s hasty stage-exit after being hit with food, Jof and Mia perform a song (text given below) that features an array of peculiar shouts and offers a kind of folkloric lens that mimics the imagery of the film and the language that abounds in many plague treatises: Hästen sitter i trädet och gal. Å hu! Å hu!

The horse sits in the tress and crows. Ahoo! Ahoo!

Vägen är bred men porten small Den Svarte dansar på stranden.

The road is wide, but the gate is narrow The Black One dances on the shore

Hönan jamar i mörkaste sjö. Mjau! Mjau!

The hen meows in the darkest lake. Meow! Meow!

Dagen är röd men fisken död. Den Svarte hukar på stranden.

The day is red but the fish is dead. The Black One crows on the beach.

Ormen flaxar i himlens höjd. Å hu! Å hu!

The snake flaps in the height of heaven Ahoo! Ahoo!

Jungfrun är blek men musen nöjd. The virgin is pale, but the mouse is satisfied Den Svarte ränner på stranden. The Black One runs on the beach. Bocken väser med tänderna två. Ish! Ish!

The goat hisses with two teeth Ish! Ish!

Blåsten är tung och vågen slår. Den Svarte mökar på stranden.

The wind is heavy and the wave beats The Black One farts on the beach.

The stage is itself a key marker dividing the audience from the point of sound, encouraging a different mode of viewing from the audience. Instead of being observers of a scene, the close camera-work puts the cinematic audience in the position of the audience of peasants.

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A Plague of Medievalism upon You All  211 Hästen sitter i trädet och gal. Å hu! Å hu!

The horse sits crowing in the tree. Ahoo! Ahoo!

Vägen är bred men porten smal. Den Svarte dansar på stranden.

The road is wide, but the gate is narrow The Black One dances on the shore

Hönan jamar i mörkaste sjö. Mjau! Mjau!

The hen meows in the darkest lake. Meow! Meow!

Dagen är röd men fisken död. Den Svarte hukar på stranden.

The day is red but the fish is dead. The Black One squats on the beach.

Ormen flaxar i himlens höjd. Å hu! Å hu!

The snake flaps in the height of heaven Ahoo! Ahoo!

Jungfrun är blek men musen nöjd. The virgin is pale, but the mouse is satisfied Den Svarte ränner på stranden. The Black One runs on the beach. Suggan värper och katten sår. Å hu! Å hu!

The sow will lay and the cat wounds Ahoo! Ahoo!

Natten är sot och mörkret står. Den Svarte stannar, stannar, stannar, stannar på stranden.

The night is soot, the darkness deep The Black One waits, waits, waits, Waits, on the shore!29

Aside from several lines relating to the “Black One” – such as “The Black One dances on the beach,” “The Black One squats on the beach,” and “The Black One farts on the beach” – the song employs descriptions of animals making peculiar noises or acting in an unusual fashion. For example, the audience hears, “The hen meows in the darkest lake” and “The horse sits in the tree and crows,” recalling the importance of animal imagery, and its disfigurement, in the description of the Day of Judgment as told in the Book of Isaiah: again, medievalist representational lenses are at work.30 Thus, the song ascribes such peculiar animal behavior and noises to the presence of the “Black One,” situating this performance in the context of both the notion of the medieval world as one of superstition and, importantly, within a rich historical tradition of medieval and early modern works. Take for example, the dissonances in the air that are described by Andreas Gallus in his Fascis de peste (1564): When the air surrounding us becomes corrupted, certain animals – not only birds, but also land animals, indicate by their querulous voices Original text transcribed from Det sjunde inseglet (1957, dir. Bergman), translation my own. 30 See, especially, chaps. 34–35 of Isaiah. 29

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the foul vapors […]. And some birds, which are accustomed to flying during the day, take flight at night, contrary to custom, wailing and clamoring. The song or the croak of the ravens and of other birds is heard more than usual where the air is polluted […]. Frogs are more vocal than usual […]. The howling of the foxes, dogs, and wolves are likewise heard more than usual and without reason. And whenever or wherever these voices are heard, the plague in fact occurs, almost without fail.31 In this case, albeit one from two centuries after the period depicted in the film, the noises of animals are related directly to the plague, with such aural dissonance seen to be a key indicator of the pestilence. The pestilence disrupts the natural consonance of the world, replacing it with a cacophonous dissonance of tortured animal cries. Compared with the text of the song performed by the actors, such a reading intensifies the darkness of the comedy played out in the musical performance, with the actors providing a particularly tragic and prophetic rendering of the view of the plague held by the masses. Again, links with the natural world serve to medievalize the filmic and narrative space, evoking a pre-technological age. This representation of the musical past draws upon imagery in near-contemporaneous texts, but reimagines these images in a sense that is more palatable to modern audiences and is, importantly, dramatically appropriate: here medievalism offers a creative resource for sound and sight. Parallels can also be found within other, more modern medievalist representations of the end-times, such as in Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose, which interestingly includes a discussion of the relative merits and drawbacks of unusual marginalia imagery.32 Similarly bizarre imagery also strikes a chord with Hieronymus Bosch’s depictions of the end-times, such as the Last Judgment in Vienna (created after 1482), which is itself imbued with visual signs of both biblical and apocalyptic significance. In the performance itself, then, the two actors provide a darkly comic allegory to the plague-filled world. Jof strums a small stringed instrument reminiscent of a gittern, and Mia plays a small drum. Both evoke an atmosphere that self-consciously mocks the fear and foreboding felt elsewhere. The appearance of the gittern especially is both historicizing and othering, further emphasizing the alterity of this performance for 1950s audiences.33 Its Andreas Gallus, Fascis de peste (1564), trans. in Remi Chiu, Plague and Music in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 92–93. 32 The discussion centers on the possible symbolism of creatures in the margins, such as owls reading to represent grammar. While not directly related to depictions of the end times, it is clear that in medievalist terms, animal behaviors are linked closely with states of natural being, with major world-events distorting these. 33 The cuckolding of Plog that goes on in the background of this scene is perhaps another 31

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bowl-shaped small body is markedly different from the modern-day guitar, probably its closest relation, placing this performance in the past, even if this is not the past of the fourteenth century. We are in the past, but quite when is not necessarily important here.34 Instead, it is the power to medievalize that is significant. The song structure too is very simple, being made of pairs of lines, interspersed with comical shouts, themselves a nod to contemporary literature on the effects of the plague. After each two pairs of lines, a refrain describing the activities of the so-called “Black One” on the beach is heard, followed by a short, plucked interlude that is repeated on the gittern identically throughout the song. Thus, it consists of only four elements, making the tune instantly memorable and, perhaps, foregrounding the poignancy and potency of the words. The accompaniment is light and unintrusive, being made up of only a few strummed chords and a repetitive drum pattern, with the style befitting the seemingly mocking tone of the animal descriptions in the text. The song concludes with the line “The Black One waits on the beach,” referring to a hope that the figure of Death, the plague personified, does not spread to the land. Importantly, the otherness of this musical style is transportative and historicizing, though not necessarily in any specific sense. The medieval setting therefore establishes a site for the downright bizarre, making rather playful use of the past, perhaps somewhat analogous with intertextual relationships in medieval manuscripts with fictional and real worlds.35 The modern audience is aware that it is engaged in a fictional world that is, perhaps disturbingly in this case, not that different from their everyday life. It is easy to imagine how, perhaps through television, cinema, or video games, a modern audience would deny the stark bleakness of the real world, instead choosing an escapist entertainment, even one that engages with similar types of anguish in a more light-hearted fashion.36 It could be fourteenth-century escapism, though the frippery seems rather trivial against the pressing and challenging question that Block’s own journey poses. This is especially interesting from the perspective of musical medievalism. medievalist element, further enhancing its medievalist aura. One might see hints of the Miller’s tale from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, where the old and dim-witted character, John, is fooled by a suave and intelligent scholar, Nicholas, with whom John’s wife, Alison, commits adultery. 34 On the medieval as a timeless and non-contiguous past, see Utz, “Coming to Terms,” 109. 35 See Gumbrecht, “Intertextuality and Autumn,” 301–30. The boundaries between these worlds, say a fictional court as a rendering of real court-life, may have been porous, with real events infiltrating the fictional narrative. Such a technique is seen in Jacapo Sannazaro’s Arcadia (written in the 1480s but published in 1504), which features a number of characters based upon important figures at the late fifteenth-century Neapolitan court. 36 One might read similarities here with the escapist undertones of Broadway musicals in the first half of the twentieth century.

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It is the closest that the score comes to providing music evocative of the period at hand, even accounting for significant changes in our understanding of historical performance practices. In this sense, the sound of live musical performance in fourteenth-century Sweden is carnivalesque escapism that connects directly to current affairs that are affecting the entire population, irrespective of social class. The mocking tones of this song offer a different perspective on the plague from the gloomy representations of Death, disfigured corpses, and the impassioned sermon that is to come, challenging the misconception that the medieval world was wholly preoccupied with death and oblivion.37 As the song builds to its climax, chanting voices can be heard in the distance, with each phrase punctuated by a deep and resonant drum.38 The voices of a crowd, apparently chanting a melody, are heard as a group of black-robed flagellants process into the village: this is an altogether different musical atmosphere for a different type of theatricality. Groups that practiced flagellation grew significantly during the plague in response to the desperation to atone for the sins of the world that had caused God’s pestilential punishment.39 Such dramatic acts of self-harm recall the images of flagellants depicted in the margins of the so-called Vow of the Peacock manuscript (Pierpont Morgan Library MS G.24 fol. 95r), where a figure has dropped his whip and reaches out to try to catch it. The extreme performance of confession, and self-punishment, links closely to the idea that the plague was a punishment from God that was indiscriminate in its power other than for spiritual purity. Indeed, even during the terrible events of the fourteenth century, Boccaccio understood the devastation of the plague as “God’s just wrath as a punishment to mortals for our wicked deeds.”40 Contrary to their intentions, flagellants spread the plague more See Michael W. George, “An Austere Age Without Laughter,” in Misconceptions About the Middle Ages, ed. Stephen J. Harries and Bryon L. Grigsby (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), 183–87. 38 Linda Schubert draws attention to the fact that the film is cut in such a way that film shots change in line with the phraseological structure of the chant. See Linda Schubert, “Plainchant in Motion Pictures: The ‘Dies irae’ in Film Scores,” Florilegium 15 (1998): 207–29, esp. 219–20. 39 Although it seems that there was a proliferation of such groups during the fourteenth century, flagellation in large groups had already been described in the thirteenth century in relation to the great revival of 1260 by Salimbene di Adam in his Cronica. I am grateful to the anonymous peer reviewer for this insight. On the development of the flagellant movement, and its geographical variation, see Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 127–47. Other films depicting the flagellants undoubtedly draw upon Bergman’s depiction in The Seventh Seal. 40 Giovanni Boccaccio, Decamorone [The Decameron], trans. and ed. Marc Musa and Peter E. Bondanella (New York: Norton, 1977), 3. 37

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rapidly as they moved from town to town. For political reasons, a papal bull was issued halting the spread of the flagellant movement, threatening to excommunicate those from the Church who had become involved. Flagellant leaders were characterized as heretics, leading simple folk astray. Somewhat ironically, such political intervention probably helped to halt the increased spread of the pestilence caused by this radical movement.41 Returning to the music itself, the musical contrast from the staged performance heard moments before could not be more extreme. The actors stand dumbstruck behind the preacher who shouts over muffled cries and mumbled prayers: the musical scene of irreverent mockery has turned much more sinister. Instead of a care-free medieval register that celebrates the bizarre, Bergman momentarily evokes the feeling of a death-obsessed gloomy world, conforming more closely to the Gothicized view of the medieval past that has its roots in nineteenth-century antiquarianism.42 This is one of the few times where Jof and Mia, representative of the Holy Family, outwardly express fear of the plague. The exclamations of Dies irae, though somewhat synchronized with the procession, do not appear to emanate from the crowd itself, with none of the flagellants being seen to move their mouths as though singing this chant. Instead, what is most striking in the aural landscape is the fact that this sacred music is featured outside and, importantly, is obscured by the extraordinary loudness of the sound effects: the cries and the cracks of whips can be heard clearly above the Latin text. The sense of diegetic perspective is therefore thrown by foregrounding these ostensibly non-musical sounds, though there is something of a rhythmic quality to the cracking of the whips. The camera placement within the crowd further intensifies the sensation of being surrounded by the flagellants, emphasizing the haggard and distressed look of the processants.43 Even though the chanting of the Dies irae melody (Fig. 2) does not, contrary to its immediate context, appear to emanate from the crowd, it is significant that this is the only recognizable Latin text in the film. In effect, it is the only time that music that could be construed as contemporaneous with the period at hand is used. That said, the rhythmicized setting of the chant, punctuated by a deep and resonant drum at the end of each phrase, sets this more out of time than as an indicator of a specific historical site. The use of quite deliberate crotchet and quaver rhythms is set in the same tradition as Orff’s Carmina burana, rather than the freer-rhythm approach that is more Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, 136–41. See van Elferen, Gothic Music, esp. 11–33. 43 The pacing of this scene, and the possibly musical origins of this type of setting, is explored in great detail in Schubert, “Plainchant in motion pictures,” 207–29. 41 42

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Fig. 2: Opening two phrases of the Dies irae sequence

common in modern recordings of chanted material. Thus, a historical melody is set in a rhythmic style that is typical of early twentieth-century music and evokes a sense of the past through its associations with religious spirituality: medievalism embodied musically yet again. The Dies irae is undoubtedly one of the most frequently appearing Latintexted melodies in cinema, alongside key incipits from the Mass (Kyrie eleison, Agnus dei, etc.). As Linda Schubert has demonstrated, whenever we hear Dies irae, “Death, danger or the supernatural are invariably part of the story.”44 Isabella van Elferen also draws attention to the widespread use of the sequence, noting that “the ‘Dies irae’ sequence is a standard trope in horror film soundtracks, where its gloomy Latin text sung in unison never fails to overlay visual narratives with eerie connotations.”45 Indeed, the broader use of chant in horror films is well documented in modern scholarship.46 John Haines provides a particularly succinct account of the diverse uses of chant in mainstream films, including those outside the horror genre, noting that, “In medieval film, the Solesmes sound became as predictable as the ‘Paramount face punch’ in action films.”47 Chant abounds in depictions of the past and of the supernatural, two themes that freely intermingle in a range of cinematic genres, but notably so in horror. In modern times, then, the chant has been used with such frequency and in such a diversity of contexts that it has achieved iconic status on its own terms. Its ties to specific historical periods or, perhaps, history itself have become less clear over time, certainly in cinema, instead being associated more clearly with the evocation of particular moods. For a 1950s art-house cinema audience, the presence of a Latin text, and one that has recognizable associations with death in a range of musico-dramatical contexts, would undoubtedly have Schubert, “Plainchant in Motion Pictures,” 207. Isabella van Elferen, “Sonic Gothic,” in The Gothic World, ed. Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 435. 46 Aspects of this are covered in James Deaville, “The Topos of ‘Evil Medieval’ in American Horror Film Music,” in Music, Meaning and Media, ed. Erkki Pekkilä, David Neumayer, and Richard Littlefield (Helsinki: Semiotic Society of Finland, University of Helsinki and International Semiotics Institute at Imatra, 2006), 26–37. 47 Haines, Music in Films, 114. Haines also briefly discusses the presence of Dies irae in The Seventh Seal. 44 45

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acted as a historicizing agent, if not necessarily as a medievalizing feature. This audience group would likely have engaged with a range of concert music and may have encountered the chant in this context, understanding its symbolic associations more fully than would a modern cinematic audience.48 That said, the chant would still have been dislocated from a specific chronological site, with its mood overpowering notions of history. In terms of medievalism, it is significant here that Christian auditory symbols, recognizable as historically distant from the present through the language of the medieval Church, are linked with the presence of the Black Death. The most pessimistic, fear-inducing musical perspective comes from a radical religious sect, accompanied in its supposed spiritual power by the declamatory statements evoking the Day of Wrath. The dirge-like setting evokes more of an air of superstitious ritual than religious and spiritual reverence. In essence, religious fervor exerts a strong influence over the crowd, and shifts the whole town from an atmosphere of frivolity to fear of the pestilence.49 The music therefore historicizes more than it Christianizes Bergman’s imaginary medievalist world, adopting a darker, more foreboding register. Smith’s Black Death A modern point of comparison reveals the power that Bergman’s iconic imagery exerts on representations of the past and, importantly, the ways in which approaches toward the musical past have changed over time, especially in the context of films on apocalypse by plague. Christopher Smith’s Black Death is far from a universally adored masterpiece, with one reviewer describing it as being “plagued with historical inaccuracies,”50 a comment that somewhat misses the point and was perhaps chosen more for its qualities as a pun than its critical insight. The film is unashamedly creative with its use of the past, using its historical location during the plague times in mid-fourteenth-century England more as a general setting than as a site to depict historical events grounded in fact. The film is not designed to provide documentary history, instead using the past as a fantastical playworld filled Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique is perhaps the most famous example of such a tradition, though quotations are to be found in Camille Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre and Gustav Holst’s The Planets. The melody continues to feature in concert- and film-music today, being featured in Thomas Adès’s Totentanz and Michael Giacchino’s recent score to the latest instalment in the Star Wars franchise, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. 49 This is markedly contrasted with the conversation that Block has with the girl condemned to be burnt as a witch, where there is an atmosphere of ritual anticipation rather than impending trepidation. 50 Alex von Tunzelmann, “Black Death should be burned at the stake,” The Guardian, 22 March 2012, , last accessed 27 July 2017. 48

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with b­ arbarity and filth.51 Signs familiar from The Seventh Seal, and medieval horror more generally, abound in this film: plague, mass death, ritual superstition, witch burning, and brutal torture all feature prominently. Indeed, another commentator’s review was titled, “Black Death is spooky, grim, impressive: Bergman eat your heart out.”52 Musically speaking, however, there are some important points of overlap in the evocation of the plague as both musical atmosphere and as narrative device that are as yet unexplored in scholarship. Following from the discussion of the deployment of the Dies irae in The Seventh Seal, it is significant that chanted material is brought to the fore in Black Death, though in a quite different context and style to more typical presentations of plainchant, or, more specifically, monastic chanting. The premise of the film is that the evil pestilence that has swept across fourteenthcentury England challenges the faith of the main character, a monk named Osmund, played by a youthful Eddie Redmayne, leading to the death of almost everyone he encounters. Osmund, initially under the impression he is going to explore rumors of a village untouched by the plague, joins a supposed mercy mission to ensure the salvation of a village suspected to be practicing peculiar superstitious rituals to ensure protection against the plague. This challenge to the power of the Christian faith, both as moral compass and social oppressor, is played out both on screen and through Christian Henson’s sparse musical score. Again, this film on the plague is characterized by the sparing use of a musical score, drawing attention to the dramatic nature of the moments at which it is deployed and blurring the boundaries between sound and music. From the outset in Black Death, it would seem that chant symbolizes the protective walls of the monastery and the purity of God, which has been polluted by this pestilence. Chant is the first thing that is heard in the film, accompanying the introductory credits, establishing its power to evoke an atmosphere that is both historical and timeless, while simultaneously suggesting an underlying tone of superstition: a narrative and historical otherness reinforcing the audio-visual imprint of the film before any sets or costumes are seen. Instead of including a melodic chant cast in the Solesmian tradition that characterized earlier Hollywood films, Henson deploys a low-pitched, monotone chant that has extensive reverb, mixed with a range of other ambient noises. One might be mistaken for thinking this more of an incantation than It holds true to what Umberto Eco termed the “shaggy” Middle Ages, characterized by barbarity. See Umberto Eco, “Dreaming in the Middle Ages,” in Travels in Hyperreality (San Diego, CA: Harvest, 1986), 61–72. 52 Tim Robey, “Black Death, film review,” The Telegraph, 10 June 2010, , last accessed 12 August 2017. 51

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a religious chant.53 The chanted words are impossible to discern, but it seems clear that they are intended to sound Latinate, itself a historicizing device, even if their construction is better described as faux-Latin. This technique distances the words from modern language, exploiting such alterity to establish a site to present an apocalyptic vision of the world.54 The similarities with the lowpitched vocal music in The Seventh Seal are significant and perhaps indicate something of the long-standing tradition of the use of low, male voices to evoke a sense of otherness – supernatural, historical, or otherwise.55 Henson’s decision to accompany the opening black screen in this way evokes a sense of a historic(ized), if not medieval, setting, situating the audience in a medievalized space. This is confirmed when “the Year of our Lord 1348” appears on screen in a Gothic-style script, with the script style itself serving as a visual signifier of the medieval as borne out through representations of early manuscripts in films.56 Underlying the introductory narration, provided by John Lynch, who plays Wolfstan in the film, is a low-pitched drone, centered on the pitch E. The chant and ambient drone, both centered on E, twinned with the misty gloom of the foreboding unease of the film, signify medievalness, a time of darkness and simplicity by all accounts in the horror genre, and provide evidence of layers of medievalism at work in the soundscape.57 The mostly unaccompanied nature of the chant is particularly arresting. The setting of monotone chant on the pitch E with a slight ascending microtonal inflection at the end of each iteration becomes a kind of harmonic center for the rest of the soundtrack. The chant is mostly in free rhythm, though there is a partial sense of regularity, if only emerging from the pacing of syllabic content. Throughout the soundtrack, other thematic material is placed in jarring superimposition (both in terms of melody and rhythm) with this monotone chanting, leading to increased levels of dissonance as the challenge posed to Osmund’s faith by the great pestilence intensifies. Indeed, the description of the plague as the “pestilence,” has itself become a key indicator of the Middle Ages, further contributing to the unease that the Developments in modern sound-enhancements and sound-design techniques permit the creation of a different type of soundworld from that heard in Nordgren’s soundtrack for The Seventh Seal. Nevertheless, the explicit use of chanted material with Latin words as a part of the ambient soundscape is significant. 54 Hints at words ending in “-ibus” and “-m” are suggestive of Latin, even if the real text is meaningless. 55 See note 18, above. 56 Examples of this are found in many films that audiences engage with as children. Take for example Disney’s medieval films, some of which open with a familiar scene of a manuscript covered in lavishly historiated initials being read by a narrator, as prime examples of the perpetuation of this signifier. 57 Finke and Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations, 36. 53

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monotone chanting creates. In many cases, a piece of plainchant introducing a film on the medieval period would have some kind of melody, perhaps even one that is developed and reworked across the course of the film; see, for example, the discussion of The Seventh Seal (above), the films of The Hunchback of Notre Dame canon that I examine elsewhere,58 and blockbusters such as Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves that deploy Mozarabic chant to some effect.59 As outlined above, countless examples of the Dies irae being set in horror films are to be found, often in the style of O fortuna from Carl Orff’s Carmina burana, and in some cases these motifs resonate throughout the film.60 In the case of Black Death, however, such relative musical comfort conforming to this familiar setting remains elusive, a point to which I shall return. Thus, chanted material has a dual function here, ultimately realized when the group of travelers, arguably on a miniature crusade, approach the village that has escaped the pestilence, supposedly due to the protection of a witch. The repetitious iteration of a single tone might be interpreted as an incantation, casting an evil spell upon medieval England for its war crimes against the French only a few years previously.61 Chanted music fuses with a cultural melting pot of relatively stock signs of the medieval: swords, violent torture equipment (laden with spikes), religious figures in the form of tonsured monks, and the power of a witch to corrupt a village of simple (and gullible) peasants. The creative powers of medievalism are at work: we are in the past, but it is a past created by reflexive historiophoty rather than documentary evidence, and is deeply indebted to Bergman. After the short title sequence that establishes the soundworld for the remainder of the film, we are first introduced to the monastery that is Osmund’s home. Following a brief shot showing a rat, a knowing nod to what modern audiences know to be the cause of the plague, we see Osmund for the first time. He is awoken by the ringing of a bell, itself one of Haines’s signs of the medieval past, marking the death of one of the members of his monastic community.62 The bell, bell ringer, and even the bell tower within the monastery are never shown on screen, but Osmund’s response to its sound would seem to indicate that it functions both as a sound effect and aural signifier of the monastery, especially in the context of the chanting the viewer has already heard. Adam Whittaker, “Musical Divisions of the Sacred and Secular in The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” in Recomposing the Past (forthcoming). 59 These themes are explored in Haines, Music in Films on the Middle Ages, 111–32. 60 Deaville, “Topos of ‘Evil Medieval,’” 26–37. 61 A conversation between Osmund and Wolfstan leaves this as a possible plot thread, returning to the theme of God punishing the world for a grievous sin. 62 On the use of bell in medieval film, see Haines, Music in Films, 26–44. Haines argues that the bell has an almost unique power to transport viewers back to a pre-technological age where bells signified both civic and religious structure across public spaces. 58

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As men wearing the familiar beaked plague masks carry a dead body – yet another visual signifier of the plague – the chant from the opening credits is heard again, though accompanied by gently pulsing rhythmic music and a low drone.63 Interestingly, the rhythmic pulse does not seem to dictate the placement of the chant entries, resisting the temptation to fall into a repetitious pattern or a heavily rhythmicized chant setting, as evidenced in the Dies irae from The Seventh Seal. At this point, it is not clear whether the plainchant represents the supposed sanctuary of the monastery or the plague itself, an ambiguity that Henson exploits throughout the film. The contradiction of a recognizable sign of Christian spiritual heritage being allied with tragic events is unsettling in the extreme. Evidence to support the argument that plainchant has functions beyond the background soundtrack is seen when one of the side effects of the plague is revealed to the audience. To this point in the film, monophonic chant has been heard only in a low register, with very little movement away from this. Intriguingly, there is one subtle textural lift in this monotone chant that accompanies the lifting of the arm of one of the victims of the pestilence. Though barely noticeable, this marks a slight change in texture at the point where the effects of the plague are shown, quite graphically, on screen. Could this represent something of the plague being exposed? Does the chanted music appear to respond to, or at least work alongside, visual imagery of the plague? If so, is it suggesting that its unearthly otherness is indicative of something more complex than simply signing the medieval Church? Indeed, this chanted material is used in a similar fashion throughout the film, raising its status from a mere historicizing agent used to situate the listener within the past, to a narrative device representing a specific aspect of the story.64 Nevertheless, chanted music clearly has an important role to play in the microcosmic world of this film and Henson’s soundtrack. Chanted material is absent from the soundtrack for around twenty minutes after the opening scene, with the otherwise brooding ambient soundscape rising to prominence. When chant does return, it accompanies a scene where the group of main characters is disturbed by flagellants walking down a river carrying a large wooden cross. The flagellants, some of whom are wearing black hoods, whip themselves and follow a bare-chested bearded man holding what appears to be the skull of a sheep high above his head. Additional sound Although there is evidence of such masks being worn during plague outbreaks in the sixteenth century, it is unclear as to whether these types of masks were used in the ­fourteenth-century epidemic. In any case, these masks are a commonly understood sign for the plague and have become a staple of plague-related apocalyptic medievalism. 64 Although it almost certainly has a narrative function, it seems unlikely that the usage of such material is designed to make a broader political and religious point, as the case of The Masque of the Red Death (1964, dir. Corman), discussed at length by Haines, where the text offers an additional layer of complexity. See Haines, Music in Films, 127–32. 63

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effects of natural-horn calls, like war signals, imitate unearthly, shifting vocal textures, almost as though a pagan rite were being conjured by ritual chant. Visually, this scene fuses, on the one hand, imagery associated with the flagellants and, on the other, the symbolism of a pagan rite, and offers the audience yet another stock signifier of plague-related medievalism, tinted with superstition. The similarities with the abovementioned procession of the flagellants from The Seventh Seal are immediately obvious, though a closer reading reveals several significant differences, especially in terms of musical medievalism. First, the soundtrack incorporates modern sound-design and guttural lowpitched chanting, creating a more aggressive vocal sound than the harrowing cries of Nordgren’s 1950s soundtrack steeped in early twentieth-century orchestral stylings akin to those of the Orff tradition. Secondly, the flagellants process up a river, certainly a sign of the madness that the plague has induced, given that such a space would not normally have been viewed as a pedestrian passageway.65 The diegetic perspective of the sound is unclear here, but it seems that this is much closer to a non-diegetic ambient soundtrack than clearly vocalized declamatory statements of a recognizable chant.66 As before, the words are indistinct, though there is a greater regularity to the chanting and a stronger sense of internal rhythm, punctuated by the crack of whips. These subtle differences to the chant heard at the beginning of the film are suggestive of something much closer to an incantation or ritual than more conventional plainchant. Perhaps this is an example of the world descending into anomie, a sociological concept that Finke and Shichtman apply in their reading of Bergman’s classic where the typical social and ethical standards of a society break down. However, Henson retains the use of repeated pitches for this musical passage, providing striking aural similarities to the opening of the film. This, twinned with the quite disturbing visual imagery of the extreme self-chastisement of the flagellants, may serve to make the viewer uneasy, transporting them into something darker, primitive, and perhaps even pagan: society has descended into anomie. Indeed, the fear of non-Christian beliefs is a theme that runs throughout the film and, ultimately, is revealed as the purpose for the journey to the village under the spell of a supposed witch. Rumors of necromancy and witchcraft circulate, This ties in with the animal imagery used to represent the onset of the madness of the plague in the musical performance by the actors in The Seventh Seal. It also aligns neatly with the imagery of plague treatises from across the following centuries. See Chiu, Plague and Music. Links between the plague and the disruption of natural orders, such as animals and plants, might also be made here. 66 It is important to note that neither Bergman’s Seventh Seal nor Christopher Smith’s Black Death shows any of the flagellants moving their mouths to vocalize their chanted material. While the diegetic perspective is ambiguous in both cases, Smith’s usage is more akin to the soundworld of the non-diegetic scoring of the rest of the film. 65

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both received with a mixture of fear and thirst for blood. Therefore, the use of chanted material in Black Death seems to have a foot in two genres of film: historical drama and gothic horror, though skewed more toward the latter than the former. It is with these two genres in mind that some of the musical directions can be understood. Henson’s aim is apparently not simply, or even principally, to evoke the medieval period, but to capture the dark brooding uncertainty of the Black Death, allying the audio-visual imprint with an aural atmosphere that is thick with the pestilence, and drawing upon a tradition of musical medievalism associated with films on the plague. The medieval setting offers a site for a disturbing sense of anomie to be created, establishing both a chronological and sociological gap between the temporality of the narrative and the present day. Although the function of chant within Henson’s soundtrack seems to be concerned primarily with creating unease and contributing to the historical distance of the film, it may also signify a broader narrative point, as the final example from this film demonstrates. After Osmund sees (and hears) the vast majority of his traveling companions murdered brutally by the villagers in the most painful ways imaginable, he is brought back to the sanctuary of the monastery by Wolfstan. At this point, chanted material reminiscent of the opening returns, centered on a single pitch and placed within the context of an ambient drone on E. However, in this instance, the text of the chant is more audible, and careful examination reveals that this is a monotone setting of a section of the Confiteor. The text of the Confiteor addresses the issues of sin and can be used as a form of mutual confession. It is therefore an appropriate text to mark Osmund’s return to the monastery, ending the journey where he has been taken under the spell of supposed witchcraft and has seen his traveling companions killed in horrifically gory and painful ways as a result.67 Given that the plague was viewed as a punishment from God for grave sins, it might be inferred that the choice of text has a greater poignancy extending beyond the use of Latin as a historicizing agent.68 Although such Latinate subtlety might be lost on the vast majority of audience members, it is perhaps symbolic of a type of musical medievalism at work, that of ancient chanted material being deployed to both historicize and comment on the drama unfolding on screen. The text reads thus: Confiteor Deo omnipotenti, istis Sanctis et omnibus Sanctis et tibi frater,

I confess to almighty God, to the saints, and to all the Saints, and to thee, brother,

The figure of Osmund lies curled up on the back of a cart, as though a scared child, clearly exhibiting signs of the psychological damage that this journey has caused. 68 To my mind, it seems unlikely that the appositeness of this text is coincidental. 67

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quia peccavi in cogitatione, in locutione, in opere, in pollutione mentis et corporis. Ideo precor te, ora pro me.

that I have sinned in thought, in speech, in work, in the purity of mind and of the body. Therefore, I beseech you, pray for me.

Therefore, the chanted text might be viewed here as a confession from Osmund that he has sinned, or simply as an aural marker that he has returned to the relative sanctuary of his monastery, away from the horrors he has witnessed. The use of the Confiteor text might also account for the presentation of this chant on a single pitch. In a liturgical context, this text was normally spoken or recited, rather than sung melodically in the style that one might expect for more traditional historical chant. Thus, Henson’s decision is seemingly both musically and historically appropriate, even though, in a sense, the spiritual (and liturgical) meaning of the Latin words is all but lost on most viewers. Their presence nevertheless contributes to the evocation of the historical past and, perhaps more importantly, a distant spirituality that is central to western European history, encoded at the deepest societal levels. While this brings the narrative to something of a circular finish, the use of this chanted material, which might be read back into the opening musical soundscape, provides an additional layer of commentary to final shots where we see the psychological damage that this journey has caused to Osmund. Drawing upon another sign of the medieval, Osmund the monk becomes Osmund the religious-crazed witch hunter, clad in a black tunic and chainmail and wielding religious authority as a weapon of destruction.69 The hero of the film, or at least its most empathetic and spiritually pure character, has become a barbaric butcher, indiscriminate in his pursuit, torture, and execution of presumed witches. Perhaps the Confiteor is most poignant here, as Osmund morphs from pious servant to zealous executioner in the name of religion. Ultimately, he conforms to the medievalist presentation of this period as a time of primitive barbarism, with such a pejorative view highlighting the deep-rooted medievalist fascination with a gruesome Middle Ages, however fictional.70 Conclusion To summarize, music clearly plays an important part in creating the dark and brooding atmosphere of the plague-filled world that is present throughout As is widely documented, witch burning, commonly associated with the Middle Ages, actually was a practice that took place in later centuries. See Anita Obermeier, “Witches and the Myth of the Medieval Burning Times,” in Misconceptions About the Middle Ages, 218–29. 70 The vast majority of the torture instruments associated with the medieval past are creations of the nineteenth century, designed to feed the burgeoning interest in this “primitive” time. 69

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both films, and contains several important features that demonstrate the layering of medievalisms upon the approaches to scoring the past. In The Seventh Seal, the musical accompaniment to Death’s movements, and the live musical performance that precedes the harrowing depiction of the flagellants creates a musical atmosphere that perfectly matches the terror and superstition that could have surrounded the spread of the plague. In Black Death, the use of non-diegetic chanted material as a key aural signifier of challenges to the faith of a main character serves to unsettle the audience and establish significant historical distance between the film and the present. We might therefore ask what role does early music play in the dramas discussed here? How is music used to evoke the past? What role does medievalism play in scoring the musical past? These questions are, admittedly, tricky to answer directly. However, if the way in which the past is represented musically in The Seventh Seal is considered, musical performance plays an important part in establishing distinct identities for the escapist songs of secular mass entertainment, and the harrowing and gloomy spectacle of sacred figures. The demarcation of a specific performance space allows for the acting troupe to hold up a mirror to society, and to mock the figure of death and the supposed superstitions that are commonly associated, almost certainly erroneously, with the imagined medieval peasantry; we mostly resist the rather gloomy misconception that the medieval world was always preoccupied with death. Thus, early music plays an important role in Bergman’s masterpiece and establishes a soundtrack of contrasts for the plague, emphasizing both ritualistic desperation and light-hearted mocking escapism. Indeed, the text of the song performed by the actors is heavily imbued with medievalist references to plague treatises and iconographical evidence, leading to a highly medievalized text, even if the musical performance itself is not strictly period. The lenses of medievalism are multifarious and interlinked here, and they work to create a historicized vision of the 1950s future in the past: in Gumbrechtian terms, the “synchronism of the asynchronous.”71 Tautologies aside, music is an important part of the medievalism inherent in Bergman’s narrative, and it shifts from atmospheric soundscape to period evocation with a deft change of medievalist lens. In Henson’s soundtrack to Black Death, modern sound-design is fused with traditional signifiers of the medieval, with the sense of otherness evoked by this historicized sonic hybrid organism being exploited for dramatic effect. Although tinted with a mixture of historicizing qualities, it is the medievalized otherness of Henson’s historical soundworld that is most striking. Chant and synthesizers are drawn together into a soundtrack that defies simple genre classification and melds contemporary trends in chant performance and Gumbrecht, “Intertextuality and Autumn,” 328.

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sound-design: perhaps something approaching a hyperreal sonic Middle Ages. The ambience and timelessness of these unfamiliar sounds are particularly apposite for a film concerned primarily with establishing a site for historical horror, rather than with understanding the historical human condition itself. Thus, musical medievalisms contribute significantly to the construction of a historicized world of the Black Death, perhaps the oldest “outbreak” narrative that continues to hold currency today. The fear of epidemic and apocalypse is a universal signifier of the fragility of mankind and, whether such a mass extinction is administered by God or by a scientific-military complex as in video games such as the Resident Evil / Biohazard series, the underlying aspects of human nature are revealed when society is stripped back to its bare bones.72 By examining the musical scores for these films in terms of specific strains of musical medievalism, the ways in which musical perceptions of a dark period of human history – and its representational possibilities – have changed might be better understood. In these two cases, which were produced at different times, represent different genres, and cater to different audiences, it seems the gaze of medievalism is everywhere in our musical experience of history, especially in anomic times in which the historically distant then catapults us to the apocalyptic now.

Mejia and Komaki, “Historical Conception.”

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The Past is a Different Planet: Sounding Medievalism in Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God Alexander Kolassa

Fig. 1: Opening scene from Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God (2013)

Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God begins as a medieval tableau vivant (Fig. 1).1 The camera lingers, tilting upwards on a fixed point to reveal a watery ditch outside a castle-like structure. It is snowing. Surrounding the ditch is all the detritus of a peasants’ slum: half-built wooden structures, makeshift huts, and a campfire. Figures in the distance move around slowly, going about their business, one walking with cattle. The visual effect, as Hard to Be a God, directed by Aleksei German (2013: Arrow Films, 2015), DVD.

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in the rest of a film, is Bruegelesque. We register the ambient noise first, though: the sound of creaking and of a roaring fire draw our attention to swinging wooden frames and a campfire. A splash – source unknown – sounds nearby, and a voice wails in the distance. It sounds like a discordant song, and its repetition over the next six minutes becomes a sort of refrain. Then we hear an expositional voice-over, but it mumbles, is low, and sounds mournful or apathetic. There is no non-diegetic musical score in the entirety of the film; yet, from the start, it is apparent that this is a film that needs to be heard. Hard to Be a God is based on the 1964 novel of the same name by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. It is set on an unnamed planet in which a few disguised human scientists – observers fitted with cameras – reside. The planet is much like Earth, only 800 years in the past. The scientists’ objective is broadly anthropological: while they are not meant to intervene in the development of this planet’s resident societies, they spend their time analyzing its historical “progress” and applying to its development an Earth-mandated theoretical orthodoxy (something akin to Marxian developmental theories). One of these scientists, Anton (disguised as a nobleman named Don Rumata), resides in the kingdom of Arkanar and is secretly rescuing writers, artists, and intellectuals who are being executed by a regressive regime dominated by rival nobleman, Don Reba.2 Arkanar, Anton comes to observe, has become stuck in time because of this suppression of culture, and he struggles to reconcile his own powers – godlike to the locals – with his mission. These details are easy to miss if you watch only German’s (pronounced “Guerman” or “Gherman”) film adaptation. Refreshingly free of traditional exposition, this Hard to Be a God elevates the mantra “show, not tell” to its absurd limit. Across its 170 minutes, the viewer is made, simply, to explore Arkanar with Rumata, experiencing it first-hand. In the words of German’s wife Svetlana Karmalita: “the main plotline often recedes into the background permitting the audience [to] just feel themselves part of the panhuman history.”3 Indeed, its staggering and oftentimes grotesque array of extras often interact directly with the viewers’ lens, reinforcing this idea: the technique is simultaneously alienating and immersing. The visuals emphasize There are obvious political resonances here, especially for the Soviet authors who enjoyed wide readership and cult status in Soviet Russia. The Strugatskys compare Reba to historical figures like Cardinal Richelieu, George Monck, and Tokugawa Ieyasu. This reading of the novel and the film will not be my main focus in this essay, however. See Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky, Hard to Be a God, trans. Olena Bormashenko (London: Gollancz, 2014). 3 Interview in the Capricci lifetime-achievement press-kit, which can be found here: , last accessed 17 August 2017. 2

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all that is stomach churning, and the sound design, added entirely in a post-production period lasting over six years, is disquietingly complex in its attention to detail. In a cinematic idiom apparently valuing the visceral over the cerebral – unreason over reason, body over brain – plot is, here, largely a distraction. This essay will focus on the use of sound in German’s Hard to Be a God, exploring how it draws on a visceral and immersive soundscape to make an otherworldly neomedievalism present for the viewer (and brutally so). Liberated from spurious notions of historical authenticity by its sciencefiction framing, the effect creates a medieval historical world more real than real (we might call it hyperreal), and to this extent I will draw tentatively upon an inversion of Umberto Eco’s notion of hyperreality.4 Hard to Be a God’s sonic medievalism, furthermore, sheds light on a series of compelling elisions and intersections. Both old and new, its immersive cinematic milieu (and aversion to traditional scoring practices) reflects global trends and new cinematic technologies, as well as an indebtedness to sensuous canons of international art cinema. Soviet filming traditions (and their attendant early theories of “montage”) will be explored for their formative influence on the film, as well as German’s own troubled background as a filmmaker in this environment, finding his voice in the liminal late Soviet era of the 1980s. Crossing the political and aesthetic divides of East and West, then, Hard to Be a God is a testament to alternative canons of medievalism and neomedievalism (including interrelated fantasy and science-fiction genres) in the near Otherness of the former communist East. (Neo)Medievalism, Science Fiction, and Fantasy, East and West Medievalism and neomedievalism are burgeoning interdisciplinary fields of research that explore the medieval period’s long shadow into modernity and postmodernity, as well as the general usage of medieval themes to “comment on the artist’s contemporary socio-political milieu.”5 The new, and oftentimes multimedia, Middle Ages that we regularly usher into existence in (and across) all manner of artworks constitutes, according to Richard Utz, a “semantic site for the fusion of creative and scholarly engagement with the past”:6 it has come to stand for a diverse practice at the crossroads of scholarly endeavor and mass entertainment, highbrow and lowbrow, old media and This is doubly relevant in that Eco’s “Travels in Hyperreality” is paired with his influential introduction of the word and concept of “neomedievalism,” Umberto Eco, Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (1986; rpt. London: Vintage, 1998), 1–86. 5 Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl, Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 1. 6 Richard Utz, “Coming to Terms with Medievalism: Towards a Conceptual History,” European Journal of English Studies 15.2 (2011): 101–13 (109). 4

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the new. Nonetheless, the “medieval” on which the -ism suffix is added here is almost universally taken to be a (western) European one. This is hardly surprising, or even particularly unfair. The concept of the medieval is bound intimately to European identities and historiographies, and has been subject to constant critical review. It is a porous place in time and space, which had neither a specified start, nor even an end. It is persistent, and we experience it some way or another, to take Umberto Eco’s memorable formulation, through “near-constant revivals,”7 be that in European nineteenth-century nationalistic narratives, or in postmodernity’s mass popular, and temporally challenged, bricolage. Broadly speaking, however, it functions as a shorthand signaling the before of a humanist Renaissance rebirth: a period equally contentious among historians and figured to be a kind of preamble to Enlightenment-era, progress-orientated modernity. Indeed, the medieval is premodernity, a timeless and, to borrow from Richard Utz, non-contiguous past, that is distant enough from now to be Other but nearer than a classical antiquity.8 By definition “European,” medievalism is the – European – nation state’s founding mythology.9 The ostensibly European-looking medievalist and oftentimes magic “knights and dragons” genre of fantasy fiction familiar in the West only really took off in Russia (known there as “fentezi”) in the post-Soviet 1990s.10 The fantasy medievalism popular throughout much Western film and literature in the twentieth century is harder to discern in the context of the U.S.S.R.11 By contrast, science fiction and fantasy had been paired in Soviet literature since its earliest days and are closely related. As Vitalii Kaplan notes, within an ideological framework holding such grand claims to “objective scientific knowledge,” there really “could be no ‘unscientific’ fantasy.”12 Very popular, Eco, Faith in Fakes, 84. Utz, “Coming to Terms,” 109. 9 I merely extend Chris Jones’s formulation that, for Britain, “Medievalism is, by another name, the process by which all forms of cultural expression in the British Isles build for themselves myths of origin.” See Chris Jones, “Medievalism in British Poetry,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, ed. Louise D’Arcens (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2016), 14–28 (14). 10 Vitalii Kaplan, “A Look Behind the Wall: A Topography of Contemporary Russian Science Fiction,” Russian Studies in Literature 38.3 (2002): 62–84 (66). 11 As Denise J. Youngblood observes, the medieval period was a difficult one for a Russian Marxism that “did not pass through a feudal phase” to internalize. Denise J. Youngblood, “Andrei Rublev: The Medieval Epic as Post-Utopian History,” in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1996), 127–43 (140). 12 The Russian for “science fiction” literally translates to “science fantasy,” for example. See Kaplan, “A Look Behind the Wall,” 65. For a discussion of the interactions between science, literature, and state censors in the Soviet Union, before and after Stalin, see Rosalind J. Marsh, Soviet Fiction since Stalin: Science, Politics and Literature (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1986). 7 8

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Soviet “science fantasy,” as they would call it, had enjoyed varying levels of state support as an “expression of a public dream through literary means.”13 The international origins of science and speculative fiction can, perhaps, be traced to the early Gothic and Romantic novel, and Brian W. Aldiss has argued, for example, that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was the first sciencefiction novel.14 An early medievalist trend, the European Gothic genre is widely interpreted as a reaction to modernity, to the political upheavals heralded by the French Revolution, and to the Industrial Revolution.15 In common to both Gothic medievalism and science-fiction literary genres is an, albeit contrasting, reaction to change, and Henriette Cederlöf has drawn meaningful parallels between Europe of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the Soviet 1960s and 1970s.16 She also argues that a gothic strain runs through the novels of the Strugatsky brothers, authors of Hard to Be a God’s source novel. The popular brand of Soviet science fiction associated with the Strugatsky brothers originates in the late 1950s and early 1960s when, following Nikita Khrushchev’s post-Stalin thaw, but preceding the long political decline that followed, a wave of excitement set about optimistically trying to construct socialism “with a human face.”17 Indeed, the U.S.S.R.’s post-Stalin era was characterized by rapid technological advancement in which the authorities were concerned with innovation (the era saw the launch of the first satellite and manned spaceship), and this inspired authors and interested audiences.18 Born of this was a tradition that, coming out of the conservative socialistrealism era, exploited the thaw in censorship by using the science-fiction canvas to voice an optimistic and critical form of dissent. Socialist realism was characterized by the propagandistic celebration of communist values; all the same, authors like the Strugatskys and Ivan Yefremov celebrated the spirit of reform and, according to Elana Gomel, the “Soviet New Man” in his finest, though short-lived, hour.19 Kaplan, “A Look Behind the Wall,” 69. Brian W. Aldiss, Trillion Year Spree (London: Victor Gollancz, 1986), 18, quoted in Henriette Cederlöf, Alien Places in Late Soviet Science Fiction: The “Unexpected Encounters” of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky as Novels and Films (Stockholm: Stockholm University, 2014), 12. 15 Imperial Russia had comparable gothic literary traditions to Europe, and authors like Nikolai Gogol (as in his 1835 novella Viy) and Alexander Pushkin (Ruslan and Ludmila, 1820) drew on folkloric elements. 16 Cederlöf, Alien Places, 12. 17 This “New Man” is, says Gomel, an optimistic and progress-orientated communist subjectivity that is neither the liberal western humanist fantasy subject, nor the fascistic übermensch one. Elana Gomel, “Gods Like Men: Soviet Science Fiction and the Utopian Self,” Science Fiction Studies 31.3 (2004): 258–377 (360). 18 Marsh, Soviet Fiction Since Stalin, 8. 19 Gomel, “Gods Like Men,” 362. 13 14

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This optimism gave way in the late 1960s (in which an erratic but reformist Khrushchev was replaced by Leonid Breznev in 1964) to the years popularly referred to as “the era of stagnation.” In this time the Strugatskys’ work, suspended, according to Cederlöf, between “genres as well as between the past and the present,” came to reaffirm science fiction’s Gothic roots.20 Soviet science fiction began to look backwards in history instead of only forwards, to unreason instead of reason, and away from utopia toward heterotopia: an illusory “other place” of escapism, or an “elsewhere,” rooted in anxieties about the future.21 Hard to Be a God is exemplary in their oeuvre for doing just this, hinting at a (quasi-European) Middle Ages on a different planet suffering a parallel era of stagnation. Perhaps because of its violent birth and radical break with history – in the form of the Imperial Russian Empire – science fiction was to the Soviet Union what medievalism is now to the global West: an imagined space on which to project identity, to articulate and disentangle contemporaneous problems, and, in a way, its founding mythology. To reflect on itself, in short. The Soviet science-fiction subject marches, according to Gomel, with time and with progress,22 albeit latterly suspended in the liminal space between utopia and heterotopia. In the same way, medievalism, to borrow from John Lance Griffith, permits modernity in a post-historical age to “dream of itself,” reminding us that, though former promises of progress seem in flux now, there is much left to be “reshaped and reused in new ways.”23 To this extent, German’s 2013 film version of Hard to Be a God contains in itself a sort of synthesis of the above, being simultaneously a relic of its Soviet-era source and a work of gritty medievalism entirely relevant to our times. German, too, is a director poised between worlds: his cinematic style (both broadly speaking and, as we see below, in his treatment of medieval subject matter) has strong Soviet origins, and yet he struggled to find acclaim and acceptance there. Not least, that is, until the liberal reforms of the 1980s and after communism’s dissolution in Russia. Indeed, his most appreciative audience is the intelligentsia of a globally traded art cinema today; his oeuvre (as we will later see) of ostensibly Stalin-era historical drama is fittingly transformed into neomedieval science fiction in Hard to Be a God.

Cederlöf, Alien Places, 133. Cederlöf, Alien Places, 134. 22 Gomel, “Gods Like Men,” 362. 23 John Lance Griffith, “Medievalism at the End of History: Pessimism and Renewal in Just Visiting,” in Studies in Medievalism XXV: Medievalism and Modernity, ed. Karl Fugelso with Joshua Davies and Sarah Salih (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016), 1–10 (8). 20 21

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Cinematic Medievalisms in the Communist East Hard to Be a God is, I would argue, the latest film in a small lineage of abstract medievalist, and, we will see, “auteur” epics from the other side of the Cold War’s Iron Curtain.24 From Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, as well as Czech director František Vláčil’s The Valley of the Bees and Marketa Lazarová, these films offer a fascinating counterpoint to their more colorful and chivalric cousins in Western Europe and North America.25 While mdievalist films of this sort are rare in the communist cinematic canon, they do endure, perhaps more readily than their utopian science-fiction counterparts, as classics of film. Speaking very generally, these films convey their medievalism in comparable ways. In the first instance, they evoke scarcity: mirroring a comparable popular western strand,26 the Middle Ages of Eastern Europe and Russia is a dirty, difficult, and violent place. This is reinforced by austere landscapes, limited dialogue, and, in the case of the abovementioned films, stark blackand-white cinematography. We might refer to these films as adopting a realist or rugged aesthetic that emphasizes the contemporaneity of the subject matter and minimizes historical difference. They are all also filmed, to varying but significant degrees, in expansive outside locations. The effect is one of geographical immersion. A type of sensory immersion, then, is what sets these medievalist Soviet films apart from the predominant logocentrism of most other communistmandated cinema. Indeed, they all rely less on traditional exposition than was then the norm, and utilize fragmentary narrative techniques to circumvent traditional cinematic didacticism. Denise J. Youngblood has posited that Andrei Rublev, Tarkovsky’s stylized retelling of the life of a fifteenth-century Russian icon painter, for this reason, is a sort of proto-postmodern work in which there is “no story, no forward momentum.”27 Peter Hames describes Marketa Lazarová, a story set vaguely in the thirteenth century during the Czech land’s conversion from paganism to Christianity and concerning a Each also could be said to have had difficult relationships with state censors and authorities; this is touched on in this essay, but calls for further exploration at a later date. 25 For Vláčil’s two films, it is worth observing that Czech and Central European work is now rightly understood to problematize Cold War binaries of East and West. These two films were made a year before the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, which was a response to Alexander Dubček’s Prague Spring liberalizing reforms. A repressively conservative era followed and, in terms of the arguments of this essay, the Czech experience retains considerable relevance for this discussion. 26 Comparable perhaps to Huizinga’s model of The Waning of the Middle Ages, which was hugely influential in Western Medieval historiography. Still, what Eco identified as this “barbaric” or “shaggy” Middle Ages, and its perhaps most popular manifestation in pop culture today, is present in these films. 27 Youngblood, “Andrei Rublev,” 139. 24

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conflict between rival tribes, as engaging in “denial of narrative,” which it does by forging unusual relationships between its cinematography, music, and editing.28 In the example of Marketa Lazarová, action is often relegated to the off-screen world, and sound (such as the clashing of swords) – which, more than is the case in western cinema, is added largely in post-production – becomes crucial for an audience to identify the source of action: which is to say, through the senses. Vláčil, here, updates Eisenstein’s earlier doctrine of “montage,” which is abundantly present in Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible. In short, montage is a uniquely Soviet elevation of creative editing to a filmic grammar or language, a technique of abstraction, and a central tenet of its early cinematic experiments. The juxtaposition and contradiction of a film’s constitutive elements, early Russian theorists of film believed, can activate the audience’s critical and interpretive faculties: again, immersion through an appeal to the senses. This approach is central to the filmic imagination of Russia and the European former-communist East. A heightened attention to sonic detail, then, also characterizes these films. Those mentioned above do, unlike Hard to Be a God, feature nondiegetic music, but their soundtracks are strikingly avant-garde. Indeed, Eisenstein’s films featured new scores by Sergei Prokofiev, and Tarkovsky and Vláčil both utilized strange music that combined choral with electronic sounds and percussion (the musical avant-garde, we will later see, exercised greater freedom in film contexts than in concert ones in the U.S.S.R.). Where sound is added in postproduction – especially necessary for on-set filming in outside locations – sound tends to lack depth but acquires immediacy and clarity, which makes it feel close and physical. The effect here is comparable to how the horror genre utilizes sound today, and the influence of those films discussed above is perhaps felt globally on such cinematic fringes as the horror genre. Indeed, horror soundtracks, too, have intentionally heightened the presence of diegetic and ambient noise to envelop and gain “direct access” to the listener in a type of “sonic architecture,” which has a primal and pre-rational effect on them.29 The influence of the techniques of musical modernism (dissonance, timbral experimentation, etc.) have been felt strongly here, and the blurring of music and sound is another related facet (the work of Stanley Kubrick and his use of Penderecki in The Shining is considered a watershed).30 Hard to Be a God exhibits some Peter Hames, “Marketa Lazarová,” in The Cinema of Central Europe, ed. Peter Hames (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), 151–62 (160). 29 K. J. Donnelly, The Spectre of Sound: Music in Film and Television (London: BFI, 2005), 109. 30 Neil Lerner, “Preface: Listening to Fear/Listening with Fear,” in Music in Horror Film: Listening to Fear, ed. Neil Lerner (New York: Routledge, 2010), viii–xi (ix). 28

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of all of the above: though it lacks a traditional musical score, it is full of music, albeit always dissonant. And its sonic design, or soundscape, is beyond realistic, even frantic, in its detail. These films offer an interesting preamble to a type of medievalism that Hard to Be a God draws upon in invoking its neohistorical landscape. Their directors are also important and recognized cinematic auteurs whose distinctive voices found expression in a type of Eastern cinematic medievalism. German, too, is a director whose idiosyncratic style warrants the title of “auteur,” and his journey to the Middle Ages moves forward in time through Soviet history. Aleksei German: Soviet Auteur Though Russian filmmakers were well regarded by the Soviet intelligentsia and have often been praised since the 1990s in global cinema-criticism, a relative paucity of western sources and scholarship about those filmmakers is compounded in the case of German by a critical shelving from the Soviet authorities back at home.31 Among comparable Russian auteurs, such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Aleksandr Sokurov, or Kira Muratova, for instance, German remains relatively underexamined, and Hard to Be a God is his only film widely available for purchase in the West. His reputation rests on just six films (the first, The Seventh Companion [1967], was co-directed with Grigori Aronov). All but his last (Hard to Be a God) were historical insofar as they were set in the Stalin era, and a number of these were based on the writings of his father, a committed author in the socialist-realism tradition.32 Revisionist in nature (by state standards), German’s historical style was realist to the point of being documentary, and his career was “hobbled by [a] Soviet censorship that rejected his independence.”33 His last three films reflect an almost absurd extension of that style. My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1984), though initially subdued, found success in Gorbachev’s liberalizing era of glasnost and perestroika, and reveled in a language in which background took precedence over the foreground. It and the other two films, Khrustalyov, My Car! (1998) and Hard to Be a God, utilize long shots without edits, a lens that wanders apparently of its own accord, and a complex soundscape of incidental noises and snatches of random dialogue with little to no nondiegetic music. Hard to Be a God, we will see, takes this to an extreme. Julian Graffy, “The British Reception of Russian Film 1960–1990: The Role of Sight and Sound,” in A People Passing Rude: British Responses to Russian Culture, ed. Anthony Cross (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2012), 301–14 (308). 32 Yuri German (1910–67) was a popular author, screenwriter, and playwright (as well as a wartime journalist). 33 Anthony Anemone, “Aleksei Gherman: The Last Soviet Auteur,” in A Companion to Russian Cinema, ed. Birgit Beumers (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 543–64 (543). 31

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It was intended that Hard to Be a God would be German’s first feature, and he worked with Boris Strugatsky on a screenplay in the late 1960s, but it was shelved amid political turmoil.34 Suitably, German revisited its neomedieval science-fiction subject matter in a, perhaps, alien post-communist era of international film financers and festivals for Russia’s auteurs, developing its new adaptation with his wife, Svetlana Karmalita, throughout the 1990s. Completed over the span of thirteen years starting in 2000 (half of which was in filming, half, as stated earlier, in post-production, mostly developing its soundtrack), Hard to Be a God generated considerable anticipation among critics: all the same, its obtuse, idiosyncratic style would eventually inspire and disturb in equal measure. Fittingly, the final work of his small oeuvre (he died a year before its completion, leaving it to his wife and director son Aleksei German Jr.), deployed a new Russian (neo)medievalism to create a space of stylistic “auteur” experimentation that is poised between old worlds and new, East and West. The extent to which the European “auteur” theory – the idea, associated with the French “new wave” of the 1950s and 1960s, that the director is the authorial voice in a film – had influence in the U.S.S.R. has been little understood or appreciated. And, though theories of authorship in film have fallen out of fashion in recent years in favor of a recognition of filmmaking’s collaborative nature, its influence endures through the recognition of a director’s idiosyncratic style. For the purposes of this essay, the notion of German being an “auteur” is a means of identifying and appreciating a type of “sonic style” with regard to music and sound-effect design.35 Indeed, nascent notions of cinematic authorship and directorial influence from the West were felt strongly during the U.S.S.R.’s rapprochement with the West and persisted into the U.S.S.R.’s era of stagnation, bringing about increases in tension between the state and the director, the latter vying for recognition as a film’s rightful author.36 The authorities, in return, viewed any “obvious personal style” as gratuitous and detrimental formalism.37 Pessimism, it is said, characterized the approach of a generation of Russian auteur directors in these years, then, and, according to Eugénie Zvonkine, the director’s auteur-inspired personal perspective sought to deform “the enthusiastic and happy Soviet reality by showing it in a grim and depressing way.”38 See Anemone, “Aleksei Gherman,” 558. James Wierzbicki, “Sonic Style in Cinema,” in Music, Sound and Filmakers: Sonic Style in Cinema, ed. James Wierzbicki (New York: Routledge, 2012), 1–14 (5). 36 Stalin-era doctrine held the scriptwriter to be of most importance; the formalities of film design and composition were not considered central to the Socialist Realism aesthetic. Eugénie Zvonkine, “Auteur Cinema during the Thaw and Stagnation,” in A Companion to Russian Cinema, ed. Birgit Beumers (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 178–201 (182). 37 Zvonkine, “Auteur Cinema,” 192. 38 Zvonkine, “Auteur Cinema,” 190. 34 35

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Auteur directors in the U.S.S.R. were not simply dissidents, however, and despite their difficulties with the state apparatus, they all, in their own ways, both challenged and reinvented Soviet ideological and aesthetic norms.39 It is in this tradition that Aleksei German sought to make a new cinematic language by “remaking the stylistic and narrative techniques of Russian cinema,” and his relationship with the state and its stylistic doctrine was complex and problematic, but formative to his style.40 Given the dearth of English-language research on the usage of sound in the work of German, there is one director whose work has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention for its sonic design and upon which we can draw: the roughly contemporaneous Russian auteur Tarkovsky. Before moving on to a discussion of Hard to Be a God itself, it is worth taking a moment to assess the reception of Tarkovsky’s sonic techniques. Of particular interest has been Tarkovsky’s tendency to elevate incidental and ordinary sounds and then abstract them, transforming said-sounds into “refrains.”41 Stefan Smith appropriates Michel Chion’s classification of “causal” and “reduced” listening modes, here. The “causal” mode, for Chion, is a type of listening associated with film sound that involves the listener identifying or gathering information about the source of that sound; the latter, “reduced” listening, rests on the appreciation of sound in and of itself, independent of its cause.42 Tarkovsky, Smith then implies, habitually blurs this distinction, then, dramatizing oscillations between the two modes. The resultant effect is crucial to Tarkovsky’s theory of film as a “sculpting in time,” and sonic affect is key to his aesthetics of temporal manipulation. Depicting metaphysical and transcendental themes, Tarkovsky’s filmic vocabulary is structured – much as is German’s – around “long takes in which images and sounds of natural beauty are given the breathing space they need in order to register with the audience.”43 Latterly, he would concentrate the action in a single location, within limited spans of time.44 Yet though comparisons have been made between Tarkovsky and German, and though the former makes for a helpful frame of reference in characterizing the latter, where Tarkovsky draws on transcendental themes and dreamlike states, German’s cinematic universe is a gruesome, and terrestrial, inversion of that (non)reality. Zvonkine, “Auteur Cinema,” 185. Anemone, “Aleksei Gherman,” 543. 41 See Elizabeth Fairweather, “Andrey Tarkovsky: The Refrain of the Sonic Fingerprint,” in Music, Sound and Filmmakers, 32–44. 42 Stefan Smith, “The Edge of Perception: Sound in Tarkovsky’s Stalker,” The Soundtrack 1.1 (2007): 41–52 (43). 43 Fairweather, “Andrey Tarkovsky,” 32. 44 Fairweather, “Andrey Tarkovsky,” 32. 39 40

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Fig. 2: Don Rumata plays his clarinet in Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God (2013)

Sounding a Medieval Past in Hard to Be a God The scene described at the beginning of this essay proceeds as follows: the opening tableau vivant switches to a street scene accompanied by the familiar sound of a cockerel call. Characters interact, laugh, wheeze, and mumble, thrusting mud (or feces) into each other’s faces, which they enthusiastically rub in further; we hear it all as if it were on our own face. A strange man blows into a surreal spiky instrument, which sounds like an empty bottle, and we witness a toothless noble woman stumble through a muddy alley followed by a man with a sort of double flute. His music is tuneless, unmetered, and characterized by overblown harmonics, and he makes rude gestures at the viewer’s lens (he stands next to a statue with an erection). A courtyard is doused in noisy rainfall, and its denizens stumble and trip in the mud. As stated earlier, a refrain of discordant song from an offscreen child returns intermittently. Cut to the castle’s indoors: the film’s protagonist, Don Rumata (with the camera so close you only initially see his hair), snores and sniffs. He gets up, dresses himself, interacts noisily with the items on a table next to him, and picks up an alien instrument that resembles a clarinet (Fig. 2). Without any accompaniment, he proceeds to growl and slide between notes, playing in a style reminiscent of jazz (the listener hears a saxophone). Film-noir-like overtures are juxtaposed with the gruesome medieval panorama that is heard and felt as much and more than it is seen. This is, moreover, a striking framing device that disrupts the sonic and temporal tone of the film (assuming we think ourselves in Earth’s medieval past, which we are not) and does much to

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emphasize Rumata’s alien status. In addition to recalling a tradition of genre polyphony and polystylism (which, we will see, was a part of German’s Soviet filmmaking milieu), the noir-like evocation knowingly and sardonically comments on the gothic roots of the film noir genre and its complex history as, to paraphrase John M. Ganim, a metaphorical counterpart to medievalist cinema.45 Waking to a world bathed in cinematic black and white, Rumata functions as a kind of noir protagonist investigating his surroundings as both an insider and outsider, much as the film’s spectator will find themselves doing as the film progresses. The film’s final scene returns to the noir-like framing device, where, having apparently destroyed Arkanar, Rumata is spotted traveling with a retinue across a snowy landscape into the distance. A man blows into an invented tuba instrument and, accompanied by a man hitting his own helmet with a stick while staring at the camera, Rumata picks up his clarinet and begins to play his jazz-like theme again. The last we see and hear, under this, is a man and a child strolling across a snowy path: the boy asks, “do you like the music?” to which the man replies, “I don’t know” (the boy then says, “it gives me a tummy ache”). Though a composer, Viktor Lebedev, is credited by the film, there is no traditional soundtrack in Hard to Be a God (no nondiegetic one, anyway). But German’s Arkanar is full of music. Ordinarily, music, and the act of musicking, in an otherwise stagnant environment is employed in film, and medievalist film in particular, as a reaffirmation of human spirit and folk-like persistence against the odds. That trope of merry medievalist music-making is completely inverted here, and German’s most disturbing vandalism is, perhaps, to rob his viewer of that musical respite that is such a trope of the medievalist cinematic idiom he requisitions. It is striking that for all its attention to visual detail, made – in part and by the director’s own admission – to create an “authentic” medieval world,46 its diegetic musical soundscape sounds dissonant and atemporal. Indeed, the only thing truly otherworldly in medieval Arkanar is its cacophonic approximation of what its observers call music. Music marks its own absence here. Such musical scenes abound, always accompanied by imagery, action, or sound that subverts or mocks it: at one point, Rumata has a child hand him a sack of feces (from a donkey he sits upon). He blows into a horn and then throws the sack at a choir of chanting monks, interrupting their austere John M. Ganim, “Medieval Noir: Anatomy of a Metaphor,” in Medieval Film, ed. Anke Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 182–202 (182). 46 For a detailed analysis of the visual planning behind Hard to Be a God, including direct access to “inspiration panels” and side-by-side comparisons of images from the film alongside old Flemish masterpieces, see Eugénie Zvonkine, “The Artistic Process of Aleksei German,” Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 9.3 (2015): 154–83. 45

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­ erformance (their music evokes the Kyrie of György Ligeti’s Requiem, which p was famously used in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey): they then shout obscenities back at him. Later on, four henchmen of the tyrant Don Reba pound furiously on drums and blow monotone fanfare into their horns in a scene that follows the discovery of the lifeless, arrow-impaled body of Rumata’s friend Baron Pampa. As they play, a hand, counting the beats with a whip, tries intentionally to obscure the camera’s view. Scenes such as these subtly recall common topoi in the music of medievalist film, what John Haines has termed idéologèmes, but in so doing robs them of their signifying power.47 Regal or militaristic trumpet fanfare and horn calls constitute what Haines calls medieval film’s “most visible” music, establishing appropriate time and place and heralding noble presence48 – here, it appears as if to mock a baron’s death. Chant, likewise, is perhaps medieval cinema’s most obvious and sacred musical trope, but it also carries primitive and sinister insinuations;49 German blunts this with a sack of excrement. Musique concrète is a genre of mid-twentieth-century proto-electronic music in which sounds not typically associated with music could be used to construct musical pieces. Efforts to explain sonic style in film, and to understand better how music and sound interact (with each other and with image) there, have found in it a handy metaphor. Musique concrète, J. G. Kickasola argues, is important for being more than “mere ephemera,” and for framing “all that is sonically foundational in our experience.”50 The sonic world’s “phenomenological power” is, for Kickasola, crucial to our dynamic relationship with the world and, when instantiated in film, allows it to point toward greater realities.51 Hard to Be a God’s soundscape, a universe of immense detail six years in the making, could, were it to be subtracted from its film, be listened to like a lengthy piece of complex Musique concrète; when placed alongside the muddy realities of Arkanar it becomes something wholly different. Music, as previously stated, is reduced seemingly to mere sound for our terrestrial and modern ears, but by recognizing the primacy of sound more broadly in the film’s design and as a derived form of cinematic Musique concrète, it is, perhaps, mere sound that is elevated to the status of music (albeit, of a strange sort). In My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1985) German uses, according to Benjamin Rifkin, a variety of documentary-like filming techniques, as well as the “strategic selection of sounds” to shift central information in the film from the John Haines, Music in Films on the Middle Ages: Authenticity vs. Fantasy (New York: Routledge, 2014). 48 Haines, Music in Films, 66. 49 Haines, Music in Films, 114. 50 J. G. Kickasola, “Kieślowski’s Musique concrète,” in Music, Sound and Filmmakers, 61–75 (73). 51 Kickasola, “Kieślowski’s Musique concrète,” 73. 47

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“centre to the periphery, and from the periphery to the centre.”52 By that same token, visual and sonic information that is of importance and might otherwise be foregrounded is either cast to the periphery, sits outside of the frame, or is regularly obscured in darkness. Rifkin channels the Russian film critic L. Karakhan here, who describes in this the “poetics of total background” wherein “German’s contribution to Soviet film may be characterized as an increase in the screen’s potential to depict reality, not by means of some technical innovation but by filling the frame with meaningful detail.”53 German corroborates this in sonic terms, utilizing the surplus musicality of voice: “sometimes the background dialogue is more important than the main [foregrounded] dialogue,” he says; “this is precisely for an immersion into time.”54 Ivan Lapshin arguably codified much that we recognize in German’s style, but, based on a novel by his father, it retains one foot in the socialist-realism tradition, reinventing it in a critical and avant-garde context. Much that shocks and impresses in Hard to Be a God can be found here (albeit in the setting of Russia in the 1930s), and his visceral brand of medievalism seen and heard in 2013 is at once indebted to that tradition but, by necessity, born outside of it. Robert Bird has described German finding his voice in Ivan Lapshin’s “gritty” narrative, “shot and recorded in a dizzyingly decentred manner, which immerses the viewer in a saturated visual and aural environment, obscuring at times the logic of the story.”55 In addition to being noted for high-contrast black-and-white cinematography (already a feature in a canon of Soviet cinematic medievalism), for long takes on an unsteady camera, and for the use of nonprofessional actors alongside trained ones (all so as to minimize the difference between fiction and documentary), his films have been celebrated for their “complex soundtrack[s] composed of bits of overheard conversation, the ‘ugly’ noises of everyday life, [and] mostly diegetic music.”56 In a crucial scene about a quarter of the way into the film (Fig. 3), Rumata goes to meet the king of Arkanar and Don Reba (before the latter effectively seizes control). The dialogue seems mostly irrelevant, but the scene is the closest in the film to a traditional expository moment; as in Ivan Lapshin most sensory information comes from the periphery or off-screen. The King’s bedchamber is crammed full of people (guards, musicians, courtesans, robed Benjamin Rifkin, “The Reinterpretation of History in German’s Film My Friend Ivan Lapshin: Shifts in Centre and Periphery,” Slavic Review 51.3 (1992): 431–47 (438–39). 53 Rifkin, “Reinterpretation of History,” 440. 54 Aleksei German, “Kino prozrastaet iz poezii,” 152, quoted in Rifkin, “Reinterpretation of History,” 440. 55 Robert Bird, “Lenfilm: The Birth and Death of an Institutional Aesthetic,” in A Companion to Russian Cinema, ed. Birgit Beumers (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 66–91 (84). 56 See Anemone, “Aleksei Gherman,” 552. 52

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Fig. 3: Rumata with Don Reba and the King in Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God (2013)

monks, etc.) and animals (including dogs on the bed, and pigeons). Many of these people are not trained actors, and German selected them from streets, offices, hospitals, and through “open calls” throughout Eurasia.57 Clearly the background actors are directed to make grotesque faces wherever possible, often directly at the viewer. Likewise, the entire cast explores and interacts with their surroundings wherever they go; the effect is incredibly tactile and makes its noisy environment possible. The distinction between center and periphery breaks down completely. In this scene we register a selection of some of the following sounds: chain mail and armor clanking; dogs yelping and birds flapping; amplified footsteps and shuffling; a recurrent tuneless horn refrain from a musician in the room; the sound of flesh being slapped as the king touches a naked courtesan’s rear; wheezing and coughing (the king and Reba are overweight); the noisy eating and drinking habits of the characters as they are brought food and wine; moaning from characters in the background; as well as the low and mumbled dialogue of the protagonist and his antagonists (as well as others). The sound of a misfired arrow signals an edit, and Rumata is seen loudly whipping an extra. He scrapes a decaying fresco on the wall with his stick (which we hear clearly), noisily drops coins from a height into a beggar’s metal plate, and tells a man with a horn to “play what I taught you” (he then tunelessly plays German supposedly forbade the use of the term “extras” and designated roles as “foreground,” “second-ground,” and “third-ground.” From Svetlana Karmalita’s interview in the Capricci lifetime-achievement press-kit.

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Fig. 4: Guard plays horn in corridor for Rumata from Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God (2013)

something resembling Rumata’s earlier jazz theme). Sudden rainfall drowns this out as people outside seek cover in the corridor where Rumata stands (Fig. 4). Listened to like this, clear patterns emerge in the incidental sounds of Hard to Be a God’s lengthy scenes: from the jazz theme framing-device to the recurrent rainfall, the sudden edits with familiar sonic interjections, and the amplified clinks and clangs of its face-pulling cast of extras. An overabundance, or surplus, of sound (in all its forms, musical and otherwise) abstracts itself from its source evoking acousmatic listening practices associated with Musique concrète. German is quoted as saying, “I am not interested in anything but the possibility of building a world, an entire civilization from scratch,” and this principle is employed most overtly in Hard to Be a God. But to create this reality it is necessary to go beyond what it means simply to be real. Sound, more than just music, but also as another sort of music (which is to say Musique concrète), is central to that process, because there is nothing truly natural, real, or authentic in this soundscape. Sound in Soviet Cinema German’s acute treatment of even the smallest in sonic minutiae in his films speaks, I would argue, to alternative traditions of sound and of scoring in the history of film in the U.S.S.R. Indeed, in its near seventy years, Soviet filmmaking’s sonic history traces parallel paths both influential and isolated, utopic and heterotopic. At the start, a generation of global thinkers theorized

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sound’s revolutionary potential in building a socialist future, and, in the end, strategies of sonic and musical design came to reflect an aesthetic of polystylistic atemporality. Central to this was the ongoing negotiation with the past: respectively, creating a past consistent with ideologies of progress, or pre-empting the conclusion of that past at the Cold War’s end-of-history moment in 1991. Those legacies simmer below Hard to Be a God’s surface: when viewed in this light, the film encompasses a cinematic tradition that is little understood in the West today. German’s post-historical (and sonic) medievalism, then, is the site at which that history and our present meet. While sound studies in the last couple of decades has sought a better understanding, and a greater appreciation, of the interaction between sound and image – and as increasing numbers of virtuosic and popular directors exploit improved sound technologies for the cinema and the home – radical thinking on the matter has, in fact, long traditions. Among those most influential of early theoretical tracts, catalyzed also by technological change, came ones from the U.S.S.R. Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori Aleksandrov’s 1928 “Statement on Sound” is an early call to arms for filmmakers to realize the full, and revolutionary, potential of sound in cinema. In order to avoid creating mere “‘highly cultured dramas’ and other photographed performances of a theatrical sort,” the “Statement on Sound” extended the theory of “montage” to encompass a film’s sonic profile.58 Eisenstein (et al.) argued that sound should be “asynchronous” with image, which is to say, in counterpoint to it. Profoundly influential in Russia and abroad, such a principle reappears in the relatively modern thought of theorist Michel Chion whose emphasis on the need for “tension” between the sound and image – so as to compensate for the supposed “completeness” of film as a medium that seems to encompass all of the senses – revisits these earliest theories. Walter Murch summarizes Chion, saying that “by choosing carefully what to eliminate, and then reassociating different sounds that seem at first hearing to be somewhat at odds with the accompanying image, the filmmaker can open up a perceptual vacuum into which the mind of the audience must inevitably rush.”59 There should be, thus, a metaphoric distance between sound and image, which, when spontaneously grasped during the viewing of a film produces extra layers of meaning.60 This perspective affords considerable narrative power to the composition of sound and soundscape in film, and accounts for the visceral immediacy of a film like Hard to Be a God. In “A Statement [on Sound],” in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 83–85 (84). 59 Walter Murch, “Foreword,” in Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), vii–xxiv (xxi). 60 Chion’s word for this is “synchresis,” which describes the way in which we are intuitively capable of forging connections between parallel sounds and images, an impulse easily exploited by able filmmakers. 58

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According to Masha Salazkina, this radical and international impetus to theorize the relationship between image, sound, and text in the Soviet Union became “central to discussion of film as a revolutionary medium between 1928 and 1935.”61 This discussion reflected, and indeed was bound up with, then-current narratives of Soviet modernization, and was framed by a discourse concerned with film’s “aesthetic, technological, and ideological potential.”62 A later stultification in Russian film theorization in this regard, then, anticipated the broader cultural trajectory under Stalinism, and the sublimation of revolutionary energies into state-approved socialist realism.63 Early experiments in sonic abstraction would be viewed by authorities as dangerously formalist. After the Breznev-era stagnation decades later, and at the dawn of glasnost and perestroika, the question of the role of sound re-emerged in Russian criticism. In 1988, critic Mikhail Yampolsky, in his essay “Cinema without Cinema,” bemoaned an overt logocentrism, which he attributes variously to a technological lag, but also the primacy of literature in the Russian artistic canon:64 ideas and script, he would argue, have been consistently foregrounded over sound (and, indeed, image also).65 Peter Schmelz refers to this tradition of cinematic silence as a “deafening vacuum” that would be filled in the intervening years with “multifarious, multifaceted sounds,” drawing particular attention to the influence of trends in Russian avant-garde polystylism championed by composer Alfred Schnittke.66 Cinema in the Soviet Union, by this time, is noteworthy for having offered a sort of refuge to the country’s musical avant-garde, promoting spaces for composers who were otherwise out of favor with the ideological authorities.67 Indeed, composers from Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich (who worked with Eisenstein) through to Eduard Artemyev (an electronic-music innovator who worked with Andrey Tarkovsky on Solaris and in other films), Masha Salazkina, “Introduction,” in Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema, ed. Lilya Kaganovsky and Masha Salazkina (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 1–17 (5). 62 Salazkina, “Introduction,” 5. 63 Salazkina, “Introduction,” 6. 64 Mikhail Yampolsky, “Cinema without Cinema,” in Russian Critics on the Cinema of Glasnost, ed. Michael Brashinsky and Andrew Horton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), quoted in Peter Schmelz, “The Full Illusion of Reality: Repentance, Polystylism, and the Late Soviet Soundscape,” in Sound, Speech, Music, 230–51 (230). 65 The logocentric conception of film held by the Soviet authorities meant that censors would consider merit largely on script alone. Russian “auteur”-minded directors were able to exploit the ambiguities here, usually by deferring to a respected scriptwriter a degree of official co-authorship. See Zvonkine, “Auteur Cinema,” 188. 66 See Schmelz, “Full Illusion,” 234. 67 Tatiana Egorova, Soviet Film Music: An Historical Survey (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998), 288. 61

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Sofia Gubaildulina, Edison Denisov, and Schnittke later in the century all found success composing for film. A “wave of collage” influenced by polystylistic trends in concert music, then, became the dramaturgical norm for Russian film in the late 1970s and 1980s, and compilation and quotation of pre-existing music were also very common. The playing with “strange styles,” which characterized this turn, Tatiana Egorova explains, was directed at the “activisation of the spectator’s associative and imaginative thinking” so as to covertly convey meaning.68 Hard to Be a God’s noir-like invocations recall this era of juxtapositions. That polystylism – symbolic of a “welling over” of history – took a subtle turn later in the glasnost era; a time characterized, according to Schmelz, by a “twinned sense of nostalgia and of an encroaching ending,” in which “past, present, and future became malleable.”69 Prompted also by an exodus of composer talent to the West (because of the state’s loosening power), there was a trend toward the expansion of the sound-world by means of “exaggeratedly naturalistic noises,” and Egorova argues that a number of films in the late 1980s found in this a non-traditional solution to the “problem of synthesis between music and cinema” proving a “practical realisation of Eisenstein’s theory of audiovisual montage.”70 Referring to Sokurov’s The Days of Eclipse (1988) – based also on a Strugatsky Brothers novel, Definitely Maybe (1974) – Egorova refers to the “astonishing […] intricacy, informational richness and expressiveness of its sound-track in all aspects: speech, music, noise. The Music appears in it in a contrapuntal interlacing of several stylistic layers which form a polyphonic construction.”71 Indeed, these statements should ring true in Hard to Be a God also. And, in the transitional era of the late 1980s, where German achieved lasting critical success with My Friend Ivan Lapshin, an auteur tradition of Russian cinema sought a new expression reflective of its times. It did that, moreover, by a synthesis of its traditions of sound and music – from Eisenstein through to the stagnation in which polystylism paralleled literature’s heterotopic search from an “elsewhere” with new avant-garde tendencies. Though this was done, often, through the interrogation of its difficult recent past, German’s barbarous historical style elides, in Hard to Be a God, his own tradition with the “shaggy” (to borrow from Eco) historical style of popular and modern medievalism.

Egorova, Soviet Film Music, 238. Schmelz, “Full Illusion,” 247. 70 Egorova, Soviet Film Music, 280. 71 Egorova, Soviet Film Music, 280. 68 69

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Conclusion: Hearing the Past and the Hyperreal Rather than presenting a remade history as historical fact, German’s revisionist and immersive films aspire to enlarge our understanding of the past by having the audience experience it as it was originally experienced. Unlike many in historical film, however, German acknowledges the impossibility of this – how do audiences forget what they already know today? Anthony Anemone suggests that this means creating more than mere historical accuracy on screen, instead accessing the past “as if it were present”: “To watch a movie by Gherman, then, is to confront the complexity, obscurity, incomprehensibility, even absurdity of a past that can neither be fully remembered, completely understood, nor adequately represented on the screen.”72 In contrast to his films set – ­obviously, at least – in their terrestrial and Stalin-era settings, Hard to Be a God is simply the absurd, logical, and modern apotheosis of this cinematic language. The filthy medieval kingdom of Arkanar is still Stalin’s Russia, but it is post-Soviet Russia also, the West, and humanity itself. Insofar as this is the case, German’s post-Soviet medievalism intersects older Russian film traditions and global ones. It is no doubt the product of a tradition within Soviet cinema, but his post-socialist-realism style is magnified through a postmodern medievalist lens, and its visceral depiction of dirt, violence, and tyranny is the product of a different, digital, and more liberal filmmaking scene. Indeed, making history as though it were present, then, means more than the reproduction of history, and in this regard Hard to Be a God aligns entirely with medievalism and its current multimedia and digital moment writ large. It has been a common critique of modern Hollywood cinema that it is “busy, noisy and seeks to simulate the senses rather than arouse the intellect.”73 But, as Chion has argued, sound’s appeal to the senses has always done more than just serve the story: there is an “inherent pleasure in the sensory.”74 Film in the digital age, moreover, has advanced this further still, and Chion argues for a recognition of the “trans-sensory” so that we can move beyond discussion of discrete “images” and “soundtracks” to appreciate better how the medium of film is more than the sum of its parts.75 If Hard To Be a God’s feces-strewn streets can assault our sense of smell, or if its ugly cohort of Eurasian extras feel like they are breathing down our necks – all sensations activated at its hyperdetailed audio-visual cinematic horizon – then Hard to Be a God functions as part of Chion’s digital trans-sensory moment too. Anemone, “Aleksei Gherman,” 560. Jeff Smith, “The Sound of Intensified Continuity,” in The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 331–556 (331). 74 Michel Chion, “Sensory Aspects of Contemporary Cinema,” in The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, 325–30 (327). 75 Chion, “Sensory Aspects,” 329. 72 73

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Hard to Be a God’s “presence”-making and immersive qualities speak ably to an era of new media too, and much that is medievalist or neomedievalist exists in a “digital vortext” of multimedia and transmedia spectacle.76 Indeed, I would argue that Hard to Be a God’s sheer length and interpretive demands innerve or empower its viewer into its fictional world, virtually.77 But further still, the novel’s cult status (in Russia and abroad) imbues it with a transmedial intertextuality. For a start, the Strugatskys included it into a “Noon universe” canon of books that all take place in the same narrative space, and their body of work mirrors the expanded universes of western fantasy medievalist canons. Hard to Be a God was also made into a film in 1989 (directed by Peter Fleischmann and starring, curiously, Werner Herzog); and there is also a 2007 role-playing video game called Hard to Be a God, as well as dedicated online communities. It is possible to experience Arkanar in a variety of ways. Seeing Hard to Be a God in the light of what we might hastily call postmodernism is a juncture where it is possible to recall the notion of “hyperreality” as it is figured in the work of Eco. Indeed, his America of simulacra and the “absolute fake,” where technologies provide us with “more reality than nature can” and in which Disneyland reigns (fittingly presided over by its castle, the ultimate testament to a popular and chivalric form of medievalism),78 meets its antithesis in Hard to Be a God. German’s medieval reality is as much a hyperreality (more real than real) as Eco imagined, but it is also a critical commentary on the same phenomena: from inside and outside, on Earth and beyond. To update the famous saying, the past is, indeed, a different planet now. Irretrievably, sound is lost to the past. Saying this should come as no revelation, but it is easy to underestimate how strange or counterintuitive a thought this can be. Indeed, there is much that we take for granted about our senses, and, while it might be an oversimplification to suggest that gauging how C. L. Robinson, “Neomedievalism in a Vortext of Discourse: Film, Television, and Digital Games,” in Neomedievalism in the Media: Essays on Film, Television, and Electronic Games, ed. C. L. Robinson and P. Clements (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2012), 1–13 (7). 77 To this extent, I refer to Jamie M. Porter’s channeling of Walter Benjamin’s account of “play” and agency in cinema, as an explanation for cinematic analysis of video games (and the relationships therein). Indeed, the following account of video-game immersion rings entirely true here: “the graphics and sounds of contemporary games effectively make a seemingly detached and visual experience quite tangible. Physicality is established through many devices including point-of-view visual perspective, sounds (breathing, footsteps, punching, growls, explosions, etc.) and ‘camera movements’ that attempt to mirror bodily motion through gravity-bound space. Such properties overtly invoke cinematic processes and experiences.” Jamie M. Poster, “Looking and Acting in Computer Games: Cinematic ‘Play’ and New Media Interactivity,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 24.4 (2007): 325–39 (325). 78 Eco, Faith in Fakes, 44. 76

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the distant past looked is easier because of the existence of visual documents and artworks from the period, it is not unreasonable to suggest that history’s soundscapes lie, noticeably, beyond our reach, or beyond the sonic constraints of this world. Increasingly, sound studies have looked to reclaim sound from the annals of unrecorded history (by which I mean, history before sound-recording technologies). Emma Dillon has sought to locate the sound of the medieval city in the medieval motet. To do this, she argues, it would be necessary to dispel, to some extent, our presentist notions of abstracted musical listening, and understand that in the medieval soundscape, the borders between sound, song, and social experience are complex: “to unsettle the category of musical listening […] allows for the inclusion of other kinds of sounds and environments as contexts to inform musical experience, and welcomes in a more holistic mode of listening to music.”79 Dillon posits the concept of “supermusicality,” which is the presence of an alternative musicality invoked by the excess presence of text in the music. The effect is one that dissolves a degree of “sense and text” in music, so as to play on the hinges of “sense and sound”: which is to say, the levels of rational and modern musical meaning, and visceral sonic pleasure itself. 80 Arkanar is, in a way, as we romantically imagine the past to sound: it is full of hustle, bustle, voice, music (regimental, secular, and devotional), and more besides. Although its intentional ugliness might seem cruel, different types of listening are required to understand its sonic and holistic whole. If sound studies can see in a musical form such as the motet a place to disentangle sound, music, and text, so as to access, in a manner, how the past sounded, Hard to Be a God dramatizes a reverse procedure. Through its hyperreal soundscape, presented to us on the alien planet of viscerally felt history, we experience its world by listening, and reconstructing it, perhaps even as a type of music. Insofar as the past is always reimagined or recreated, Hard to Be a God’s sonic medievalism is compelling in its authenticity.

Emma Dillon, The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France 1260–1330 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 6. 80 Dillon, The Sense of Sound, 27. 79

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Contributors AIDA AUDEH, Professor of Art History at Hamline University, is a frequent contributor to Studies in Medievalism and an expert on nineteenth-century European artists’ use of Dante and his writing as source and inspiration for works of art. She is the author of several articles, appearing in such journals as Dante Studies, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and Annali d’Italianistica. Her book Dante in the Long Nineteenth Century: Nationality, Identity, and Appropriation was published in 2012, and her chapter on teaching Dante and the visual arts is forthcoming in the new edition of the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” edited by Christopher Kleinhenz and Kristina Olson. TESSEL M. BAUDUIN is Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Art History at the University of Amsterdam and a laureate of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research’s VI-programme for Excellence in Research. Her book Surrealism and the Occult: Occultism and Western Esotericism in the Works and Movement of André Breton was published in 2014. The volume Surrealism, Occultism and Politics: In Search of the Marvellous, co-edited with Victoria Ferentinou and Daniel Zamani, appeared in 2017. She has also published elsewhere on modern art, surrealism, automatism in art, Hilma af Klint, and Hieronymus Bosch as a surrealist, among other topics, and is currently working on a book about the reception of past masters in surrealism. MATTHIAS D. BERGER is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at the University of Bern and a member of the Graduate School of the Humanities at the Bernese Walter Benjamin Kolleg. He is writing his comparative dissertation on contemporary cultural, social, and political medievalisms that negotiate national identities in Britain and Switzerland. His forthcoming article in the Anglistentag 2016 Proceedings, “Roots and Beginnings,” examines the neo-Whiggish, Euroskeptic medievalism of Brexiteer Daniel Hannan as an example of a new medievalist politics of autochthony. KAREN M. COOK is an assistant professor of music history at the Hartt School at the University of Hartford. Her primary specialization is late medieval musical notation, and the development of ever-smaller rhythmic note Studies in Medievalism XXVII, 2018

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values is the topic of her current monograph project, preliminarily entitled “Non est minimo dare minus: The Fracturing of Rhythm in the Late Medieval Period.” She maintains a strong secondary interest in music in media such as television and video games, with special regard to intersections between music and medievalism. She is most recently published in Musica Disciplina and Sounding Out!; she is the co-author of the Oxford Bibliographies entry on medievalism and music, and she has forthcoming work in the Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism, an edited collection of essays on music in role-playing games, and Grove Music Online. TIMOTHY CURRAN is a PhD Candidate in English at the University of South Florida. A scholar of medievalism who specializes in the British long nineteenth century, his research and teaching interests focus on the Victorian novel, Romantic verse, and closet drama, and their interdisciplinary negotiations with theological, psychological, and scientific discourses. His scholarly interests have also tended toward literature and philosophy and the history of the body. His article “Dickens and Eucharist: Sacramental Medievalism in Bleak House” was recently published in Christianity and Literature. NICKOLAS HAYDOCK is Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, where he teaches courses in medieval and early modern literature, film, and critical theory. He is the author of two monographs, Movie Medievalism: The Imaginary Middle Ages (2008) and Situational Poetics in Robert Henryson’s “Testament of Cresseid” (2010), and co-author with E. L. Risden of “Beowulf” on Film: Adaptations and Variations (2013). Two further monographs are in preparation: The Afterlife of Chaucer’s Antique Romances on adaptations of “The Knight’s Tale” and Troilus and Criseyde, and a book on the discourses of classicism, orientalism, and medievalism in the television miniseries. ALEXANDER KOLASSA is an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Musical Research, Royal Holloway University of London. He completed a PhD in Music Composition at the University of Nottingham and has taught Composition and Musicology there. His music has been performed nationally by professional and amateur ensembles, and he has composed for the Royal Television Award-winning immersive theater piece, The Memory Dealer. He has also published on sound studies and new media, as well as on medievalism in modernist British opera. His co-edited collection Recomposing the Past: Representations of Early Music on Stage and Screen will be published in 2018. CAROLYNE LARRINGTON is Professor of Medieval European Literature at the University of Oxford and Official Fellow and Tutor in Medieval English Literature at St. John’s College, Oxford. She researches Old Norse-Icelandic literature, Arthurian literature and romance, and medievalism topics. She

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Contributors  253 has published Winter is Coming: The Medieval World of “Game of Thrones” (2015), The Land of the Green Man: A Journey through the Supernatural Landscapes of the British Isles (2015), and, most recently, The Norse Myths: A Guide to Viking and Scandinavian Gods and Heroes (2017). DAVID MATTHEWS is Professor of Medieval and Medievalism Studies in the Department of English at the University of Manchester. His most recent book is Medievalism: A Critical History (2015). Previous books include Writing to the King: Nation, Kingship and Literature in England 1250–1350 (2010), and he is also the author of several essays on medievalism in such journals as postmedieval and Review of English Studies. He is currently working on a study of Middle English literature in the Tudor period. ELAN JUSTICE PAVLINICH is a PhD Candidate and Presidential Fellow at the University of South Florida. He has recently received the USF Libraries Special Collections’ LGBT Research Award for his analysis of gender and sexuality in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women. His publications explore, among other topics, cognitive approaches to Alfred’s Old English Boethius and feminist approaches to Disney’s medievalisms. His current book-length project explores queer literary authority in early English texts. LOTTE REINBOLD is a PhD Candidate in English at Robinson College, University of Cambridge. Her interests include medieval dream-poetry, Chaucerian afterlives, fantasy literature, and literary conventions. She is currently completing her PhD thesis, entitled “Unstable Dream, according to the Place: Setting and Convention in Chaucerian Dream Poetry.” Her next project is a book tracing the dream-poem form from Chaucer to Bunyan, entitled Unstable Dreams: The Dream in Literature 1330–1678. She teaches extensively on medieval literature and language, with a particular focus on Chaucer, and is a Teaching Associate at Queens’ College, Cambridge, and Wolfson College, Cambridge. CLARE A. SIMMONS is a Professor of English and Director of Undergraduate Studies at The Ohio State University, Columbus. She is the author of Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (1990); Eyes Across the Channel: French Revolutions, Party History, and British Writing 1830–1882 (2000); Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain (2011); and papers and articles on nineteenth-century British literature and medievalism. She is also the editor of Prose Studies, an edition (2001) of The Clever Woman of the Family by Charlotte Mary Yonge, and an essay collection, Medievalism and the Quest for the “Real” Middle Ages (2001). Currently, she is working on a book on medievalism and celebration in nineteenth-century Britain.

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ADAM WHITTAKER is a postdoctoral researcher working at Birmingham City University. He teaches courses on historical musicology and music education courses, covering a broad spectrum of topics ranging from medieval and Renaissance music, to classroom creativity in educational settings. He completed his PhD at Birmingham Conservatoire in 2016. His most recent publication is “Signposting Mutation in Some Fourteenth- and FifteenthCentury Music Theory Treatises” in Plainsong & Medieval Music, and he is a co-editor and contributor to the forthcoming volume Recomposing the Past: Representations of Early Music on Stage and Screen (2018). DANIEL WOLLENBERG is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tampa in Florida, where he teaches courses on literature and academic writing. He has recently published articles on political medievalism in the journal postmedieval, and on medieval romance, cultural memory, and nationalism in Northern Studies. He is the author of a forthcoming book on political medievalism, The Medieval in Today’s Politics.

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Previously published volumes Details of earlier titles are available from the publisher XIV. Correspondences: Medievalism in Scholarship and the Arts Edited by Tom Shippey and Martin Arnold. 2005 XV. Memory and Medievalism Edited by Karl Fugelso. 2006 XVI. Medievalism in Technology Old and New Edited by Karl Fugelso with Carol L. Robinson. 2007 XVII. Defining Medievalism(s) Edited by Karl Fugelso. 2009 XVIII. Defining Medievalism(s) II Edited by Karl Fugelso. 2010 XIX. Defining Neomedievalism(s) Edited by Karl Fugelso. 2010 XX. Defining Neomedievalism(s) II Edited by Karl Fugelso. 2011 XXI. Corporate Medievalism Edited by Karl Fugelso. 2012 XXII. Corporate Medievalism II Edited by Karl Fugelso. 2013 XXIII. Ethics and Medievalism Edited by Karl Fugelso. 2014 XXIV. Medievalism on the Margins Edited by Karl Fugelso with Vincent Ferré and Alicia C. Montoya. 2015 XXV. Medievalism and Modernity Edited by Karl Fugelso with Joshua Davies and Sarah Salih. 2016 XXVI. Ecomedievalism Edited by Karl Fugelso. 2017

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FUGELSO (ed.)

Studies in Medievalism XXVII

Authenticity, Medievalism, Music

Given the impossibility of completely recovering the past, the issue of authenticity is clearly central to scholarship on postmedieval responses to the Middle Ages. The essays in the first part of this volume address authenticity directly, discussing the 2017 Middle Ages in the Modern World conference; Early Gothic themes in nineteenth-century British literature; medievalism in the rituals of St. Agnes; emotions in Game of Thrones; racism in Disney’s Middle Ages; and religious medievalism. The essayists’ conclusions regarding authenticity then inform, even as they are tested by, the subsequent papers, which consider such matters as medievalism in contemporary French populism; nationalism in re-enactments of medieval battles; postmedieval versions of the Kingis Quair; Van Gogh’s invocations of Dante; Surrealist medievalism; chant in video games; music in cinematic representations of the Black Death; and sound in Aleksei German’s film Hard to Be a God.

Editor: KARL FUGELSO

KARL FUGELSO is Professor of Art History at Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland. Contributors: AIDA AUDEH, TESSEL BAUDUIN, MATTHIAS BERGER, KAREN COOK, TIMOTHY CURRAN, NICKOLAS HAYDOCK, ALEXANDER KOLASSA, CAROLYNE LARRINGTON, DAVID MATTHEWS, E.J. PAVLINICH, LOTTE REINBOLD, CLARE SIMMONS, ADAM WHITTAKER, DANIEL WOLLENBERG.

Studies in Medievalism XXVII Authenticity, Medievalism, Music an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com