American/Medieval: Nature and Mind in Cultural Transfer [1 ed.] 9783737006255, 9783847106258

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Gillian R. Overing / Ulrike Wiethaus (eds.)

American/Medieval Nature and Mind in Cultural Transfer

With 8 figures

V& R unipress

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available online: http://dnb.d-nb.de. ISBN 978-3-7370-0625-5 You can find alternative editions of this book and additional material on our website: www.v-r.de Sponsored by Wake Forest University.  2016, V& R unipress GmbH, Robert-Bosch-Breite 6, D-37079 Gçttingen, Germany / www.v-r.de All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher. Cover image: “Prevailed (Wounded Angel)” by Steven DaLuz,  2011, All Rights Reserved

Contents

Acknowledgments

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Gillian R. Overing and Ulrike Wiethaus Introduction: The Making of American/Medieval

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. . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Tina Marie Boyer Medieval Imaginations and Internet Role-Playing Games . . . . . . . . .

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Sol Miguel-Prendes Medieval Iberian Studies: Borders, Bridges, Fences

. . . . . . . . . . . .

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Ulrike Wiethaus “Yet another group of cowboys riding around the same old rock”: Religion and the German-American Genesis of a Capitalist Stereotype . .

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Part One: Old Trauma

Part Two: New Archives Joshua Davies “Beyond the Profane”: Machine Gothic and the Cultural Memory of the Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Mary Kate Hurley “Scars of History”: Game of Thrones and American Origin Stories . . . . 131 Gale Sigal At What Price Arthur? Academic Autobiography, Medieval Studies, and the American Medieval . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151

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Contents

Part Three: Creatures on the Move Clare A. Lees In Three Poems: Medieval and Modern in Seamus Heaney, Maureen Duffy and Colette Bryce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 Margaret D. Zulick The Fox and the Furry : The Animal Tale and Virtual Narrative in Rhetorical Narrative Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203 Ulrike Wiethaus The Black Swan and Pope Joan: Double Lives and the American/Medieval

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Author Biographies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 Index

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235

Acknowledgments

With gratitude, we acknowledge our contributors for their work, their inspiration, and their friendship along the journey. Several colleagues not represented in the volume have been an important part of its making and thinking nonetheless: Michele Gillespie, Liz Herbert McAvoy, Judith Madera, Roberta Morosini, and Ann-Marie Rasmussen. The paintings of Steven DaLuz offered a profound source of inspiration as the project took shape. We are indebted to Steven for the generous contribution of his work to our volume’s cover. This collection of essays originated in a faculty research seminar sponsored by the Wake Forest University Humanities Institute with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. We are grateful to the Humanities Institute and the Institute Director Mary Foskett for wholehearted support throughout the stages of this project. The Office of the Dean at Wake Forest Universit, under the guidance of Senior Associate Dean Rebecca Thomas, has generously provided us with both material assistance and intellectual encouragement at crucial junctures of the publication process. Jeff Nichols has worked his magic as the IT specialist of the Department for the Study of Religions, and Stephanie Williams offered important editorial support in the final stages of the manuscript. Thank you all!

Gillian R. Overing and Ulrike Wiethaus

Introduction: The Making of American/Medieval

Medievalism and the American/Medieval Any formal consideration of the modern understanding of the medieval past is already informed and shaped by the now well established scholarly field of Medievalism. There are varieties of “medievalism” to choose from, and these are energized by a widespread interest in all things medieval across different disciplines and contemporary media. We do not propose to offer a comprehensive survey of the field here, nor to engage in any of the lively debates about the relationship between Medieval Studies and Medievalism, or its status within and without the more traditional field of Medieval Studies.1 We include some of the studies that have been influential in our own thinking in our bibliography, and many of our contributors take up aspects of these debates. The contributors to this collection rely on a variety of scholarship that considers and reveals connections between the medieval and modern, as well as having authored some of it themselves.2 While we acknowledge our debt to the field of Medievalism, we also believe that our focus on the American/Medieval, like the neo-gothic train stations discussed by Joshua Davies, can provide a new point of critical departure, and some different points of entry into the medieval world as it extends through space and time. 1 See David Matthews, Medievalism: A Critical History (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2015). 2 See for example, Joshua Davies, “Re-locating Anglo-Saxon England: Places of the Past in Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts and Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns,” Locating the Middle Ages: The Spaces and Places of Medieval Culture, ed. Julian Weiss and Sarah Salih (London: Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, King’s College London, 2012), 199–212 and “The Absent Anglo-Saxon Past in Ted Hughes’s Elmet,” Anglo-Saxon Cuture and the Modern Imagination, ed. David Clark and Nicholas Perkins (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2010), 237–53; Clare A. Lees, “Basil Bunting, Briggflatts, Lindisfarne and Anglo-Saxon Interlace” in Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination, ed. David Clark and Nicholas Perkins (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2010), 111–27; Ulrike Wiethaus, German Mysticism and the Politics of Culture (New York: Peter Lang, 2014).

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Medievalism scholarship is often styled as conversations about the medieval and modern constructions of what the medieval is. Bruce Holsinger’s work, for example, looks at the frequent demonization of the medieval and its imbrication in contemporary anti-Islamic political discourse.3 Many of the plentiful discussions of medieval film are concerned to discover and illuminate the preoccupations of modernity, including race, ethnicity, and gender.4 Other studies such as Why the Middle Ages Matter : Medieval Light on Modern Injustice ask profoundly ethical questions of the medieval, and interrogate it as a productive resource and guide for the modern.5 One recent overview, David Matthews’ Medievalism A Critical History, offers a thorough examination of the history of the field and its interdisciplinary reach, as well as a critique.6 Matthews argues for a more integrated framework for the field of Medievalism overall, in that he attenuates the boundaries between concepts of medieval and modern, and between fact and fiction. Arthurian studies might offer a new paradigm for “a conjoined medieval-medievalism studies” which exist in a continuum. “There is, evidently,” he asserts, “no authentic Arthur story, but rather multiple disseminating and proliferating texts, medieval, early modern, modern, and postmodern, none of them able to claim primacy.”7 Matthews’ is an essentially connective argument, allowing for flow and intersection, rather than separation and definition, which chimes well with our aims in this volume. After all, scholars make such distinctions, and may also undo them. The focus of Matthews’ work, however, in contrast to this and other volumes, reflects a largely Eurocentric pattern of scholarship. Other scholars have paid specific attention to more global or intercontinental aspects of medievalism, beginning perhaps with Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s landmark study on post-colonialism, published at the beginning of the new millennium, and followed by, for example, Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul’s collection of essays Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of ‘the Middle Ages’ Outside Europe.8 More recent examples are International Medie3 Bruce Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism and the War on Terror (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007). 4 See for example, Anke Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer, eds, Medieval Film (Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2009); Bettina Bildhauer, Filming the Middle Ages (London: Reaktion, 2011), and Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages on Film (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). 5 Celia Chazelle, et al., ed., Why the Middle Ages Matter: Medieval Light on Modern Injustice (London: Routledge, 2012). 6 See fn 1. 7 Matthews, Medievalism: A Critical History, 179. 8 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed., The Postcolonial Middle Ages, (New York: Palgrave 2001); Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul, eds., Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of ‘the Middle Ages’ Outside Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2009).

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valism and Popular Culture by Louise D’Arcens and Andrew Lynch, and Birdman of Assisi. Art and the Apocalyptic in the Colonial Andes by Jaime Lara, the first in a new series on Medieval and Renaissance Latin America launched by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.9 The journal postmedieval offers some US focus in a volume entitled “Contemporary Poetics and the Medieval Muse.”10 While we do not claim that the US has been left out of the conversation – American artists, media, and cultural productions of all kinds have been subjects of study – we wish to begin a new dialogue where the “American” is in deeper conversational exchange with the “Medieval.” As argued elegantly by Jacques Le Goff, the European-centered conversation began as a slow trickle in 1492, with much opportunity for mythmaking and fantasy as the tempo accelerated over time.11 As we will outline below, our volume is guided by tides of transatlantic cultural transfer in all its peculiar aliveness, paying attention to motion, movement, spaces, passages, and flows that preserve family resemblances yet allow for variation and adaptation specific to the predominantly Euro-American slice of the American pie. While our anthology is concerned with modernity’s medieval shadow, our approach departs from the well-marked path in significant aspects. We are seeking to expand the parameters and foundations of how we think and speak through the medieval, of how we experience and enact its manifold mutations in the US, and how we can propose and develop new conversations with the past. Consistently, instead of a conversation about the medieval, each essay proposes a dialogue with and through the medieval through certain categories of performativity and simultaneity.

American/Medieval: The Challenge of Definition When this project was in its early stages and the editors were applying for grant money to sustain its momentum, we were asked on a number of occasions what we meant by “medieval” – though, interestingly, we were never asked to define what we meant by “American.” We filled the gap with a quantifiable generalization, “the time period between ca. 500 and 1500 CE.” As we now face the challenge of definition once again, of either term, single and conjoined, we understand the terms as their meaning unfolded in the evolution and process of 9 Louise D’Arcens and Andrew Lynch, International Medievalism and Popular Culture (New York: Cambria, 2014); Jaime Lara, Birdman of Assisi. Art and the Apocalyptic in the Colonial Andes (Arizona: MRTS, 2016). 10 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, 6, no. 3 (Summer 2015). 11 Jacques Le Goff, Must We Divide History into Periods? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

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a three-year collaborative research endeavor. We began with the format of a 2013–2014 Wake Forest University Humanities Institute faculty research seminar directed by the editors, in which some of our present contributors participated. We continued and expanded the work of the research seminar by organizing a roundtable discussion on the American/Medieval at the Leeds International Medieval Congress in 2014, which opened up our transatlantic inquiry to other scholars, some of whom became contributors to the volume as well. The research was in some measure driven and created by our own personal identities as expatriate Europeans and our professional identities as medievalists. It was further energized by our pedagogical preoccupations with contemplative studies and mindfulness, such as a First Year Seminar on Contemplative Traditions. While the American/Medieval shapes public architecture, recreational sites, and internet role-playing games (RPGs), among other manifestations, it also shapes the ethnic core stories Euro-Americans tell about who they are and who they wish to be. Secondly, there is the matter of the discipline of Medieval Studies. Our contributors found many ways to ask what mediates the relationship between Medieval Studies and a focus on contemporary Euro-American cultural formations of the medieval. The original questions included: how do medievalists, artists, writers, and entertainment industries communicate, replicate, and evoke these formations; how do national and transnational discursive fields relate to understandings of the medieval in its many unstable states; where are the communal memory sites and what functions do they serve for those who are associated with them; where are the medieval disjunctions and conjunctions of race, ethnicity and time in a settler society ; and what do place, nature, and land/landscape (“built,” “imagined,” “creaturely,” “wild”) have to do with it? The questions proliferated over time, enriched and complicated by the density of our two conjoined concepts expressed as floating adjectives with the capacity to sometimes act and stabilize as nouns. American. Medieval. American/Medieval is thus about the eddying currents that flow between two unstable markers, the American and the Medieval. The questions of definition raised by each of these very alive and very dynamic categories are addressed and refined by our contributors’ work, but here we wish to emphasize the idea of flow and why we came to choose the glyph-(/)–or the slash. We claim our keywords as both adjectives and nouns, and the glyph offers us some agrammatical finesse. A/M, as one of several manifestations of settler identities with problematic and irreconcilable loyalties to “Old Europe” and the “New World,” brings together changing stories of an unstable world-making. A/M is not about extending some or another conceit of reifiable influence from Europe to the Americas. Rather, the glyph opens new paths to the lifeworlds we share in, shape, and study right here, right now; the life-worlds we

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write about, and the life-worlds we open through our work to others. This project casts a wide net, and as its title suggests, and the glyph – or slash – insists, it allows multiple and open-ended means of connection and association. Our project insists that A/M is experiential and as such, always productive and efficacious as demonstrated by the case studies collated in this volume. To use Eugene Gendlin’s felicitous concept, it offers a “felt sense” of the past in the present, and the present in the past, often barely so at the threshold of the spoken word.12 As we work through the growing body of literature in Medievalism Studies, and review the various accounts we have given of our own project, we see that we felt the need to re-define it at every turn of the process. A/M has been and will remain an emergent project precisely because the A/M complex is alive, breathing, usable, marketable, relevant, and has tremendous power to signify exuberance, fear, and grief, to evoke a sense of belonging and of being-in-theworld as Euro- Americans – for better or worse. For now, we will define A/M by following these transatlantic tides in three interlocking terms grounding the work of our contributors: A/M marks the persistence of old trauma (racism, class antagonism, settler colonialism), the exuberance of new archives (technocommunities, festivals, architecture), and the mobility of creatureliness (swans, herons, foxes and furries). And with all three movements, like water in the Atlantic, ebbing, flowing, and eddying, the chapters selected for this volume articulate a felt sense of the American, of the Medieval, and of A/M.

A/M: Old Trauma, New Archives, and Creatures on the Move In the arts, architecture, online communities, and entertainment, we can observe a transfer of the European Medieval as a practice of conflicted heritage identification; we see how processes of displacement, traumatization, fragmentation, and ideological idealization work their way into the settler nation’s symbolic and imaginary systems. Part One of the volume, entitled Old Trauma, brings together three essays: Tina Boyer’s study of the haunting figure of Slender Man entitled “Medieval Imaginations and Internet Role Playing Games,” Sol Miguel-Prendes’ analysis of deeply contentious transatlantic scholarship in “Medieval Iberian Studies: Borders, Bridges, Fences,” and Ulrike Wiethaus’ essay on the transfer of anti-semitic stereotypes to the United States, “‘Yet another group of cowboys riding around the same old rock’: Religion and the German-American Genesis of a Capitalist Stereotype.” Boyer’s article is based on the recent US social media phenomenon called 12 Eugene T. Gendlin, Focusing (New York: Bantam, 1982).

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Slender Man, a monstrous internet meme that has taken on a life of its own. Although at first this monster did not have a historical/mythological background, contributors on various social internet platforms such as blogs, YouTube, and Facebook soon established a German late medieval construct of its origins. This “medieval” background placed the monster into a Western European folkloric context. However, the “telling” of the monster story took a traumatic turn towards simultaneity when children started mimicking the actions of the monster in real life by attempting to murder a friend. With that in mind, Boyer’s article explores the boundaries between storytelling, fear, monstrous entities, and the formation of identities that goes along with it. Questions that arise from such an investigation are: how does medievalism play into such an identity development for children and adults? Furthermore, how does this monster and its narrative complex define American medievalism? Child abduction by aliens is a predominantly American preoccupation, as is the fear of letting children play outside without supervision. Interestingly, Abenaki storyteller Joseph Bruchac has transferred the ancient Abenaki telling of Skeleton Man into the modern era.13 The spirit being Skeleton Man behaves in an uncannily similar manner to Slender Man, although knowledge about him derives from a much older lineage of indigenous oral transmission. In the Abenaki context, the story’s plot line empowers children to fight and overcome the monster rather than being overcome, abducted, and worse. The Abenaki youth succeed precisely because they are comfortable in the forest and wilderness. It is their home since time immemorial. We are tempted to speculate that in the story of Slender Man, settler trauma is reasserting itself in the fear of the forest and wilderness, its threatening foreignness and frontier character encoded as Slender Man’s habitat. Sol Miguel-Prendes maps the arc from alterity to identity in Iberian Studies and Hispanomedievalism in her essay “Medieval Iberian Studies: Borders, Bridges, Fences.” Working with Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of liquid modernity, Spain and the Americas relate by continuously building and dismantling borders, bridges, and fences around the trauma of Spanish colonization and the politics of memory surrounding al-Andalus. Medieval Iberian Studies and Hispanomedievalism undermine normative Anglo-Saxon narratives and memes of a northern European Middle Ages. Miguel-Prendes situates Hispanomedievalism’s dual origins in a history of marginalization of Hispanism in US secondary education, and in Spain as a patriotic response to the SpanishAmerican War. She also considers some fascinating ramifications of its US and continental trajectory. Since the trauma of 9/11, for example, the topos of medieval convivencia in al-Andalus has garnered ever widening attention. Outside 13 Joseph Bruchac, Skeleton Man (New York: HarperTrophy, 2001).

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of the academy, the Camino de Santiago has become an international destination for those in search of contemplative experiences and “authentic” medieval spirituality. The trauma of Jewish marginalization and persecution is revisited in twenty-first century Spanish tourism as a fictitious re-creation of “medieval” Jewish quarters or evoked in Catalan nationalism. It also surfaces in the widespread unease with the growth of modern capitalism in the US and Germany, utilizing transatlantic cultural and economic exchange as its medium of transmission. In her essay, “‘Yet another group of cowboys riding around the same old rock’: Religion and the German-American Genesis of a Capitalist Stereotype,” Ulrike Wiethaus traces the biography of a monster not quite unlike Slender Man, the homo capitalisticus or Wirtschaftsmensch, an unfeeling, greedy, and overly rational type of human being embodying anti-judaic stereotypes first encountered in medieval Europe. In exploring Max Weber’s interdisciplinary turn to look to religion as the foundation for economic behavior, economic thinkers and a wider public generated an explanatory model for the cultural shifts that once again pitted Christianity against Judaism as its inferior and destructive Other. The A/M anti-Judaic and eventually anti-Semitic complex has manifested transatlantically in the spread of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion by, among others, US business tycoon Henry Ford, and the uneasy evocation of the medieval vice of greed in Hollywood films about Wall Street. The peculiar narrative linkage between the civilized Anglo-Saxon settlers and the savage and primitive Other, collapsed in the negative figure of the Eastern and Southern European urban immigrant and the positive figure of the noble American Indian roaming the wilderness, complicates the story of American settler capitalism by unmasking its dependency on racism and genocide.

New Archives The depth and historicity of the trauma embedded in our first three essays both haunt and give substance to the domain of the American/Medieval. This is to say old trauma does not disappear in the guise of creating new archives, or positing new ways of understanding the currents that flow between our two unstable markers, the American and the Medieval. The essays in this section look both forward and back, and create and interrogate the American/Medieval present. What, indeed, might comprise a “new archive?” How shall it be built, who will build it? (And if we build it, who will come?) What purpose will it serve? The three essays in this section take up these questions from very different perspectives, and in varying registers. Joshua Davies’ title “‘Beyond the profane’: Machine Gothic and the Cultural Memory of the future” indicates some of the

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complexity of his discussion of time and space, and their crisscrossing in the pattern of the railway track, the railway station, and railway technology. His essay begins with W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, and an encounter at Antwerp’s Centraal railway station, a building that celebrates the imperial wealth and power of late nineteenth-century Belgium by appropriating the architectural forms of the Christian Middle Ages. It is fitting that Sebald’s novel, which is so interested in memory, identity and temporality, should open in a building that works so hard to disguise its own historicity. Antwerp Centraal, like St Pancras in London, Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in Mumbai and Point of Rocks MARC station in Maryland, USA, is a nineteenth-century railway station built in the Gothic style. The architectural and cultural histories of these buildings reveal the passage and transfer of traditions and bodies and what Austerlitz calls the creation of “medieval associations” between times, places, people and events. His essay interrogates this deployment of medieval art alongside modern technology to examine a transnational phenomenon which speaks of colonial and industrial history, which embeds old trauma as well as the history of ideas of the medieval in the modern world. Davies offers a far-reaching analysis of the cultural and visual apparatus that is the American railway, shaping it for, and locating it in, a new American/Medieval archive. Mary Kate Hurley’s “’Scars of History’: Game of Thrones and American Origin Stories” considers a popular TV series and its relation to trauma, history, and national self-understanding. In an article called “On Writing,” George R.R. Martin, author of Song of Ice and Fire, on which Game of Thrones is based, makes a stark distinction between the reality of the modern world and the refuge provided by fantasy fiction in the following observation about the gap between modern life and the refuge of fantasy literature: Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?…There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of ShangriLa. They can keep their heaven. When I die, I’d sooner go to middle Earth.14

Martin’s words here resonate with the strong reaction his Song of Ice and Fire has received among American audiences. Martin’s thoughts drift, oddly, from the modern fantasy of Tolkien to the medieval(-ish) fantasy of the Arthurian legend, from Oz to Greece and Icarus to aeronautics. “There is something old,” he 14 George R. R. Martin, “On Writing,” http://www.georgerrmartin.com/about-george/on-wri ting-essays/on-fantasy-by-george-r-r-martin/ accessed 4 October 2015.

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argues, “and true.” Hurley’s essay challenges and interrogates this equivalence between the “old” and the “true” in order to better understand why a medieval setting is so compelling for modern audiences. Through a meditation on Erich Auerbach’s analysis of Odysseus’ Scar in Mimesis, she argues that the interruption in time provided by Martin’s narrative allows non-indigenous North Americans to overlook an element of their own history they wish to avoid: the foundational violence committed against Native Americans in the founding of the United States and Canada. She suggests that the version of the American/ Medieval offered by Game of Thrones is part of a larger desire for alternative origin stories, ones that overwrite histories of settler violence – signaling a desire for scars that belong to a fictive “us” and not to the “them” displaced by another world’s legends. Television, and the internet as discussed in Tina Boyer’s essay, are media that do indeed create new archives, and they both demand our participation in this creation, and challenge us to evaluate both “the old and the true.” Gale Sigal’s essay offers an overview of “medievalisms” past and present in the US, and also chronicles a personal journey through place and time, a journey that creates an individual archive of the American/Medieval. Sigal’s essay, “At What Price Arthur? Academic Autobiography, Medieval Studies, and the American Medieval,” looks at aspects of cultural transfer from the viewpoint of an American-born European medievalist teaching in a United States institution of higher learning. She questions how personal identity colors our attitudes and approaches to our work, and how we might make the translatio studii to contemporary students. Sigal initially situates her argument in the context of a brief historical overview of US perceptions of the medieval, and then assembles examples of some pieces of the medieval that are most available to our students today. This contemporary slice of the American/Medieval runs the gamut from consumption of turkey legs at Renaissance Faires, to exact replicas of Excalibur for sale, to the solitary dignity of the Cloisters in New York. This inclusive A/M happily incorporates “witches, star troopers, hobbits, royals, knights, archers and pirates.” Sigal’s argument resists judgment or condescension, or the easy condemnation of the purist approach to what “counts” as medieval. Instead, she emphasizes that the very popularity and ubiquity of these user-friendly medieval places across the United States is perhaps their most surprising and important characteristic, and that even fantastical visions of the medieval provide a multi-layered rather than binary view of the age. They create a feedback loop to the popular and nonacademic, indeed, feed a US hunger for the medieval. Her argument concludes with a look backwards to old trauma and an affirmation of community as these both shape A/M. She examines the perennial popularity of the figure of Arthur, intensified in her experience of teaching in the American South, and conjures echoes of trauma in her speculation about the

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White South’s particularly enthusiastic embrace of this most iconic piece of the medieval. In Sigal’s personal journey, A/M is finally about community and diversity, and the institutional and personal comings together that are reflected in the history of this volume. Sigal’s emphasis on community and her affirmation of delight in things medieval resonates with us as editors of this volume who have followed its genesis and directed its progress, but who have also been led and inspired by its contributors: the new archive is also built by such means and values.

Creatures on the Move In this section we take an animal turn, and consider some of the ramifications of our subtitle in the entanglement of the natural and cultural, the animal and the human. The three essays follow the broad metaphorical and literal contours of creaturely movement, taking A/M into the “natural” world as narrated through time and place and considering the cultural, disciplinary and media bases for the construction of this world. Clare A. Lees’ “In Three Poems: Medieval and Modern in Seamus Heaney, Maureen Duffy and Colette Bryce” considers some modern poetic flights of imagination, Margaret Zulick’s “The Fox and the Furry : The Animal Tale and Virtual Narrative in Rhetorical Narrative Analysis” takes us into a virtual world of animal and human co-existence, and Ulrike Wiethaus’ “The Black Swan and Pope Joan: Double Lives and the American/Medieval” looks at some of our twin animal selves and their medieval antecedents. The “creatures” in these essays offer new ways to imagine the processes of both natural and cultural transfer that A/M embodies, or perhaps, new shape-shifting embodiments of A/M. Clare Lees’ “In Three Poems: Medieval and Modern in Seamus Heaney, Maureen Duffy and Colette Bryce” offers close readings of a selection of modern poems and their complex intersectional means of reinterpreting the early medieval past. Her purview is both local and global, detailing how complex currents of poetry and culture flow between the sixth and the twenty-first century across what is now modern-day Northern Ireland, Scotland and England, and on to the US and back again, revealing how the medieval sources the modern poetic imagination. These poems witness how poetic understandings of place and environment, and of the animal and natural world, are marked by a temporality both medieval and modern. Lees traces the working of early medieval Irish literature into Heaney’s creative imagination in the lyric sequence of “Hermit Songs” from his final collection, Human Chain (2010), and also considers two other creative encounters with the sixth and seventh centuries: Duffy’s “Lex Innocentis 697” from Environmental Studies (2013); and Bryce’s “Asylum” in

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The Whole & Rain-Domed Universe (2014). In choosing these three poems, her intent is to suggest just how present is early medieval literary culture in contemporary English-language poetry, whether in that by long-established writers such as Heaney or Duffy, both of whom have drawn on medieval literature throughout their careers, or in the more recent generation of poets such as Colette Bryce, born like Heaney in Northern Ireland although some thirty years after him. Her discussion of these processes of poetic transfer evokes the presence of the environment, a deeply felt sense of place, and the flight and passage of both birds and the imagination. For Seamus Heaney, the persona of mad exiled King Sweeney, “the bird-man,” forges a way for Heaney to explore the writing of poetry across time, in which the early medieval past with its conflicts about faith and belief, writing and poetry grounds lyrical access to a more immediate, personal and differently conflicted present. The flight of the bird-man carries over through time; the bird-man turned poet has flown – migrated – but without easy resolution or settlement. Maureen Duffy’s work is more politically engaged in that it addresses the harsh realities of violence and oppression as these manifest over time. Her modern poem, inspired by a story from the life of St Columba, is an elegy for the high price and “bitter fruit” of those innocently killed and persecuted whether in war or for gender, ethnicity, race or faith, medieval and modern. In Bryce’s poem, the bird image returns; here, following another story told of St. Columba, the heron is the hungry and exhausted guest to be nurtured, enabling it to fly home. This poem, Lees argues, illustrates Columba’s foreknowledge and prophetic abilities and is pre-eminently about time – about the rhetorical power of prophetic utterances to fly through time like a bird, like a dove perhaps, through storms and reach fine weather ; like words. Indeed, her chapter lyrically follows “the long craft of words and stories, past and present, shadowing one another, moving from place to place, breathing new meanings into old ones.” Lees creates a different, poetic space for the American/ Medieval as she demonstrates how each poem curates new homes for the past in the lyric present, but also is clear to point out that they do so in ways far removed from those of the heritage industry or forms of medievalism invested in recreation and reconstruction. In her essay “The Fox and the Furry : The Animal Tale and Virtual Narrative in Rhetorical Narrative Analysis,” Margaret Zulick works through classic narrative theories to extract a methodology which may assist us in identifying surviving family resemblances of the animal tale over time. Merriam Webster’s Dictionary defines the concept of survival as “the state or fact of continuing to live or exist especially in spite of difficult conditions. Something from an earlier period that

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still exists or is done.”15 The very term “survival” generates interesting questions for the continuing appeal of animal tales – to what degree can an identifiable cultural practice or text with pre-modern parallels be seen as a survival of its older self rather than as a phenomenon sui generis? Can a distinction be made between the complexity of survival (“to live or exist especially in spite of difficult conditions”) and comparatively simple continuity that is easy to track and to document? Does the productive transatlantic transposition of medieval creatureliness (something that “lives” and “exists” in a spatio-temporal life-world) play a specific, unique, and necessary role in our assumptions about the continuity between settler cultures and their places of origin, and their fracturing in modalities of survival? Zulick suggests that the genre of animal tales constitutes both an example of our enduring affinity for the animal world and the enormous usefulness of traditional public narrative forms of expressing such animal affinity as it populates and animates electronic media today. The animal tale elucidates the way fact and fiction intertwine in narrative form in the minds of a public online audience, a medium where as in the past, there is little distinction between speaker or writer and audience or reader. In Zulick’s case study, the genre of animal tales is shown metamorphosing from Aesop’s fables into the medieval beast epics of Ysengrimus and Reynart the Fox, then finding its way via Fritz the Cat into the internet Furries Wars. Neither archetypal hero’s journey nor cosmogonic myth, the animal tale with its attendant humor, wit, and merciless take on the pettiness of ordinary life offers a highly accessible and often cruelly truthful platform for the critique of mundane behavior inaccessible through other narrative genres. The third essay in this section, Ulrike Wiethaus’ “The Black Swan and Pope Joan: Double Lives and the American/Medieval,” evokes another aspect of animal creatureliness, that of shape shifting and doubling. Swans rather than herons or foxes emerge into sight here, but like them, are creatures of the Northern hemisphere on both sides of the Atlantic since their ancient beginnings. Known for their monogamy and beauty, swans have figured prominently in European mythology. The final essay of this collection, an extension of an earlier chapter for an electronic Festschrift, explores the need for shape-shifting and a human double in the context of feminism, and takes a look at three contemporary films, Black Swan, She…Who Would Be Pope, and Pope Joan/Die Päpstin.16 Wiethaus builds her argument on German historian Ernst Kantorowicz’ study of the medieval royal double, an ideological trope claiming the 15 Merriam Webster Dictionary, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/survival. 16 Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, 2010); She…Who Would Be Pope (Michael Anderson, 1972); Pope Joan/Die Päpstin (Sönke Wortmann, 2009).

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theological, legal and political bifurcation between office and person. Kantorowicz’ life itself can be read as a poignant example of American/ Medieval transatlantic exchange. His academic prospects curtailed by Nazi politics, Kantorowicz fled Germany in 1933 to settle at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1939. He was not interested in the gendered implications of his work; Wiethaus’ essay’s title is a wordplay on his scholarship as much as it is a reflection of the gendered tension between the personal and the political. Reversing the trajectory that Kantorowicz mapped, the chapter argues that women’s political and cultural work is to recuperate the body/embodiment from the supra-individual office or ideological holding place of power. The medieval tale of the fairy lover, the Russian folk tale of the white duck – a possible source of the Swan Lake plot line – and the medieval legend of Pope Joan prove to be vital resources for the cultural re-conceptualizing of women’s “two bodies” on the threshold of political activism. Always the carrier of an aura of numinosity and uncanniness, the concept and counter-narrative of a supernatural double and its shape-shifting qualities have existed in excess of the theocratic legitimization and legalization of monarchy and papacy and its Christian manifestation (i. e., as the dogma of hypostatic union, which declares that Jesus Christ is equally human and divine, with these two natures present in one person). Wiethaus’ essay proposes that the doubling phenomenon is alive and well in literature and film, the arts, and folk tales, known as the shadow double and the Doppelgänger, or double walker, a German word coined by Romantic writer Jean Paul (1763–1825). Propelled in the US in no small part by the influential work of radical Catholic and later on Pagan theologian/thealogian Mary Daly, the eighties bore witness to the feminist manifestation of the double in the US – as body and as office – in the form of countless negotiations of “Woman is dead, long live woman.” It was also the decade of a transition from second wave feminism to postfeminism and in tandem, the gradual institutionalization of American Indian and Indigenous studies, cultural studies, queer studies, and postcolonial studies at US universities. All constituted efforts to overcome the normative hegemonic violence of a White settler state ideology.

Conclusion The contributors and the editors offer these various, disparate, provocative, benign, discomfiting and lyrical considerations of what the American/Medieval might be in the spirit of an ongoing and evolving conversation. Our volume aims to carve, to shape a path through the relatively uncharted territory opened up by a plethora of questions. We aim not to claim it or to demarcate it, but to ask what

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indeed might be newly discovered about our understanding of the American, of the Medieval, and of the American/Medieval, by exploring the tides of transfer between them. Our three axioms – that A/M encodes settler state trauma, that it generates new archives, and that it transfers cultural ways of being in and with nature and its creatures – manifest to some degree in almost all of the essays collected here and spill into daily life in ever new and surprising ways. The legend of the Black Swan is danced on Second Life; 2016 presidential candidates such as Ted Cruz evoke the anti-Semitic stereotype of Wall Street; Slender Man keeps prowling, an internet monster as busy as ever closing the Gutenberg parenthesis between the literate and the oral as is true of the Furries. The vitality of the Medieval asks for another kind of hypostatic union declaration. The Medieval is dead, long live the Medieval.

Select Bibliography Alexander, Michael, Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Bernau, Anke and Bettina Bildhauer, eds., Medieval Film (Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2009). Biddick, Kathleen, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1998). Bildhauer, Bettina, Filming the Middle Ages (London: Reaktion, 2011). Bruchac, Joseph, Skeleton Man (New York: HarperTrophy, 2001). Clark, David and Nicholas Perkins, eds., Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination (Woodbridge: Suffolk; DS Brewer, 2010). Chazelle, Celia, et al., ed., Why the Middle Ages Matter : Medieval Light on Modern Injustice (London: Routledge, 2012). Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, ed., The Postcolonial Middle Ages, (New York: Palgrave 2001). D’Arcens, Louise, and Andrew Lynch, International Medievalism and Popular Culture (Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2014). Davies, Joshua, “Re-locating Anglo-Saxon England: Places of the Past in Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts and Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns,” Locating the Middle Ages: The Spaces and Places of Medieval Culture, ed. Julian Weiss and Sarah Salih (London: Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, King’s College London, 2012), 199–212. —, ”The Absent Anglo-Saxon Past in Ted Hughes’s Elmet,” Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination, ed. David Clark and Nicholas Perkins (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2010), 237–53. Davis, Kathleen and Nadia Altschul, eds., Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of ‘the Middle Ages’ Outside Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). Finke, Laurie A. and Martin B. Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages on Film (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). Ganim, John, Medievalism and Orientalism (New York: Palgrave, 2005). Gendlin, Eugene T., Focusing (New York: Bantam, 1982).

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Holsinger, Bruce, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). —, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism and the War on Terror (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007). Jones, Chris, “New Old English: The Place of Old English in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Poetry,” Literature Compass 7.11 (2010), 1009–19. Joy, Eileen A., ed., Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Lara, Jaime, Birdman of Assisi. Art and the Apocalyptic in the Colonial Andes (Arizona: MRTS, 2016). Lees, Clare A, “Basil Bunting, Briggflatts, Lindisfarne and Anglo-Saxon Interlace’ in AngloSaxon Culture and the Modern Imagination, ed. David Clark and Nicholas Perkins (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2010), 111–27. Le Goff, Jacques, Must We Divide History into Periods? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). Louv, Richard, Last Child in the Woods. Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2008). Martin, George R. R., “On Writing,” http://www.georgerrmartin.com/about-george/onwriting-essays/on-fantasy-by-george-r-r-martin/ accessed 4 October 2015. Matthews, David, “What was Medievalism? Medieval Studies, Medievalism and Cultural Studies,” in Medieval Cultural Studies: Essays in Honour of Stephen Knight, ed. Ruth Evans, Helen Fulton, and Matthews (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006), 9–22. —, Medievalism: A Critical History (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2015). Marshall, David W., ed. Mass Market Medieval: Essays on the Middle Ages in Popular Culture (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co, 2007). Nagel, Alexander, Medieval/Modern: Art Out of Time (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012). Pugh, Tison and Angela Jane Weisl, Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present (London: Routledge, 2013). Ramey, Lynn T. and Tison Pugh, eds, Race, Class, and Gender in ‘Medieval’ Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Powell, Amy Knight, Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum (New York: Zone Books,MIT Press, 2012). Weisl, Angela Jane, The Persistence of Medievalism: Narrative Adventures in Contemporary Culture (New York: Palgrave, 2003). Wiethaus, Ulrike, German Mysticism and the Politics of Culture (New York: Peter Lang, 2014).

Part One: Old Trauma

Tina Marie Boyer

Medieval Imaginations and Internet Role-Playing Games

Introduction1 Much can be said for the American fascination with the European Middle Ages. It is certainly not a new one. Numerous literary works, films, and paintings over the last two hundred years have created various artistic conceptions of the Middle Ages. Like translating a book from one language into another, re-creating this period in fiction, art, and film becomes an interpretation. Most often when dealing with contemporary formations of the medieval in a creative work we encounter reflections and concerns of modern society placed into a historical or pseudo-historical setting. The intersection between this American interest in all things medieval and the creation of monstrous creatures on the internet is new. This is not meant in the sense that role-playing games (RPGs), movies, books and other media perpetuate and re-invent the medieval period in novel ways. Instead, the focus is on a newly created internet monster meme (Slender Man) without any historical background. What happens when various internet users start creating a historical construct for the monster? The choice of period, medieval myths, and historical art pieces emphasizing the historicity of Slender Man– these are the interesting questions. Why choose a European medieval background for an American monster meme? Therefore, several thoughts coincide when the idea of the medieval meets the internet. Focusing on a newly invented monster like Slender Man, who with his business suit, tentacles, and facelessness seems to represent the thoughtless technological void of the 21st century more than anything, we can learn more about current social fears. Yet, Slender Man em-

1 In an earlier essay, I analyzed Slender Man’s characteristics and connection to medieval folkloric material that had appeared as background for Slender Man narratives. The present essay is both a critique and extension of the previous one. See Tina Marie Boyer, “The Anatomy of a Monster : The Case of Slender Man,” Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural 2, no. 2 (2013): 240–61.

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bodies baser anxieties than that. Within the various narratives lie the seeds of childhood trauma, paranoia, and victimization. But how can this monster possibly have any connection to the Middle Ages? The relationship is two-fold. Firstly, the internet users who contribute stories with a historical or mythological setting are using the medieval period as an anchor. This functions as a validation that Slender Man stories are old, which gives the monster historical gravitas and at the same time creates an idea of the medieval that interprets the period as dark, dangerous, and monstrous – an overgeneralized view. Furthermore, the contributors use folkloric storytelling techniques on a creative meta-level akin to medieval oral tradition. Tom Petitt offers an explanation: And the future, it seems, will be a mirror image of the past, the changes inherent in the shift from print to the cinematic to the electronic media to the digital media reversing the changes inherent in the shift from scribal copying to print, and before that from memoral tradition to scribal, and before that from improvisational to memoral. While we may welcome the freedoms these developments offer, the reminder that they are effectively taking us back into the Middle Ages (even to the “digital feudalism” already invoked to discuss relationships between suppliers and consumers) – that we are surfing to serfdom – should give pause for thought.2

Although the statement is somewhat problematic regarding the term feudal, Petitt, nevertheless, offers an interesting perspective. Folkloric stories were passed down in various forms via oral tradition. These stories were altered and amended because they were shaped by individual communities and storytellers to suit the needs and expectations of their society. Similarly, Slender Man stories exhibit signs of this type of storytelling. Petitt believes that the internet is the place where oral tradition is reinvented in a form where the technological uses are new, but how stories are disseminated, altered, and re-purposed is similar. The communicative and social relationship between storyteller and the community that responds to the tale is the crucial factor in this process. The two-fold progression, both of folkloric storytelling and what types of medieval settings are used, render Slender Man an intriguing study in modern culture. At the crossroads of monstrous metaphors and fictional medieval pasts, the modern American imagination shapes its identity. This place is an intensely social environment that demands constant negotiation between the creator of the fiction and the audience who elaborates upon its premise. The medieval 2 Tom Pettitt, “Before The Gutenberg Parenthesis: Elizabethan-American Compatibilities,” (Plenary : Folk Cultures and Digital Cultures, Media in Transition 5: Creativity, Ownership and Collaboration in the Digital Age, April 1, 2010), http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/fo rums/gutenberg_parenthesis.html.

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background offers the perfect setting because it can be filled with individualized fantasies of the period and at the same time can conform to certain stereotypical cultural expectations on a meta-cultural level. The medieval, like the monster, serves as an ambiguous placeholder for a multitude of modern cultural meanings. This chapter is divided into two sections. One examines the evolution of Slender Man and its cultural meaning in contemporary society. Because of the recent tragedies surrounding the internet meme, I have decided to explore one of the many cultural anxieties Slender Man represents. Childhood trauma and victimization are linked intimately with Slender Man narratives – in the real world and the fictional. Underlying the contemporary cultural concerns are fictional origin stories that ground Slender Man in the medieval European past. Internet communities perpetuate these stories in a form of “folkloric” storytelling, leading to the proposition that we are embedded, and at the same time, renegotiating our views of the medieval in contemporary culture.

Slender Man As we look forward in time, we are always drawn to look back as well. We exist in the space between the future that we, at turns, hope for and fear and the past that we define and by which we are defined. We are creatures who remember and anticipate. We are also creatures who are haunted and shaped by the past but who cannot foretell the future, caught in the middle of this tense deliberation between the past and the future we create. We are endless makers of art and literature. With the rise of the internet, this creation has taken new forms and new mediums. An exciting time? Indeed, but as exhilarating as it is, new technology (as in every age) has brought its share of tensions. We have various ways of expressing our fears artistically. One way is to create monsters. These artistic and literary creations have been with us from the beginning. They accompany our earliest childhood memories and are with us in everything we do. Monsters are our creation, and we pour our desire and fear into their shapes and behaviors. As Jeffrey Weinstock states: … that what is monstrous is always defined in relation to what is human… What this means is that to redefine monstrosity is simultaneously to rethink humanity. When our monsters change, it reflects the fact that we – our understanding of what it means to be human, our relations with one another and to the world around us, our conception of our place in the greater scheme of things – have changed as well.3

3 Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, “Invisible Monsters: Vision, Horror, and Contemporary Culture,”

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Inventing monsters is a natural extension of our creativity. In them, we hide all that is dark and abhorrent to us – and yet at the same time we are fascinated by our monstrous children. In contemporary culture the monster has undergone a shift in definition – no longer is the monster directly recognizable by some “physical difference,” instead monstrosity expresses itself in its “antithetical moral values.”4 With this shift in perception, we have become used to “identify with and even esteem the traditional monster while resisting or reviling the cultural forces that define monstrosity based on non-normative appearance and behavior.”5 In fact, this shift can be seen in many mainstream movies and literature, such as True Blood, Hell Boy, Shrek, and most strikingly Twilight, to give a few examples. Added to this complex idea of contemporary monstrosity is the need to identify origin stories to explain the behavior of the monster. Because we are pattern makers and categorizers, we have the need to understand the monster’s motives. Weinstock terms this “rational irrationalism”: … a logical narration of nonsensical origins that has three significant effects: it responds to the reader or viewer’s desire to make sense of what is taking place; however, it does not fully satisfy this desire, and it, therefore, leaves a residue of mystery and a sense of unease that allows for further elaboration in a sequel.6

This residual mystery – but also discovering facets of the monster’s past – leads to an intense identification with the monster. Unlike movies and books, internet creepypastas (short horror narratives) written by anonymous authors, have the ability to multiply this effect. One such creepypasta is the Slender Man. On May 1st, 2015 an article in the New York Times related the heartbreaking investigation into multiple suicides by teenagers on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.7 Julie Bosman noted: “Several officials with knowledge of the cases said that at least one of the youths who committed suicide was influenced by Slender Man, a tall, faceless creature who appears in storytelling websites, often as a figure who stalks and kills victims.”8 Why so many teenagers (and adults) commit suicide on the reservation is a more culturally complex and traumatic issue than an internet meme can explain. Ultimately, many factors influence someone to take their life. Nevertheless, mentions of Slender Man in relation to crimes and tragedies had become more present in the

4 5 6 7 8

in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. Asa Simon Mittman and Peter Dendle, Ashgate Research Companion (Burlington: Ashgate, 2012), 275. Ibid., 276. Ibid., 277. Ibid., 288. Julie Bosman, “Pine Ridge Indian Reservation Struggles With Suicides Among Its Young,” New York Times, May 1, 2015, http://nyti.ms/1GBtqXv. Ibid.

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media since the 2014 incident in Milwaukee when two pre-teens stabbed their friend nineteen times. The girls maintained that the attempted murder had been inspired by Slender Man.9 They identified themselves with this imaginary internet meme to such a degree that they wanted to become his servants. Other events followed with the Pine Ridge suicides the most recent ones to date.10 These tragedies show one feature that Slender Man has exhibited since his creation: the deliberate blurring of reality and fiction. However, this is not an unusual characteristic in its genre. When Eric Knudsen (known as Victor Surge) created Slender Man, he did so in a forum competition for the best paranormal image. Along with other posters on the Something Awful Forum, many images were created that were designed to seem real. All artworks exhibited a sliver of the supernatural in ordinary and everyday settings to give it an uncanny and frightening atmosphere. This is a contemporary trend, especially in genres such as found-footage movies and internet horror-story communities. Peter Dendle defines it as one of the characteristics of the monster in general: But since it resides at the semantic and epistemological border between what society accepts as real and what it rejects as imaginary, and since it trespasses regularly and obstinately into both of those realms, the “monster” is well suited to explore those very boundaries, and to keep competing discourses of the real an active and open register…11

Heartbreakingly this discourse has culminated in crimes and tragedies in the case of Slender Man. We have to ask ourselves what it is about this particular monster that influenced such an outcome. Eric Knudsen posted two pictures. Each one portrayed a group of children and to each, he added the blurry image of a tall, faceless man wearing a suit in the background. To compound the threatening nature of the creature stalking the children, Knudsen added the following text: 9 Jason Hanna and Dana Ford, “12-Year-Old Wisconsin Girl Stabbed 19 Times; Friends Arrested,” CNN, June 14, 2014, http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/03/justice/wisconsin-girl-stab bed/. 10 In 2014, a girl tried to stab her mother who said that the attack was influenced by Slender Man. See: Brad Evans, “Hamilton Co. Mom: Daughter’s Knife Attack Influenced by Slender Man,” WLWT5, June 6, 2014, http://www.wlwt.com/news/hamilton-co-mom-daughtersknife-attack-influenced-by-slender-man/26370588?_escaped_fragment_=WAFFp#!WAFFp. Another incident involved a teenager who set her mother’s house on fire convinced that Slender Man told her to do so. See: Kevin Melrose, “Teen Claims ‘Soul Eater,’ Slender Man Led Her to Set Home on Fire,” Comic Book Resources, September 8, 2014, http://robot6. comicbookresources.com/2014/09/teen-claims-soul-eater-slender-man-led-her-to-set-homeon-fire/. 11 Peter Dendle, “Conclusion: Monsters and the Twenty-First Century : The Preternatural in an Age of Scientific Consensus,” in Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. Asa Simon Mittman and Peter Dendle, Ashgate Research Companion (Burlington: Ashgate, 2012), 448.

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We didn’t want to go, we didn’t want to kill them, but its persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time… ____1983, photographer unknown, presumed dead. One of two recovered photographs from the Stirling City Library blaze. Notable for being taken the day which fourteen children vanished and for what is referred to as “The Slender Man.” Deformities cited as film defects by officials. Fire at library occurred one week later. Actual photograph confiscated as evidence ____1986, photographer : Mary Thomas, missing since June 13th, 1986.12

The fascination for these pictures soon inspired other contributors to create their own photos and narratives. After only a few days, Slender Man went viral. Little did his creator and the ones who followed him suspect how his monster would bridge the divide between fact and fiction. Of course, the insistence that Slender Man was real encapsulated the intrigue and the attraction he provoked. Without this essential facet, the monster would have soon lost his appeal. In this sense, Freud’s idea of the Uncanny (Unheimlichkeit) is a good fit for Slender Man. The Uncanny always occurs in the breakdown between reality and fiction. For the Uncanny to be effective, the setting has to be realistic: the picture of children walking or playing on a playground. Once the viewer relates to the people in the photo (or in a narrative), the supernatural element, here Slender Man lurking in the background, destabilizes and breaks the expected view of reality. It is in the fragmentation that an individual experiences the moment of unease and questions reality.13 The folklorist Bill Ellis states that in the horror genre authenticating the supernatural as real is crucial to the story (and the monster within) to make a significant impact on the audience.14 The effectiveness of the story and genre hinges on this aesthetic choice and treads the fine balance between fascination and aversion. In the case of Slender Man and the online communities that perpetuate narratives about him, the horror genre becomes a communal negotiation of conceptions of the real world and the transgressing of social boundaries.15 Terming it a “digital campfire,” Shira Chess and Eric Newsom, have considered that these online social networks and communities interact on a folkloric level in a digital medium, “digital communication brought about the potential for reciprocal, impactful, two-way communication between author and audi12 Eric Knudsen, “Create Paranormal Images,” Something Awful, June 10, 2009. 13 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, ed. David McLintock and Hugh Haughton (New York: Penguin Books, 2003). 14 Bill Ellis, Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults: Legends We Live (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 29. 15 Ibid., 11.

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ence, sender and receiver, system and user, often leading to the limiting or dissolution of boundaries between each.”16 These communities, whether they are forums or blogs, have internal rules of social conduct and expectations of appropriate storytelling behavior. In some cases, such as in the blog Just Another Fool, the blog writers and commenters play an intricate role-playing game, an alternate reality game (ARG), maintaining the authenticity and veracity of the blog as a physical phenomenon with Slender Man at the heart of the story. The impact the story has on the contributors is astounding. Although the blog has been officially inactive since 2010, commenters still contributed to the last post three years later amounting to over 500 posts. The blog offers a storyline that connects Slender Man to the war in Afghanistan and Norse myth. Although seemingly disparate themes, the connection between bleak mythological mentions of sacrifice and the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder draws in readers. The effect is heightened by the unreliable narrator and the typical depiction of Slender Man as a nebulously threatening figure. Because the monster’s motivations are not clear, readers and commenters take on the task of deciphering the mystery. This explains the continuous posting even three years after the blog officially closed down. Since 2009, the two Slender Man pictures have changed into a complex of stories, videos, and other narratives that have now become known as the Slender Man Mythos. Independent movies have been made, and there have even been crossovers with Native American Folklore of the Pacific Northwest, such as the Wendigo.17 Slender Man, with his lack of face and his business suit, is the newest emergence of the boogie man. Simplified to this monstrous type, however, Slender Man is more than something to scare children (and originally was not created with such a purpose in mind). In fact, two notable traits show why he is such a fascinating and disturbing creature. His facelessness and silence (Slender Man does not speak, he threatens and simultaneously lures through his mere presence) make him a malleable figure. He is an empty shell that can be filled with different fears depending on the intent of the creator. Furthermore, he wears a business suit and most often has more than two arms (tentacles are a typical depiction in Slender Man images). On a grand scale, he is an interesting amalgam, linking a sense of urbanization and civilization with the natural and hybridism.18 16 Shira Chess and Eric Newsom, Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man: The Development of an Internet Mythology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 84. 17 An independent movie Windigo (2011) was released on YouTube that fuses the folkloric monster with Slender Man in the form of a found footage horror movie. 18 “His motives are generally left to mystery, although many of the early stories have him specifically targeting children or young adults. Often, noticing the Slender Man in some way

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One would think that this monster, who wears a business suit would exist in an urban environment, a haunter of cityscapes. Most often he is connected to forests and natural settings. It might be a strange juxtaposition, but it fits. Slender Man is – without connection to a narrative – an embodiment of tension and anxiety, a sign of the times, of conforming urbanization in contrast to irrepressible nature. At the same time, there is the danger that someone might genuinely believe in Slender Man’s existence as an authentic phenomenon. Slender Man shares this risk with other fictional entities (Yeti, Sasquatch, Loch Ness Monster, Demons, Angels). Despite their fictionality, many people expend much effort to prove that they exist. As Peter Dendle states, “for the modern secular world, there is still an apparent need for monsters to be ‘real.’”19 When the game Dungeons and Dragons and other RPGs were first created, they gained similar notoriety as Slender Man. Soon, stories of satanic worship and other transgressive actions of gamers spread through the media. It led to a negative backlash against the gaming culture that has also happened to Slender Man. Paul Cardwell states: The collection of anti-game anecdotes has sometimes been called a “modern urban legend,” a term coined by the folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand. Actually, it is a collective delusion. The modern urban legend is a traveling tale, in which the same story is set in various parts of the country and has “actually happened” to a friend of a friend, with only the names of the people and places changing. A collective delusion, on the other hand, is seen to be a situation that is “everywhere” but “they” are keeping it a secret. Thus, the attacks on role-playing games are part of a phenomenon that Brunvand calls “satanic panic.”20

The Milwaukee incident caused this sort of panic in the local community and the news media.21 The collective alarm over the girls’ actions led to blaming the ignites his attention, and he then stalks the person who has noticed. In general, the Slender Man is a stalker character whose primary interest is in taking children. While some variations involve young adults who have been driven insane by the Slender Man and act on his behalf, many do not. In some variations, the Slender Man is capable of teleportation, and in some versions, nearby humans become violently ill. It is important to note that few of the retellings identify exactly what kind of monster the Slender Man might be, and what his specific intentions are, these points all remain mysteriously, and usefully, vague.” Chess and Newsom, Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man: The Development of an Internet Mythology, 30. 19 Dendle, “Conclusion: Monsters and the Twenty-First Century : The Preternatural in an Age of Scientific Consensus,” 439. 20 Paul Jr. Cardwell, “The Attacks on Role-Playing Games,” Skeptical Inquirer 18, no. 2 (1994): 157–65. 21 The two twelve year old girls became close friends. They started believing in Slender Man after reading several creepypasta sites. At the same time, as they were frightened of the figure, they also wanted to become his “proxies” or servants. In police reports it stated that the girls believed they needed to kill their friend in order to keep their families safe. See a more in-

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online wiki and creepypasta communities immediately. Slender Man (and by extension the people who wrote about him) became the culprits for a wider social fear. Although the creepypasta communities defended their works as creative fiction and literary endeavors, some media outlets perpetuated the negative stereotyping. In a Newsweek article, Abigail Jones criticized this fear : “Slender Man is now a facsimile of the Puritan devil: He is everywhere, every day, a specter of our anxieties about raising children in a world where technology reigns and the lines between reality and fantasy grow dimmer.”22 Jones astutely points to the gendered aspect of the case and notes: The Slender Man stabbing seems to embody all our fears about what can go wrong for girls: how they are growing up in a culture saturated in their sexualization; how the Internet has altered the ways they communicate and express themselves; how young people spend so much time curating their online personas that the line between their Internet selves and their real selves all too often blurs.23

The monster has become real, not only in the girls’ minds but in the collective cultural consciousness as well. What clashes here are normative cultural expectations of parenting and the way young girls are supposed to behave. Added to that is the fear of technological submersion to such a degree that a person cannot distinguish between reality and the fictionalized. The vulnerability of childhood and the possible abuse and victimization that children might experience is a fear that we all share. In this regard, it is important to look at the places where the fiction takes place. The internet hosts social communities that adhere to rules of conduct. One of these is the Something Awful Forum where Slender Man was created. The internal socializing factor binds the users into a mutual pact of acceptable and unacceptable behavior in which story and picture creation are freely explored.24 They act like any other literary or artistic community that explores and negotiates its constructs of reality.25 Chess and Newsome emphasize this point of social interaction through storytelling: The development of the Slender Man and the community surrounding it resembles the folk communities that created traditional tales. The difference is that these tales are mediated and distributed through digital technology, and being part of a community no longer means being co–located. Slender Man themed forums and communities

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depth report: Abigail Jones, “The Girls Who Tried to Kill for Slender Man,” Newsweek, August 13, 2014, http://www.newsweek.com/2014/08/22/girls-who-tried-kill-slender-man264218.html. Ibid. Ibid. Shira Chess, “Open Sourcing Horror : The Slender Man, Marble Hornets, and Genre Negotiations,” Information, Communication & Society 15, no. 3 (2012): 376. Boyer, “The Anatomy of a Monster : The Case of Slender Man,” 244.

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serve as a jumping off point for storytellers to distribute their tales. Audiences follow, using the affordances of the digital media to talk back.26

It was the CreepyPasta Wiki (among other sites) that the Milwaukee girls encountered. Within this elaborate storytelling community, the social conduct and established rules (especially in a case such as Slender Man) demand the upholding of fiction while emphasizing the possible reality of supernatural creatures. A cooperative project, such as Slender Man, relies on the balance between reality and the paranormal. The monster is only viable if the certainty of his existence is maintained. Therefore, intricate background stories and supporting narratives bolster the image of the creature. The fundamental rule in such a community is to adhere and “play along” with the story’s internal reality.27 This negotiation is essential to keep the story and monster within it alive. The collective creative process is vital in this instance. As Chess and Newsom state: But in considering the Slender Man stories from the folkloric perspective, we shift the analytic emphasis away from looking at the stories themselves as a fixed and finite text to be dissected, to considering these digitally told stories in the dynamic context of community. Through this lens, the quality of the stories matters less, and we instead are able to understand the collective creative processes that fashion them, their everchanging nature, and the rules the stories serve in the communities that make them.28

As much as the creative process and social interactions between contributors are essential, one has also to consider the individual stories – especially the historical background – to see how Slender Man is placed into a historical and cultural context. In the most elaborate historical creepypastas, Slender Man is almost always situated in a European medieval or pseudo-medieval context. Why this setting? Why this particular fascination with medieval folklore and art? The development bears consideration. It points to a pre-occupation with the Middle Ages that is specific to the fantasy genre, but not necessarily so for the horror genre. The most elaborate historical background for Slender Man on CreepyPasta Wiki was a medieval and early modern German setting. Other historical settings included prehistoric Brazilian cave paintings, Egyptian mythology, and English folklore. However, the German background provided longer narratives and 26 Chess and Newsom, Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man: The Development of an Internet Mythology, 93. 27 However, since the Milwaukee incident, new rules have been established in the Wiki. Commenters who claim that they are servants of Slender Man or want to be his proxies are discouraged from posting. The Wiki is heavily guarded by site administrators and the comment threads reflect that cautious attitude. The Wiki administrators and writers banded together to promote the site as a literary place, not one of satanic worship. 28 “Open Sourcing Horror : The Slender Man, Marble Hornets, and Genre Negotiations,” 92.

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photo-shopped pictures of Holbein woodcuts. These woodcuts were attributed to a fictional artist named Freckenberg: Renowned German woodcutter Hans Freckenberg created at least two woodcuts featuring a character he described as Der Ritter (The Knight) during the mid-sixteenth century that were discovered in Halstberg Castle in 1883. Whilst Freckenberg was well-known for his realistic depiction of human anatomy – something that was unusual among woodcuts of the time – these pictures featured a skeletal, multi-limbed character. Historians are unsure of the exact symbolic nature of the character, with some claiming that it is a personification of the religious wars that raged in Europe at the time, while others say it represents the mysterious plagues that have been believed to be the reason for the mysterious abandoning of the Hastlberg Castle and the nearby village in 1543. However, many insist that Freckenberg was attempting to represent “Der Großmann” (the Tall Man). According to legend, he was a fairy who lived in the Black Forest. Bad children who crept into the woods at night would be relentlessly chased by Der Großmann, who wouldn’t leave them be until he either caught them or they were forced to tell their parents of their wrongdoing. Even then, there is a chilling account from an old journal, dating from about 1702: “My child, my Lars… he is gone. Taken, from his bed. The only thing that we found was a scrap of black clothing. It feels like cotton, but it is softer… thicker. Lars came into my bedroom yesterday, screaming at the top of his lungs that ‘The angel is outside!’ I asked him what he was talking about, and he told me some nonsense fairy story about Der Großmann. He said he went into the groves by our village and found one of my cows dead, hanging from a tree. I thought nothing of it at first… but now, he is gone. We must find Lars, and my family must leave before we are killed. I am sorry, my son… I should have listened. May God forgive me.”29

There are several aspects to consider in this narrative and the accompanying illustrations. The choice of art is uniquely suited to portray Slender Man in a historical setting. In a visual medium such as the internet, the original photographs and the images of the woodcuts add a layer of “authenticity” to the legend. Furthermore, the woodcuts bear a striking resemblance to the monster and in a historical context are known as examples of memento mori. Slender Man is always closely connected to unexplained deaths and mysterious disappearances, and so the creator of these photoshopped images plays with a late medieval concept of death by putting it into a modern context. Slender Man is as a boogie man figure who, like other monstrous creatures, is used as a warning by parents. He is the monster that patrols the borders of social expectations and acts as a prohibitionary entity, so children obey societal rules.30 29 “The Slender Man,” Wiki, CreepyPasta Wiki, (May 1, 2015), http://creepypasta.wikia.com/ wiki/The_Slender_Man. 30 For more on categorizing monstrosity, please refer to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Theory : Reading Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

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Set in a folkloric environment, it copies similar legends that are common to Europe. In these tales, people are often warned not to venture into a particular space (typically these are wild and natural, most often forests and mountains). As in all these tales the warnings are not heeded and the monster exacts its punishment. What is different here is the fact that the child is taken from his bed. This is an artistic deviation from a more traditional plot, where the child would be punished for his disobedience. However, it falls in line with Slender Man narratives, because the prohibitions that Slender Man represents are never known by his victims. His punishment seems almost arbitrary, although he is explicit about his choice of targets. It increases the suspense and threat of the monster. The setting of the story is the Black Forest, which by name alone already presents a good starting point for a horror story to an American audience. Images of Germany in the Northern American imagination typically center negatively around the Second World War and the Holocaust, or on stereotyped ideas of people drinking beer and wearing Lederhosen. In this case, the overgeneralization is needed to make a point. A geographic location like the Black Forest is well known to an American audience because it is a popular tourist attraction, known for its cuckoo clocks and charming landscape. Conveniently removed, both geographically and temporally, this forest, with a slightly sinister name, is the ideal origin for a monster like Slender Man. The artistic choice for the setting is no different from English and German nineteenth and early twentieth-century Gothic novels that chose ruined castles in “exotic” locales. Another longer narrative on the Wiki shares the remote setting with the German tale. Placed in an Eastern European environment, reminiscent of Transylvania, the Romanian fairy tale on the site has similar fake folkloric roots.31 The premise promises that the translation of the following story is an authentic fairy tale.32 This story of a little girl who sees her mother overcome by 31 Both, the German woodcut entry and the Romanian fairy tale, were originally created on the Something Awful forum in support of Eric Knudsen’s original post. They were then collected on the CreepyPasta Wiki. “Other users were compelled to contribute to the Slender Man mythos, interestingly the first few positioning the character as part of a faux folklore tradition. User Thoreau-up posted the story about the German folkloric version of the Grossmann and added fake woodcuts. Similarly, other users followed and one contributed a Romanian fairy tale.” Chess and Newsom, Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man: The Development of an Internet Mythology, 25. 32 I know of an old Romanian fairy tale, highly unpopular even in its earliest iterations. It might be based on a particular event, or perhaps it is an extrapolation from existing Slender Man stories. The translation I’m most familiar with goes a bit like this: Once upon a time there were twin girls, Stela and Sorina. They were brave little girls, and had no fear of the dark, nor of spiders and other crawling things. Where other young ladies and even young boys would cower, Stela and Sorina would walk with their heads held high. They were good girls, obedient to their mother and father and to the word of God. They were the best children a

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the “Tall Man” with writhing arms, ends tragically with her demise and the death of her entire family. As in all Slender Man narratives, the reason for the monster’s actions is not given. The only explanation is a chilling one: “Because,” said her mother, “there is no reward for goodness; there is no respite for faith; there is nothing but cold steel teeth and scourging fire for all of us. And it’s coming for you now.” Equally vague and horrifying, it mirrors a particular desperate gloom that clings to all iterations of Slender Man appearances to date. However, the writer also shows an affinity with traditional fairy tales that speak of children’s victimization.33 The posts of the readers to this story are examples of typical reactions in this medium. The Wiki entry has 18 comments by users. The first states: “I am mother could ask for, and this was their undoing. One day, Stela and Sorina were out with their mother gathering berries from the forest. Their mother bid them stay close to her, and they listened, as they were good children. The day was bright and clear, and even as they walked closer to the center of the forest the light barely dimmed. It was nearly bright as noon when they found the tall man. The tall man stood in a clearing, dressed as a nobleman, all in black. Shadows lay over him, dark as a cloudy midnight. He had many arms, all long and boneless as snakes, all sharp as swords, and they writhed like worms on nails. He did not speak, but made his intentions known. Their mother tried not to listen, but she could no more disobey the tall man than she could forget how to breathe. She walked into the clearing, her daughters shortly behind her. “Stela,” she said, “take my knife, and cut a circle on the ground big enough to lie in.” Stela, who was not afraid of the tall man, nor afraid of the quiver in her mother’s voice, obeyed what her mother said. “Sorina,” the mother said, “take the berries and spread them in the circle, and crush them underfoot until the juice stains the earth.” Though Sorina wondered why her mother asked her to do such a thing, she obeyed, because she was a good girl. “Stela,” the mother said, “lie in the circle.” Stela, though she worried she might stain her clothes, did as her mother asked. “Sorina,” the mother said, and bid Sorina cut her sister open with the knife. Sorina could not; would not. “Please,” her mother said. “If you don’t, it will be worse. So much worse.” But Sorina could not, and she threw the knife away and ran home, crying. She hid under her bed, afraid for the first time in her life. She waited until her father came home from the fields, and told him of the terrible thing she had found in the woods. Her father comforted her, and told her she would be safe. He went to the woods, his axe in hand, and as he commanded, she stayed by the hearth, waiting for his return. After some time she fell asleep. When she woke, it was to the sound of knocking on her door at the darkest hour of the night. “Who is there?” she said. “It is your father,” the knocker said. “I don’t believe you!” said Sorina. “It is your sister,” the knocker said. “It cannot be!” said Sorina. “I am your mother,” said the knocker, “and I told you it would be worse.” And the door, locked tight before her father left, fell open as if it had been left ajar. And her mother stepped in, her sister’s head clutched in one bloody hand, her father’s in the other. “Why?” wept Sorina. “Because,” said her mother, “there is no reward for goodness; there is no respite for faith; there is nothing but cold steel teeth and scourging fire for all of us. And it’s coming for you now.” And the tall man slid from the fire, and clenched Sorina in his burning embrace. And that was the end of her “The Slender Man.” 33 Various versions of Red Riding Hood come to mind, although child abuse and murder are noticeable in other tales. The corpus of the Grimm’s fairy tales has about 25 tales that explicitly deal with child abuse. See: Jack Zipes, The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 167.

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romainian on my moms side i live in the us though but we live near the woods and my grandma allways told me this story to keep me out of the woods.”34 This user plays into the fabrication of the legend, adhering to the rules of the site to uphold the fiction of the character. By validating the existence of the fake fairy tale, the user enhances the game-like experience of other users. The second comment on the site is: “i am from Romania and i never heard of this story, but the name of the girls Sorina & Stela (btw i heave an aunt with that name) are from Romania.” This user, on the other hand, negates the experience, but at the same time shows that he or she does not understand the rules of conduct when it comes to the fabrication of creepypasta. It suggests that this user is ready to believe in an actual Slender Man (or Tall Man). Other users commented: “This is clearly a Slenderman story. The bit about it being an old Romanian story is there just to play up on the notion that Slenderman has been around forever.” It shows the constant negotiation between people who are trying to “play the game” and the ones that are reassuring commenters that these stories are, in fact, fictional. The traumatic nature of the background stories shows a preoccupation with children and their victimization. In both tales, little children either disappear or are murdered. It supports the original Slender Man post, in which children vanished as well. However, the historical background pastas elaborate on Slender Man’s affinity with a natural setting. Here, the first seeds of sacrifices hanging from trees, writhing tentacles, and Slender Man’s penchant for residing in woods are sown. Child abuse and victimization were also evident in the blog Just Another Fool, where a traumatized soldier witnessed a bombing in Afghanistan. The doctor relating the story to the principal narrator stated that: The story that we pieced together from Matt’s limited responses was that, in his mind, the Slender Man attacked his squad while in a town. Three of his squadmates’ bodies were thrown into a nearby tree, while the rest of them, as well as two civilian children, were murdered by the Slender Man as well. At some point the bodies became engulfed in flames. I understand that the story isn’t as clear as you might like, but you have to understand that for someone who can’t talk, establishing continuity is a bit of a challenge. What actually happened according to the military is that they were in the town, and one of the children was carrying a bomb, which she detonated. Matt was the only one to survive the attack, and thus he quickly ended up in my care.35

The commonality of child victimization, trauma, violence, and loss occur in other narratives as well. The folkloric stories are impactful because they provide

34 None of the quotes have been edited for spelling and grammar. 35 “Response,” Just Another Fool (blog), August 11, 2009, http://jafool.wordpress.com/2009/08/ 11/response, (accessed May 15, 2015).

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the historical background to more modern tales as noted in Knudsen’s original pictures and Just Another Fool. The question then is what influence the Romanian and the German tales have on furthering Slender Man’s image as an old legend. Just as the horror genre explores the darker side of human nature, so do fairy tales.36 Jack Zipes states the psychological influence that fairy tales have on children and adults: What is significant here is that children in contemporary society respond intuitively to symbolic tales of past experiences that are historical representations of familial problems and problems of power that have continued to hinder the development of compassionate social relations. And, of course, we as adults continue to be attracted to these tales, repressing those that are perhaps too explicit in exposing adult cruelty and choosing those that apparently resolve problems of child abuse.37

In traditional fairy tales, the happy ending ensures the satisfying resolution of all conflict. Psychologically the reader is reassured and eased. Maria Tatar also noted the pattern of victimization and retaliation when the child victim finally gains the upper hand and deals revenge to his or her abuser, as in some versions of Red Riding Hood.38 However, the Slender Man narratives in their “fake” historical and folkloric context provide no such solace. This is at once part and parcel of the expectation of the entire Slender Man Mythos, but it also points to a psychological nexus in what writers and readers expect. Since Slender Man exhibits no apparent motivation for his crimes and since the children he victimizes can never defend themselves, the tragic outcome is far more realistic than a conciliatory fairy tale ending. Despite the medieval setting and the folkloristic style, the stories themselves explore psychological issues of child abuse (this includes teenagers) and traumatization. This is, of course, not only a 21st-century phenomenon but is a prevalent theme in modern literature and the media. It is also one of the deepest fears. Slender Man narratives explore the issues of child abuse, trauma, and loss from a desolate and despondent stand-point. The protagonists are unable to withstand the monster ; they are overpowered, at times suffer from amnesia and do not remember any abusive acts they might have committed or that were done

36 One has to differentiate between folkloric and literary fairy tales, but essentially the theme of child abuse is explored in each. The literary fairy tales grew out of the oral tradition. And it is no wonder that in order to invoke an aura of “authenticity” the modern tellers of Slender Man stories choose the folkloric flair and “fake” their own versions. 37 Zipes, The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World, 173–174. For more on child victimization in fairy tales refer to Maria Tatar, Off with Their Heads!: Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992). 38 Maria Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 190.

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to them. The YouTube series Marble Hornets exemplifies this process very well.39 Here, the protagonists only find out what has happened after viewing themselves on video recordings. And so, Slender Man represents the faceless horror of victimization and the inability to control situations, actions, and other people. This loss of control leads to the cruel traumatization and the loss of children and, for all that it is fiction, is frighteningly realistic.

American Imaginations of the Medieval and Slender Man In a 2012 BBC broadcast, Aleks Krotoski investigated how stories are told in the digital world with a particular emphasis on Slender Man tales. “Digital storytelling is … completely interactive and participatory so it allows for, in terms of storytelling, to make use of all of these tools [blogs, video, social media] in really interesting and fascinating combinations. I think that’s where we are going, not exactly back to orality, but to certainly something that is much more like oral tradition…”40 Moreover, if Tom Petitt’s statement is taken into consideration, oral tradition is transformed via digital media to make way for new interactive storytelling. The exciting fact about the development of the Slender Mythos is that researchers can see “oral” legend making in progress. What a medievalist cannot do is find the origins of the Nibelung cycle in all its details or the exact origins of King Arthur. The end products are all we have, but the detailed process of how it happened has been lost to time. So, watching the Slender Man narratives unfold is a fascinating journey into how legend making occurs. At the same time as Slender Man narratives can be used to explore the process of legend-making, the stories are also embedded in the modern American fascination with “medieval stuff.” Slender Man, at first, a monster without a cultural and historical setting soon developed a complex and ever-increasing legendary background. Most of the previous “sightings” of Slender Man could be found in a Western Medieval environment.41 The medieval stories in which Slender Man became embedded followed traditional folkloric storytelling. Furthermore,

39 Alex Kralie, Marble Hornets, YouTube Video, Found Footage, (2009), https://www.youtube. com/user/MarbleHornets. 40 “Aleks [Krotoski] speaks to A.S. Byatt to understand what a story is for before examining how modern online storytelling bears a striking resemblance to oral traditions of mediaeval times. To see this in action she explores the growth of the Slender Man myth and how its community based evolution mimics how legends grew in the past” “Tales,” Digital Human (BBC Radio, October 29, 2012), http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01nl671. 41 “The Slender Man.”

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medieval images were manipulated in such a way to give Slender Man historical validity. One wonders why precisely a medieval setting emerged? Umberto Eco was not the first one to mention that each one of us possesses the unique disposition to imagine their version of the middle age(s).42 However, as much as we have individualized views, there are certain stereotypical images that have been perpetuated in the American imagination. From Hollywood’s early interpretations of Robin Hood and the Arthurian cycle, to movies like First Knight (1995) and A Knight’s Tale (2001), all the way to the pseudo-medieval phenomenon of Game of Thrones – not to name the ubiquitous medievalized video games (Dragon Age, Skyrim, etc.) – the American imagination has run wild with medieval images. Looking at German Expressionist cinema, Siegfried Kracauer remarked on the unseen dynamics of human relations and recurrent stereotypical images. He maintained that they “are more or less characteristic of the inner life of the nation from which the films emerge… Persistent reiteration of these motifs marks them as outward projections of inner urges. And they obviously carry most symptomatic weight when they occur in both popular and unpopular films, in grade B pictures as well as in super-productions.”43 The duplication of the same images reflects inner psychological currents. The medieval period is not re-created but instead filled with ideals and fears that show current social ideas and wish-fulfilments. At the same time as these urges manifest themselves in the media, the constant reiteration of these images leads to stereotyped views of an entire historical period. Kracauer draws attention to Hollywood “super-productions” and “B pictures,” and is correct in his assessment that the images have to occur in many media to carry weight. By extension, internet memes and creepypastas reinforce the same ideas and imaginations that modern film and fiction perpetuate. Since this reinforcement occurs on all levels, there is a meta-social identification with the medieval period that would be otherwise impossible. Images such as the “knight in shining armor” or the “damsel in distress” are ideas that have gained such a strong hold in our social consciousness for that very reason. Therefore, it 42 Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyper Reality : Essays, trans. William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986). 43 Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler : A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947), 8. He also states: “The films of a nation reflect its mentality in a more direct way than other artistic media for two reasons: First, films are never the product of an individual. Since any film production unit embodies a mixture of heterogeneous interests and inclinations, teamwork in this field tends to exclude arbitrary handling of screen material, suppressing individual peculiarities in favor of traits common to many people. Second, films address themselves, and appeal, to the anonymous multitude. Popular films – or, to be more precise, popular screen motifs – can therefore be supposed to satisfy existing mass desires” (5).

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is an easy choice to place Slender Man into a pseudo-medieval construct because the reinforced images of the medieval will automatically be triggered in the perceptions of the audience. Not much more work is needed to evoke these ideas than choosing the historical setting. However, Slender Man represents the fears of the present and also symbolizes the hopelessness of imagining a future. The future is a blank, faceless void: an impossibility. With that in mind, the creators of Slender Man stories turn to the past. We need to control our environment in predictable and reliable patterns and achieve it by giving Slender Man a historical construct. With an explanation of his existence, we validate our fears but within the safe environment of the past. After all, the monster has “existed” for hundreds of years. The imaginary medieval landscape becomes the nexus that harbors the darkest fears and is the origin of evil monsters. Tison Pugh and Angela Weisl state: What is more interesting in the study of medievalisms, then, is not whether a particular trope, or text should be prefixed with neo before its medievalism, but how and why the artists looking back to the Middle Ages create this particular past, in whichever historical, semi-historical, or magical incarnation they desire.44

Slender Man is a new monster. He is the incarnation of social communities that collectively create art and literature. However, as much as Slender Man was born out of an American cultural context because no immediate background was at hand, one had to be imagined.45 Contributors took it upon themselves to create it, and the most imaginative historical information was medieval. Slender Man embodies the curious relationship of American culture to a very remote medieval past or the lack thereof. On one hand, there is the longing for historical veracity and exact placement in the European Middle Ages to lend authenticity to America’s heritage. At the same time, the remoteness of the Middle Ages is the perfect setting for monstrous entities – as if the Middle Ages themselves, popularly described as “dark” and “barbaric” lend their shadowy image to the newly created monster. Interestingly, it is not a British heritage but a German one in which Slender 44 Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl, Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present (London: Routledge, 2013), 4. 45 Knudsen’s inspiration for creating Slender Man came from different sources: “I was mostly influenced by H.P Lovecraft, Stephan King (sic) (specifically his short stories), the surreal imaginings of William S. Burroughs, and couple games of the survival horror genre; Silent Hill and Resident Evil. I feel the most direct influences were Zack Parsons’s “That Insidious Beast”, the Steven King (sic) short story “The Mist”, the SA tale regarding “The Rake,” reports of so-called shadow people, Mothman, and the Mad Gasser of Mattoon. I used these to formulate asomething (sic.) whose motivations can barely be comprehended and causes general unease and terror in a general population” (“Victor Surge,” interview by “Tomberry,” “Interview with Victor Surge, creator of Slender Man,” http://knowyourmeme.com. Accessed May 15, 2015).

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Man was embedded. The American obsession with German history is undoubtedly exacerbated by the Second World War. Unending documentaries on the History Channel alone can attest to that. The Nazis were notorious for creating their myths out of a Germanic and Norse past. With the American fixation about German history come stereotypes and negative connotations that are readily transmitted to a medieval setting, showing a seemingly unrelenting, monolithic horror of German monstrosity from medieval to modern times. On the other hand, the preoccupation with childhood trauma in these origin stories points to our contemporary anxieties. Because this threat is faceless and all-consuming, we show the remorseless process – the continuation and obsession – with the victimization of children and the loss of innocence. Our psychological struggles are realized in Slender Man’s historical background glimpsed in fairy tales and folklore. We have placed his monstrous origin directly in an ongoing deliberation on child abuse. If Slender Man can teach us anything then surely it is that we are legend makers and storytellers. However, we are also deeply entrenched in our cultural heritage, so that even an internet monster, a meme, a viral image has to conform to our expectations and negotiations with the past. This fictional thing finds its roots in the idea of the medieval, a dark origin story for a sinister monster.

Bibliography Bosman, Julie. “Pine Ridge Indian Reservation Struggles with Suicides among Its Young.” New York Times, May 1, 2015. http://nyti.ms/1GBtqXv. Boyer, Tina Marie. “The Anatomy of a Monster : The Case of Slender Man.” Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural 2, no. 2 (2013): 240–61. Cardwell, Paul Jr. “The Attacks on Role-Playing Games.” Skeptical Inquirer 18, no. 2 (1994): 157–65. Chess, Shira. “Open Sourcing Horror: The Slender Man, Marble Hornets, and Genre Negotiations.” Information, Communication & Society 15, no. 3 (2012): 374–93. Chess, Shira, and Eric Newsom. Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man: The Development of an Internet Mythology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Monster Theory : Reading Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Dendle, Peter. “Conclusion: Monsters and the Twenty-First Century : The Preternatural in an Age of Scientific Consensus.” In Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, edited by Asa Simon Mittman and Peter Dendle, 437–48. Ashgate Research Companion. Burlington: Ashgate, 2012. Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyper Reality : Essays. Translated by William Weaver. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. Ellis, Bill. Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults: Legends We Live. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001.

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Evans, Brad. “Hamilton Co. Mom: Daughter’s Knife Attack Influenced by Slender Man.” WLWT5. June 6, 2014. http://www.wlwt.com/news/hamilton-co-mom-daughtersknife-attack-influenced-by-slender-man/26370588?_escaped_fragment_=WAFFp#! WAFFp. Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. Edited by David McLintock and Hugh Haughton. New York: Penguin Books, 2003. Hanna, Jason, and Dana Ford. “12-Year-Old Wisconsin Girl Stabbed 19 Times; Friends Arrested.” CNN, June 14, 2014. http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/03/justice/wisconsingirl-stabbed/. Jones, Abigail. “The Girls Who Tried to Kill for Slender Man.” Newsweek, August 13, 2014. http://www.newsweek.com/2014/08/22/girls-who-tried-kill-slender-man-264218.html. Knudsen, Eric. “Create Paranormal Images.” Something Awful, June 10, 2009. Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler : A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947. Kralie, Alex. Marble Hornets. YouTube Video, Found Footage, 2009. https://www.youtube. com/user/MarbleHornets. Krotoski, Aleks. “Tales.” Digital Human. BBC Radio, October 29, 2012. http://www.bbc.co. uk/programmes/b01nl671. Melrose, Kevin. “Teen Claims ‘Soul Eater,’ Slender Man Led Her to Set Home on Fire.” Comic Book Resources, September 8, 2014. http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/ 2014/09/teen-claims-soul-eater-slender-man-led-her-to-set-home-on-fire/. Pettitt, Tom. “Before The Gutenberg Parenthesis: Elizabethan-American Compatibilities.” Plenary : Folk Cultures and Digital Cultures presented at the Media in Transition 5: Creativity, Ownership and Collaboration in the Digital Age, April 1, 2010. http://web. mit.edu/comm-forum/forums/gutenberg_parenthesis.html. Pugh, Tison, and Angela Jane Weisl. Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present. London: Routledge, 2013. Tatar, Maria. Off with Their Heads!: Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992. . The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987. “The Slender Man.” Wiki. CreepyPasta Wiki, May 1, 2015. http://creepypasta.wikia.com/ wiki/The_Slender_Man. Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew. “Invisible Monsters: Vision, Horror, and Contemporary Culture.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, edited by Asa Simon Mittman and Peter Dendle, 275–89. Ashgate Research Companion. Burlington: Ashgate, 2012. Zipes, Jack. The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

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Medieval Iberian Studies: Borders, Bridges, Fences Men resemble their times more than their fathers.

Playing on Guy Debord’s quote, Zygmunt Bauman faulted modern-day women and men for living in a present oblivious of the past and without hope for the future.1 Bauman theorizes our present historical condition of globalized capitalism not as “postmodernity,” “second modernity,” or “surmodernity” but as “liquid” because it has dissolved modernity’s solid, nation-bound order. Our liquid modernity, according to the Polish sociologist, is characterized by a changing relationship between space and time. Space has become irrelevant, “masquerading as the annihilation of time;” “in the software universe of lightspeed travel, space may be traversed, literally ‘in no time,’” cancelling “the difference between ‘far away’ and ‘down here.’”2 Perhaps our own collapsed context sparks the recent interest in medieval spatial concepts, ideologies of space, and critique of national and cultural boundaries.3 Back in finite time, one of American medievalists’ most cherished institutions, the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, Michigan, celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in May 2015. I was invited to speak on a panel about medieval Iberian studies in the last fifty years. In search of an effective way to restrict such an unmanageable topic and to compress in my allotted fifteen minutes something meaningful about the development of the discipline formerly known as Hispanomedievalism, I chose to analyze the changes in subtitles of La corjnica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures and Cultures, where I was editor-in–chief between 2007 and 2012. The e-archives of La corjnica and past Kalamazoo and MLA congresses allowed me instant access to the transactions of those fundamental organizations for Iberomedievalists. As I was writing the paper, I had to confront an uneasiness elicited by the 1 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 128. 2 Ibid., 117. 3 For a succinct survey of the most recent trends, see the editors’ “Introduction,” in Locating the Middle Ages: The Spaces and Places of Medieval Culture, ed. Julian Weiss and Sarah Salih (London: Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, King’s College London, 2012), xv–xxvi.

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discipline’s name change. Did my Castilian origins predispose me to accept the nationalization of Castilian culture – Hispanism as ideology – and make me highly suspect of narrow-mindedness?4 From this intellectual location of shame and insecurity, I started soul-searching about my cultural biases and my affective relationship to Iberia. What was this location that had displaced Spain in my field? Before the rise of cultural studies and theory-oriented criticism, Iberia was used in medieval studies mostly by two groups: Anglo-American historians for whom the geographical term was a concise way to designate the area now occupied by the modern countries of Portugal and Spain and Catalan literary scholars who rejected Hispanomedievalism for its association with Castilian centralism. Not until the 1990s, in the midst of the culture wars, did Iberia begin to appear regularly in scholarship.5 As early as the 1989 Kalamazoo Congress, Joseph T. Snow had launched the Ibero-Medieval Association of North America (IMANA) to include non-Castilian and non-Latin works in the sessions and activities of the ever-growing group. In 1995, Colbert Nepaulsing identified a “sea-change” in Hispanomedievalism, reflecting that while traditional criticism acknowledged the multicultural range of medieval Spanish literature, it failed to recognize “the monocultural biases that most critics bring to the text.”6 Medieval Iberian Studies emerged in response to the larger crisis of Hispanism in US higher education. Faculty in Spanish and Portuguese departments, independently or in the larger frames of Romance or Modern Languages departments, traditionally practiced this field of study. The uneasy mixture of disciplines, methodologies, and geographical span included under American Hispanism, which can be loosely defined as the study of Hispanic language, literature, and culture, is too complex to summarize here.7 Suffice it to say that its 4 For the ideology of Hispanismo, see Enric Bou, “On Rivers and Maps: Iberian Approaches to Comparatism,” in New Spain, New Literatures, ed. Nicholas Spadaccini and Luis Mart&nEstudillo (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2010); Sebastiaan Faber, Anglo-American Hispanists and the Spanish Civil War (New York: Palgrave, 2008); “Economies of Prestige: The Place of Iberian Studies in the American University,” Hispanic Research Journal 9, no. 1 (2008): 7–32; the collection of essays in Mabel MoraÇa, Ideologies of Hispanism (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005), in particular Joan Ramon Resina, “Whose Hispanism? Cultural Trauma, Disciplined Memory, and Symbolic Dominance.” 5 An overview of La corjnica in those years produces titles of critical clusters, such as “Early Medieval Iberian Lyric” and “Bringing Iberian Women into the Canon,” and reviews of such titles as Queer Iberia, alternating with the use of “medieval Spain.” 6 Colbert I. Nepaulsing, “Rachel and Vidas Monocultural Criticism,” La corjnica 28, no. 1 (1999), 233. 7 The interested reader may consult the collection of articles in MoraÇa, Ideologies of Hispanism. Faber, Anglo-American Hispanists; “Economies of Prestige;” and Joan Ramon Resina, Del hispanismo a los estudios ib8ricos: una propuesta federativa para el #mbito cultural (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2009).

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branch, Peninsular Studies, has been increasingly losing ground to Latin American Studies for the past forty years in inverse proportion to the situation in departments of history, where the number of specialists in medieval Iberia continues to rise.8 A full renovation of the field was required to justify its academic existence and, as such, Iberian Cultural Studies is “the latest phase in the long struggle for status and prestige that has marked the institutional history of Hispanism in the American academy.”9 As editor of La corjnica, I tried to maintain Hispanomedievalism in the mission statement with this expansive definition: Devoted to Hispanomedievalism in its broadest sense, La corjnica also welcomes scholarship that transcends the linguistic and/or cultural borders of Spanish and explores the interconnectedness of those languages and cultures that coexisted in medieval Iberia.

However, the persistence of Iberia in the last line implies methodologies that reach beyond the monolithic, proto-nationalist narrative implied in Hispanism as an ideology. In its association with Castilian nationalism, Hispania and Hispanic cannot possibly compete in English with Iberia and Iberian, which are free of any kind of political or otherwise imperial associations; moreover, they reflect the musical-sounding, encompassing, theoretical space of indeterminacy so dear to our liquid modernity. By 2003, the term had acquired full currency : E. Michael Gerli edited Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia for Routledge, and in 2014, it became institutionalized when the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association, in response to the intellectual changes in the profession over the last four decades, approved a proposal for a new division and discussion group structure starting with the 2016 convention. The old division, Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures and Cultures, is now the forum Medieval Iberia as part of the LLC group (literature, language, and culture).10 This latest label defines the field as part of a larger Iberian Comparatism “focused on issues of inclusion and difference, non-hierarchical approaches, and an emphasis on multilingualism” that, as Enric Bou claims, “would do much to lead Europe” – and the United States, I may add – “on a path towards inclusiveness and respect for the Other.”11 The question remains: what is “medieval Iberia?” As a geographical marker of 8 Simon Doubleday, “Hacia la descolonizacijn del concepto de convivencia: algunos apuntes sobre el contexto norteamericano,” in La influencia de la historiograf&a espaÇola en la produccijn histjrica americana, ed. Ariel Guiance (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2011), 65. 9 Faber, “Economies of Prestige,” 8. 10 For a complete list of the forums, visit https://executivecouncil.commons.mla.org/list-ofmla-forums/. 11 Bou, “On Rivers and Maps,” 23.

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the past, it fits Weiss’s definition of a chronotrope, or a “place in time made up of topographies, events and peoples, which act like the co-ordinates of a map read not for its historical reliability but as a memory cue, helping an audience recall past cultural, political and economic relationships and processes in and for the present.”12 The motif of thinking about the past as a way to think about ourselves – clearly a familiar justification for our medieval courses – is made explicit by Mar&a Rosa Menocal, for whom the study of medieval Iberia sheds light on past societies “as well as our own.”13 She defends the use of the term “to undo the damage of hundreds of years of misnaming and misperceptions” and points out the bliss afforded by Iberian literature “in all its glorious messy inconsistencies and multiplicities.”14 In the same 2006 issue of Diacritics where Menocal’s “Why Iberia?” appeared,15 Jean Dangler’s “Edging toward Iberia” searched for a holistic name that could break down the temporal and geographic barriers imposed by national narratives. She preferred the fullness of Iberia as capturing the “political and cultural fluidity” of that place in time and rejected Hispania as anachronistic and narrow for failing to represent cultural productions other than Castilian Romance and Latin and for its association with the modern nation-state of Spain and its nation-building process.16 However, her liquid vocabulary throughout the argument – “fluidity,” the “melting of borders” as she edges toward them, the “varying” and “fragmentary” – evokes the contemporary managerial world where “business organization is increasingly seen as a never conclusive, ongoing attempt ‘to form an island of superior adaptability’ in a world perceived as ‘multiple, complex and fast moving, and therefore as ‘ambiguous,’ ‘fuzzy’ or ‘plastic.’”17 Dangler was attempting to approach her field “in a way that demonstrates medieval issues and values rather than modern ones,” yet, while her analysis is a nuanced exposition informed by postcolonial theory, her definition of medieval Iberia as “a network of interrelated attachments between varying individuals and groups,” as “a space of struggle and reconciliation,”18 also de12 Julian Weiss, “Remembering Spain in the Medieval European Epic: A Prospect,” in Locating the Middle Ages: The Spaces and Places of Medieval Culture, ed. Julian Weiss and Sarah Salih (London: King’s College Centre for Late and Antique Medieval Studies, 2012), 69. 13 Mar&a Rosa Menocal, “Why Iberia?” Diacritics 36, no. 3–4 (2006), 11. 14 Ibid., 8. 15 It was a monographic number called “Theories of Medieval Iberia.” 16 Jean Dangler, “Edging toward Iberia,” Diacritics 36, no. 3–4 (2006), 20. 17 Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 117, citing Thrift’s “The Rise of Soft Capitalism.” 18 Dangler, “Edging toward Iberia,” 13 and 24. For the anthropological concept of communities of practice as “a group with a common sense of purpose nested within a larger network … consisting not merely of individuals but also of concepts, technologies, theories, and such,” see Timothy Kuhn, “Negotiating Boundaries between Scholars and Practitioners,” Management Communication Quarterly, 16, no. 1 (2002), 108.

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scribes the negotiation processes among the communities of practice, methodologies, and theories of Medieval Iberian Studies learning and innovation. What is Iberia? Rummaging through the sociology of science and information studies, I propose to consider the Iberian chronotope from the perspective of the actor-network theory as a dynamic boundary object: a purposeful construct that crosses boundaries between perspectives and communities of practice by facilitating translation of ideas and information, encouraging cooperation, and defining the field’s identity.19 My method of analysis fits comfortably in the restless mix of methods that has characterized Hispanism historically and illuminates the structuring process that mediates the American understanding of Iberian medieval.

Boundaries Spanish exceptionalism, the fact that Spain belongs to Europe geographically but differs culturally, is never more evident than in the eight-centuries long contact of Latin-Christian kingdoms with a dynamic Arabo-Islamic culture and thriving Jewish minorities on both sides of the Islamic-Christian political divide. The scarcity of Romance literary texts – particularly that most medieval genre, the epic – and their belatedness, as compared to the manuscript-rich French literary tradition, added to the sense of backwardness. The peninsula’s multicultural peculiarity was used to justify Hispanomedievalism’s disciplinary identity and its marginalization in American medieval studies, where the dominance of England and France placed the Iberian Middle Ages in the subaltern position of orientalized Other.20 In Spain, the narrative of national philology was established by historian 19 For my analysis of boundary objects, I am following M. S. Feldman et al., “Ways of Knowing and Inclusive Management Practices,” Public Administration Review 66 (2006): 89–99; K. R. Fleischmann, “Boundary Object with Agency : A Method for Studying the Design-Use Interface,” Information Society 22, no. 2 (2006): 77–87; Uri Gal et al., “The Dynamics of IT Boundary Objects, Information Infrastructures, and Organisational Identities,” European Journal of Information Systems 17 (2008): 290–304; and Kuhn, “Negotiating Boundaries.” The concept of boundary object was developed by Susan Leight Star and James R. Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeleys’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1903–39,” Social Studies of Science 19, no. 3 (1989): 387–420. 20 For the precarious institutional position of Hispanism in American academia, see Faber, Anglo-American Hispanists; “Economies of Prestige.” Resina addresses the isolation and lack of relevance of Peninsular Studies in “Whose Hispanism?” The colonized status of Medieval Iberian Studies is adroitly stated by Dagenais and Greer in their introduction to the critical cluster “Decolonizing the Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30, no. 3 (2000): 431–48.

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Ramjn Men8ndez Pidal (1869–1968), who crafted Hispanomedievalism’s canon from a lost tradition of Castilian epic, latent in oral ballads, with fragments surviving in historiographical texts. His scholarship was a patriotic response to positivist European criticism of Spanish cultural insignificance as well as the 1898 Spanish-American War, which shattered the country’s self-image.21 Like his contemporaries, in particular those intellectuals known collectively as the Generation of ‘98, Men8ndez Pidal found national identity in this latent Castilian soul that flowed through history, determining cultural evolution.22 This ideology was imported into US academia by philologist Am8rico Castro, a student of Men8ndez Pidal, who was exiled from Spain during the Civil War and taught at the Universities of Wisconsin and Texas before accepting an endowed chair at Princeton in 1940 and a postretirement appointment at the University of California San Diego until his death in 1968. Castro followed his former professor in restricting medieval Spain to Castile, but its template is the violently confrontational country he left behind.23 Castro reimagines Spanish difference as a hybrid identity, emerging in the Middle Ages as a result of the contact among the three ethno-religious groups – Christians, Muslims, and Jews – the now much-contested theory of convivencia.24 His comparatist method influenced generations of American Hispanists and drove deeper the wedge between the two views of Spanish history – Men8ndez Pidal’s national-Castilianism vs. Castro’s cultural hybridity – and between two methodologies of philology – the interpretive literary and cultural criticism prevalent in North America and the 21 See E. Michael Gerli, “Inventing the Middle Ages: Ramjn Men8ndez Pidal, Spanish Cultural History, and Ideology in Philology,” La corjnica 30, no. 1 (2001); also Catherine Brown, for whom the invention of the medieval corpus served to “pedigree that most desperately important of things for a scholar of Pidal’s generation – a coherent and continuous *Spanish* Identity that would order the losses, divisions, and fragmentation of Spanish modern history,” with asterisks in the original, “The Relics of Men8ndez Pidal; Mourning and Melancholia in Hispanomedieval Studies,” La corjnica 24, no. 1 (1995), 34. 22 Joan Ramon Resina, “Hispanism and Its Discontents,” Siglo XX/20th Century 14, no. 1–2 (1996): 106–12. 23 Brian A. Catlos, “Christian-Muslim-Jewish Relations, Medieval ‘Spain,’ and the Mediterranean: An Historiographical Op-Ed,” in In and Of the Mediterranean: Medieval and Early Modern Iberian Studies, ed. Michelle Hamilton and Nfflria Silleras-Fern#ndez (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2015): 6. 24 A useful review of the history of convivencia until 2009 can be found in Kenneth Baxter Wolf, “Convivencia in Medieval Spain: A Brief History of An Idea,” Religion Compass 3, no.1 (2009). For a more recent view, see Brian A. Catlos, Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, C. 1050–1614 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). For Szpiech, the debate over convivencia is a consequence of the “opposed reactions to the conflict of method in the human sciences in the wake of the linguistic turn,” “The Convivencia Wars: Decoding Historiography’s Polemic with Philology,” in A Sea of Languages: Rethinking the Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History, ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Karla Malette (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2013), 136.

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empiricist philology of Spanish academia.25 As Szpiech remarks in analyzing the origins of the methodological split between Spanish and US scholars, the divide between a “scientific” approach to language and history and interdisciplinary interpretive criticism is “the product of unsettled rivalries generated by the shared disciplinary history of philology, historiography, and literary criticism.”26 As the institutional position of Peninsular Hispanism was weakened in American departments by its lack of relevance to Latin America, and Hispanomedievalism continued to lag behind the great European literatures, “medieval Spain” suddenly became pertinent as a consequence of the tragic events of September 11, 2001. One of Osama bin Laden’s broadcasts invoked “the tragedy of al-Andalus,” the Arabic term for the Iberian peninsula. Mar&a Rosa Menocal, a philologist and cultural historian at Yale, whose tremendous impact in American Hispanomedievalim exceeds that of Castro, had just finished the writing of The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain when the terrorist attack occurred. Four years later, she would acknowledge that dark moment as the “perfect storm” or “tipping point” for the discipline because “medieval Spain has become relevant, even chic.”27 By then, The Ornament enjoyed a vast readership, translated into numerous languages, including Arabic and Japanese, although, like Castro’s work,

25 Even now, Spanish philologists who approach their field as textual criticism and manuscript scholarship feel that their American colleagues only access primary sources through modern editions without touching codices, incunabula, or manuscripts of any kind, as one juror protested when casting the vote to select the winner of that year’s La corjnica Book Award. In this objection lurks the disparagement of interpretive critics expressed by J. Ribera in 1928. According to the venerable Arabist, his work was considered at the level of “a literary labourer … extracting raw materials for the benefit of those amateurs, masters of the literary arts, great thinkers and expert sociologists, engineers or architects of history, who proceed then to polish the texts with their art to make them acceptable for public consumption” [Capaz fflnicamente de hacer faenas de jornalero literario, de pejn dedicado a extraer materiales medio en bruto con el fin de que esos aficionados, maestros en las artes literarias, grandes pensadores y profundos socioljgos, ingenieros o arquitectos de la historia, los pulan, aderecen y arreglen con arte para hacerlos agradables al pfflblico] Cit. Manuela Mar&n. “Arabistas en EspaÇa, un estudio de familia,” Al-Qantara 2 (1992): 389–90; my translation. The list of current research projects at SEMYR (Seminario de Estudios Medievales y Renacentistas) at the Universidad de Salamanca evinces a clear preference for textual criticism and manuscript scholarship (http://campus.usal.es/~semyr/?page_id=19). 26 Szpiech, “The Convivencia Wars,” 136. See also Nadia Altschul and Bradley Nelson, “Transatlantic Discordances: The Problem of Philology,” Hispanic Issues Online 2 (2007) for the discordances between North American and Spanish approaches to medieval and early modern studies. 27 Menocal, “Why Iberia?” 8.

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it “received at best a mixed and at worst a hostile reception in Spain, when it has received any reaction at all.”28 Menocal’s untimely death in 2012 cut short an illustrious career in some ways spurred by an incentive similar to Men8ndez Pidal’s: demonstrating the magnitude of Spain’s contribution to European culture. Her most popular book appeared at a time of profound trauma that weakened American self-confidence. More in consonance with Castro – she studied with Samuel Armistead, one of his students – and with her comparatist training – she received one of the last PhDs in Romance Philology – she explored Spain’s pluri-lingual and mixed heritage with an emphasis on its Semitic tradition. Castile was just one of the many components. This cursory glance at some of the actors in North American Hispanomedievalism – philologists, historians, critics in all the cultural and linguistic traditions of the Iberian peninsula – does not account for other communities of practice, such as undergraduate students, doctoral candidates, university administrators, and tourists. Their heterogeneous ways of knowing can be conceptualized as ever-changing networks in which nonhuman actants, such as libraries, technologies, and governmental agencies, offer equally important contributions to the renovation of Hispanomedievalism. Actants’ needs and interests are a direct consequence of their ways of knowing, but new ways of knowing may emerge with new concerns and demands. For instance, contemporary mass engagement in the medieval pilgrimage route known as the Camino de Santiago – the Way of St. James – in northern Spain developed in the 1970s due to individual interest in pilgrimage and its sites: Fathers Javier Navarro, Canon at the Colegiata in Roncesvalles, and El&as ValiÇa Sampedro, Priest of O Cebreiro, the first hamlet entering Galicia. David Gitlitz and Linda Davidson lead university study trips from the United States.29 As interest increased, the Way, with its towns and churches, was proclaimed the first European Cultural Itinerary by the Council of Europe in 1987 and a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1993. Today, it is “a fashionable topic for study by art historians, musicologists, historians, literary scholars, anthropologists and archeologists”30 and attracts more than 200,000 pilgrims each year. Interest was further fueled in the US by Emilio Est8vez’s film The Way (2010) with Martin Sheen as pilgrim-protagonist.31 The College of William & Mary sponsors the Institute for Pilgrimage 28 Lourdes Alvares and Ryan Szpiech, “A Sea of Histories: An Introduction,” La corjnica 43, no. 1 (2014), 100. 29 Maryjane Dunn, “The Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela: A Bibliographical Update,” La corjnica 36, no.2 (2008), 416. 30 Ibid., 415–16. 31 The variety of disciplinary approaches is evident in the monographic issue edited by John K. Moore and Thomas D. Spaccarelli, “The Road to Santiago and Pilgrimage,” La corjnica 36,

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Studies, which supports and organizes the annual conference of the international Consortium on Pilgrimage Studies, and facilitates undergraduate and graduate interdisciplinary research through its summer program in Santiago de Compostela.32 Similarly, British travelers and historians of the Romantic period idealized alAndalus as a hybrid-society model of tolerance and it was enthusiastically embraced by 19th-century Spanish thinkers, who attributed the country’s decadence to the Catholic monarchy’s intolerance after 1492. In the last years of Franco’s regime, interest revived as a reaction to Men8ndez Pidal’s prevalent proto-nationalist narrative; al-Andalus was presented as a genuinely Spanish historical model to guide the transition to democracy.33 A simplification of Castro’s theory of convivencia was much touted in Spain around the 1992 quincentennial celebrations of Columbus’s arrival in the New World as a mirror image of diverse, tolerant, democratic Spain. It was particularly popular among journalists and teachers in France, a country with a large and poorly assimilated immigrant population from the Maghreb, who thought providing Muslim children a social model of tolerance and a reason for pride in the glories of their ancestors would facilitate their integration.34 After the September 11 attacks and the war on terror, Menocal’s The Ornament of the World popularized in the US the vision of Andalusi society as a model of peaceful co-existence applicable to contemporary multicultural societies. While popular in tone and style, her thesis was quite nuanced, propounding Andalusi openness to contradictions and the crucial role of Arabic poetry in European culture. She had developed it earlier in scholarly works, such as The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History : A Forgotten Heritage, and it could be framed in the scholarly critique of convivencia raging since the 1970s. American concerns about fundamentalist Islam led to a PBS program, Cities of Light: The Rise and Fall of Islamic Spain, which included the voices of renowned historians no. 2 (2008). Statistics about pilgrims can be consulted in http://www.followthecamino.com/ blog/statistics-pilgrimage-2014-camino-de-santiago/. 32 http://www.wm.edu/sites/pilgrimage/index.php. 33 See a critique of contemporary myths about al-Andalus in Federico Corriente, “Tres mitos contempor#neos frente a la realidad de Alandalffls: Romanticismo Filo#rabe, ‘Cultura moz#rabe’ y ‘cultura sefard&,’” in Orientalismo exotismo y traduccijn, ed. Eduardo Manzano Moreno et al. (Cuencia: Ediciones de la Universidad Castilla-La Mancha, 2000). For alAndalus as the lost paradise of peaceful harmony, see Mercedes Garc&a Arenal, “Introduccijn,” in Al-Andalus allende el Atl#ntico, (Granada: Ediciones UNESCO, 1997). 34 See Rosa Mar&a de Madariaga, “En torno a al-Andalus: Extrapolaciones histjricas y utilizaciones abusivas,” in Orientalismo, Exotismo y traduccijn, ed. Gonzalo Fern#ndez Parrilla and Manuel C. Feria Garc&a (Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 2000). Madariaga mentions this experience and others during her tenure as director of a cultural project for UNESCO, “Contribucijn de la cultura #rabe a las culturas iberoamericanas a trav8s de EspaÇa y Portugal.”

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– Olivia Remi Constable, Brian Catlos, David Nirenberg – and loosely followed Menocal’s narrative in The Ornament. As a companion to the documentary, UPF, a nonprofit organization working for peace through the media, created a website where middle and high school teachers can find lesson plans, supplemental readings, and resources “as part of a research effort to explore students’ understanding of tolerance and pluralism through the lens of world history,” a noble aim reminiscent of French educational efforts in the 1990s.35 More general concerns about migration have led to Border Studies Programs; the University of California at Riverside advertised a tenure-track job that required specialization in the literatures and cultures of Medieval Spain since they “envision Medieval Iberia as an early and compelling example of border studies.”36 North American tourists – perhaps these very professors and their students – pour into “medieval Jewish quarters” in Spain, such as the one in Herv#s, a small town in Extremadura, although not a single source identifies the existence of a segregated Jewish quarter, and, in fact, the area was home to Christian peasants. Flesler and P8rez Melgosa, who have studied present-day festivities related to convivencia in Herv#s and the complexities of adding such cultural initiatives to the marketing of Spain as a tourist destination, play with the double sense of Spanish reconversijn – meaning either the act of converting back or the technical process of industrial modernization – and point out the irony that, five hundred years after the forced conversions of Jews in C#ceres, “in the twenty-first century we are witnessing the phenomenon of the forced reconversion, merely for touristic reasons, of the Christian material patrimony into a fictional Jewish material legacy.”37 The demise of philology in North American doctoral programs meant greater specialization and the emergence of academic silos, particularly in Spanish and Romance Languages departments at the undergraduate level, where dependence on Spanish as a language of instruction obstructs the teaching of Spain’s multiculturalism and multilingualism.38 Younger scholars, trained in cultural studies and comparatist methodology, have moved beyond such boundaries to produce interdisciplinary work of great theoretical breadth.39 While some universities 35 http://www.islamicspain.tv/For-Teachers/index.html. 36 Fall 2007 MLA Job Information List. 37 Daniela Flesler and Adri#n P8rez Melgosa, “Herv#s, Convivencia, and the Heritagization of Spain’s Jewish Past,” Journal of Romance Studies 10, no. 2 (2010), 57. 38 Resina, “Whose Hispanish?” 181. 39 A notable example is Menocal’s disciple Ryan Szpiech, whose latest work Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), winner of the 2015 La corjnica Book Award, is a comparative analysis of Arabic, Hebrew, Catalan, Castilian, and Latin texts in the best philological tradition of literary analysis and intellectual history. Or Nadia R. Altschul, who has successfully applied postcolonial and trans-Atlantic approaches to Spanish philology in her Geographies

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may be phasing out medieval Spanish literature or simply eliminating singleauthor, single-canonical-work courses, other departments are reconfigured as centers for Iberian and Latin American Literatures and Cultures.40 Governmentfunded programs, such as the NEH summer seminars directed by Brian Catlos and Sharon Kinoshita, and the publications that have emerged from them, have broadened Iberian Studies from its European concentration into the comparative framework of the Mediterranean.41 Technology has been pivotal in the discipline’s adaptation to complexity and rapid change. Among the branches of medieval studies most threatened by administrative cuts is historical Romance linguistics, which has disappeared from most US doctoral programs, remaining here and there as an optional subject. Reflecting on its possible demise, Steven Dworkin cautiously added a question mark to the title of a forum on “Historical Romance Linguistics: The Death of a Discipline?” that he edited for La corjnica in 2003, but contributors contrasted the subject’s institutional instability with the vigor of research initiatives disseminated through the internet.42 A superb example of the latter is the extensive digital library of old Spanish texts created by the Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies. Since 2011, it has offered them online, free, and is in the process of making the complete database available.43 Internet access has not completely eliminated travel to research libraries but allows scholars and their students at small institutions instant contact with abundant materials once restricted to top research universities. Individual initiatives have led to important projects, such as Dorothy S. Severin’s An

40 41

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of Philological Knowledge: Postcoloniality and the Transatlantic National Epic, which received an honorable mention for the MLA-Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for an outstanding book published in English or Spanish in the field of Latin American and Spanish literatures and cultures. Columbia University, Stanford University and University of Notre Dame are a few examples. For the creation of new departments, see Stanford’s Iberian and Latin American Cultures, https://dlcl.stanford.edu/departments/iberian-and-latin-american-cultures/about, chaired by Joan Manuel Resina. A recent publication emerging from the NEH summer seminars is Michelle M. Hamilton and Nfflria Silleras-Fern#ndez, eds., In and Of the Mediterranean: Medieval and Early Modern Studies (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2015). Steven N. Dworkin, “Thoughts on the Future of a Venerable and Vital Discipline,” La corjnica 31. No. 2 (2003). For a reassessment of the vitality and future directions available to historical Romance linguistics, see Dworkin’s introduction to the forum, “Further Reflections on ‘Historical Romance Linguistics: The Death of a Discipline?’” La corjnica 34, no.1 (2005): 125–30. The Hispanic Seminary was founded in the 1970s by John J. Nitti and Lloyd A. Kasten at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and continued work initiated by Antonio Garc&a Solalinde, a student of Men8ndez Pidal, at the Seminario de Estudios del EspaÇol Medieval, which he established in 1931 at the same university. The latest online additions, with the support of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and permission of the Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, are the L8xico hispanoamericano, edited by Ray Harris and John Nitti and published on CD-ROM in 2007, and the Corpus of Hispanic Chivalric Romances (Ivy Corfis’s post to MEDIBER, July 31, 2015).

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Electronic Corpus of 15th-Century Castilian Cancionero Manuscripts, sponsored by the universities of Liverpool, Birmingham, and Barcelona, and sustained by collaborators at other institutions. It is an online version of Brian Dutton’s courtly poetry project, adding Severin and Maguire’s larger project of moralistic, didactic, and religious Castilian poetry.44 Another instance of international collaboration is PhiloBiblon, an online bio-bibliographical database of the romance vernacular sources of medieval and early modern Iberian culture, initiated by Charles B. Faulhaber at UC-Berkeley.45 Online forums, particularly MEDIBER (Medieval Iberian Literatures, Languages, History, and Cultures), are instrumental in extending the contacts that scholars develop in specialty groups at professional meetings. IMANA regularly posts calls for papers for the sessions it organizes at Kalamazoo, and so do the executive committee of the MLA division, the Hispanic Seminary, and the American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spain for their own congresses. Scholars announce their publications and sometimes share personal messages inadvertently by replying to the whole list, bridging the private and professional. Since 1994, when John Dagenais created MEDIBER, the list has provided space for conversations that replace disciplinary silos with communitarian hostels. A comprehensive survey of all the actants in the evolution of Hispanomedievalism to Iberian Studies is impossible here. I wanted only to illustrate the plasticity of associations that have changed traditional perspectives and how the emergence of new ways of knowing has changed those associations. Ideas are not rocks but spread through translation, changing as they move through time, space, cultures, and consciousness, creating, dissolving, and recreating networks. In this process, boundary objects, residing between organizations, enable people to understand other ways of knowing and facilitate joint transformations of knowledge by providing a common focus and requiring us to cross the boundaries between perspectives and methodologies. The MEDIBER discussion list would qualify as a boundary object, but what allows the process of exchange and translation is not simply virtual space. Rather, the purposeful formulation of the Iberian chronotrope shapes the practices and identity of medieval Iberian studies, explaining the relevance of associations and enabling inclusion of different actants and new associations.

44 Accessed July 2016: http://cancionerovirtual.liv.ac.uk/. 45 Accessed July 2016: http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/philobiblon/.

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Bridges In “Remembering Spain in the Medieval European Epic,” Julian Weiss productively applies Homi Bhabha’s thesis that cultural identities are formed in the to-and-fro movement across a bridge – “the realm of the beyond” – to his analysis of Spain in epic imagination. Here, Spain is the stereotypical chronotropic Other of western Europe, “an imaginative topography with which to think about the ideas we now associate with the cultural.”46 Spain as al-Andalus has appeared in Arabic novels since the 19th century, symbolizing an “‘interfaith utopia,’ a cosmopolitan [myth] of high culture, religious tolerance, and political ascendancy.” William Granara uses what he fittingly calls the “Andalusian chronotrope” as a tool for studying those novels.47 Their fictional representation, argues John Ganim, renders the Middle Ages, not an origin or lost paradise, but a double of the complex and divided present, and raises questions of national identity that closely relate the medieval to the theme of exile.48 The experience of exile was inextricably bound to American Hispanomedievalism from early on. Castro’s emigration from Civil War-torn Spain in 1937 prompted his antinationalist vision, “based on a theory of figural historiography very similar to that espoused by Auerbach,” another exile from a fascist regime displaced first to Istanbul and then the United States.49 Francisco M#rquez Villanueva (1931–2013) – Cervantes scholar, Sevilian, and exile, as he defined himself – left Spain in 1958 after his promotion at the University of Seville was denied for political reasons. His doctoral thesis on the converso poet Juan ]lvarez Gato initiated a line of research at odds with the nationalist vision of Francoist Spain. From his endowed chair at Harvard, M#rquez Villanueva developed an influential multidisciplinary work – four authors in the collection Queer Iberia mentioned below were his students – centered, like Castro’s, on the contributions of Jewish or Islamic authors to Spanish culture. Catalan philosopher Joaquim Xirau, on leaving Barcelona after Francoist troups occupied the city in 1939, remarked: “the same people who expelled the Jews in 1492 are expelling us now.” Enric Bou cites him to explain how “the notion of hispanicity has been defined through a politics of exclusions and inclusions, expulsions and executions.”50

46 Weiss, “Remembering Spain,” 76. 47 William Granara, “Nostalgia, Arab Nationalism, and the Andalusian Chronotrope in the Evolution of the Modern Arabic Novel,” Journal of Arabic Literature 36, no. 1 (2005): 58–59. 48 John Ganim, “Cosmopolitanism and Medievalism,” Exemplaria 22, no. 1 (2010): 10–11. 49 Szpiech, “The Convivencia Wars,” 150. 50 Bou, “On Rivers and Maps: Iberian Approaches to Comparatism,” 5. For the articulation of Catalan nationalism relating the fate of Catalans to that of the Jews, see Edgar Illas, “On

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The influence of Spanish 8migr8s in the configuration of American Hispanomedievalism cannot be dismissed, particularly the inclusion of perspectives and approaches rejected or ignored in Spain, and it continues as younger expatriates are forced by Spanish university hiring practices to look for teaching positions in the more dynamic US job market.51 The relationship between ways of knowing on either side of the Atlantic is not always smooth.52 Beyond the methodological differences, Spanish cultural critics are suspicious of hidden agendas in American theoretical approaches, as Gregory Hutcheson discovered when reading reviews of the innovative collection Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings, which he edited with Josiah Blackmore in 1999. While not rejecting the volume’s queer reading, Spanish reviewers considered its premise an American platitude – Iberian history as a rich collection of “heterodoxa” – based on Castro’s school, a school comprised mostly of “Spanish expatriates … his most zealous disciples, who were hell-bent on dropping Castro’s historical vision back on Spain’s doorstep”.53 Spaniards perhaps understood Queer Iberia’s claim that Iberia was always Europe’s queer Other as another foreign-crafted, mildly annoying formulation of Spanish exceptionalism that did nothing but reinforce enduring stereotypes of cultural marginality and challenge the post-Franco image of Spain as diverse but European. These passions can run hot. For example, in a 2011 article, Valero Moreno, a professor at the University of Salamanca, critiqued Castro’s historical analysis for embracing “literary empathy that leads us to forge legends on old legends” instead of a scientific approach.54 He describes Castro as infected by exile and intellectual humiliation, plagued with highly contagious delusions “that extend their germs and bacilli with unusual speed and find a host in the seemingly healthiest bodies and brains.”55 Castro’s main hallucination was diluting the European Christian tradition in favor of the Semitic component, particularly

51 52 53 54

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Universalist Particularism: The Catalans and the Jews,” Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 12, no. 1 (2011). Altschul and Nelson cite ]ngel G. Loureiro’s remark from 1995 about “the “rigid, autarchic, endogamous, and hierarchized structure that still dominates the Spanish university,” “Transatlantic Discordances,” 59. The irritated Spanish reactions to Material Philology are documented in two lengthy debates published in La corjnica, as Altschul and Nelson point out, ibid., 58. Gregory S. Hutcheson, “What Queer Iberians Have to Say,” La corjnica 30, no.1 (2001), 226. My translation of “Conviene, a la hora del an#lisis histjrico, renunciar a las sirenas textuales, a la empat&a literaria que nos empuja a forjar leyendas sobre antiguas leyendas,” Juan Miguel Valero Moreno, “Cristianos, moros y jud&os: los ajustes culturales de una convivencia conflictiva,” eHumanista 8 (2011): 2. My translation of “que extienden sus g8rmenes y bacilos con inusitada rapidez y encuentran asiento en los cuerpos y cerebros aparentemente m#s sanos.” Ibid., 3–4.

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Jews.56 Just four pages later, Valero Moreno remarks about the massacre of Jews that took place after the coronation of Richard I, the Lionheart, in London: The Jew’s presence is noticed as a bacterial or viral infection of the Christian body and, as a consequence, the germ causing the infection must be eradicated in order to clean the body. This dehumanization of the Jew and the medical metaphors that accompany final solutions refer to the dangerous language games practiced at the beginning of the Second World War. … In spite of some medieval chroniclers’ magnificent style, their aseptic coldness and indifference to their truculent words’ effect cannot fail to impress.57

How has Valero Moreno missed his own application of the medical metaphor to Castro and his school? Why does he engage in dangerous language games with the same cold indifference, comparing Castro’s ideas to a pestilence that spreads through rational scholarship – what he calls “clinical” history – and implying that it must be eliminated? In North American academia, the articulation of Hispanomedievalism’s difference with English-dominated medieval studies has given way to the Iberian chronotrope in its project to renew the identity of a disciplinary subfield traditionally considered the irrelevant Other. Like the epic literary representation of Spain studied by Weiss, Iberia is “a symbolic space that resolves” political contradictions of power “at an ideological level.”58 More intentionally, it is also a theoretical construct that bridges many disciplines and methodological approaches, not so much to reconcile them, as to find transdisciplinary ground to produce a different kind of knowledge. One aim is to adapt to the ever-changing market, fighting for the prestige to decide which humanities subjects are best positioned to teach the necessary cultural competency and intercultural communication skills for a globalized economy as well as to compete for shrinking funding and publishing resources. The following outline of several articulations of the Iberian chronotrope does not pretend to establish a teleology but to feature some moments in the changing relationships among actants in medieval Iberian studies. One of the earliest articulations of the Iberian chronotrope was proposed by 56 My translation of “Pero Castro, en el que el virus del destierro y el desaire intellectural hab&a mutado su tradicijn historiogr#fica, est# dispuesto a diluir a toda costa la tradicijn cristiana y europea al exaltar el drama de moros y, sobre todo, jud&os.” Ibid., 3. 57 My translation of “La presencia del jud&o es advertida como una invasijn bacteriana o virulenta del cuerpo cristiano y, en consecuencia, para sanear el cuerpo es preciso expulsar de forma definitiva el germen causante de la infeccijn. Esta cosificacijn del jud&o y las met#foras m8dicas que acompaÇan a las soluciones finales nos remiten a los peligrosos juegos de lenguaje practicados en los albores de la II Guerra Mundial. … A pesar del estilo suntuoso de algunos cronistas medievales impresiona la as8ptica frialdad y el detalle indiferente ante el efecto de lo truculento de las palabras.” Ibid., 7–8. 58 Weiss, “Remembering Spain,” 76–77.

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John Dagenais in announcing the creation of the online discussion list MEDIBER in 1994: “We take Medieval Iberia in its broadest sense – geographically, chronologically, and culturally.”59 Iberia, as boundary object, shapes the list’s goal to “adapt itself to the interests of the people who participate in it,” who would be involved in the disciplines of “art, architecture, codicology, musicology, history, historical linguistics, and literature” of “the medieval Catalan and GalicianPortuguese traditions as well as those cultures which arose in central Iberia” in the “Islamic, Jewish, and Hispano-Latin cultures,” suggesting the field’s porous borders. The incorporation of gender studies produced readings that combatively turned the discipline’s difference and isolation into methodology. The most distinctive and influential was Queer Iberia (1999). In their introduction, Blackmore and Hutcheson define Iberia as chronotrope – “a space bound by history and geography, the domain of a recoverable past” – but “only incidentally.” More emphatically, Iberia is hypothesized as a chemistry experiment, bringing together different ways of knowing to discover what new perspectives emerge: “a space within which to rethink the very idea of boundaries, within which to explode categories, multiply centers, and begin imagining (to borrow from Michael Warner), a ‘desirably queer world’”.60 The queering of Iberia was informed by Castro, and, like his work, it was an activist proposal to destabilize the academic discourse of Hispanism.61 Castro’s impact is even clearer in the echoes of contemporary ethical and political debates that all the authors find in their analyses of medieval Iberia as an ethical intervention.62 Menocal’s The Ornament of the World transformed the complex academic language of the Iberian chronotrope into a clear narrative. Although she does not use the term Iberia in a work destined for mass consumption, she conveys the cultural relevance of Iberian hybridity to the American public through the type of tropological reading imported by other eminent exiles, Castro and Auerbach. In the epilogue, in the tradition of The Thousand and One Nights, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, she speaks to us directly to vindicate the stories both as history and echoes of the past in the present.63 Her “Andalusian shards” that depict medieval Iberia are stories of 59 John Dagenais, “Mediber : An Internet Discussion Group for Medieval Iberia,” La corjnica 23, no. 1 (1994), 66. 60 Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson, Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (Durham: Durham University Press, 1999), 13. 61 Hutcheson, “What Queer Iberians Have to Say,” 223. 62 For an analysis of the influence of Castro’s intellectual activism on North American scholars, see Doubleday, “Hacia la descolonizacijn,” 73–75. 63 In Mimesis, Auerbach speaks directly, passionately, about his experience of Nazism; he conceived it as a humanist manifesto.

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crossings between ways of knowing – young Christians with a taste for Arab books; Arabized Jews; Andalusi singers moving across the Pyrenees to Aquitaine with their Christian captors; the recent Christian convert from Judaism Petrus Alfonsus, migrating from his native Aragon to Norman England, where he becomes its first professor of Arabic. They propose Iberia as a society able to live with its obvious contradictions, but these are also tales of exile, like the story of Abd al-Rahman, escaping to Cordoba after his family is murdered by the Abbasids in Damascus, that mirror Menocal’s separation from her Cuban birthplace. Cordoba, “with its stylistic openness, the capacity to look around, assimilate, and reshape promiscuously,”64 is a proxy for Menocal’s adoptive New York or perhaps, more pointedly, Yale University. How much her Iberian chronotrope owes to the Arabic novels analyzed by Granara is a subject for a different article by more informed scholars. Ganim, who has touched on the subject, affirms that The Ornament of the World “could stand in for the scenarios” described in the Arabic novels he studies.65 However, The Ornament is history, not fiction, conveyed creatively by a literary critic.66 The connection with mainstream America was exactly what medieval Iberian studies needed in the midst of the larger crisis in the humanities. In 2004, Greenia warned Hispanomedievalists that the demise of historical Romance linguistics was not only administrative: “the fact that we stopped offering the courses meant that we, the faculty, stopped imagining ways in which historical linguistics could mesh with the humanities enterprise we assign ourselves” and affected the whole field. He proposed a creative reimagining “to sketch new and more permeable frontiers for Hispanomedievalism.”67 If The Ornament of the World gave popular currency to the Iberian chronotrope, four years after its publication and in the same year that Greenia issued his call to action, Menocal’s article in Diacritics argued the legitimacy of her poetic, figural reading of history. Poetry – by which she meant “all the art forms” – reveals “the sometimes unbearable contradictions that political and ideological discourse rarely tolerates.”68 Poetry tells another story, just like her vignettes in The Ornament of the World, by finding the voices shrouded in “hundreds of years of misnamings and misperceptions.”69 64 Mar&a Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (New York, Little, Brown and Co., 2002): 60. 65 Ganim, “Cosmopolitanism and Medievalism,” 10. 66 Ryan Szpiech recalls that one of the lessons that Menocal strove to teach was that “the greatest writing and speaking should be meaningful to experts and the general public alike, and no story should be told if it cannot be told movingly,” Alvarez and Szpiech, “A Sea of Histories,” 103. 67 George D. Greenia, “Del director,” La corjnica 33, no. 1 (2004), 2. 68 Menocal, “Why Iberia?” 11. 69 Ibid., 8. Menocal embodies Edward Said’s definition of “the intellectual as exile and mar-

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Menocal’s work shares some of the idealizing impulses of cosmopolitanism and the doubling of the self that occurs with migration and bilingualism. In Shards of Love, she defined Romance philology as the discipline of the exile, concerned with the fragmentation of homeless languages.70 Quite telling for the symbolic configuration of medieval Iberian studies, however, are the reflections of one of Menocal’s students, Abigail K. Balbale. In reviewing Menocal’s legacy, she discusses how academic perception of the field has shifted since the 1980s: In [Menocal’s] view, the medieval was in some ways closer to the contemporary world than it was to the centuries that separated these two periods: both were multilingual, mixed, layered. Both the medieval and the contemporary worlds did not fit neatly into nationalist frameworks, full as they were of people who transgressed boundaries and embodied multiple identities … [Her work] freed students of the Middle Ages from the instinct to see the period as everything conveyed by the word “medieval:” traditional, religious, respectful. Instead, reading culture with an eye toward the cacophonous and the fragmentary revealed a medieval world populated by people as varied and complex as we are.71

To legitimate study of the Middle Ages, Balbale, like her teacher, moved from 1980s alterity to identity. Collapsing present into past in the pliable space of Iberia, cosmopolitan scholars embody multiple identities; most of us live in multiple languages as migrants, ceaselessly moving across national, cultural, methodological, and institutional borders, pilgrims in search of meaning in a fragmented, fast-changing world. “It is in exile,” writes Bauman, “that the thinking person’s detachment, his habitual way of life, acquires survival value.”72 Menocal’s work illustrates some of the ways of knowing to which historians, textual critics, and other actors in medieval Iberian studies were being sensitized and proves that literary practice has become more influential in the disciplinary network. Liminality and exile became core ideas and practices whose translation is facilitated by the Iberian chronotrope. Two examples are the ambitious 2014 study, Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c. 1050–1614, by historian Brian Catlos and Heather Bamford’s philological analysis of poetic fragments. Catlos gives voice to the largely ignored experience of European Muslim minorities, who lived at the crossroads of Arabic, Latin, and Romance “as exile, object, or the accused.”73 Struggling with the limitations of historiography to offer an

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ginal, as amateur, and as the author of a language that tries to speak the truth to power.” Cit. Faber, Anglo-American Hispanists, 42. Mar&a Rosa Menocal, Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (Durham: Duke UP, 1994), 109. Abigail Krasner Balbale, “Cacophony,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 5, no. 2 (2013), 124–25. Emphasis added. Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 43. Catlos, Muslims, 518.

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objective picture and aware that “the mere act of observing, and the presence of the observer, shapes the evidence as she perceives it,” Catlos dwells on the discontinuities, the “shard of love, and shard of hate … of hope, of fear, and pride … of shame,” rejecting realism and opting for a “Cubist approach” to historical reality through a variety of dissonant perspectives because “we should not expect the people of the past to be any more coherent, consistent, or comprehensible than those of today.”74 Liminality, exile, fragmentation, the scholar’s detached observation allows an ethical intervention in the present. If language is essential in the constitution of the nation-state and its philology, fragmentation, mobility, and translation are the building blocks of material philology in medieval Iberian studies. Heather Bamford examines fragments of muwashshahas – Iberian hybrid Arabic, Hebrew, and Romance poems – discarded in the storage room of a Cairo synagogue as shifting, reshaping ellipses across time and Mediterranean geographies.75 The discipline’s imaginative scope is fully articulated by Jean Dangler in “Edging toward Iberia,” which followed Menocal’s “Why Iberia?” in the Diacritics issue on “Theories of Medieval Iberia.” She envisions medieval Iberia and medieval Iberian studies as a malleable “network of interrelated attachments between varying individuals and groups.”76 Disciplinary practices are shaped by the fluidity, fullness, and liminality of their boundary object, “a border, an edge, a space of conflict and cohabitation, but not merely a line.”77 The world-making impetus that Dangler assigns to Iberia – continually made and remade rather than defined by geography – is performed in Menocal, Catlos, and Bamford’s fragmentary storytelling, in the shards that incorporate ignored voices and their echoes. Altschul and Nelson argue that Men8ndez Pidal and Castro’s philology is “based on a sense of presence that closes the gap between the past and present;” their present played a constitutive role in their critical practice.78 Presence in Iberomedievalism’s figural readings and ethical interventions provides a valuable justification for our threatened courses – “the medieval world was populated by people as varied and complex as we are,” Balbale learned from Menocal – but Dangler, Catlos, and Bamford are fully aware that their methodological choice is determined by the place and time of enunciation, and Dangler intentionally positions herself on the Iberian edge “like quicksand that constantly shifts.”79 74 Ibid., 519–20. 75 Heather Bamford, “Ruins in Motion.” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 4 (2013), 192–204. 76 Dangler, “Edging toward Iberia,” 24. 77 Ibid., 25. 78 Altschul and Nelson, “Transatlantic Dicordances,” 59–60. 79 Dangler, “Edging toward Iberia,” 13.

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The fullest formulation of the discipline appears in the mission statement of the Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, founded in 2009 by historian Simon Doubleday and Pablo Pastrana, a scholar specializing in Spanish medieval literature and historical linguistics. It is no coincidence that the journal’s founders come from the three branches of the old philology, and their statement is so revealing that it deserves to be quoted in full: JMIS, which aims to bring theoretically informed approaches into creative contact with more empirically minded scholarship, encompasses archaeology, art and architecture, music, philosophy and religious studies, as well as history, codicology, manuscript studies and the multiple Arabic, Latin, Romance, and Hebrew linguistic and literary traditions of Iberia. We welcome work that engages peninsular Iberia in relation to other parts of the ‘post-classical’ world; which explores links of colonization and exchange with the Maghreb, embraces the study of Occitania, addresses Iberia’s presence in the Mediterranean, or adopts a transatlantic or Latin American frame. We also encourage interdisciplinary work combining radically different forms of sources or theoretical proposals, and ‘unconventional’ types of submissions including brief opinion pieces or archival reports, individual or clustered interviews with prominent scholars, audio clips, ‘podcasts’, and video files.

The emphasis is not so much on contact as in “creative” contact, so the discipline’s identity is articulated through continuous, pliable interactions among ever-expanding types of actants to produce “radically different forms” and “unconventional” ways of knowing. The liminal status of the Iberian chronotrope facilitates not only cultural translation among all actants but, more important, the symbolic structuring of the field. Evolving from the academic marginality of Hispanomedievalism, medieval Iberian studies positions itself as “an island of superior adaptability,” to quote Bauman once again, within the market-driven enterprise of American academia, increasing its desirability and prestige.

Fences Medieval Iberian studies has raised the standing of Hispanomedievalism by imagining new connections with other fields and theoretical approaches in the humanities. In 2005, Speculum, that venerable institution of American medieval studies, issued a flyer that asked, “Interested in medieval Iberia?” and answered, “Then you should be reading Speculum,” listing eight articles scheduled for publication in 2005 and 2006.80 While some titles still spoke of Spain, the Iberian chronotrope was clearly the common thread. 80 Since the flyer is not archived and cannot be accessed anywhere, I shall list all articles it

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A rapid look at MLA job listings in the past three years yields advertisements for positions in medieval Iberian literatures and cultures (Notre Dame) or, when still using the old tag “Medieval Spanish Literature,” the description encourages applications from candidates “working at the intersection of multiple cultural traditions” (Indiana University) or “in connection with wider areas such as Trans-Atlantic studies or the Jewish or Muslim diasporas” (Bowdoin College; George Washington University presents a comparable requirement). Similarly, SUNY-Buffalo’s position requires “expertise in the Christian, Muslim, and/or Jewish cultures of Medieval Iberia,” and the University of Chicago welcomes applications from “candidates working in additional languages, literatures and cultures of relevance to the Iberian Peninsula, such as Arabic, Byzantine Greek, Catalan, Hebrew, Portuguese or Occitan.” Palgrave MacMillan’s “New Middle Ages” series consistently publishes on Iberian subjects, and the University of Toronto Press has launched “Iberic,” a series focusing on all aspects of Iberian history, culture, and literature from the Middle Ages to modern times. One way in which medieval Iberian studies is failing to reflect its multilingual, multicultural subjects is its dependence on English. The obstacles to incorporating the very different languages of medieval Iberian cultures seem insurmountable, but exclusive reliance on English actively bars Spain and even undergraduate students of Spanish. As Faber remarks, “Iberian cultural studies are largely written in English for an English-speaking scholarly audience, published at steep prices by Anglo-American conglomerates, and hardly distributed or consumed in Spain itself.”81 Ironically, the dissemination of scholarly work written in Spanish is faster and wider, as Lawrence J. McCrank, Professor of Library, Information, and Media Studies and Dean of the Library and Information, Learning, and Instructional Services at Chicago State University, informed the audience in his presentation for the session on “How to Get Published” at the 2009 Kalamazoo congress.82 mentioned and their topics: Catalonian history (Adam J. Kosto’s “Layman, Clerics, and Documentary Practices in the Early Middle Ages: The Example of Catalonia”); Galician Portuguese poetry (William Paden’s “Principles of Generic Classification in Medieval European Lyric: The Case of Galician Portuguese”); Arabic and Jewish cultures (Susan L. Einbinder’s “A Proper Diet: Medicine and History in Crescas Caslari’s Esther ;” Marco Zucato’s “A Tenth-Century Jewish Channel for the Transmission of Arabic Science to the West;” Michelle M. Hamilton’s “The Endrina Episode of the Libro de buen amor in Light of the Judeo-Spanish and Pseudo-Ovidian Traditions;” and David Nirenberg’s “How Jewish was Medieval Spain? The Case of Poetry”); art history (Therese Martin’s “Art of a Reigning Queen as Dynastic Propaganda in Twelfth-Century Spain”); and cultural studies (Julian Weiss’s “What Every Noblewoman Needs to Know: Cultural Literacy in Late Medieval Spain”). 81 Faber, “Economies of Prestige,” 9. 82 Lawrence J. McCrank, “They Ate Your Budget!”(paper presented at the 44th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 7–10, 2009).

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No resources related to medieval Iberia are created for Spanish undergraduate classes, the cradle of future Iberomedievalists – no textbooks with accessible narratives and bibliographies for Spanish majors and minors; no bilingual editions that expose students to Iberian linguistic variety and spark their interest in those languages and cultures; not even passing mentions in lower-level Spanishlanguage textbooks that might encourage students to take advanced courses. Anthologies of texts translated into English may be used in history or humanities courses, while Spanish departments rightly insist, as all language departments do, that representation depends in large measure on the original language.83 Note that many Iberomedievalists are hired to teach Spanish language and culture classes; classes in their specialty are barely tolerated as proto-narratives of Spain, a way to understand modern Spanish language and the Spanish colonial project in America. Academic politics keeps scholars from publishing new teaching materials, which carry little weight with tenure and promotion committees. Even if Menocal’s The Ornament of the World was prefaced by Harold Bloom and praised by the New York Times,84 the responses by some scholars on both sides of the Atlantic will surely deter those at less prestigious institutions from engaging in that kind of “unscientific” writing. The situation in high schools is worse; medieval Iberia is either absent from Advanced Placement course curricula or taught as a stale “traditional, religious, respectful” Castilianism. Now that medieval Iberian studies has raised its prestige in the humanities, we must start building the profession from the ground up. Beyond the linguistic divide, the interests of Spanish nationalisms – “their need for exclusivity” and “their tendency toward institutional coercion”85 – are at odds with those of cosmopolitan Iberomedievalists, which may partially ex83 One successful anthology in English translation is Olivia Remie Constable and Damian Zurro, eds., Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), now in its second and highly expanded edition. Notable exceptions are Barletta et al’s anthology of 14th- to 17th century Iberian poetry in the original Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish with translations into English, Dreams of Waking: An Anthology of Iberian Lyric Poetry 1400–1700 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013); Cortijo OcaÇa’s bilingual editions of Catalan classics, Bernat Metge, The Book of Fortune and Prudence, ed. Antonio Cortijo OcaÇa and Vicent Martines (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2013); “The Dream” of Bernat Metge: Del Somni d’en Bernat Metge, ed. Antonio Cortijo OcaÇa and Elisabeth Lagresa (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2013); and the bilingual edition of texts on the Spanish Querelle des femmes of Emily C. Francomano, ed. and trans., Three Spanish Querelle Texts: Grisel and Mirabella, The Slander against Women, and The Defense of Ladies against Slanderers (Toronto: Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2013). However, they are intended for specialists and students in comparative literature. 84 http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/28/opinion/a-golden-reign-of-tolerance.html. 85 Thomas Harrington, “Rapping on the Cast(i)le Gates: Nationalism and Culture-Planning in Contemporary Spain,” in Ideologies of Hispanism, ed. Mabel MoraÇa (Nashville, TN: Vandelbilt UP, 2005), 131.

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plain why the Iberian chronotrope is not prevalent in Spain. The vitality of nationalisms in post-Franco Spain has produced strategies of cultural representation that emphasize cultural borders. The constitution of 1978 reorganized the country’s administration into highly decentralized “autonomous communities” that recognized peninsular historical and cultural identities. In Catalonia, Galicia, the Basque Country, and Andalusia, restagings of their medieval past as nationalist projects to revise and reconstruct the present have challenged the narrative of a single eternal Spain. For instance, Andalusia, which was not one of the original “historical” communities, had to justify its right to self-rule by asserting a distinctive culture. Accordingly, since the 1980s, Andalusian politicians and intellectuals have engaged in the creation of a sanitized version of the region’s Arabo-Islamic past that is disseminated through public museums, cultural exhibitions, and television broadcasts. The celebrations of 1992 were just a highly visible instance. Such discourse is based on the work of 19th-century Arabists, which “provided the arguments, lexicon, and historical sources for the anticolonial, federalist, yet non-separatist Andalucismo crafted by Blas Infante (later canonized as ‘Father of Andalusia’) and publicized in southern journals such as B8tica (1913–1917) and Andaluc&a (1916–1920).”86 As a reaction to secessionist or federalist nationalisms, the conservative Partido Popular engages, while in power, in similar efforts. Among them was the 2000 creation of an institute at San Mill#n de la Cogolla, a monastery considered the birthplace of the Spanish language, that was used to launch initiatives that “re-bundle the fundamental building blocks of the centuries-old tradition of Castilianism (language, faith, tradition, and a ‘universal’ imperial mission)” in the cultural power of the Spanish language and its place in the world today.87 In that sense, the Spanish language competes with English in freely exercising its power by disregarding national borders. The aversion of some Spaniards toward the use of Iberia and Iberian may be a consequence of rivalry with English cultural influence or the fact that the hybrid past defined by the Iberian chronotrope does not conform to the exclusionary narratives of Spanish nationalisms. Borders, bridges, and fences can all be built and traversed or dismantled. As Iberomedievalism translates and exchanges, converses and debates, is anything essential lost? I’m thinking of the children’s game Telephone, in which a word is whispered child-to-child, with a great deal of giggling, and if the original word was cereal, the last child may report it as seashell or poodle. Positioned on the shifting quicksand of exile, what do I see? Iberia or Spain? Then or now? For all that is gained by multiplicitous conceptions and approaches, what is lost? 86 I thank Jos8 Luis Venegas for allowing me to consult his book project Andalusia, Orientalism, and the Making of Modern Spain from which this information and the quote are taken. 87 Harrington, “Rapping on the Cast(i)le Gates,” 129–31.

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Bibliography Altschul, Nadia. Geographies of Philological Knowledge: Postcoloniality and the Transatlantic National Epic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Altschul, Nadia, and Bradley Nelson. “Transatlantic Discordances: The Problem of Philology.” Hispanic Issues Online 2 (2007): 55–63. Web. Alvarez, Lourdes, and Ryan Szpiech. “A Sea of Histories: An Introduction.” La corjnica 43, no. 1 (2014): 93–110. Balbale, Abigail Krasner. “Cacophony.” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 5, no. 2 (2013): 123–28. Bamford, Heather. “Ruins in Motion.” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 4 (2013): 192–204. Barletta, Vincent et al, eds. and trans. Dreams of Waking: An Anthology of Iberian Lyric Poetry 1400–1700. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. Blackmore, Josiah, and Gregory S. Hutcheson. Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Durham: Durham University Press, 1999. Bou, Enric. “On Rivers and Maps: Iberian Approaches to Comparatism.” In New Spain, New Literatures, edited by Luis Spadaccini and Nicholas Mart&n-Estudillo, 3–26. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2010. Brown, Catherine. “The Relics of Men8ndez Pidal: Mourning and Melancholia in Hispanomedieval Studies.” La corjnica 24, no. 1 (1995): 15–41. Catlos, Brian A. “Christian-Muslim-Jewish Relations, Medieval ‘Spain,’ and the Mediterranean: An Historiographical Op-Ed.” In In and Of the Mediterranean: Medieval and Early Modern Iberian Studies, edited by Michelle M. Hamilton and Nfflria SillerasFern#ndez, 1–16. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2015. . Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, C. 1050–1614. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Constable, Olivia Remie, and Damian Zurro, eds. Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources. 1997. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Corriente, Federico. “Tres mitos contempor#neos frente a la realidad de Alandalffls: romanticismo filo#rabe, ‘cultura moz#rabe’ y ‘cultura sefard&,’” In Orientalismo, exotismo y traduccijn, edited by Eduardo Manzano Moreno et al, 39–47. Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad Castilla-La Mancha, 2000. Dagenais, John. “MEDIBER: An Internet Discussion Group for Medieval Iberia.” La corjnica 23, no. 1 (1994). Dagenais, John, and Margaret Greer. “Decolonizing the Middle Ages: Introduction.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30, no. 3 (2000): 431–48. Dangler, Jean. “Edging Toward Iberia.” Diacritics 36, no. 3–4 (2006): 12–26. Doubleday, Simon. “Hacia la descolonizacijn del concepto de convivencia: algunos apuntes sobre el contexto norteamericano.” In La influencia de la historiograf&a espaÇola en la produccijn histjrica americana, edited by Ariel Guiance, 59–75. Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2011.

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Dunn, Maryjane. “The Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela: A Bibliographical Update.” La corjnica 36, no. 2 (2008): 415–25. Dworkin, Steven N., ed. “Forum ‘Historical Linguistics: The Death of a Discipline?’” La corjnica 34, no. 1 (2005): 125–256. . “Thoughts on the Future of a Venerable and Vital Discipline.” La corjnica 31, no. 2 (2003): 9–17. Faber, Sebastiaan. Anglo-American Hispanists and the Spanish Civil War. New York: Palgrave, 2008. . “Economies of Prestige: The Place of Iberian Studies in the American University.” Hispanic Research Journal 9, no. 1 (2008): 7–32. Feldman, M. S. et al. “Ways of Knowing and Inclusive Management Practices.” Public Administration Review 66 (2006): 89–99. Fleischmann, K. R. “Boundary Object With Agency : A Method for Studying the DesignUse Interface.” Information Society 22, no. 2 (2006): 77–87. Flesler, Daniela, and Adri#n P8rez Melgosa. “Herv#s, Convivencia, and the Heritagization of Spain’s Jewish Past.” Journal of Romance Studies 10, no. 2 (2010): 53–76. Francomano, Emily C., ed. and trans. Three Spanish Querelle Texts: Grisel and Mirabella, The Slander against Women, and The Defense of Ladies against Slanderers. Toronto: Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2013. Gal, Uri et al. “The Dynamics of IT Boundary Objects, Information Infrastructures, and Organisational Identities.” European Journal of Information Systems 17 (2008): 290–304. Ganim, John. “Cosmopolitanism and Medievalism.” Exemplaria 22, no. 1 (2010): 5–27. Garc&a Arenal, Mercedes. “Introduccijn.” In Al-Andalus allende el Atl#ntico, edited by Mercedes Garc&a Arenal, 23–34. Granada: Ediciones UNESCO, 1997. Gerli, E. Michael. “Inventing the Middle Ages: Ramjn Men8ndez Pidal, Spanish Cultural History, and Ideology in Philology.” La corjnica 30, no. 1 (2001): 111–26. . Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia. New York: Routledge, 2003. Granara, William. “Nostalgia, Arab Nationalism, and the Andalusian Chronotrope in the Evolution of the Modern Arabic Novel.” Journal of Arabic Literature 36, no. 1 (2005): 57–73. Greenia, George D. “Del Director.” La corjnica 33, no. 1 (2004): 1–4. Harrington, Thomas. “Rapping on the Cast(i)le Gates: Nationalism and Culture-Planning in Contemporary Spain.” In Ideologies of Hispanism, edited by Mabel MoraÇa, 107–37. Nashville, TN: Vandelbilt University Press, 2005. Hutcheson, Gregory S. “What Queer Iberians Have to Say.” La corjnica 30, no. 1 (2001): 223–27. Illas, Edgar. “On Universalist Particularism: The Catalans and the Jews.” Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 12, no. 1 (2011): 77–94. Kuhn, Timothy. “Negotiating Boundaries Between Scholars and Practitioners.” Management Communication Quarterly 16, no. 1 (2002): 106–12. Madariaga, Rosa Mar&a de. “En torno a al-Andalus: extrapolaciones histjricas y utilizaciones abusivas.” In Orientalismo, exotismo y traduccijn, edited by Gonzalo Fern#ndez Parrilla and Manuel C. Feria Garc&a, 81–89. Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad Castilla-La Mancha, 2000.

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Mar&n, Manuela. “Arabistas en EspaÇa, un estudio de familia.” Al-Qantara 2 (1992): 379–93. McCrank, Lawrence J. “They Ate Your Budget!” Paper presented at the 44th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 7–10, 2009. Menocal, Mar&a Rosa. The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History : A Forgotten Heritage. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987. . The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2002. . Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994. . “Why Iberia?” Diacritics 36, no. 3–4 (2006): 7–11. Metge, Bernat. The Book of Fortune and Prudence. Edited by Antonio Cortijo OcaÇa and Vicent Martines. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2013. . “The Dream” of Bernat Metge: Del Somni d’en Bernat Metge. Edited by Antonio Cortijo OcaÇa and Elisabeth Lagresa. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2013. Moore, Jr. John K., and Thomas D. Spaccarelli. “Monographic Issue on The Road to Santiago and Pilgrimage.” La corjnica 36, no. 2 (2008). MoraÇa, Mabel. Ideologies of Hispanism. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005. Nepaulsing, Colbert I. “Rachel and Vidas Monocultural Criticism.” La corjnica 28, no. 1 (1999): 229–37. Resina, Joan Ramon. “Hispanism and Its Discontents.” Siglo XX/20th Century 14, no. 1–2 (1996): 85–135. . “Whose Hispanism? Cultural Trauma, Disciplined Memory, and Symbolic Dominance.” In Ideologies of Hispanism, edited by Mabel MoraÇa, 160–86. Nashville, TN: Vandelbilt University Press, 2005. . Del hispanismo a los estudios ib8ricos: una propuesta federativa para el #mbito cultural. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2009. Star, Susan Leigh, and James R. Griesemer. “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39.” Social Studies of Science 19, no. 3 (1989): 387–420. Szpiech, Ryan. Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. . “The Convivencia Wars: Decoding Historiography’s Polemic With Philology.” In A Sea of Languages: Rethinking the Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History, edited by Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Karla Mallette, 135–61. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Valero Moreno, Juan Miguel. “Cristianos, moros y jud&os. Los ajustes culturales de una convivencia conflictiva.” eHumanista 18 (2011): 1–22. http://www.ehumanista.ucsb. edu/. Weiss, Julian. “Remembering Spain in the Medieval European Epic: A Prospect.” In Locating the Middle Ages: The Spaces and Places of Medieval Culture, edited by Julian Weiss and Sarah Salih, 67–82. London: King’s College Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 2012. Weiss, Julian, and Sarah Salih. “Introduction.” In Locating the Middle Ages: The Spaces and Places of Medieval Culture, edited by Julian Weiss and Sarah Salih, xv–xxvi. London: King’s College Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 2012.

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Wolf, Kenneth Baxter. “Convivencia in Medieval Spain: A Brief History of an Idea.” Religion Compass 3, no. 1 (2009): 72–85.

Ulrike Wiethaus

“Yet another group of cowboys riding around the same old rock”: Religion and the German-American Genesis of a Capitalist Stereotype “And, behind it all, money lurks – too pervasive to be a symbol of anything, yet always a symbol of everything; magical in its combination of the absolutely palpable and the intrinsically metaphorical.”1 “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Matthew 6:21 “You may labor, for God, to become rich, though not for the flesh and sin.”2

Introduction At a campaign speech, Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann proposed (jokingly, perhaps) a link between the economic state of the United States and God. She said, “I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, ‘Are you going to start listening to me here?’ Listen to the American people, because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we’ve got to rein in the spending.”3 Bachmann’s comments reflect beliefs of a significant number of American citizens. According to a recent Public Religion Research Institute/ Religion News Service study, forty percent of the American public embraces the distinctly pre-modern belief that God communicates in and through the natural world to impact economic and social life.4 Divine blessings for wealth are easily accessed on the internet, whether on Christian, Jewish, Hindu, or Muslim sites. Indeed, sociologist of religion Peter Berger argues that neither modernity nor capitalism have 1 James Wood, “The Very Rich Hours: Two novels about money without morals” in The New Yorker (February 15 and 22, 2010), 146. 2 Richard Baxter (1615–1691), Works of the Puritan Divines, vol.1, 108. Cited in Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Stephen Kalberg (Los Angeles: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 109. 3 Jonathan Capehart, “Michele Bachman talks to God – Again.” Blog Entry. Washington Post. August 29, 2011. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/under-god/post/michele-bachmannjokes-that-god-sent-hurricane-earthquake/2011/08/29/gIQAUN6QnJ_blog. 4 Cited ibid.

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succeeded in eradicating religiosity, but instead generated unprecedented religious pluralism on a global scale. His research contradicts the belief that capitalism would engender post-religious societies characterized by pervasive rationality.5 In Berger’s analysis, rather than constituting an impediment, religions deliver an important service to capitalism. They offer a haven of comfort to individuals and communities in an economic world defined by unpredictability, mobility, and faceless bureaucracies. It is here that another aspect of the American/Medieval complex comes into view, that is, the deep linkage between religiosity and social relationships determined by economic transaction. Indeed, the often absent referent in reflections on white, read Anglo-Saxon, America as the problematical offspring of a white, read Anglo-Saxon, medieval Europe, is the productive force of land rather than space or place. Land as a force worked in a number of ways: it functioned in feudal relationships between peasants and lords; it shrunk to manageable those trade routes operated by the emerging medieval merchant class and bourgeoisie; or, land defined as terra nullius and coveted by colonial powers in agricultural venture businesses, has required the on-going dispossession of Native nations and the enslavement of both American Indigenous and African diaspora women and men. If an ocean geographically divides “Old Europe” and the “New World,” it is the definition of land as an exploitable productive force in sustained and sustainable relationships of domination that creates all too recognizable family resemblances in the American/Medieval complex. Bachmann’s quip and Berger’s research are contemporary echoes of a contentious debate at the heart of an academic inquiry into capitalism’s rise and its manifold relationship to religion as a set of practices, ideological superstructure, and arguably with roots deep in the “medieval.”6 Having been waged more than a century ago, the debate’s discursive contours are little known today, even though it constitutes an extraordinary example of transatlantic collaboration with a direct – and distressing – impact on social policy making. Academic lines of cross-disciplinary inquiry developed in German universities, and extended

5 Peter L. Berger, Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist (New York: Prometheus Books, 2011), 135. Berger revised his own earlier views that secularism would eventually replace religion. 6 See Peter Linebaugh, “Class Justice: Why We Need a Wat Tyler Day” in Celia Chazelle, Simon Doubleday, Felice Lifshitz, and Amy G. Remensnyder eds., Why the Middle Ages Matter. Medieval Light on Modern Influences (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 169–183. For the medieval roots of oppressive social relationships, see especially R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society : Authority and Deviance in Western Europe 950–1250. 2nd Edition (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007).

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across the English Channel and the North Atlantic in multiple pathways of crossfertilization, whether by attraction or rebuttal.7 Max Weber’s (1864–1920) theory of the influence of Puritan ethics on the development of modern capitalism is a product of this pre-World War II knowledge network, and continues to be re-printed by academic publishing houses.8 Central to Weber’s focus on Puritans is the concept of Entzauberung or disenchantment, a paradigmatic break with pre-modern magical religiosity that allowed for the rise of modern rationality, scientific method, and bureaucratic nation states. Although medieval feudalism created conditions conducive to the birth of capitalism such as emerging markets and a merchant class, it took the dramatic impact of Puritan anti-Catholic reform to move capitalist economic systems to center stage.9 Puritans themselves, however, as the quintessential white Americans in all their mythic Mayflower and Thanksgiving splendor still are in dire need of their own Entzauberung.10 This essay pursues the web of ideas spun from this early transatlantic academic network. Despite its distinctive emphasis on Protestantism, Weber’s theory arose in neither disciplinary nor thematic isolation. His colleagues, many of whom better known than Weber at the time, pursued a research agenda on the religious provenance of modern capitalism that built on a now outdated premise: that peoples and ethnic groups could be defined by a collective physique, psychology, and mentality. Nineteenth century race science promoters, anthropologists, and evolutionary theorists generated their own versions of a religiously expressed Völkerpsychologie (the psychology of ethnic peoples), and on this basis devised arguments for the existence of a distinct capitalist char7 The German academic community was exceedingly small at the time, and the debates therefore well-known. Stephen Kalberg points out that only one percent of Germans attended the elite school system (Gymnasium) at Weber’s time. The social impact of this small elite was stunningly disproportionate to its size. See Kalberg in Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Protestantism, ix, n.3. Kalberg relied on Fritz Ringer’s study, The Decline of the German Mandarins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969). On Weber’s political thought and context, see David Beetham, Max Weber and the Theory of Modern Politics (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974). I thank David Coates for the reference. 8 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Protestantism. A new translation and introduction by Stephen Kalberg (Los Angeles: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), originally published in German in an early version (1904/05) and a revised version (1920/21) as Die protestantische Ethik und der „Geist“ des Kapitalismus – Die religiösen Grundlagen der innerweltlichen Askese, published in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Tübingen: Mohr, 1920–1921). 9 Richard Jenkins argues against Weber’s model as overly simplified and demonstrates the ongoing enchantment and current re-enchantment turn in the United States in particular. Richard Jenkins, “Disenchantment, Enchantment and Re-Enchantment,” Max Weber Studies 1:1, November 2000, 11–32. 10 For a recent popular effort see Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower. A Story of Courage, Community, and War (New York: Viking, 2006).

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acter.11 This research paradigm contrasted sharply with Weber’s Enlightenment emphasis on the universality of mind and rationality rather than the localized, physio-psychological uniqueness of human traits and types. Yet another research strand was developed by Georg Simmel (1858–1918), who tracked the genesis and impact of capitalism on psychological, intellectual, and emotional dimensions of human life, yet without recourse to a discourse of racially or religiously distinct traits and mentalities.12 Each research program was in no small part driven by the effort to accurately explain a relatively new and anxiety-provoking social phenomenon, the birth of modern “economic man,” the Wirtschaftsmensch or homo capitalisticus.13 Karl Marx (1818–1883) offered one of many similar portraits of this new and not very likable creature. In Marx’ portrayal of the Wirtschaftsmensch, religion is not erased but transformed to fit new economic and social realities. Marx accurately

11 The scholarly term Völkerpsychologie was originally coined by the German philosopher Moritz Lazarus (1824–1903). From its inception, Lazarus was devoted to clarify differences between Jewish and Christian identities. As was true for Weber, Lazarus was an activist scholar and committed to rebut the growing German anti-Semitism of the second half of the nineteenth century. For his writings, see, inter alia, Treu und Frei: Reden und Vorträge über Juden und Judenthum (1887), and his publications in Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, which he co-founded in 1859. As an attempt to avoid stereotyping, Weber’s concept of ideal type served as an approximate description of a specific configuration of historical, social, religious, and economic factors. See Hans Henrik Bruun, Science, Values, and Politics in Max Weber’s Methodology (London, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 209ff. Levine notes passim the stereotyping of Jews as pariah people in Weber’s Religionssoziologie, thus challenging the objectivity of Weber’s methodology. See Hillel Levine, Economic Origins of Antisemitism. Poland and Its Jews in the Early Modern Period (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991). On Weber’s stance towards race science, see John Stone, “Max Weber on Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism” in Stone, ed., Race and Ethnicity : Comparative and Theoretical Approaches (Malden, Massachusetts: Routledge, 1995), 13–28. 12 Simmel noted a flattening of emotional life, superficiality, and lack of convictions. The following passage summarizes his analysis. „Die eigentümliche Abflachung des Gefühlslebens, die man der Jetztzeit gegenüber der einseitigen Stärke und Schroffheit früherer Epochen nachsagt; die Leichtigkeit intellektueller Verständigung, die selbst zwischen Menschen divergentester Natur und Position besteht – während selbst eine intellektuell so überragende und theoretisch so interessierte Persönlichkeit wie Dante noch sagt, gewissen theoretischen Gegnern dürfe man nicht mit Gründen, sondern nur mit dem Messer antworten; die Tendenz zur Versöhnlichkeit, aus der Gleichgültigkeit gegen die Grundfragen des Innenlebens quellend, die man zuhöchst als die nach dem Heil der Seele bezeichnen kann und die nicht durch den Verstand zu entscheiden sind – bis zu der Idee des Weltfriedens, die besonders in den liberalen Kreisen, den historischen Trägern des Intellektualismus und des Geldverkehrs gepflegt wird: alles dies entspringt als positive Folge jenem negativen Zuge der Charakterlosigkeit.“ Georg Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1900, 459–460. http://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/book/show/simmel_geld_1900. 13 Weber, op.cit., 118; Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism (Munich and Leipzig: Verlag von Duncker & Humblot, 1922), 281 and passim. For a contemporary blog on the Wirtschaftsmensch, see http://zoonpolitikon.blogsport.de/2011/05/10/der-wirtschaftsmensch/.

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predicted the contemporary inundation with religious choices described by Berger, writing that This man, the member of bourgeois society, is now the basis, the presupposition, of the political state. He is recognized as such in the various declarations of human rights. The recognition of the freedom, of egotistical man, however, is the recognition of the unrestrained movement of spiritual and material elements that form its content. Man, therefore, was not freed from his religion but received religious freedom. He was not freed from property but received freedom of property. He was not freed from professional egotism but received freedom to practice it professionally.14

Whereas Simmel and Weber’s theories, research principles and methods are still studied and discussed today, alternative lines of inquiry and the search for specific human types have retreated into the shadow lands of social prejudice.15 Nonetheless, the stereotypes produced by joining economic theory and Völkerpsychologie still haunt the social imaginary and are reactivated especially in times of crisis. In hindsight, the Wirtschaftsmensch belongs to the gallery of humanoid cryptids such as the medieval witch, Frankenstein, or Big Foot. Those who have been identified with the religious Wirtschaftsmensch stereotype and its antipode experienced the collective effort to control his might as far surpassing the cataclysm of the European early modern witch hunts. As is true for the belief in the existence of witches, however, even the Wirtschaftsmensch carried medieval DNA.

From Mammon to Letzter Mensch 1871 marks the terminus ad quem of Germany’s Angst about capitalism. The era of unprecedented economic growth after German unification in 1871 is commonly known as Gründerzeit (“Founders’ Era”). A cause for strong emotional reactions and social friction, older regional identities now had to yield to an imagined supra-regional “German-ness,” On one hand, liberal nationalist sentiment proclaimed that the citizen body should include everybody within the 14 Karl Marx, AWorld without Jews, translated with an introduction by Dagobert D. Runes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959) 32.It should be noted that the English title is by Runes, not Marx. For an apologetic reading of Marx’s view of Jews, see Helmut Hirsch, Marx und Moses. Karl Marx zur ‘Judenfrage’ und zu Juden, Volume 2: Judentum und Umwelt, edited by Johann Maier (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter D. Lang, 1980). For a detailed study of the social impact of Western notions of freedom, see Orlando Patterson, Freedom. Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (London: I.B.Tauris & Co, 1991). 15 Jerry Z. Muller, The Mind and the Market. Capitalism in Western Thought (New York: Anchor Books, 2002), 166–208, and Muller, Capitalism and the Jews (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 189–219.

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nation state boundary. In stark contrast, illiberal “integral” nationalism demanded, however, that the citizenry should include only those who shared the same biological, religious and cultural heritage. The former position included, the latter rejected German Jews as citizens.16 Academic life profited from the novel political and economic realities. The new nation state invested heavily in German universities, generated innovative and formidable research institutes, endowed chairs, and generously funded ambitious research programs.17 The precipitous growth of capitalist industrialization during the Gründerzeit shifted a rural focus of production to urban centers and necessitated the move from family-based companies to bureaucratically run corporations.18 In quick succession, the 1873 German stock market crash, known as the Gründerkrise (Founders’ Crisis), triggered widespread doubts and anxiety about German industrialization and new capitalist wealth.19 The Berlin stock exchange was viewed with increasing suspicion, since it appeared to promote international trade through arbitrage (balancing global pricing) at the expense of national interests.20 Medieval stereotypes and disjointed scraps of religious discourse were mobilized and modernized in a collective search for scapegoats. The disproportionate Jewish presence among the founders of the stock exchange and stock exchange traders became conflated with aversion to the stock market, deeply ingrained anti-Semitism, and the long-standing Christian condemnation of usury.21 At work on an explanatory narrative of economic man’s ill repute, intellectuals responded to the crisis with research programs on the religious, cultural and economic history of capitalism. In service to the nation state, they

16 See Edward Timms and Andrea Hammel, The German-Jewish Dilemma. From the Enlightenment to the Shoah (Lewiston, NJ: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1999); George L. Moss, The Crisis of German Ideology (New York, 1981), cited in Muller, The Mind and the Market, 234. Muller notes that between 1815 and 1850, perhaps as many as 2,500 publications discussed the issue of Jewish citizenship in Germany. See Muller, The Mind and the Market, 181. 17 Such generous funding left its footprints in sometimes amusing ways. For example, while traveling in the US, Max Weber noted with surprise that American academics were comparatively less well to do and more overworked, trying to juggle family life, home obligations, and a strenuous teaching schedule with research. He was especially struck by the diminutive houses in which professors lived. Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, edited and translated by Harry Zohn (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1975), 283ff. 18 Muller, The Mind and the Market, 232. 19 Anne Harrington notes that other Europeans forged anti-German stereotypes during the era of industrialization, identifying Germans as cold “machine people.” See Harrington, Reenchanted Science. Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 30. 20 Muller, The Mind and the Market, 237. 21 On the anti-Semitic trajectory of the concept of usury, see Muller, Capitalism and the Jews, 15–72.

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also devised pragmatic strategies of either revolution or reform to correct the dismal economic state of affairs. German intellectuals on the left reacted to the crisis with efforts to create conditions for non-alienated labor and the communal ownership of capital.22 A skeptical-realist group of academics envisioned capitalism as a dynamic and evolving system capable of reform that would make a revolution unnecessary. This faction, to whom Weber belonged, promoted the regulation of capitalist self-interest by endorsing fair pricing policies in support of the welfare of all citizens of a nation-state. A third position was worked out by conservative social thinkers, eventually including Werner Sombart (1863–1941). As was true for the left, the conservative position rejected capitalism, yet with a different line of reasoning. Capitalism was perceived not as an extension of, but as a threat to Christianity, traditional culture, and local and national identity. The proposed solution was to return to a “natural” economy based in agrarian, Christian, community-based local structures. Despite their divergent diagnostic tools and solutions, anti-Semitism saturated leftist and conservative positions to varying degrees.23 Buoyed by loyalty to the local and the traditional, academics in both camps endeavored to find proof for the mono-causal thesis that Jews had invented and spread capitalism, and portrayed Christians as victims of a Jewish financial conspiracy. Karl Marx famously turned anti-Semitic polemics on its head and pronounced (sarcastically, perhaps) that Christian capitalists were Jews par excellence. Werner Sombart in turn polemicized that Puritanism was indeed Judaism. Weber’s reaction was to offer a sustained scholarly dismantling of the anti-Semitic myth of capitalist origins, and worked to prove that under certain conditions, modern capitalism could emerge in all world religions.24 Yet 22 Many of these academics, also identified as Sozialpolitiker, were ridiculed as so-called “Kathedersozialisten,” a German sub-species of “armchair revolutionaries.” See https://de. wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathedersozialismus; Fritz Völkerling, Der deutsche Kathedersozialismus. Berlin: Verlag die Wirtschaft, 1959. 23 On the anti-Semitism of the internationally significant leader of the Sozialpolitiker camp, Gustav von Schmoller (1838–1917), especially his emphasis on racial theory and definition of Jews as a racial minority in medieval Germany, see Erik Grimmer-Solem, “Every True Friend of the Fatherland: Gustav Schmoller and the ‘Jewish Question,’” 1916–1917, http://egrim mer.web.wesleyan.edu/pdf/Every_True_Friend.pdf (accessed December 27, 2015). 24 For a summary, see Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, translated by Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 265–275. These included Islam, Judaism, Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) charts some aspects of the emerging paradigm of “world religions” as a Eurocentric concept. For her view of Weber’s theses, see 291–309. On Weber’s scholarly rebuttal of anti-Semitic arguments for a “Jewish” capitalism, see, inter alia, Weber, Ancient Judaism, translated and edited by Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1952). On an apologetic reading of Sombart’s anti-Semitism and the Weber-Sombart debate, see Hartmut Lehmann, “The Rise of Capitalism: Weber versus

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despite their ideological differences, critical explanatory templates shared the conviction that the genesis of modern capitalism had to be linked to religion. The religious concept of avarice or greed, the sin of excessive covetousness, was the discursive motor to generate such genealogy. Historians of Christian ethics trace the conceptual origins of the vice to the prolific monastic theologian Evagrius Ponticus (345–399).25 In a massive cultural transfer to contemporary economic and scientific discourse, avarice, having risen in rank in medieval pastoral theology as one of the seven cardinal vices and positioned as the immoral foundation of usury, re-appeared in the guise of a religiously neutral yet scientifically legitimate sounding “acquisitive instinct.” Medieval Christian theologians such as Peter Lombard (1096–1160) once speculated that avarice constituted the blasphemous worship of a demon called Mammon; late medieval and early modern German anti-Judaism linked Jews with Mammon, even demonizing Jews themselves as Geizteufel (“avarice devils”).26 Theories about the unchecked growth of a racially distinct acquisitive instinct seem equally antiquated today.27 Yet at the time, academic theories about the ethno-religious genesis of acquisitiveness and an endemic Christian resentment of Judaism generated a toxic pseudo-scientific brew. In the 1870s, hostility toward German Jews was on rise once again.28 For the left and right, the archetypal capitalist was despicable and pitiful. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) called the new species the letzte Menschen (the “last human beings”), “repulsive figures without emotion. Through their “little pleasures” they render everything small – yet they claim to have ‘invented happiness.’”29 In the shadows of the letzte Mensch and Geizjude, another equally

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Sombart” in Lehmann and Guenther Roth, eds., Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts, Publications of the German Historical Institute (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 195–211. See Angela Tilby, The Seven Deadly Sins: Their Origin in the Spiritual Teaching of Evagrius the Hermit (London: SPCK, 2009). See Nicoline Hortzitz, Die Sprache der Judenfeindschaft in der frühen Neuzeit (1450–1700). Untersuchungen zu Wortschatz,Text und Argumentation (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2005), 188–191. According to Kalberg, “a number of German scholars at the end of the nineteenth century argued that, in earlier times, the ‘acquisitive instinct’…was less developed or even nonexistent. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, they saw avarice and greed as becoming stronger. They believed that modern capitalism resulted from an intensification of the ‘acquisitive instinct’ [and the] pursuit of gain.” See Stephen Kalberg, op.cit., xxi. See Werner Mosse, Jews in the German Economy: The German-Jewish Economic Elite, 1820–1935 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 380ff. Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), cited in Muller, op.cit., 237. For a survey of Jewish business families in Germany, see, inter al., Nachum T. Gidal, Juden in Deutschland (Cologne: Krönemann, 1998), 260–268. Quotation in Stephen Kalberg, op.cit., 246. Georg Simmel offered a less rhetorically charged, yet equally pessimistic portrayal of the psychological impact of money. See above, note 9.

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fantastic economic archetype came into American/Medieval existence to symbolize pre-capitalist wholeness, the noble savage.

Indigeneity and Doomed Pre-capitalist Wholeness German intellectuals depended upon anthropological studies of American Indian and other Indigenous peoples to propose a theory of economic devolution rather than evolution, thus inverting Darwin’s (1809–1882) theory in the field of economics.30 In Friedrich Engels’ (1820–1895) creation story of Western European capitalism, the economic fall from grace took place in the European south.31 The rising merchant class in Greece and Italy laid the groundwork for the calamitous development of class structures, slavery, exploitation, money, and the rise of capitalism. In Engels’ view, knowledge of an economic paradise, however, was still retrievable. Combining Marxist economic analysis with the work of American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881), Engels identified the ideals of a non-alienated human life world with the society of the pre-contact Iroquois Confederacy (League of the Haudenosaunee). Fascinated since his youth with American Indian culture to the point of fashioning a Native alter ego, Morgan wrote seminal works on the Haudenosaunee which collated and interpreted data on kinship structures, language, government, and gender roles.32 Engels followed Morgan’s view that Iroquoian society embodied the ideals of economic justice and equality for men and women alike. Generalizing from Morgan’s Ancient Society, Engels asserted that “there cannot be any poor and destitute–the communistic households and the gentes know their duties toward the aged, sick and disabled. All are free and equal–the women included. There is no room yet for slaves, not for the subjugation of foreign tribes.”33

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Simmel’s career suffered greatly from anti-Semitic prejudice. Despite his brilliance, Simmel never received appropriate university appointments. For a concise historical review of the dependency of a notion of “Western Civilization” on the paradoxical figure of the savage and the primitive with a special emphasis on North American Native nations, see Robert A. Williams, Savage Anxieties. The Invention of Western Civilization (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012). Friedrich Engels, Der Ursprung Der Familie, Des Privateigenthums Und Des Staats. Im Anschluß an Lewis H. Morgan‘s Forschungen (Stuttgart: Verlag von J.H.W. Dietz Nachfolger, 1884). Henry Lewis Morgan, The League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee or Iroquois (Rochester : Sage and Brothers, 1851), The Laws of Descent of the Iroquois (volume XI, Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1856), Ancient Society (New York: Henry Holt, 1877). On his Indian self-identification, see Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian, Yale Historical Publications Series (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 71–95. Engels, English translation, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State translated by Ernest Untermann (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1902), 117.

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Engels refashioned the devastating impact of European colonialism on Iroquoia, which Morgan witnessed firsthand and tried to ameliorate through political action, as the global Ur scene revealing the destructive character of capitalists. For Engels, colonialist invasion was clearly a matter of character deformation, and he did not mince words in describing it. Interpreting colonialist exploitation as a practice of class oppression, he wrote, “the new system of classes is inaugurated by the meanest impulses: vulgar covetousness, brutal lust, sordid avarice, selfish robbery of common wealth. The old gentile society without classes is undermined and brought to fall by the most contemptible means: theft, violence, cunning, treason.”34 Engels’ utopia, the era of liberation from capitalist alienation, is imagined as the now destroyed Indigenous past – yet improved, paradoxically so, by Western-style individualism. Despite its many desirable features, native religion bound the otherwise admirable society of the Haudenosaunee to “the navel string of the primordial community” and precluded the freedom of the individual.35 In line with Morgan’s evolutionary scheme that located Native Americans outside of “civilization,” Engels fantasized the noble but doomed savage, whose religiosity is “childish.” As adulthood follows childhood, a “more highly developed” “civilization” was destined to succeed in the necessary destruction of the “childish” Indigenous character through theft, rape, deceit, and treason.36 With such intellectual sleight of hand, Engels thus could both critique and defend aspects of colonialist violence as necessary for the progress of “civilization.”37 Engels relied on and replicated Morgan’s etic perspective and his anthropological categories of analysis. Morgan in turn was entirely dependent on his collaboration with Ely S. Parker (1828–1895), a prominent Seneca diplomat, attorney, and engineer active in American politics.38 Parker’s contribution to Morgan’s scholarship was ambivalent. Although generous in his support of Morgan’s work, Parker resented Morgan’s attempts at superimposing Eurocentric categories of analysis on Iroquoian culture, religion, and society. Morgan’s tripartite developmental scheme of the progressive stages of primitive, barbaric, and civilized societies was rife with Eurocentric prejudice and vio34 Ibid., 119. 35 Ibid., 119. As for its Western-style rebirth, Engels imagined that “it will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality, and fraternity of the ancient gentes,” ibid, 217. 36 Ibid, 119. 37 Glen Coulthard has demonstrated the pernicious survival of this paradox in the case of the Dene struggle against the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline in Coulthard, “From Wards of State to Subjects of Recognition? Marx, Indigenous Peoples, and the Politics of Dispossession in Denendeh” in Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith, eds., Theorizing Native Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 56–99. 38 See Scott Michaelsen, “Ely S. Parker and Amerindian Voices in Ethnography” in American Literary History, 8: 4 (Winter 1996), 615–638; Philip J. Deloria, as in note 25.

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lence; it located Indigenous nations in pre-civilized netherworlds. Not surprisingly, contemporary Lakota intellectuals Vine Deloria, Jr., and Frank Black Elk found little else but predictable Christian Euro-centrism in leftist analyses of American Indian peoples based on Eurocentric anthropology. Vine Deloria, Jr., concluded his review of Marxist theory by writing that From the perspective of American Indians, I would argue, Marxism offers yet another group of cowboys riding around the same old rock. It is Western religion dressed in economistic clothing, and shabby clothing it is… its universalism, disguised in the costume of international concern and application, poses as much threat as ever did the Christian missionaries.39

Seneca scholar Barbara Alice Mann offers an emic description of traditional Haudenosaunee economic practices that dismantles the centerpiece of Engels’ argument for the West’s uniqueness in having developed individualism. Mann describes Iroquoian economic practices as embedded in Indigenous spirituality and cosmology, yet her study also underscores the centrality of individualism as as important as community well-being, egalitarian gender complementarity, and the wide circulation of surplus community wealth. She, too, notes the stark contrast to Western economic practices, and describes the efforts among a number of contemporary Haudenosaunee to bring back traditional economies.40 Rather than locking Indigenous economic systems into a mythologized value position below European capitalism and individualism, both Deloria Jr. and Mann identify pre-contact tribal economic traditions as viable contemporary alternatives sui generis. Right wing theorists as well took note of the destructiveness of the EuroAmerican invasion of American Indian nations. Consistent with their ethnoreligious identification of the Wirtschaftsmensch, the devastation was linked specifically to Jewish capitalists.41 For example, in a 1943 book published by the NSDAP, Nazi journalist Hermann Erich Seifert faults Jewish merchants for the 39 Vine Deloria, Jr., “Circling the Same Old Rock” in Ward Churchill, ed., Marxism and Native Americans (Cambridge, Massachusetts: South End Press, 1983), 113–137, 135; Frank Black Elk, “Observations on Marxism and Lakota Traditions,” concludes that “when Marxists come upon a culture which functions on the basis of truly dialectical understanding and thought, they don’t understand it … they condemn it … as being ‘primitive’ and ‘underdeveloped’” in Churchill, op.cit., 137–159, 149. 40 Barbara Alice Mann, Iroquoian Women. The Gantowisas (New York: Peter Lang, 2000). On the difficulties of tribes to develop sustainable economies post-contact, see Alexandra Harmon, Rich Indians. Native People and the Problem of Wealth in American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 41 For a discussion of Nazi attitudes toward Native Americans, see Paul C. Rosier, Serving Their Country. American Indian Politics and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2009), 73–84.

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destruction of American Indian nations.42 On the left and right, the portrait of homo capitalisticus is drawn as a transatlantic predator par excellence, and, in a move of circular logic, thus proven to operate on a worldwide scale. The birth of economic man and the transition to capitalism is written as a history of transatlantic traumatization and the obliteration of women as economic players.

The Natural Habitat, Race, and Sexual Threat of Homo capitalisticus Engels published his analysis of Lewis Henry Morgan’s work in 1902. A little more than a decade later, another American anthropological bestseller crossed the Atlantic to stimulate German research. Like Morgan’s Ancient Society, Madison Grant’s (1865–1937) The Passing of the Great Race; or, the racial basis of European history subscribed to a developmental model of economic life.43 Yet unlike Morgan’s magnum opus, Grant’s study applied the new category of race science rather than a cultural evolution or devolution model to put a human face on the modern origins of capitalism. Its arguments were so appealing and its author so well-connected to cultural elites that The Passing of the Great Race quickly became the canonical text for the transatlantic eugenics movement. By 1937, the bestseller, which still attracts rave reviews on Amazon.com today, sold over one and a half million copies in the US. In 1925, Hitler praised the book as “my bible” and applied its Nordic supremacy theory to German social issues. Madison Grant, an ardent environmentalist, juxtaposed the assumed superiority of the “Nordic race” to the “Negroid” and “Mongoloid races,” and expounded on the perceived dangers of the latter to the former. According to Grant, “Nordic” people flourished in the open spaces of nature, yet could not adapt well to the cramped and decadent new environment of growing urban centers and factory life. As wild animal species such as the American bison were threatened by extinction, so was the “Nordic race” – in this case, by industrialization generally and in the United States specifically by the immigration of Non-nordic peoples. A lifelong denizen of New York, Grant witnessed the city’s growing importance as an immigration portal. He theorized that only “inferior” races could thrive in the squalid urban landscape of capitalism, pushing out and overrunning earlier, more delicate Nordic groups, which Grant referred to as 42 Hermann Erich Seifert, Der Jude zwischen den Fronten der Rassen, der Völker, der Kulturen (Berlin: Zentralverlag der NSDAP Franz Eher Nachfolger GmbH, 1943), 99–108. 43 Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race; or, the racial basis of European history (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916). On the impact of Grant, briefly described in the next paragraph, see Jonathan P. Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (Burlington, Vermont: University of Vermont Press, 2009).

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“native Americans.” Eastern European Jewish immigrants on the flight from pogroms and economic deprivation figured prominently in this doom and gloom race scenario. Polish Jews, for example, were derisively noted for their “dwarf stature, peculiar mentality, [and] ruthless concentration on self-interest.”44 The stereotype of a Jewish “ruthless concentration on self-interest” was integral to a racially structured academic narrative of modern capitalism even before Grant published his defamatory oeuvre.45 Werner Sombart, long-time colleague and friend of Max Weber, added German academic respectability to the racial fantasies that formed the backbone of Madison Grant’s bestseller. Beginning his academic career as a Marxist sympathizer, Sombart eventually aligned himself with National Socialist goals.46 Trained in history and economics, Sombart served – together with Weber – as the founder and co-editor of the leading German journal in the new academic discipline of sociology, the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. In 1902, Sombart published Modern Capitalism (Der moderne Kapitalismus), an extensive study which mapped the emergence of capitalism within the narrative structure of evolutionary progress. Modern Capitalism placed Jews in the position of its creators.47 The anti-Semitic writings of Karl Marx (1818–1883), a variation of right wing thought about Jews and capitalism rather than a new discursive turn, provided a blueprint for Sombart’s research agenda. Marx, baptized as a Lutheran Protestant and a life-long admirer of the ideal of the artistic, well-rounded person (the hallmark of the “Bildungsbürgertum”) interpreted money-making as a form of 44 Grant, op.cit., 16. The identification of Jews with undesirable physical traits can be traced back to the Christian Middle Ages. See Irven M. Resnick, Marks of Distinction. Christian Perceptions of Jews in the High Middle Ages (Washington, DC: The Catholic University Press, 2011). On Polish Jews and economic stereotyping, see Hillel Levine, Economic Origins of Antisemitism. Poland and Its Jews in the Early Modern Period (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991). Levine locates the origins of financial rationality in the rise of medieval nominalism rather than Puritan ethics. On current trafficking of the stereotype, see Abraham H. Foxman, Jews & Money. The Story of a Stereotype (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2010). 45 See Ritchie Robertson for a survey of the modern currents of German anti-Semitism, identified by Robertson as nationalist essentialism, racist, and cultural anti-Semitism. Robertson, “Varieties of Antisemitism from Herder to Fassbinder” in Timms and Hammel, op.cit., 113–23. 46 See the discussion of Sombart’s career in Eberhard Demm, “Philosemitism and Antisemitism: Nietzsche, Sombart, Alfred Weber” in Timms and Hammel, op.cit., 77–93. A close reading of Sombart’s Der moderne Kapitalismus does not warrant its interpretation as a philosemitic work as Demm seems to suggest. 47 Werner Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1902); Sombart developed his ideas further in Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1911), translated by M. Epstein as The Jews and Modern Capitalism (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1951).

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Non-Western magical religious activity and evidence of polytheism, fetishism.48 Marx borrowed the concept from Charles de Brosses, an eighteenth century scholar of Egyptian polytheism, whom Marx read in 1842.49 Marx’ acerbic tract On the Jewish Question (Zur Judenfrage) turns all of bourgeois society into caricatured Jews. Echoing the description of Nietzsche’s letzte Mensch in an antiSemitic key, Marx castigated the “narrowness of the Jew…as the Jewish narrowness of society”(“die jüdische Beschrýnktheit der Gesellschaft”).50 Marx’ diatribes against a presumed Jewish capitalism were received with mixed results on the left.51 In a combination of Orientalism and Morgan’s evolutionary scale, the more cautious Engels identified Jewish religiosity with past evolutionary stages and gave it a distinct racial identity. Engels wrote to Marx that “Jewish so-called Holy Scripture is nothing more than a record of the oldArabian religious and tribal tradition, modified by the early separation of the Jews from their consanguineous but nomadic neighbors.”52 It was Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924), however, who linked anti-Semitism to its economic and ideological functions in service of a Christian elite. Lenin, who was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church, denounced anti-Semitism as scapegoating Jews for the human suffering caused by economic exploitation. Lenin underestimated 48 See Muller, The Mind and the Market, 166–208, and Muller, Capitalism and the Jews, 33–45, for an overview of Marx’ position toward Jews and his dependence on the values of the Bildungsbürgertum. Muller points to the discursive nexus between Christian teachings against usury and Marxist ideals of non-alienated work. In his view, “to a degree rarely appreciated, he [Marx] merely recast the traditional Christian stigmatization of moneymaking into a new vocabulary and reiterated the ancient suspicion against those who used money to make money. In his concept of capitalism as ‘exploitation’ Marx returned to the very old idea that money is fundamentally unproductive, that only those who live by the sweat of their brow truly produce, and that therefore not only interest, but profit itself, is always ill-gotten.” Muller, The Mind and the Market, 167. Protestant leaders of his generation promoted anti-Semitism as well; for a prominent example, see Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich, “Judenfeindschaft im 19. Jahrhundert. Hofprediger Stöcker und seine Zeit” in Tribüne. Zeitschrift zum Verständnis des Judentums 18, no.72 (1979), 78–92. See also David Nirenberg’s brief review in Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism. The Western Tradition (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013), 1–13. 49 Cited in Frank E. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959) and discussed in Muller, The Mind and the Market, 192. For Freud’s better known definition of fetishism as defense against the threat of castration, see Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism” in Miscellaneous Papers, 1888–1938. Volume 5 of Collected Papers (London: Hogarth and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1924–1950), 198–204. 50 http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/; accessed July 2016. See also the somewhat controversial translation by Dagobert D. Runes, AWorld Without Jews, cited in note nine. 51 On Jewish reactions, see Timms and Hammel, op.cit., passim. 52 Letter of Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, Manchester, approximately May 24, 1853, cited in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: On Religion (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2008), 120.

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the ability of anti-Semites to believe in their own ideological constructs as a description of reality, yet understood the longue dur8e of the exploitation of labor, which was able to survive cultural change by adapting to new discursive and economic patterns.53 For almost two decades, between 1902 and 1920, Sombart and Weber engaged in amicable publication combat over the role of Jews and Judaism in the emergence of modern capitalism. Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic challenged Sombart’s argument of the Jewish origins of capitalism by shifting the focus to Calvinist ethics as the foundation of a capitalist mentality. Sombart responded with a defense of his views and published Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (The Jews and Economic Life) in 1911. At the end of the same year, Sombart commented on miscegenation and Jewish assimilation in a short treatise entitled Die Zukunft der Juden (The Future of the Jews). Sombart agreed with Weber on the centrality of rationality in the development of capitalism, yet argued that “Puritanismus ist Judaismus” – Puritan ethics and rationalism are at their core Jewish ethics and rationalism.54 Sombart maintained that Jews had developed the capacity for abstract rationalist thought and action long before the Protestant reformation. In either case, the birth of homo capitalisticus became tied to religious identity formation.55 Rather than violence, as argued by critics on the left, the main characteristic of the Weberian and Sombartian Wirtschaftsmensch was envisioned to be his rationality. Rationality developed as religious systems abandoned magical thinking and practices (such as seemingly evidenced in Indigenous fetishism). In Weber’s thinking, the Puritans’ rational prototype of economic man acted ethically rather than selfishly.56 Although Sombart did not define himself as an anti-Semite, he refused to 53 Lenin’s trenchant analysis (recorded March 1919) deserves to be quoted at length. “AntiSemitism means spreading enmity towards the Jews…It is not the Jews who are the enemies of the working people. The enemies of the workers are the capitalists of all countries. Among the Jews there are working people, and they form the majority. They are our brothers, who, like us, are oppressed by capital; they are our comrades in the struggle for socialism. Among the Jews there are kulaks, exploiters and capitalists, just as there are among the Russians, and among people of all nations. The capitalists strive to sow and foment hatred between workers of different faiths, different nations and different races. Those who do not work are kept in power by the power and strength of capital. Rich Jews, like rich Russians, and the rich in all countries, are in alliance to oppress, crush, rob and disunite the workers…Shame on those who foment hatred towards the Jews, who foment hatred towards other nations.” Lenin’s Collected Works, translated by George Hanna, Volume 29, 4th English Edition (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972) Volume 29, 252–253. 54 Sombart ibid., 293. 55 See Salo W. Baron, “Changing Patterns of Antisemitism: A Survey” in Jewish Social Studies 38, no.1 (1976), 5–38, on contextualizing Sombart’s views in a wider historical framework. 56 For a nuanced re-reading of the question of Puritan self-interest, see Donald Frey “Individualist Economic Values and Self-Interest: The Problem in the Puritan Ethic,” in Journal of Business Ethics, 17 (1998), 1573–80. I thank Donald Frey for the reference.

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approach the emergence of homo capitalisticus as a non-Jewish process. His scholarship employed arguments from the emerging fields of genetics, evolutionary science, and race theory, and insisted that these new scientific endeavors be supplemented with cross-disciplinary data from ethnographic “collective psychology,” Völkerpsychologie. Sombart juxtaposed a desirable “concrete, particularist, Christian Gemeinschaft” with a problematic “abstract, universalistic, judaized Gesellschaft” as the outcome of capitalist development.57 Methodologically inconsistent and bordering on the polemical, Sombart’s research relied on popular writings and belles-lettres to add additional ammunition to his arsenal of arguments aimed against Weber’s more erudite research, especially in regard to theology and the comparative study of world religions (Religionsgeschichte). Sombart was trained in law and economics, but not theology and Religionsgeschichte. Sombart was careful to distance himself from a violently polemical anti-capitalist anti-Semitism, which was encouraged on a transatlantic scale by the publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1905.58 The more cautious Sombart isolated four unfavorable Jewish personality traits that distinguished (capitalist) Jews from (non-capitalist) Christians: extreme intellectualism, goal-orientedness (Zielstrebigkeit), restlessness (Rastlosigkeit), and flexibility (Anpassungsfähigkeit). He proposed, again an example of circular logic, that these were the ideal characteristics of a successful capitalist entrepreneur.59 In Weber’s model, intellectualism/rationality and goal-orientedness are linked to religious ethics and piety rather than ethnicity. Compare Sombart’s list with Weber’s succinct enumeration in Religions of China: 57 Sombart, op.cit., 281 and 300. See also Muller, The Mind and the Market, 254. On the origin of the binary, see Ferdinand TPnnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Community and Society, 1887); English translation by Margaret Hollis, Community and Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 58 See Hadassa Ben-Itto, The Lie That Would Not Die. The Protocol of the Elders of Zion (Portland, Oregon: Vallantine Mitchell Publishers, 2005). Nazi cultural perception of the Jews, based upon the anti-Semitic The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, emphasized that Jews throve on fomenting division among Germans, and among nation-states. Yet Nazi antiSemitism was also physical and racial. In the words of Joseph Goebbels, “the Jew is the enemy and destroyer of the purity of blood, the conscious destroyer of our race … As socialists, we are opponents of the Jews, because we see, in the Hebrews, the incarnation of capitalism, of the misuse of the nation’s goods.” http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/haken32.htm: accessed July 2016. 59 Sombart, op.cit., 313–324. In itself an act of creative destruction, Joseph A. Schumpeter (1883–1950) has done much to split the original archetype into (not so good) capitalist and (good) entrepreneur, severing the entrepreneurial image, now renamed as Unternehmergeist, from its anti-Semitic moorings. It is the positively inscribed image of entrepreneur that serves as identificatory matrix and justification for capitalism in much of the academy and popular culture today especially in its mutation as social entrepreneurship. For an example, see Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty. Economic Possibilities for Our Time (New York: Penguin, 2005).

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The indispensable ethical qualities of the modern capitalist entrepreneur were: radical concentration on God-ordained purposes; the relentless and practical rationalism of the asceticist ethic…a horror of illegal, political, colonial, booty, and monopoly types of capitalism.60

The sources for Sombart’s characterological stereotyping were necessarily abstruse. Reviewing popular opinion, Sombart concluded that since both antiSemitic and philo-Semitic authors agreed on the uniqueness of Jewish characteristics, these must exist.61 Sombart’s main scholarly authority for these presumably Jewish characteristics is a sixteenth century Spanish physician and psychologist, Juan Huarte de San Juan (1529–1588). Juan Huarte de San Juan proposed that Jewish characteristics developed from Jewish existence in a desert climate.62 Combining Völkerpsychologie and Huarte de San Juan’s environmental theories in one grand sweep, Sombart pronounced that whereas rational Jews are desert people, Nordic types are people of the water and the woods and therefore developed emotionality.63 The Jewish Wirtschaftsmensch learned rational abstraction in the “dead” landscape of the desert; by force of his Volkspsychologie, he could not but re-create the harshness of the desert as urban life under capitalism.64 As noted above, the dualistic association of a Nordic race with nature and of “inferior” races with cities also structured Grant’s work. Unlike the Indigenous fantasies of Morgan and Engels, however, here it is the romanticization of Western European pre-modern agriculture and landscapes that drives the anti-capitalist idyll. With the publication of his tract Die Zukunft der Juden, Sombart extended his academic work to recommendations on social policy and pressing contemporary issues. Frequent critical references to the United States dramatize his points, which at first glance seem philo-Semitic. He compared European dis60 Weber, Religions of China, 247. According to Muller, The Mind and the Market, “[Weber] dubbed the notion that modern capitalism is characterized by greater greed than other forms of life ‘the illusions of modern romanticists.” Max Weber, Protestant Ethic, cited in Muller, op.c.it., 240. 61 His list includes Houston Chamberlain, Heinrich Heine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Karl Marx, Walter Rathenau, and others. Ibid., 313. 62 Juan Huarte de San Juan Examen de ingenios para las ciencias (1575), Con nueuo Previlegio del Rey N.S. Impresso en BaeÅa. En casa de Juan Baptista de Montoya. AÇo de 1594. 63 Sombart, op.cit., 421. 64 Sombart writes, “Dab der Sinn für das Lebendige, Organische, Gewachsene nur aus der tausendfältig lebendigen Natur des Nordens sich entwickeln kann oder leichter sich entwickeln wird als aus der toten Natur des Orients, scheint auch nicht unwahrscheinlich. Wie denn ebenso wie die Wüste (der Süden) die Stadt, weil sie den Menschen von der dampfenden Scholle abdrängt und ihn loslöst von dem Zusammenleben mit den Tieren und Pflanzen – organisch-gewachsenen Gebilden – in ihm das eigene Miterleben des Lebendigen, das allein das ,Verständnis‘ für die organische Natur vermittelt, verkümmert und zerstört.“ (op.cit., 423).

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crimination against impoverished Eastern Jews with increasingly restrictive American policies against Jewish immigration, concluding somewhat surprisingly that anti-Semitism in the US was stronger than anywhere in Europe. In his view, Zionism was justified by the oppression of Eastern European Jewry. His defense of Zionism, couched in sympathy for the plight of Eastern European Jews, reveals a disturbing underlying motive: the wish for the forceful removal of Jews from German public life. Sombart’s reflections on German Jews insist on racial separation and strongly advocate anti-miscegenation policies. He bemoans the “gray, boring, dull ‘American man’” who is the result of miscegenation, in this case fomented by the European immigrant melting pot.”65 In contrast, Sombart celebrates the assumedly racially pure and thus unique “deep, sad Jewish eyes” and the “dark oriental type” that Jews have added to the “Nordic environment”, especially in the case of Jewish women’s appealing sexual allure. With an astonishing sense of sexual ownership, he exclaimed that “we don’t want to miss the rassigen (racially pure and racy) Judiths and Miriams.”66 American style miscegenation in Germany, however, is undesirable despite sexual attraction. Equating sexual contact with intellectual exchange, Sombart proclaims that “however, they [Jewish women] must be and want to remain rassig. We don’t like the black-blond mishmash. And it is the same on the intellectual level.”67 To persuade his readers of the rationality of this equation, Sombart claims that German Christian-Jewish marriages remain infertile – to him a clear proof that miscegenation between “Nordic” and “Oriental” races is “against nature.” Children of such unions lack “psychological balance,” and as adults, tend toward suicide, mental illness, and moral depravity. Against the assumed wishes of their progenitors, the multigenerational offspring of Jewish-Christian marriages will always “look Jewish.”68 Preceding Grant’s racist urban discontent, Sombart complained that a concentration of Jewish citizens in certain parts of Germany felt suffocating. His proposed solution: anti-miscegenation policies, the decentralization of Jewish communities by forcibly resettling Jewish families, and limitations on the political participation of Jews, especially in the German military. He lived long 65 66 67 68

Ibid., 56. Ibid., 57, 72. Ibid., 72. Ibid., 43–45. Max Weber argued against Sombart’s view that miscegenation violated natural law. In the case of the US, he saw the dynamics of a struggle for white supremacy at work. Miscegenation only became a matter of conflict after the emancipation of enslaved Africans, who strove to be treated as citizens with rights equal to those of Euro-Americans. The dynamic of a social monopolizing of power and prestige was rationalized in a discourse of miscegenation. Weber, Grundriss, 217. On the African American experience of the rise of capitalism, see Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery : From the Baroque to the Modern, 1992–1800 (New York: Verso, 1998).

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enough to witness the Nazi regime’s implementation of all three of his policy suggestions. In the final pages of the tract, and perhaps in an effort to avoid the charge of outright anti-Semitism or to mollify his Jewish readers, Sombart mitigated this model of racially argued separation by suggesting that on a vaguely defined higher plane of civilization (“einer bestimmten Höhe des Menschtums”), especially gifted human beings of all races would transcend the boundaries of a Volk and become purely, spiritually human.69 These closing comments are an inconsistent non sequitur, since Sombart critiqued in earlier sections of his reflections the “desert-born” entrepreneurial abstractness of Jewish thought which generated a disembodied view of peoples as mere “humankind” (“Menschheit”), devoid of any local and regional particularity. It is precisely the notion of a universal humanity, however, that forms the anthropological counterpart to homo capitalisticus as predator and anti-Semitic stereotype. To some critics, the universal human’s capitalist creation story began in a very unhappy childhood.

The Puritan Spirit and the Desires of the Id Warding off any connection between the desire for sex and the desire for money was not just a matter of jealously guarding racial purity. For some of the creators of economic man, the explanatory path looped back to masculine childhood trauma. Karl Marx, in one of his more memorable evocations of homo capitalisticus, deftly connects an association of commodities with the abject, with magic, and with Jewish circumcision. He fantasized that “the capitalist knows that all commodities – however shabby they may look or bad they smell – are in faith and in fact money, internally circumcised Jews, and in addition magical means by which to make more money out of money.”70 Behind the storefront of cool rationality, another world looms large, filled with emotions, sensations, and memories of an intensely charged childhood ritual. In the world of homo capitalisticus, childhood carries a heavy symbolic load that is always negative: the doomed savage as the “child” preceding Western civilization, the defective child born as a result of miscegenation, and an as-

69 Ibid., 91. 70 “Der Kapitalist weib, dab alle Waaren, wie lumpig sie immer aussehn oder wie schlecht sie immer riechen mPgen, im Glauben und in der Wahrheit Geld, innerlich verschnittne Juden sind, und zudem wunderthýtige Mittel, um aus Geld mehr Geld zu machen.“ Das Kapital, MEGA II, 6, 172. See Ben Fowkes, translator, Capital, vol. 1, 256. Quoted in Muller, op.cit., 196–197.

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sociation of commodities with a male infant marked by circumcision, which, according to Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), symbolized castration. As Horst E. Richter points out, Freud and Marx began their work with the empathic acknowledgment of the damage suffered by individuals caused by sexual repression (Freud) or economic oppression (Marx).71 Avarice, per Marx a personality trait of first the Jewish, then the Judaized Christian capitalist, reemerges in psychoanalysis as the universal gratification of an anal drive first experienced in overbearing infant-parent relationships. We love money, according to Freud, because it reminds us of feces.72 Feces are the earliest substance that afforded us a sense of control and independence vis-/-vis overpowering parents, especially domineering mothers. For the unconscious, money is feces, “however shabby” it looks and however “bad” it “smells.” Both protect successfully against the tyrannical parent. S#ndor Ferenzci (1858–1918) describes the genesis of this concept formation as it relates to a capitalist handling of money and intellectual property as follows: Children originally devote their interest without any inhibition to the process of defaecation, and that affords them pleasure to hold back their stools. The excrementa thus held back are really the first ‘savings’ of the growing being, and as such remain in constant, unconscious inter-relationship with every bodily activity or mental striving that has anything to do with collecting, hoarding, and saving.73

In the discursive turn created by Freud and his school, avarice has metamorphosed beyond its medieval Christian origins as one of the seven cardinal vices, and its anti-Semitic holding place as a racial Jewish trademark to being reimagined as a defense mechanism first practiced in infancy, the withholding of feces. Posited to exist as universally as Weber’s concept of capitalist rationality, avarice resurfaces as the traumatized withholding of self in relationship to a loved and feared Other. Fetishism, or the hoarding and veneration of objects, is lifted from its Indigenous religious contexts by Marx and Freud, and refashioned in Freudian analysis as an effort to master the fear of castration. Psychoanalysis located the genesis of both acquisitiveness and fetishism in early childhood in that capitalist avarice and hoarding became linked to the experience of nuclear family trauma and powerlessness.74 An adult overreliance 71 See Horst E. Richter, Der Gotteskomplex. Die Geburt und die Krise des Glaubens an die Allmacht des Menschen (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1979), 61–75. 72 Sigmund Freud, “Character and Anal Eroticism” (1908) in Standard Edition, edited by James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1959), 9: 167–175. 73 S#ndor Ferenzci (1914), “The Ontogenesis of the Interest in Money,” quoted in Ludwig Eidelberg, editor in chief, Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis (New York: The Free Press, 1968), 249. 74 Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism.” In Standard Edition, edited by James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 21:149–158.

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on rationality, seemingly the main characteristic of the new capitalist species, eventually became inscribed as a sign of mental dysfunction as well.75 Preceding psychoanalytic insight, Lakota leader Sitting Bull (c. 1831–1890), is said to have come to very similar conclusions regarding the place of rationality in capitalism. He summarized his view by noting that for white Americans, “the love of possessions is a disease with them.”76

Contemporary American Mutations of Medieval DNA Weber thought it unlikely that intellectual elites could create a new religion that would forge solidarity beyond long-standing stereotypes and class differences. He identified the class interests of the privileged few as the strongest factor for inhibiting the emergence of new forms of communal religious solidarity.77 Berger’s discovery of religion’s ability to comfort people in times of economic stress does not include evidence of new religious tools on behalf of social justice. This does not mean, however, that traditional religions have remained silent on economic exploitation.78 Even though capitalist rationalism did not bring about economic security for the global majority nor destroy religiosity, the face, soul, and body of homo capitalisticus underwent, if not a sex change, so at least a thorough ethnic and genetic make-over in the liminal dream spaces of popular Western fantasy and fiction. Eschewing Gründerkrise Angst, Forbes.com, for example, maintains a list of wealthy imaginary characters, the “Fictional 15.” Apart from a duck (Scrooge McDuck), a dragon, and the Tooth Fairy, they tend to be Anglo-Saxon males,

75 See James M. Glass, “Schizophrenia and Rationality : On the Function of the Unconscious Fantasy” in David Michael Levin, editor, Pathologies of the Modern Self. Postmodern Studies on Narcissism, Schizophrenia, and Depression (New York: New York University Press, 1987), 405–439. 76 See Frank Black Elk, op. cit, 144–145. On capitalist rationality’s ethical failure already visible at the height of the Enlightenment, see Ian Baucom’s work on the context of the Zong massacre of 1781, Specter of the Atlantic. Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 77 Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, translated by Ephraim Fischoff, 4th edition (Boston, 1993), 136–137. 78 For an overview, see Interfaith Worker Justice, A Worker Justice Reader (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2010). For a humanistic evaluation of medieval monastic labor practices, see Martha G. Newman, “Labor : Insights from a medieval monastery” in Celia Chazelle, Simon Doubleday, Felice Lifshitz, and Amy G. Remensnyder, eds., Why the Middle Ages Matter. Medieval Light on Modern Influences (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 106–121.

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including, most recently, a blond, blue-eyed vampire.79 Before blond vampire Carlisle Cullen entered the world of screen fantasies, however, an exceptionally famous Anglo-Saxon capitalist counterpoint to the Jewish Wirtschaftsmensch arrived on the stage of the imaginary : Oliver Stone’s blond, blue-eyed Gordon Gekko of Wall Street (1987) and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010). Gekko’s identity feeds on the narcissistic association of capitalist greed with human progress and US nationalism. In Wall Street, Gekko philosophizes that Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures, the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A.80

Gekko, of course, is meant to seduce and to frighten simultaneously. In the genre of popular fiction and their B-rated movie versions, Hollywood writer Ayn Rand (1905–1982) created a flatter version of Gekko, the capitalist hero John Galt of Atlas Shrugged (1957). The novel was released in a poorly received film version in 2011 (Paul Johansson, Atlas Shrugged, Part One). Rand’s novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged are now distributed each year for free to 400,000 High School students in Advanced Placement programs across the US.81 The fictional character of John Galt has been utilized as alter ego by contemporary Tea Party members, thus bending tradition – playing Indian, the original Boston Tea Partiers of December 16th, 1773, impersonated Mohawks – but once again blending fact and fiction with near religious enthusiasm.82 Glancing toward an orientalized East, The Protocol of the Elders of Zion proclaimed the uncanny ability of the fictitious Elders’ conspiracy to spread far and wide by invoking not Yahweh, but Vishnu, noting that “Our kingdom will be 79 http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/13/fictional-15-richest-characters-opinions-fictional_land. html :Accessed July 2016 (Edited by Michael Noer & David M. Ewalt). 80 “Memorable Quotes for Wall Street (1987)”. Internet Movie Database. http://www.imdb. com/title/tt0094291/quotes; accessed 26 July 2016. Gekko’s last name is the German word for chameleon. 81 The source of this information is the biographical entry on Ayn Rand in Wikipedia. To quote, “Rand’s books continue to be widely sold and read, with 25 million copies sold as of 2007, and 800,000 more being sold each year according to the Ayn Rand Institute. In addition, the Ayn Rand Institute provides 400,000 copies of Rand’s novels every year for free to Advanced Placement high school programs in the United States. When a 1991 survey conducted for the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club by the Information Analysis System Corporation asked 5,000 Book-of-the-Month club members, what the most influential book in the respondent’s life was, Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was the second most popular choice, after the Bible.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand, accessed January 2, 2012. 82 “‘Going Galt’: Everyone’s Doing It!” http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/06/ going-galt-everyones-doing-it/?ref=opinion; accessed 26 July, 2016; NYT Opinion Pages, March 6, 2009.

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an apologia of the divinity Vishnu, in whom is found its personification – in our hundred hands will be, one in each, the springs of the machinery of social life…”83 Real life US industrialist Henry Ford (1863–1947) became notorious for his anti-Semitism and the wide distribution of copies of The Protocol. Prominent US Christians and the Federal Council of Churches rigorously rebutted and condemned Ford’s stance. In a document entitled “The Perils of Racial Prejudice,” anti-Semitism was declared “un-American and un-Christian agitation.”84 Although Ford eventually distanced himself from his anti-Semitic views, he justified the transatlantic economic collaboration with the Nazi regime as good business. His decision contributed to the Shoah through the use of Nazi slave labor in German Ford factories.85 In the context of a nationalist discourse, the anti-Semitism of early theories of capitalism with its roots in medieval antiJudaism is sometimes used as an argument against the existence of the state of Israel and US involvement in the Middle East.86 Given these broadly sketched contemporary mutations of homo capitalisticus and the medieval Christian meme of greed as one of the seven cardinal sins, the early transatlantic academic debates about the culture of capitalism and their consequences demonstrate that men indeed labored to become rich for both the flesh and sin, and that money, if not a symbol of everything, is at least a symbol of 83 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, quoted in Will Eisner, The Plot. The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (New York: W.W.Norton, 2005), 76. Parts of the Protocols were first published in Tsarist Russia by Sergius Nilus, an Orthodox Christian, in 1905. See also the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s website on the Protocols at http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en& ModuleId=10007244. 84 See http://www.ajcarchives.org/AJC_DATA/Files/1922_1923_8_AJCAnnualReport.pdf. Cited in Neil Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews. The Mass Production of Hate (New York: Public Affairs, 2001), 149–151. 85 Promulgating Ford’s view of a Jewish economic presence in the US, the Dearborn Independent proclaimed, “In America alone, most of big business, the trusts and the banks, the natural resources and the chief agricultural products, especially tobacco, cotton, and sugar, are in control of Jewish financiers and their agents. Jewish journalists are a large and powerful group here…Jews are the largest and most numerous landlords…They absolutely control the circulations of publications in this country.” Dearborn Independent, quoted in Max Wallace, The American Axis. Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of the Third Reich (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003), 11. For a discovery of the extent of the collaboration, see Michael Dobbs’ detailed report, “Ford and GM Scrutinized for Alleged Nazi Collaboration” in the Washington Post, Monday, November 30, 1998; Page A01. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/nov98/nazicars30.htm. 86 A very recent example is anti-Semitic commentaries on Bernard Madoff ’s crimes; see, inter alia, Bradley Burston’s commentary in Ha’aretz, December 16th, 2008, printed in http://www. haaretz.com/jewish-world/news/bradley-burston-the-madoff-betrayal-life-imitates-anti-se mitism-1.259625. On Israel, see Raphael Israeli, “The Charter of Allah: The Platform of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas),” in Fundamentalist Islam and Israel. Essays in Interpretation (New York, London, 1993), 123–168; Goran Larsson, Fact or Fraud? The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Jerusalem, 1994).

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one thing, the emergent transatlantic life world that was to become the habitat of homo capitalisticus.

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Israeli, Raphael. “The Charter of Allah: The Platform of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas),” in Fundamentalist Islam and Israel. Essays in Interpretation, 123–168. New York, London, 1993. Jenkins, Richard, “Disenchantment, Enchantment and Re-Enchantment,” in Max Weber Studies 1, no 1 (November, 2000): 11–31. Larsson, Goran. Fact or Fraud? The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Jerusalem: The Jerusalem Center for Biblical Studies and Research, 1994. Lehmann, Hartmut. “The Rise of Capitalism: Weber versus Sombart.” In Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts, 195–211, edited by Hartmut Lehmann and Guenther Roth. Publications of the German Historical Institute. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Lenin, Vladimir. Collected Works, translated by George Hanna, Volume 29, 4th English Edition. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972. Levine, Hillel. Economic Origins of Antisemitism. Poland and Its Jews in the Early Modern Period. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991. Linebaugh, Peter. “Class Justice: Why we Need a Wat Tyler Day.” In Why the Middle Ages Matter. Medieval Light on Modern Influences, 169–183, edited by Celia Chazelle, Simon Doubleday, Felice Lifshitz, and Amy G. Remensnyder. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. Manuel, Frank E. The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959. Marx, Karl. AWorld Without Jews, translated with an introduction by Dagobert D. Runes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1959. Mann, Barbara Alice. Iroquoian Women. The Gantowisas. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Masuzawa, Tomoko. The Invention of World Religions or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Michaelsen, Scott. “Ely S. Parker and Amerindian Voices in Ethnography” in American Literary History, 8 no 4 (Winter 1996): 615–638. Morgan, Henry Lewis. The League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee or Iroquois. Rochester : Sage and Brothers, 1851. . The Laws of Descent of the Iroquois, volume XI, Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1856. . Ancient Society. New York: Henry Holt, 1877. Mosse, George L. The Crisis of German Ideology. New York: Schocken Books, 1981. Mosse, Werner E. Jews in the German Economy: The German-Jewish Economic Elite, 1820–1935. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Muller, Jerry Z. Capitalism and the Jews. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. . The Mind and the Market. Capitalism in Western Thought. New York: Anchor Books, 2002. Newman, Martha G. “Labor : Insights from a Medieval Monastery.” In Why the Middle Ages Matter. Medieval Light on Modern Influences, 106–121, edited by Celia Chazelle, Simon Doubleday, Felice Lifshitz, and Amy G. Remensnyder. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. Noer, Michael and Ewalt, David M., “The Forbes Fictional Fifteen,” Forbes Magazine, April 10, 2013. http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/13/fictional-15-richest-characters-opinionsfictional_land.html.

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Patterson, Orlando. Freedom. Freedom in the Making of Western Culture. London: I.B. Tauris & Co, 1991. Philbrick, Nathaniel. Mayflower. A Story of Courage, Community, and War. New York: Viking, 2006. Pulzer, Peter. The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964. Resnick, Irven M. Marks of Distinction. Christian Perceptions of Jews in the High Middle Ages. Washington, DC: The Catholic University Press, 2011. Richter, Horst E. Der Gotteskomplex. Die Geburt und die Krise des Glaubens an die Allmacht des Menschen. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1979. Ringer, Fritz. The Decline of the German Mandarins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969. Robertson, Ritchie. “Varieties of Antisemitism from Herder to Fassbinder.” In The German Jewish Dilemma. From the Enlightenment to the Shoah, 113–123, edited by Edward Timms and Andrea Hammel. Lewiston, NJ: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1999. Rosier, Paul C. Serving their Country. American Indian Politics and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Sachs, Jeffrey. The End of Poverty. Economic Possibilities for Our Time. New York: Penguin, 2005. Seifert, Hermann Erich. Der Jude zwischen den Fronten der Rassen, der Völker, der Kulturen. Berlin: Zentralverlag der NSDAP Franz Eher Nachfolger GmbH, 1943. Simmel, Georg. Philosophie des Geldes. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1900. http://www. deutschestextarchiv.de/book/show/simmel_geld_1900. Sombart, Werner. The Jews and Modern Capitalism, translated by M. Epstein. Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1951. . Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben. Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1911. . Der moderne Kapitalismus. Munich and Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1902. Spiro, Jonathan P. Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant. Burlington, Vermont: University of Vermont Press, 2009. Stone, John. “Max Weber on Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism” in Race and Ethnicity: Comparative and Theoretical Approaches, 13–28, edited by John Stone. Malden, Massachusetts: Routledge, 1995. Tilby, Angela. The Seven Deadly Sins: Their Origin in the Spiritual Teaching of Evagrius the Hermit. London: SPCK, 2009. Timms, Edward and Andrea Hammel. The German-Jewish Dilemma. From the Enlightenment to the Shoah. Lewiston, NJ: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1999. TPnnies, Ferdinand. Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887). Translated by Margaret Hollis, Community and Civil Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. http:// www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en& ModuleId=10007244. Völkerling, Fritz. Der deutsche Kathedersozialismus. Berlin: Verlag die Wirtschaft, 1959. Wallace, Max. The American Axis. Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of the Third Reich. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003. Weber, Marianne. Max Weber : A Biography, edited and translated by Harry Zohn. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1975.

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Weber, Max. Ancient Judaism, translated and edited by Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale. Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1952. . The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Stephen Kalberg. Los Angeles: Blackwell Publishing, 2002. . The Sociology of Religion, translated by Ephraim Fischoff. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964. Williams, Robert A. Savage Anxieties. The Invention of Western Civilization. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012. Wood, James. “The Very Rich Hours: Two novels about money without morals.” In The New Yorker. February 15 and 22, 2010.

Part Two: New Archives

Joshua Davies

“Beyond the Profane”: Machine Gothic and the Cultural Memory of the Future “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body – it is heritage.”1 Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

W. G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz begins with an encounter at Antwerp’s Central Railway Station, a building that celebrates the imperial wealth and power of modern Belgium by appropriating the architectural forms of the past (see figure 1). It is fitting that Sebald’s novel, so interested in memory, identity and temporality, should begin in a building that works so hard to disguise its historicity. The novel’s unnamed narrator sits beside Austerlitz in the waiting room and listens as he explains, in a bravura display of architectural learning, the building’s history : Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Austerlitz began, in reply to my question about the history of the building of Antwerp station, when Belgium, a little patch of yellowish grey barely visible on the map of the world, spread its sphere of influence to the African continent with its colonial enterprises, when deals of huge proportions were done on the capital markets and raw-materials exchanges of Brussels, and the citizens of Belgium, full of boundless optimism, believed that their country, which had been subject so long to foreign rule and was divided and disunited in itself, was about to become a great new economic power – at that time, now so long ago although it determines our lives to this day, it was the personal wish of King Leopold, under whose auspices such apparently inexorable progress was being made, that the money suddenly and abundantly available should be used to erect public buildings which would bring international renown to his aspiring state.2

Austerlitz explains that the main influences on the design were “the palaces of the Italian Renaissance” and asks the narrator if he “had noticed the round grey and white granite turrets, the sole purpose of which was to arouse medieval I’d like to thank Gillian Overing, Zoe Roth, Ed Sugden and Ulrike Wiethaus for their help and advice. 1 Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (Melbourne: Text Publishing Company, 2015), 103. 2 W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Penguin, 2001), 9–10. On the history of Belgium in the Congo see Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (London: Pan, 2006) and Neal Ascherson, The King Incorporated: Leopold II and the Congo (London: Granta, 1999).

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associations in the minds of railway passengers.”3 These turrets – over two hundred of them – line the final approach trains take to the station and condition the movement of bodies as they enter and depart the city (see figures 2 and 3). Antwerp Central is, for Austerlitz, a building “beyond the profane […] a cathedral consecrated to international traffic and trade.”4 It is also a cathedral of cultural memory. It is a confection of nationalist fantasy which re-presented Belgium’s past and imagined a future that integrated that past with new social realities. It is as interested in prophecy as remembrance.

Figure 1: Antwerp Central Railway Station. Source of Image: Author Photograph.

Antwerp Central is one of numerous railway stations built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that “arouse medieval associations.” My destination in this essay is Point of Rocks Railroad Station in Maryland, USA, a station built to the design of E. Francis Baldwin by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company in the first half of the 1870s.5 Like, for instance, St Pancras in London 3 Sebald, Austerlitz, 10. 4 Ibid., 10. 5 Point of Rocks is not the only nineteenth-century Gothic railroad station in the US. Other examples include the Tenafly Railroad station in Bergen County, New Jersey, which is roughly contemporary with Point of Rocks, Hinton station in West Virginia which dates from the late 1870s, and the astonishing St Louis Union Station (1894). I am drawn to Point of Rocks

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Figure 2: Turrets lining the approach to Antwerp Central. Source of Image: Author Photograph.

(1873), Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in Mumbai (1888), Amsterdam Central (1900), and Antwerp Central (1905), Point of Rocks is a work of the Gothic Revival that adapts forms of medieval architecture which flourished in France and England from the thirteenth century to create new perceptions of the past, present and future.6 “Gothic” is a postmedieval term which came into widespread use in English only in the early seventeenth century. It was first used in English to refer to the culture and language of the East Germanic people known as the Goths, who were traditionally thought to have caused the downfall of the Roman Empire and brought about the Middle Ages, but by the early eighteenth century its semantic range incorporated medieval culture more broadly, too.7 because of its location at the meeting point of different tracks and traditions and its continuing popularity for railroad enthusiasts in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. 6 On medieval Gothic see Paul Binski, Gothic Wonder : Art, Artifice and the Decorated Style 1290–1350 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). 7 “Gothic, adj. and n.,” OED Online. March 2015. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed. com/view/Entry/80225?redirectedFrom=gothic (accessed April 27, 2015). See also E. S. de Beer, “Gothic: Origin and Diffusion of the Term: The Idea of Style in Architecture,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 11 (1948): 143–62. For a good overview of the meanings of “Gothic” see Nick Groom, The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). On the Goths and Rome see Guy Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376–568 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). On some of the

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Figure 3. Detail of turret. Source of Image: Author Photograph.

political meanings of twentieth and twenty-first century Gothic see Roger Luckhurst, “The Contemporary London Gothic and the Limits of the ‘Spectral Turn,”’ Textual Practice 16 (2002): 527–46.

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Although the term’s precise origins are obscure, histories of cultural and racial difference, civilization and primitivism, are threaded through its usages. This is true, as Antwerp Central and Point of Rocks demonstrate, of much work that is described as Gothic as well. Gothic, no less than other forms of medievalism, is fascinated by the production and interpretation of difference.8 Like the railway, Gothic is a product of modernity. But to begin this essay in Antwerp is to begin out of place and out of time. The trajectories that define Antwerp Central – railway lines, national and colonial histories – run parallel to those which define Point of Rocks. They do not intersect. Point of Rocks predates Antwerp Central by almost three decades and is located over three thousand miles away. There is no evidence that Louis Delacenserie, the architect of Antwerp Central, knew of Baldwin’s work. And yet medieval Gothic and its revivals insist on the malleability of order, the fluidity of time, and the possibility of association between different times, places and peoples, and American Gothic was fascinated by its European heritage.9 The architecture of these modern buildings reveals the passage and transfer of traditions, but also how medieval forms conditioned the transit of bodies and capital on the railway and provided a means of interpreting radical social change. They constitute a transnational phenomenon that speaks of colonial and industrial history and national and international ambitions and anxieties. But what were the effects of the “medieval associations” these buildings created? How does their architecture give form to history? What ideas of time do they participate in and generate? Time is one of the central concerns of this essay. Modern Gothic is often characterized as uncanny, untimely and anachronistic,10 and the Gothic railway station resists, in Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood’s words, “anchoring in time.” In their study of the temporal regimes of Renaissance art, Nagel and Wood suggest that many societies organize themselves around apparently “timeless” objects, buildings and works of art. These “anachronic” works “hesitate” to locate themselves within history and therefore remove ideas of national identity, cultural hegemony, and political process from the temporal 8 See for instance H.L. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996) and The Gothic Other : Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination, ed. Ruth Bienstock Anolik and Douglas L. Howard (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co, 2004). 9 This is a point eloquently made by the artist Patrick Keiller’s work Londres, Bombay (2007) in which the interior architecture of Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus was mapped via video and sound installations within the gallery space of Le Fresnoy : Studio National des Arts Contemporains, at Tourcoing, near Lille. See further Patrick Keiller, “Londres, Bombay,”Vertigo 3 (2007): 38–40 (for an image of the installation), 42–4 (for Keiller’s essay). 10 See for instance, Julian Wolfreys, Transgression: Identity, Space, Time (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 119.

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world.11 The Gothic railway station, however, simultaneously resists and is suffused with time. This is a point that Austerlitz emphasizes in his analysis of Antwerp Central: The movements of all travellers could be surveyed from the central position occupied by the clock in Antwerp Station, and conversely all travellers had to look up at the clock and were obliged to adjust their activities to its demands. In fact, said Austerlitz, until the railway timetables were synchronized the clocks of Lille and LiHge did not keep the same time as the clocks of Ghent and Antwerp, and not until they were all standardised around the middle of the nineteenth century did time truly reign supreme.12

As Austerlitz explains, modern notions of time developed alongside the technology of the railway. The development of the railways brought disparate places in sync but also transformed perceptions of time.13 The new temporal regime threatened tumult, disrupted established practices and caused alienation as it brought regularity. Local times were “corrected” according to state sanctioned measures. Standardization was achieved, at the request of the railways, in Britain in 1847, in the US in 1883, and worldwide with the institution of Greenwich Mean Time in 1884.14 As Jeremy Till writes, The time of modernity is therefore typified by qualities that are the antithesis of the weight of traditions – fluidity, speed, and the instant. On the one hand this is seen as something to be celebrated and represented, as capturing the spirit of the age, but on the other hand this temporal flux brings with it uncertainty, disorder, and chaos.15

This tension is typified by the architecture of the Gothic Revival. Modern Gothic at once signifies stability and flux. It suggests the reassurance of a constant, unchanging past, but continually reinvents that past. It is predicated on the continuing meaningfulness of medieval forms, but undermines the coherence of their meanings in its reuse of them. Neatly, there are two clocks at Antwerp Central: one in the entrance hall and one above the platforms, both intricately decorated with Gothic flourishes (see figures 4 and 5). Jerrold Hogle suggests that in modern Gothic, “the remnant of ‘obligatory’ or ‘natural’ meaning is 11 Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 7. 12 Sebald, Austerlitz, 10. Ibid., 10. 13 This is summed up in the famous phrase “the annihilation of space and time.” See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey : Trains and Travel in the 19th Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 33. See also Todd Samuel Presner, Mobile Modernity : Germans, Jews, Trains (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 14 See Matthew Beaumont and Michael Freeman, “Introduction: Tracks to Modernity,” The Railway and Modernity : Time, Space and the Machine Ensemble, ed. Matthew Beaumont and Michael Freeman (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 19. 15 Jeremy Till, Architecture Depends (London: MIT, 2009), 81.

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replaced as the sign’s point of reference by counterfeits of that remnant […] The neo-Gothic is therefore haunted by the ghost of that already spectral past and hence by its refaking of what is already fake and already an emblem of the nearly empty and dead.”16 This process produces hollow signifiers which are ready for cultural and capitalist exchange and endless reiteration. Hogle continues to argue that the Gothic “mediates undecidably between social and cultural orders that are simultaneously fading into the past (the priestly and the old aristocratic, for example) and rising to prominence (the capitalist and the industrial or even the post-industrial).”17 Similarly, the development of the railways is one part of the development of industrialization, urbanization and capitalism, but the architecture of these stations draws on the formal histories of the feudal, the rural and the religious.18 Railway Gothic is at once inside and outside time and history, it mediates undecidedly between past, present and future. This paradox is confirmed by contemporary American responses to the railroad. As William Cronon writes, the railroad was seen “less as an artificial invention than as a force of nature, a geographical power so irresistible that people must shape their lives according to its dictates.”19 For Henry David Thoreau, the railroad moved “with planetary motion – or, rather, like a comet, for the beholder knows not if with that velocity and with that direction it will ever revisit this system, since its orbit does not look like a returning curve.”20 The railroad was at once natural and unnatural, mysterious and familiar. Some elements of this discourse are echoed in a celebrated account of the medieval Gothic architecture of Lincoln Cathedral. The Latin Metrical Life of Saint Hugh, composed in the first half of the thirteenth century, meditates on Gothic architecture’s apparent shape-shifting and boundary-blurring: Nam quasi pennatis avibus testudo locuta, Latas expandens alas, similisque volanti, Nubes offendit, solidis innisa columnis. Viscosusque liquor lapides conglutinate albos, Quos manus artficis omnes excidit ad unguem. Et paries ex congeries constructus eorum, 16 Jerrold Hogle, “The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Progress of Abjection,” in A Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000), 298. 17 Ibid., 299. 18 On the social histories of American railroads see Robert William Fogel, Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1964) and John Stilgoe, Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). 19 William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 72. 20 Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. Stephen Fender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 106.

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Figure 4. Clock in the entrance hall at Antwerp Central. Source of Image: Author Photograph.

Hoc quasi dedignans, mentitur continuare Contiguas partes; non res unita, sed una. [The vault seems to converse with the winged birds; it spreads broad wings of its own, and like a flying creature jostles the clouds, while yet resting upon its solid pillars. The gripping mortar glues the white stones together, all of which the mason’s hand has hewn true to the mark. But although the wall is put together from the mass of separate stones, it seems to disdain this fact and gives the semblance of joining in a continuum the contiguous parts. It seems to be the result not of art but of nature, not a thing unified but a single entity.]21

The architecture of the vault succeeds in troubling the distinction between signifier and signified and it is unclear whether it is the work of humans or nature. Later in the same passage the stone is imagined to exert a strange agency upon the viewer : “Inspectus lapis iste potest suspendere mentes” [On being closely inspected this stone can hold people’s minds in suspense]. This meditation reveals the interest in hybridity which both medieval and modern Gothic share. They are forms fascinated by movement and stillness and chaos and order. The Metrical Life of St Hugh also, like Hogle’s analysis, speaks of how Gothic 21 Charles Garton, The Metrical Life of Saint Hugh: The Latin Text with Introduction, Translation, and Notes (Lincoln: Honywood Press, 1986), 54–5.

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Figure 5. Clock above the train platforms at Antwerp Central. Source of Image: Author Photograph.

reifies social relations. Like King Leopold’s Antwerp Central and the B& O’s Point of Rocks, Lincoln Cathedral is an effective production of symbolic capital which, as Pierre Bourdieu suggests, “produces relations of dependence that have an economic basis but are disguised under a veil of moral relations.”22 Medieval Gothic is not just an invocation of power, but an invention and perpetuation of power relations. Similarly, railway Gothic worked to naturalise its newly established networks of power, people, and capital by relating them to an apparently uncontestable, pre-ideological past. Antwerp Central drew together Belgium’s history of medieval and modern Gothic architecture and its imperial present while Point of Rocks entwined the US’s colonial history with its capitalist ambitions. Both attempted to remove political and social process to an alwaysalready settled past, outside the flux of time. As the medieval German theologian Meister Eckhart put it, “Time is what changes and evolves: eternity remains

22 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 123. For an excellent analysis of the medievalist production of cultural capital see Kathleen Davis, “Tycoon Medievalism, Corporate Philanthropy, and American Pedagogy,” American Literary History 22 (2010): 781–800. Davis uses this citation of Bourdieu at 783.

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simple.”23 Railway Gothic sought to collapse the boundaries between time and eternity in order to locate its own interests beyond the reach of the present.

Gothic Origins Antwerp Central’s interest in genealogy speaks to one of the defining elements of the Gothic Revival. Horace Walpole, whose work offers a potential origin for both literary and architectural modern Gothic, appears to have been fascinated with beginnings and inheritance. The son of Robert Walpole, generally identified as the first Prime Minister of Great Britain, Horace Walpole’s adventures in Gothic were funded by his father’s legacy. Between 1749 and 1776 he worked on Strawberry Hill, the first house built in the Gothic style without any medieval origins of its own. His novel, The Castle of Otranto, was published on Christmas Day 1763 with a preface that claimed it was a translation from an Italian text first printed in 1529 but written during the Crusades, sometime between 1095 and 1243. Walpole only claimed ownership of the novel following its positive reception and the printing of a second edition in April 1765, when the subtitle “A Gothic Story” was added.24 Walpole’s work self-consciously troubled the boundaries between past and present, original and imitation, and self and other. For Lytton Strachey, this blurring of boundaries was exactly what attracted Walpole to the Gothic. Strachey suggested that Walpole “liked Gothic architecture, not because he thought it beautiful but because he found it queer.”25 Strachey’s view is similar to the common suggestion that Walpole’s work is evidence of the Gothic’s “reaction against classism and the Enlightenment,”26 and Susan Bernstein clarifies Strachey’s thinking with her insight that, “The queerness of the Gothic consists in its simultaneous participation in and resistance to signification. It moves across – quer – the demarcation line between history and fantasy, referent and reified signifier.”27 Despite this, in many respects Walpole’s work is deeply conservative. Regardless of his attempts to obscure the novel’s origins, Walpole offered a clear 23 Quoted by Till, Architecture Depends, 83. 24 See E.J. Clery, “Horace Walpole, the Strawberry Hill Press, and the Emergence of the Gothic Genre,” Ars et Humanitas 5 (2010): 93–112. 25 Lytton Strachey, “Horace Walpole,” Characters and Commentaries (London: Chatto and Windus, 1933). 26 Allan Lloyd Smith, “Postmodernism/Gothicism,” in Modern Gothic: A Reader, ed. Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith (Manchester : Manchester University Press, 1996), 7. See also the opening paragraph of Fred Botting, “In Gothic Darkly : Heterotopia, History, Culture,” in A Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000), 3–14. 27 Susan Bernstein, Housing Problems: Writing and Architecture in Goethe, Walpole, Freud, and Heidegger (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 47.

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biblical moral for his story, “that the sins of the fathers are visited on their children to the third and fourth generation.”28 The strange and confusing narrative revolves around the question of inheritance. Following his son Conrad’s death (he is crushed by a giant helmet that mysteriously falls on top of him), the lord of the castle, Manfred, decides to marry Conrad’s bride-to-be Isabella himself in order to secure an heir and keep the castle in his family line. The dramas prompted by this decision are only resolved when Theodore, a peasant who protects Isabella from Manfred’s intentions, is revealed to be the true prince of Otranto and the legitimate heir to the castle. As George Haggerty argues, The Castle of Otranto is driven by transgressive desire.29 But the potential subversion threatened by Manfred’s desire for his dead son’s fianc8e is resolved by the return to an earlier – truer – social hierarchy. The logic of the narrative is the logic of feudal class divisions. Social disruption is a symptom of disruption to social order. That said, for Walpole, Gothic was not about authenticity. He described Strawberry Hill as consisting of “more the works of fancy than of imitation,”30 and in this stood opposed to Augustus Welby and Northmore Pugin, whose work offers an alternative genealogy and competing philosophy of the Gothic Revival. Indeed, Pugin occasionally self-consciously positioned himself against Walpole. On April 11 1842, for instance, Pugin visited Strawberry Hill and recorded the trip in his diary with a single word: “disgusted.”31 This reaction was partly prompted, as Rosemary Hill explains, by the fact that Gothic was a fluid and fastdeveloping tradition and by 1842 Strawberry Hill “looked hopelessly dated.”32 But it also reveals Pugin’s deeply held views on society, culture and history and his faith in the essential nature and purpose of Gothic architecture. By the time he took a trip to Twickenham to see Walpole’s work, Pugin was a well-established architect and critic. He had converted to Catholicism in 1834 and by 1842 had designed and built over fifty institutional, domestic and ecclesiastical buildings including one of his major works, St Giles’ Church, Cheadle (1840). He was close to completing various projects for the Earl of Shrewsbury at Alton and his own house, St Augustine’s Grange, Ramsgate, was completed in 28 Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, ed. W.S. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 7. 29 See George Haggerty, Queer Gothic (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2006). 30 Horace Walpole, “To Mary Berry, Friday 17 October 1794,” in Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with Mary and Agnes Berry, II, ed. W.S. Lewis and A. Dayle Wallace, with the assistance of Charles H. Bennet and Edwine M. Martz, The Yale Edition of the Correspondence of Horace Walpole, ed. W.S. Lewis, Volume 12 (London: Oxford University Press, 1944), 13. 31 Alexandra Wedgwood, AWN Pugin and the Pugin Family (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1985), 51. 32 Rosemary Hill, God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (London: Allen Lane, 2007), 267.

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1845. His 1836 book Contrasts, which sought to establish the inferiority of modern architecture as compared to the medieval, had been reissued in 1841. For Pugin the Gothic Revival was a fight against modernity. At the laying of the foundation stone for St Chad’s Cathedral, Birmingham, in 1837, for instance, Pugin claimed he would not rest “till I see the cross raised high above every chimney in Birmingham, and hear the sound of St Chad’s bells drowning out the steam whistle and the proving of the gun barrels.”33 Pugin began working for Charles Barry on his proposal for the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster in 1834, and it was his work with Barry which sealed his reputation as the most important architect of the Gothic Revival.34 Pugin’s revulsion to Walpole’s work stemmed perhaps from its ambiguity, what Strachey would call its queerness, its refusal of an essence. For Pugin, architecture was a moral endeavour, while Walpole suggested he thought of it as no more than a hobby or curiosity. Pugin wanted his architecture to transform society, while Walpole believed that his work would survive no more than ten years after his death.35 Together, Pugin and Walpole represent the double origins of the Gothic Revival: secular and religious, authentic and inventive, industrial and leisurely, inside and outside modernity. The distance between Walpole and Pugin is closed somewhat, however, by their shared fascination with the medieval and, more broadly, inheritance and genealogy. Although divided by ideology, both were fascinated by how the signifiers of the medieval past might become part of, and transform, the present.36 The essence of Gothic lies precisely in its reiterations.

33 Quoted by Hill, God’s Architect, 221. 34 In another move which highlights the importance of genealogy and inheritance in nineteenth-century Gothic, A.W.N Pugin’s son published a pamphlet calling for the full recognition of his father’s work on the Palace of Westminster. See Edward Welby Pugin, Who was the art-architect of the Palace of Westminster? A statement of facts, founded on the letters of Sir Charles Barry and the diary of Augustus Welby Pugin, etc. (London: Longmans and Co., 1867). 35 See Horace Walpole, “To Conway 5 August 1761,” in Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with Henry Seymour Conway, Lady Ailesbury, Lord and Lady Hartford, Lord Beauchamp, Henrietta Seymour Conway, II, ed. W.S. Lewis, Lars E. Troide and Robert A. Smith, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W.S. Lewis, Volume 38 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 110. 36 My language here is borrowed from L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, “Living Chaucer,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 33 (2011): 41–64.

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American Gothic While Pugin’s legacy, particularly his work on the Palace of Westminster, outshines Walpole’s today, it was Strawberry Hill which exerted the stronger influence on the architecture of the American Gothic Revival.37 The first US church built in the Gothic style was Ithiel Town’s Trinity Church on the Green in New Haven, Connecticut, consecrated in 1816. In 1829 Town formed a partnership with Alexander Jackson Davis and their first large-scale Gothic commission came from Robert Gilmour in 1832. Gilmour had stayed at Strawberry Hill in 1830 and his new home, Glen Ellen, was the first domestic Gothic building in the US.38 Together Town and Davis designed New York University’s Gothic building in Washington Square (1835) and the remarkable Wadsworth Athenaeum, a squat castle-like art gallery in Hartford, Connecticut (1842). In 1837 Davis published Rural Residences, a study of domestic Gothic architecture which, like Pugin’s Contrasts, served both as a manifesto and an advertisement. In his preface, Davis explained the reasoning behind his deployment of Gothic in domestic buildings. He argued that, The bald and uninteresting aspect of our houses must be obvious to every traveller ; and to those who are familiar with the picturesque Cottages and Villas of England, it is positively painful to witness here the wasteful and tasteless expenditure of money in building.

Davis continued to delineate the merits of Gothic, which he termed “English Collegiate Style,” against Greek forms: The Greek Temple form, perfect in itself, and well adapted as it is to public edifices, and even to town mansions, is inappropriate for country residences, and yet it is the only style ever attempted in our more costly habitations. The English collegiate style, is for many reasons to be preferred. It admits a greater variety both of plan and outline; – is susceptible of additions from time to time, while its bay windows, oriels, turrets, and chimney shafts, give a pictorial effect to the elevation.39

It is striking that Davis counts flexibility as one of the key qualities of Gothic. Gothic forms are, for Davis, practical and changeable. There is little concern for authenticity as effects and styles are borrowed and merged at will. To borrow 37 See Wayne Andrews, American Gothic: Its Origins, its Trials, its Triumphs (New York: Random House, 1975), 1–14. 38 Susanne Brendel-Pandich, “From Cottages to Castles: The Country House Designs of Alexander Jackson-Davis,” in Alexander Jackson Davis: American Architect 1803–1892, ed. Amelia Peck (New York: Rizzoli International Publications and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992), 70. On the importance of Pugin see 72. 39 Alexander Jackson Davis, Rural Residences: Consisting of designs, original and selected, for cottages, farm-houses, villas, and village churches with brief explanations, estimates and a specification of materials, construction, etc. (New York: Dacapo Press, 1980), n.p.

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Judith Butler’s language, these buildings are copies without an original.40 Davis’ vision stands in contrast to Pugin’s work and also John Ruskin’s famous argument that Gothic was distinguished from other architectural traditions by the freedom of its craftsman. Ruskin saw Gothic as an ethical alternative to Greek, Roman and modern architectural practice which treated workmen as slaves. For Ruskin, what was important about the Gothic was its accommodation of imperfection, in which the humanity of the maker remained visible.41 For Davis, however, the value of Gothic lies in part in its reproducibility. His Gothic is a machine Gothic: practical, reproducible, and driven by “effect” rather than essence. Davis’ philosophy was refined in Cottage Residences (1842), written in collaboration with Andrew Jackson Downing, which prompted the development of the style known as Carpenter Gothic that flourished in the later nineteenth century.42 The fascination with European tradition evident in Rural Residences and Cottage Residences is revealing and much of the writing carries a political charge. Downing in particular put forward arguments for the moral value of Gothic architecture, even suggesting that “there is a moral influence in a country home.”43 The value of Gothic as a non-native, white, tradition is implicit and the possibility of an indigenous American architecture is not entertained at any moment. In her study of the Cathedrals of St John the Divine in New York and St Peter and St Paul in Washington, built from 1892 and 1907 respectively, Elizabeth Emery locates American Gothic in the colonial and postcolonial history of the US. Drawing on Homi Bhabha’s theorization of the “mimicry” and “ambivalence” at the heart of the colonial project, Emery argues that the Gothic cathedrals glance simultaneously in two directions, outwards towards the European origins of the white settlers, and inwards towards the indigenous populations of the US: While attempting to break free from British authority by adapting a language of inclusion and by building their own Gothic structures, the cathedral trustees in New York and Washington perpetuated their role as “colonized” by mimicking the allegedly superior European medieval culture. At the same time, however, their treatment of

40 Judith Butler, “Imitation and gender insubordination,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, MichHle Aina and David M. Halperin (London: Routledge, 1993), 313. 41 See John Ruskin, “The Nature of Gothic,” in The Stones of Venice, ed. Jan Morris (London: The Folio Society, 2001), 131–70. 42 The most famous example of Carpenter Gothic is the building featured in Grant Wood’s celebrated painting “American Gothic” (1930). 43 Alexander Jackson Downing, The Architecture of Country Houses (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), xix.

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America’s “authentic” heritage – that of Native Americans – unintentionally replicated the colonial discourse they rejected.44

A similar tension is evident in the work of Davis, Town and Downing. Their buildings are ambivalent. While their architecture refashions the signifiers of the past it does not posit the possibility of a nostalgic return to that past.45 Instead it creates an origin, a form of cultural memory, which brings a possible American future into being, all the time glancing back to England, the former colonial power. American architectural Gothic forms part of the “mythic formulations” Helen Carr identifies, “of the United States as both the truly primitive and the truly modern.”46 It breaks with the indigenous past as it reformulates European cultural history according to contemporary concerns.

Railroad Gothic The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was the first common carrier and the first intercity railroad in the US. Construction began on July 4 1828 and the first stone was laid by Charles Carron, the last surviving signatory of the Declaration of Independence. The initial route of the Railroad followed the Patapsco River west of Baltimore and terminated in Ellicott City. Services began on May 24 1830 and by December 1831 the line had been extended to Frederick, just over fifty miles from Baltimore. Andrew Jackson became the first American president to travel by rail when he journeyed from Ellicott Mills to Baltimore on the B& O on June 6 1833.47 In 1835 the B& O opened a branch from Relay Junction to Washington and by 1853 the track reached from Baltimore to Wheeling, West Virginia, a distance of almost 400 miles. The B& O’s progress was severely disrupted by the Civil War, but picked up following the ceasefire and the line reached Ohio in 1869 and Chicago in 1874. Point of Rocks Railroad Station (see figures 6 and 7) is situated at the junction between the B& O Old Main Line (which runs to Baltimore) and the Metropolitan Line (which runs to Washington). It was built between 1871–5 and was known as Washington Junction for the first few decades of 44 Elizabeth Emery, “Postcolonial Gothic: The Medievalism of America’s ‘National’ Cathedrals,” in Medievalisms in the Postcolonial Word: The Idea of “the Middle Ages” Outside Europe, ed. Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 238. 45 Emery makes a similar point at 245. 46 Helen Carr, Inventing the American Primitive: Politics, Gender, and the Representation of Native American Literary Traditions (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), 9. 47 John F. Stover, The History of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1987), 38. See also James Dilts, The Great Road: The Building of the Baltimore and Ohio, the Nation’s First Railroad, 1828–1853 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1993).

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its existence. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. Like Town and Davis’ Wadsworth Athenaeum, it is squat yet monumental. The historian of the B& O, Herbert Harwood, describes it as follows: An exhilarating conglomeration of shapes and polychrome masonry culminating in a high cupola and spire topped with an iron finial, it is the prototype High Victorian Gothic railroad station […] almost the whole Victorian bag is there: gabled and hipped roof sections; gabled, hipped and jerkinhead dormers; carved bargeboards; gothic arched windows; ornate finials; scalloped shingles; polychrome bands of granite and sandstone.48

Point of Rocks was one of a number of stations designed by E. Francis Baldwin, an architect whose major client aside from the B& O was the Roman Catholic Church. His major Gothic projects include St Leo’s Church, Baltimore (1881) and the Cathedral of St John the Baptist in Savannah, Georgia (1896). Baldwin designed over two dozen buildings for the B& O following his appointment as Head Architect in 1872. His Gothic railroad stations – including, in addition to Point of Rocks, Oakland (Maryland, 1884) and Harpers Ferry (West Virginia, 1889) – are executed on a modest scale, and most of his railroad work is built in the Queen Anne style rather than Gothic.49 But Point of Rocks is by far his most celebrated building, frequently reproduced on postcards, in railroad studies, and cut-andassemble building kits; it occupies an important position in the heritage of the American railroad. An image of the station illustrates Carlos P. Avery’s biography of Baldwin. The railroad locomotive was, for Walt Whitman, a “Type of the modern! emblem of motion and power! pulse of the continent!”, and he celebrated how it “Launch’d o’er the prairies wide – across the lakes, / To the free skies, unpent, and glad, and strong.”50 Whitman’s lines speak of the railroad’s role in settling the US.51 The railroad offered a way of plotting paths across land and between peoples but also through time. As the tracks connected communities, enabled capital and cultural exchange, so the technology – and the forms with which it was associated – connected the present to the future, often via idealised visions of the European past. Part of what makes Point of Rocks such a powerful statement of financial and cultural capital is that it served only a small community. Isaac Bond’s 1858 map of Frederick County records the presence of just 48 Herbert Harwood, Impossible Challenge: The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in Maryland (Baltimore: Barnard, Roberts, 1979), 425. 49 See Carlos P. Avery, E. Francis Baldwin, Architect: The B& O, Baltimore, and Beyond (Baltimore: Baltimore Architecture Foundation, 2003). 50 Walt Whitman, “To a locomotive in winter,” in The Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy (London: Penguin, 1977), 48. 51 See David E. Nye, America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings (London: MIT Press, 2003), 157–62.

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Figure 6. Point of Rocks Railroad Station, Maryland. Source of Image: Collections of the B& O Railroad Museum.

twelve individually owned properties in the area, and the political power of the railroad was such that rather than building the railroad station near the existing town, the B& O insisted that the town relocate closer to the route of the railroad.52 While the railroad opened up networks of transit and commerce and enabled long-term settlement, Point of Rocks remains a small town today with a population just under 1,500 and Maryland’s Register of Historic Properties notes that the station “is unusually sophisticated for its rural setting.”53 The future Baldwin’s building prophesised never quite arrived.

52 Detail from Isaac Bond, Map of Frederick County, accessed May 6 2016, http://msa.maryland.gov/msa/mdslavery/html/mapped_images/pointofrocks.html. 53 Point of Rocks Railroad Station, Maryland’s National Register Properties, last accessed May 6 2016, http://mht.maryland.gov/nr/NRDetail.aspx?FROM=NRDBList.aspx& NRID=155& COUNTY=&SEARCHTYPE=propertySearch& PROPNAME=Point%20of%20Rocks&STREET NAME=& CITYNAME=& KEYWORD=.

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Figure 7. Point of Rocks Railroad Station, Maryland. Source of Image: Collections of the B& O Railroad Museum.

Colonial Gothic As Kerry Dean Carso, Paul Giles, Christopher Hanlon, Claire Sponsler and others have demonstrated, the fascination with the European medieval past illustrated by American architectural Gothic extended to other cultural realms too.54 To conclude this essay I would like to turn briefly to a novel published just over two decades before Point of Rocks Railroad Station was built. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) offers a lengthy meditation on the temporalities of American modernity and a fine example of American literary

54 Kerry Dean Carso, American Gothic Art and Architecture in the Age of Romantic Literature (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014), Paul Giles, The Global Remapping of American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 70–107, Christopher Hanlon, America’s England: Antebellum Literature and Atlantic Sectionism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) and Claire Sponsler, Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama in America (London: Cornell University Press, 2004). See also Lynn White, “The Legacy of the Middle Ages in the American Wild West,” Speculum 40 (1965): 191–202.

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Gothic.55 There is a clear connection with the concerns of The Castle of Otranto in the moral of Hawthorne’s story, which he plainly describes in the preface as “the wrongdoing of one generation lives into the successive ones,”56 and the novel is similarly fascinated with architecture. The house that stands at the centre of the plot is noteworthy as “a specimen of the best and stateliest architecture of a longpast epoch, and as the scene of events more full of human interest, perhaps, than those of a gray, feudal castle.”57 The building’s architecture is described as “conceived in the grotesqueness of the Gothic fancy”58 and Robert Weisbuch writes of the building’s “medieval associational richness.”59 The House of the Seven Gables is distinguished from The Castle of Otranto, however, by Hawthorne’s democratic social vision. Like Walpole’s story, Hawthorne’s novel revolves around the correction of an historic injustice, but it is decidedly ambivalent about structures of social hierarchy. The narrative turns on the discovery of the various misdeeds that established and maintained the wealth and power of the Pyncheon family and, as Ronald Curran suggests, Hawthorne “retains the negative aspects of the bogus heirs, but applies them to aristocracy in general, in fact to any system of class preference.”60 At a key point in the narrative, just as Jaffrey Pyncheon meets the same fate as his distant Puritan relative Colonel Pyncheon, Clifford and Hepzibah Pyncheon, the innocent inheritors of their ancestors’ evil doings, attempt to escape their troubles on the railroad. Hawthorne’s description of their journey speaks to the central elements of railroad discourse, particularly its relation to perceptions of space and time: looking from the window, they could see the world racing past them. At one moment, they were rattling through solitude; – the next, a village had grown up around them; – a few breaths more, and it had vanished, as if swallowed by an earthquake […] Everything was unfixed from its age-long rest, and moving at whirlwind speed in a direction opposite to their own.61

During the journey, Clifford, caught up in the suggestive possibilities of the railroad, engages a fellow passenger in a conversation about how the new 55 See Lloyd Pratt, Archives of American Time: Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 64–94. 56 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, ed. Michael Davitt Bell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 2. 57 Ibid., 10. 58 Ibid., 11. 59 Robert Weisbuch, Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson (London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), 157. 60 Ronald T. Curran, “Yankee Gothic: Hawthorne’s ‘Castle of Pyncheon,’” Studies in the Novel, 8 (1976), 77. 61 Hawthorne, House of the Seven Gables, 256.

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technology might transform society, and elaborates a complex theory of time, history, and human civilization: You are aware, my dear Sir – you must have observed it, in your own experience – that all human progress is in a circle; or, to use a more accurate and beautiful figure, in an ascending spiral curve. While we fancy ourselves going straight forward and attaining, at every step, an entirely new position of affairs, we do actually return to something long ago tried and abandoned, but which we now find etheralized, refined, and perfected to its ideal.62

Clifford’s meditation reveals his own desire to return to the past to correct injustices and create a “refined, and perfected” present, but this is entwined with a sense – which is present throughout The House of the Seven Gables – of the power of providence and prophecy.63 The narrative of The House of the Seven Gables begins with Matthew Maule’s prophecy that Colonel Pyncheon would die by choking on blood. Maule was “the original occupant of the soil” on which the Pyncheons’ house was built and Colonel Pyncheon only took possession of the land when Maule was executed on charges of witchcraft, charges that the Colonel had supported with “invidious acrimony.”64 Maule delivered his prophecy at the moment of his execution and his augury is inherited by the Colonel’s relatives. It is Jaffrey’s death by the same means which prompts Clifford and Hepzibah to attempt their railroad escape. Clifford, Hepzibah and Holgrave, the Pyncheon’s mysterious lodger who is working on a history of the family, all live their lives in the shadow of the past, the inequalities of which are represented by the architecture of the house Colonel Pyncheon constructed to give form to, and sustain, his privilege, and to erase Maule’s claim to the land. Hawthorne’s complex narrative explores how the past gives form to the present and how the present might atone for the past. While his concern for the occupation and ownership of land might have invited Hawthorne to contemplate the deeper history of the soil on which Pyncheon’s house was built, he spares little time considering indigenous claims to the land. The history Hawthorne is interested in is explicitly raced. Indeed, this fascination with providence and historical reconciliation also imbued Hawthorne’s thinking on the key social issue of nineteenth-century America: slavery. In his biography of Franklin Pierce, which Hawthorne published in 1852 before Pierce was elected President of the US in 1853, Hawthorne described slavery as 62 Ibid., 259. There is a curious echo of Hawthorne’s lines in Bruno Latour’s We have never been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 75. 63 Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet makes a similar point in The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 62. 64 Hawthorne, House of Seven Gables, 8.

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one of those evils which divine Providence does not leave to be remedied by human contrivances, but which, in its own good time, by some means impossible to be anticipated, but of the simplest and easiest operation, when all its uses shall have been fulfilled, it causes to vanish like a dream.65

Paul Gilmore has demonstrated how Hawthorne’s racial thinking is weaved through The House of Seven Gables. The only non-white bodies visible in The House of the Seven Gables are the “Jim Crow” sweets for sale in Hepzibah’s cent shop and a servant named Scipio who appears in Holgrave’s account of his eighteenth-century ancestor’s encounter with Gervayse Pyncheon. Hawthorne’s “democratic vision” is restricted to those of European heritage and Gilmore diagnoses in Hawthorne an “inability to imagine an equitable multiracial society in the United States or, perhaps more exactly, his wilful desire to fantasize the race ‘problem’ – not simply slavery but the presence of African Americans in the United States – out of existence.”66 The fantasies of Hawthorne’s Gothic fiction, like the architecture of the Pyncheons’ house, sought to create a form of cultural memory which might sustain the racial inequalities of the past and present in the future. The existence of African Americans on the railroad was carefully controlled throughout the nineteenth century. On his journeys through the US in 1842, Charles Dickens was struck that “a black man never travels with a white one on the railroad” and in 1896 the US Supreme Court confirmed the legality of Louisiana’s use of separate railway cars for blacks and whites in the case known as Plessy v Ferguson.67 Slavery was outlawed in Maryland in 1864, less than ten years before Point of Rocks was built. The only evidence of this history in the building’s architecture is its absence. The material form of the station brings into being a vision of a past that never occurred, which purposefully erases the history of the land on which it was built. As Hawthorne understood, the past can determine the limits of the possible in the present. The House of the Seven Gables, like the architecture of Baldwin, Davis, Delacenserie, Town and Downing, reminds us that race matters in representations of the past. Like other medievalist work, both critical and creative, the Gothic forms part of the archive of the Middle Ages and, as Ruth Evans puts it, “The past exists in

65 Nathaniel Hawthorne, Life of Franklin Pierce (Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1852), 113. On Hawthorne’s attitudes towards slavery see Jean Fagan Yellin, “Hawthorne and the Slavery Question,” in A Historical Guide to Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Larry J. Reynolds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 135–64. 66 Paul Gilmore, The Genuine Article: Race, Mass Culture, and American Literary Manhood (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 129. 67 See Charles Gallagher and Cameron D. Lippard, eds., Race and Racism in the United States: An Encyclopaedia of the American Mosaic (Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2014), 1432–45.

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the form it does because it has been archived in a certain way.”68 Representation and production are intimately linked and representations of the medieval past are always the first experience of that past. The American Middle Ages created by Hawthorne and Baldwin preserves traces of a past that was never present, to borrow Jacques Derrida’s language.69 These works of cultural memory give form, or presence, to the present, and make the future they desire possible. The absence, elision and erasure of non-white cultures and bodies in medievalist work, and works of cultural memory and historiography more broadly, not only records contemporary inequalities rather than historical reality but also ensures that non-white bodies are excluded from visions of the future.70 This point is made by Ta-Nehisi Coates in the midst of a meditation on the cultural memory of the American Civil War. Coates draws a clear line between the “The Dream” of the Civil War that expresses “a comfortable narrative that made enslavement into benevolence,” and the fact that, in twenty-first century America, “of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.”71 Works of cultural memory such as Coates’ “Dream” and the American medieval of Hawthorne and Baldwin perform a two-fold destruction of black bodies, erasing them from the past and the future. Cord Whitaker details exactly what is at stake in medievalist contexts. “The study of the European Middle Ages,” Whitaker writes, has denied blacks the right to a shared medieval past that would, in turn, authorize them to share the present that emerges from it. In other words, denying blacks medieval coevalness allows Euro-centric cultures to relegate modern blacks to a strictly modern status in which their history appears to be without the authorizing length and depth available to whites. The denial of medieval coevalness encourages students to ask, “Where were the black people in the Middle Ages?” in a tone that suggests they are not entirely certain whether black people existed at all.72

The architecture of Point of Rocks, like Leopold’s Antwerp Central, attempts to authorize a vision of the medieval past that in turn authorizes social and racial hierarchies. These railway stations teach us that the medieval is relational, open, and always located at intersections of competing interests. As Paul Gilroy argues 68 Ruth Evans, “Chaucer in Cyberspace: Medieval Technologies of Memory and the House of Fame,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 23 (2001): 67–8. Allen J. Frantzen makes a similar point in relation to Anglo-Saxon studies in Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 111. 69 Jacques Derrida, “The Art of Memories,” in Memoires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 57. 70 See further Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Karl Steel, “Race, Travel, Time, Heritage,” postmedieval 6 (2015): 98–110. 71 Coates, Between the World and Me, 102–3. 72 Cord J. Whitaker, “Race-ing the Dragon: The Middle Ages, Race and Trippin’ into the Future,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 6 (2015): 6.

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that “race is not the ‘eternal cause of racism’ but rather its ‘complex, unstable product,’” so I suggest that the medieval is not the eternal cause of medievalism but, likewise, its complex, unstable product.73 The medievalism of Point of Rocks is a medievalism determined by contemporary social concerns and the Middle Ages made possible by this work is thus bound up with conceptions of privilege, power, wealth and race. It is a Middle Ages designed to create a world in which the B& O and its political, social and capitalist interests might flourish. It is a Middle Ages which suggests that the medieval has never not been modern.

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Hanlon, Christopher. America’s England: Antebellum Literature and Atlantic Sectionism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Harwood, Herbert. Impossible Challenge: The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in Maryland. Baltimore: Barnard, Roberts, 1979. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The House of the Seven Gables. Edited by Michael Davitt Bell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. _____.Life of Franklin Pierce. Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1852. Hill, Rosemary. God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain. London: Allen Lane, 2007. Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. London: Pan, 2006. Hogle, Jerrold. “The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Progress of Abjection.” In A Companion to the Gothic. Edited by David Punter, 293–304. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000. Keiller, Patrick. “Londres, Bombay.” Vertigo 3 (2007): 38–40 and 42–4. Latour, Bruno. We have never been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. Luckhurst, Roger. “The Contemporary London Gothic and the Limits of the ‘Spectral Turn.”’ Textual Practice 16 (2002): 527–46. Malchow, H.L. Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century England. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Maryland’s National Register Properties, Maryland Historical Trust, last accessed May 6 2016, http://mht.maryland.gov/nr/NRDetail.aspx?FROM=NRDBList.aspx& NRID= 155& COUNTY=& SEARCHTYPE=propertySearch& PROPNAME=Point%20of%20 Rocks& STREETNAME=& CITYNAME=& KEYWORD=. Maryland State Archives. Detail of Point of Rocks from Isaac Bond, Map of Frederick County, 1858, Library of Congress, MSA SC 1213–1–457, last accessed 12 May 2015, http://msa.maryland.gov/msa/mdslavery/html/mapped_images/pointofrocks.html. Monnet, Agnieszka Soltysik. The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Nagel, Alexander, and Christopher Wood. Anachronic Renaissance. New York: Zone Books, 2010. Nye, David E. America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings. London: MIT Press, 2003. Peck, Amelia, ed. Alexander Jackson Davis: American Architect 1803–1892. New York: Rizzoli International Publications and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992. Pratt, Lloyd. Archives of American Time: Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Presner, Todd Samuel. Mobile Modernity : Germans, Jews, Trains. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Pugin, Edward Welby. Who was the art-architect of the Palace of Westminster? A statement of facts, founded on the letters of Sir Charles Barry and the diary of Augustus Welby Pugin, etc. London: Longmans and Co., 1867. Reynolds, Larry J. A Historical Guide to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Ruskin, John. The Stones of Venice. Edited by Jan Morris. London: The Folio Society, 2001.

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Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey : Trains and Travel in the 19th Century. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980. Sebald, W.G. Austerlitz. Translated by Anthea Bell. London: Penguin, 2001. Smith, Allan Lloyd, “Postmodernism/Gothicism.” In Modern Gothic: A Reader, edited by Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith, 6–19. Manchester : Manchester University Press, 1996. Sponsler, Claire. Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama in America. London: Cornell University Press, 2004. Stilgoe, John. Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983. Strachey, Lytton. Characters and Commentaries. London: Chatto and Windus, 1933. Stover, John F. The History of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1987. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. Edited by Stephen Fender. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Till, Jeremy. Architecture Depends. London: MIT, 2009. Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story. Edited by W.S. Lewis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Walpole, Horace, Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with Mary and Agnes Berry, II. Edited by W.S. Lewis and A. Dayle Wallace, with the assistance of Charles H. Bennet and Edwine M. Martz. The Yale Edition of the Correspondence of Horace Walpole. Edited by W.S. Lewis, Volume 12 (London: Oxford University Press, 1944). Wedgwood, Alexandra. AWN Pugin and the Pugin Family. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1985. Weisbuch, Robert. Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson. London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986. Whitaker, Cord J. “Race-ing the Dragon: The Middle Ages, Race and Trippin’ into the Future.” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 6 (2015): 3–11. White, Lynn. ‘The Legacy of the Middle Ages in the American Wild West.’ Speculum 40 (1965): 191–202. Whitman, Walt. The Complete Poems. Edited by Francis Murphy. London: Penguin, 1977. Wolfreys, Julian. Transgression: Identity, Space, Time. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Mary Kate Hurley

“Scars of History”: Game of Thrones and American Origin Stories

“In some of my stories there’s this sense of a lost golden age, where there were wonders and marvels undreamed of.”1 “Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy : that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?”2

Few works of medievalism have been as successful with a general audience as HBO’s Game of Thrones, a television show based on George R.R. Martin’s book series A Song of Ice and Fire.3 Time and again, Martin’s fiction is understood – and I would argue is meant to be understood – as being based on a medieval past. More specifically, Martin himself has suggested that we can understand the turbulent years of the Wars of the Roses as the inspiration behind his work.4 One need only look as far as the most recent round of headlines regarding the show to 1 Mikal Gilmore, “George R.R. Martin: The Rolling Stone Interview,” The Rolling Stone, April 23, 2014, accessed October 4, 2015, http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/news/george-r-r-martinthe-rolling-stone-interview-20140423. 2 Ibid. 3 Throughout this essay, I will refer to the novels as A Song of Ice and Fire and the television show as Game of Thrones. 4 Martin can be rather vague on this point, but he notes the piecemeal provenance of much of his work: “I’m proud of my work, but I don’t know if I’d ever claim it’s enormously original. You look at Shakespeare, who borrowed all of his plots. In A Song of Ice and Fire, I take stuff from the Wars of the Roses and other fantasy things, and all these things work around in my head and somehow they jell into what I hope is uniquely my own” (Gilmore, see note 1). Interestingly, Martin seems to mingle fantastic and historical materials in this response, as he does elsewhere in his work. Later in the same interview, he avers that at one point he did consider writing historical fiction about this period in English history.

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note that the dominant interpretation of its temporal disposition relies quite heavily on the Middle Ages as a cipher denoting “what modernity is not.”5 Both Martin’s novels and HBO’s rendition of them have been described as “medieval fantasy epic.”6 That term should not be accepted without inquiry : each component of it designates a specific and distinct literary or historical object. Literally, “medieval” and “fantasy” are mutually exclusive – one describes an historical period while the other is by definition fictional. Epic is here taken in its colloquial American context, simply meaning “long” rather than referring to the generic conventions of Homeric or even Anglo-Saxon epic poetry. Whatever genre these books might be, they are not medieval epics. By blurring these distinctions, however, the description is paradoxically quite accurate in that it mimics the kind of elision of the difference between a historical past and a historically-inspired narrative that Martin uses as a framing device in the novels. In this essay, I suggest that one way to understand Martin’s fiction – and contemporary affective responses to it – is by examining its function through its effect as a fictional temporal archive7 which creates an alternative medieval “past” that is ultimately less complicated and nuanced than its historical referent. While A Song of Ice and Fire can be interpreted in this vein with reference to its readers, temporal archives also operate within Martin’s fictional universe to frame characters’ relationships to the past. This device is particularly evident in the literary motif of scars, both as literal and figurative phenomena. In order to explain how scars function as temporal archives – “unstable amalgam[s] of unexhausted past and unaccomplished futures”8 – I will begin by considering how their essential nature indicates the heterogeneity of time in narratives. Scars necessarily invoke the past in which they were formed, serving as nostalgic reference points that inhere in the physical bodies of their characters. This concept of the scar as a form of temporal archive is particularly useful for considering Tyrion Lannister’s literal and metaphorical scars. For Tyrion, the scar’s potential to deform is crucial: his physical scarring links his present to his past even as it renders him (at times) unrecognizable. While scars function this way within the narrative, the scar as a temporal archive also serves as a valuable heuristic for understanding the popular response to Martin’s work. Positioning the scar as a remnant of the past that 5 See below, notes 18–20. 6 See, for example: Bill Carter, “‘Game of Thrones,’ not ‘Mad Men,’ had the Bigger Sunday Night,” New York Times, April 9, 2013, accessed October 4, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/ 2013/04/10/business/media/game-of-thrones-not-mad-men-had-the-bigger-sunday-night. html. 7 I borrow this terminology from Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 8 Strohm, ibid., 80.

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indicates an originary moment of violence, I will return to the notion of the temporal archive as it pertains to the American relationship to the medieval past that A Song of Ice and Fire may indicate. I will speculatively suggest that part of the series’ popularity results from its representation of the medieval past as something that is at once accessibly familiar and fantastically remote. In the same manner that a scar simultaneously indicates a heightened moment in the past and the present that has safely transcended it, Martin’s story engages his audience’s desire to connect to an exotic past that it can selectively distance itself from. The key distinction is that, unlike a physical scar which only exists because of an actual historical moment, Martin’s fictional temporal archive relies on a confusion between history and fantasy. A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones are successful because they offer an alternative vision of the past: one that is able to be endured, and even enjoyed, because it is born from this indeterminate zone between history and fantasy.

Scars of History: Time, Nostalgia, and the Wounds of the Past Temporal archives and their narrative effects perform crucial tasks in relation to understanding the function of time in stories. Paul Strohm derives the idea of the temporal archive from Derrida’s discussion of mal d’archive, the “compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement.”9 Strohm, however, distances himself from the negative and destructive power of the archive in order to highlight its utopian possibilities – its ability to function as a “repository of meanings that await discovery.”10 This ability to archive time results in the concomitant ability of an archive or text to create its own theory of time, or temporality. Strohm emphasizes that by existing as an archive of different times, a text demonstrates the heterogeneity of time in narrative. In other words, the “now” of a text is rarely (if ever) singular and “no text fails to bear within itself a range of alien temporalities, imported into its bounds as unavoidable part and parcel of the words and images of which it is made. No text, that is, can be temporally self-consistent, for the very reason that it does not own its words and cannot specify their prehistories.”11 Moreover, “each text harbors different notions of time”12 – that is, time inhabits texts in complex ways. 9 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 91. 10 Strohm, Theory and Premodern Text, 80. Italics in original. 11 Ibid., 80–81. 12 Ibid., 81.

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In fact, one might well say that each text harbors different notions of times. Each text becomes a repository for not only the present of its action but the present of its reading, the present of the events it narrates, and the present of its own composition. This heterogeneity of times becomes particularly meaningful when the text in question is a form of medievalism because of the nostalgic impulse inherent in such works. The “capacious now” of the text that Carolyn Dinshaw identifies – a kind of temporal heterogeneity that allows the past and the present to become coeval13 – also renders the Middle Ages presented in such texts paradoxically remote yet intensely engaging. Such a sense of time risks encouraging a problematic nostalgia, one that, as Ren8e Trilling has observed, presents serious ramifications when turning to works of medievalism and the type of periodization that inevitably arises in these pieces. The nostalgic impulse of medievalism “pushes toward an absolute separation of the Middle Ages as not only past but also the realm of fantasy, where [. . .] self-flagellating monks [exist] comfortably alongside wizards and dragons.”14 As such, it also drives a lopsided view of the medieval period as one that is denied historical reality in favor of the fetishization of the Middle Ages as somehow more “alive” (or magical) than the present. The nostalgia of medievalist fantasy “provides the narrative – an endless narrative – to account for an endemic human longing for an always-already lost object which persists under different forms in different historical moments.”15 If the past – the medieval past – was not understood to be both fundampentally distinct from yet originary of its modern successors, there would be no impulse to long for it. Scars can function as temporal archives and imply a kind of longing for the past.16 Take, for example, the paradigmatic scars of the Saint Crispin’s Day speech in Shakespeare’s Henry V. Here, shared violence and anticipation of its recollection and commemoration give birth to a kind of advance nostalgia for the survivors of the battle. In exhorting his soldiers to bravery, Henry creates a prospective temporal archive in the form of the scars that he knows the battle’s survivors will have when they arrive home:

13 See Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). For her ideas about coevalness, Dinshaw draws on, among others, Dipesh Charkrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 14 Ren8e Trilling, “Medievalism and its discontents,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2 (2011), 220 (doi: 10.1057/pmed.2011.7). 15 Helen Dell, “Nostalgia and Medievalism: Conversations, contradictions, impasses,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2 (2011), 121 (doi:10.1057/pmed.2011.6). 16 Another such example is found in the chapter on “Odysseus’ Scar,” in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis. I wish to thank Martin B. Schichtman for pointing me to this example of scars in literary criticism, and for first suggesting that I pursue this essay.

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He that outlives this day and comes safe home, Will stand a tip-toe when this day is named, And rouse him at the name of Crispian. He that shall see this day and live t’old age Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbors, And say, ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian.’ Then he will strip his sleeve and show his scars, And say, ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’ Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot, But he’ll remember, with advantages What feats he did that day.17

In this speech, the past, present, and future of these men cohere in the bodily feature of their scars. Cyclical time – the repeated celebration of the saint’s day each calendar year – syncs with the future memories of the men who fought in that battle. The scars themselves, although still in the future of these men, will function as links not only to their individual pasts and futures but to the group as a whole, as an impulse to both memory and nostalgic self-identification as part of a specific group.18 The Saint Crispin’s day speech indicates how a national history can emerge from battles fought and remembered across time. In this speech, scars are crucial to the process because they reposition violence as valor. Their persistence beyond the moment they are created as wounds becomes a specific impulse to narrative. Martin’s work requires a similar sense of history in order to create fictional depth – so much so that it defines both the relationship of his audience to his characters and that of his characters to their own formative “medieval” pasts. Martin chooses the high medieval period as the past his characters inhabit, but also creates a fictional historical memory relative to his characters’ present that they frequently look back to in order to analyze their world. By paying attention to the scars that occur in this “medieval fantasy epic,” the use of the temporal archive as it inheres in scars and scarring becomes an intrinsic part of how we might assess and interpret this aspect of the text’s theoretical framework. This theoretical framework indicates the desired identities and alternative histories that epic fantasy can make possible. It also allows us as readers and critics to better understand the complex implications of A Song of Ice and Fire’s strangely historical medievalism.

17 William Shakespeare, Henry V IV.3, lines 45–53, ed. Stanley Wells, et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 18 I wish to thank Marshelle Woodward, who suggested I look to Henry V as a source for understanding the temporal functions of scars. She also gave helpful comments on an early draft of this work.

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Scars of Fantasy: Westerosi History and Time’s Wounds At this juncture in American culture, it is nearly impossible to be unaware of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, which exists in parallel as novels as well as the HBO series Game of Thrones. The ongoing series chronicles the story of a vaguely western European realm called Westeros, with the main conflict initially occuring between the Starks of Winterfell in the North and the Lannisters of King’s Landing in the South. HBO (which produces the television series), the media at large, and even Martin himself have referred to the series as being intentionally “medieval.” Some of the terms that critics have used to describe it include: a “fantasy epic set in a quasi-medieval somewhereland,”19 “a series whose veneer of medieval drama conceals more fanciful and mystical layers,”20 and a “dense medieval fantasy.”21 The co-occurrence of “medieval” and “fantasy” indicates the ways in which, as Trilling observed, audiences are more than willing to understand the fantastic and the medieval as holding same semireal status, fundamentally and ineluctably separate from the present.22 As one might expect of an “imagined historical universe” set in a “quasimedieval” past where violence runs rampant,23 scars play an important role in the narrative. In fact, they appear over 200 times in the course of the five novels that Martin has thus far completed – frequently enough to indicate some of their effect on the novels’ narrative temporality.24 Perhaps the most clearly scarred character – both physically and emotionally – is Tyrion Lannister. Tyrion is the disfigured, dwarf son of the cruel but powerful Tywin. Because he was born a dwarf in a family that privileged both beauty and physical power, Tyrion is hated by his father as a blot on the golden Lannisters of Casterly Rock. Early in the 19 Ginia Bellafonte, “A Fantasy World of Strange Feuding Kingdoms,” The New York Times, April 14, 2011, accessed October 4, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/arts/televi sion/game-of-thrones-begins-sunday-on-hbo-review.html. 20 David Itzkoff, “A Heroic Fantasy for Skeptics,” The New York Times, April 10, 2011, accessed October 4, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/arts/television/game-of-thrones-onhbo-from-george-r-r-martin-novels.html. 21 Neil Genzlinger, “They Just Can’t Wait to Be King: ‘Game of Thrones’ on HBO,” The New York Times, March 29, 2011, accessed October 4, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/30/arts/ television/game-of-thrones-on-hbo.html. 22 See Trilling, ibid. 23 Bellafonte, ibid. 24 In my consideration of the fictional narratives regarding Westeros, I am conciously avoiding treating HBO’s Game of Thrones as interchangeable with or equivalent to A Song of Ice and Fire. My reasoning is that the series is not quite so easily attributable to a single authorial vision as the novels, and thus presents a problem for interpretation – the myriad changes that have been made to the series as it progresses make the two rather incommensurate at present. Moreover, the added violence of the HBO series creates another layer of temporality that both heightens the public sense of the narrative as “medieval” while also, importantly, making it less “authentically” so.

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books, Jon Snow observes the differences between Tyrion Lannister and his siblings, Queen Cersei and Jaime: “[a]ll that the gods had given to Cersei and Jaime, they had denied Tyrion. He was a dwarf, half his brother’s height, struggling to keep pace on stunted legs. His head was too large for his body, with a brute’s squashed-in face beneath a swollen shelf of brow. One green eye and one black eye peered out from under a lank fall of hair so blond it seemed white.”25 Tyrion’s malformed body wounds his family by drawing attention to both his father’s inability to sire another, more normative child and the fact that his mother died during his birth. Tyrion’s stature becomes disabling because it limits his usefulness to his family’s political ambitions. The deep political controversies of Westeros can be difficult to parse for the casual observer. One representative set of alliances and grudges – in which Tyrion and his stature play an important role – is between two rival houses, the Lannisters and the Martells.26 Oberyn Martell holds a deep grudge against the Lannisters because he believes his sister’s untimely death during a rebellion was plotted by them. This grudge seems natural to him because the Martells rejected a Lannister offer of marriage between her and Tyrion. He pursues the feud into the present of the Song of Ice and Fire narrative. Oberyn’s partial understanding of the situation is conditioned by everything he knows about the past. Tyrion too observes the situation with reference to the past, albeit one framed more in terms of social norms than individual actions. He recognizes that the feuds pursued by the great houses are part and parcel of a 25 George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire Book 1) (New York: Bantam, 2011), 43. 26 The rivalry between the Lannisters and the Martells becomes understandable only in the context of a longer span of Westerosi history. For approximately three hundred years, Westeros was ruled by the foreign Targaryen dynasty, who came to power through their ancestor Aegon the Conqueror. The Targaryens fell slightly before the action of the novels begins, overthrown by Robert Baratheon and his supporters in what became known as Robert’s Rebellion. Before this rebellion took place, the seven kingdoms of Westeros were united, with seven powerful ruling houses leading smaller kingdoms that answered to the Targaryen overlords. In the years before the rebellion, the Martells and the Lannisters (two of the most powerful houses) sought a marriage alliance. Initially, the Martells wished to marry their eldest son, Oberyn, to Cersei Lannister, Tywin’s eldest daughter. Convinced that his daughter would one day marry the Targaryen Prince Rhaegar (the future king of Westeros), Tywin refused. As a result, the Martells attempted to secure the alliance by instead offering a union between their daughter Elia and Jaime Lannister. Tywin refuses that arrangement too, offering them the “deformed” Tyrion for Elia instead. The Martells are insulted at the suggestion and hold a grudge against the Lannisters as a result. Elia goes on to make a better match with Prince Rhaegar – a match that will lead directly to her death. However, when Prince Rhaegar leave King’s Landing as a result of his adulterous relationship with another woman, Elia is left alone with her children and the mad King Aerys when the rebels take the stronghold. The king is killed by Jaime Lannister, and Lannister leigeman Ser Gregor Clendane kills Elia’s children before raping and killing her as well.

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patrilineal society bent on power and aggression: “It all goes back and back, Tyrion thought, to our mothers and fathers and theirs before them. We are puppets dancing on the strings of those who came before us, and one day our own children will take up our strings and dance on in our steads.”27 Tyrion’s interpretation of this situation – which refers to the “puppet strings” of the past – positions the present political situation as a kind of temporallyextended marionette, controlled by the remains of the past. This status results directly from a political intepretation of emotional scars: Oberyn’s mourning for his sister’s death takes the form of continued violence against the Lannisters. Tyrion, by contrast – and perhaps because of his outcast state within his family – can recognize the situation for what it is. The endless struggle for power and revenge is the logical result of the grudges and horror of the past which won’t be forgiven and cannot be forgotten. Those in the present are held hostage by their memory and interpretation of previous events. In their response to this partial knowledge, they propel history forward. In fact, the interrelation of past and present conditions Tyrion’s family life far more than political power (or anything else). Tyrion’s stature serves as a reminder not only of his difference from his siblings and his father’s resentment of that difference, but also of his birth. Tyrion’s mother died in childbirth – and Tywin never forgives his son for this loss. Nowhere is his father’s hatred more clear than when Tyrion asks to inherit the Lannister family seat, Casterly Rock. He is the logical choice, because his siblings cannot inherit – Cersei on account of her sex and Jaime because of his position in the Kingsguard. However, Tywin’s explosive reaction makes it clear how deeply his wife’s death scarred him: You, who killed your mother to come into the world? You are an ill–made, devious, disobedient, spiteful little creature full of envy, lust, and low cunning. Men’s laws give you the right to bear my name and display my colors, since I cannot prove that you are not mine. To teach me humility, the gods have condemned me to watch you waddle about wearing that proud lion that was my father’s sigil and his father’s before him. But neither gods nor men shall ever compel me to let you turn Casterly Rock into your whorehouse.28

Tywin’s response belies the fact that Tyrion was not ethically responsible for his mother’s death, even if his birth caused it. It also indicates the pull of the past on the present in A Song of Ice and Fire. Tywin’s present shame about Tyrion’s stature and behavior are linked inextricably to his grief for his dead wife. Tywin’s remarks yoke Tyrion’s mother’s death (“You, who killed your mother to come into the world”) to both his stature (“you are [. . .] ill–made”) and his behavior, 27 George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 3) (New York: Bantam, 2003), 969. 28 Ibid., 65.

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which Tywin believes will diminish the respectability of the family seat at Casterly Rock. Tyrion’s past, and his implication in his mother’s death, leads Tywin to read his younger son’s physical difference as a metaphor for his morality. Moreover, Tywin internalizes what others have said of Tyrion: that his deformities are the gods’ way to “teach [Tywin] humility.” Tywin sees Tyrion as a kind of monster – and, like all monsters, his difference becomes a sign that his father (and indeed the world) can read.29 Despite his high lineage, Tyrion is an outsider in A Song of Ice and Fire, made to feel distant and despised by the father that many characters say he, of all the Lannister children, most resembles. His stature brings the past in to his present: the loss of Tywin’s beloved wife is made legible in the persistent survival of the malformed child that killed her. Tyrion knows his place, however – he perceptively speaks of it to that other misfit of Westeros, Jon Snow, admonishing the bastard-born young man: “Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not.”30 When Jon asks how Tyrion – a legitimate heir – could understand the position of a fatherless bastard, Tyrion observes that “All dwarfs are bastards in their father’s eyes.”31 The metaphorical scars caused by Tyrion’s mother’s death and the difference he embodies mar his relationship with Tywin. Tyrion’s literal scarring occasions a break with both his father and his brother. It marks another disfiguring attribute for Tyrion: “The gash was long and crooked, starting a hair under his left eye and ending on the right side of his jaw. Three-quarters of his nose was gone, and a chunk of his lip. Someone had sewn the torn flesh together with catgut, and their clumsy stitches were still in place across the seam of raw, red, half-healed flesh.”32 Tyrion earns this scar while making his father’s victory over a potential usurper-king possible.33 In return, Tywin demotes his son from his crucial role as the “Hand of the King,” taking it for himself during – and after – Tyrion’s recovery. Tyrion’s physical scarring completes his alienation from his family, but not without a final resurrection of an old emotional scar. Upon his return to court, Tyrion struggles to reinsert himself into the Lannister political machine with disastrous results. When he is condemned to death for the murder of his 29 This formulation is indebted to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s essay “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” where he writes “A construct and a project, the monster exists only to be read: the monstrum is etymologically ‘that which reveals,’ ‘that which warns,’ a glyph that seeks a hierophant.” Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” in Monster Theory : Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 4. 30 Martin, Game of Thrones, 47. 31 Ibid. 32 George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 2) (New York: Bantam, 1999), 939. 33 The potential usurper king, Stannis Baratheon, is the brother of the King Robert Baratheon, whose death early in the Song of Ice and Fire novels precipitates much of the action later.

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nephew,34 his brother Jaime releases him from prison – noting as he does so that he owed a debt to Tyrion for a wrong now long past. When pressed, Jaime confesses a lie that, in many ways, had shaped Tyrion’s life: his first love – Tysha, who Tyrion has long thought was a prostitute bought for him by his brother – was not a prostitute at all. She was truly in love with him,35 but because Tywin disapproved of their relationship, he coerced Jaime into helping him end it. Tywin’s punishment of his son – and the woman he loved – is grotesquely violent: Tysha is raped by every guard in Casterly Rock while Tyrion is forced to watch. When Jaime reveals this deception, it rips open an emotional scar that Tyrion had long tried to forget. That old wound – sutured over by time but never healed – breaks Tyrion out of his father’s control. Tyrion murders his father for his betrayal. Although not linked explicitly with his facial scars, I would suggest that the scar itself stands in for Tyrion’s long marginalization by his father, represented by the episode with Tysha. Scars are physical remnants of a foundational wounding, one that can only exist because of this originary violence. Tyrion’s scar, and the revelations that follow it, suture together the past and present in the same way that Oberyn Martell’s memory resurrects the loss of his sister as a motivating force in his present. Tyrion’s stature, his family’s grief, and the grief of his own emotional wounds all inhere in the temporal archive of the scar. By doing so, they condition the possible futures of the youngest Lannister in the still-unfolding world of Westeros.

Scars of Time: Martin’s “Medieval” World As previously mentioned, the acceptance of A Song of Ice and Fire as a fauxmedieval world is commonplace. This conception is made more prominent by both HBO’s version of the novels and the enthusiasm that the series has generated. What makes A Song of Ice and Fire’s Westeros a compelling world is not only the complexity of the political situations of the characters’ present but also the deep history that is inscribed in the landscape. The physical environment in A Song of Ice and Fire provides a living backdrop for the characters, but it also 34 The boy King Joffrey is poisoned by an unknown assailant, and Cersei imprisons Tyrion for the murder in part because she has always hated him, much like her father. 35 In fact, she was precisely “what she seemed to be. A crofter’s daughter, chance met on the road.” Jaime confesses that Tywin coerced him into lying to his borther, explaining that Tywin was convinced that “all she wanted was the gold, which made her no different from a whore, so . . . so it would not be a lie, not truly, and . . . he said you required a sharp lesson. That you would learn from it, and thank me later . . .” Tywin meant Jaime’s lie to coerce Tyrion into leaving Tysha of his own accord. See Martin, A Storm of Swords, 1064–1065.

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provides a temporal archive itself – one seen most prominently through human marks on the landscape. For example, as one central character – Catelyn Stark – approaches the capital city of King’s Landing, her thoughts turn to the deep past of the Westerosi landscape and the history written in it: Three hundred years ago . . . those heights had been covered with forest, and only a handful of fisherfolk had lived on the north shore of the Blackwater Rush where that deep, swift river flowed into the sea. Then Aegon the Conqueror had sailed from Dragonstone. It was here that his army had put ashore, and there on the highest hill that he built his first crude redoubt of wood and earth.36

This “first crude redoubt” has of course expanded exponentially, as suggested by Catelyn’s further observation that “now the city covered the shore as far as [she] could see.”37 However, her musing on the violence that marked the entrance of the Targaryens into Westerosi history implies a temporal archive readable in the landscape itself. King’s Landing – in the present of the novels – shares space with the past. Even its name preserves an historical act tied to the location. That memory conditions the future, as another Targaryen (Daenaerys), spurred on by memories of her ancestors, seeks to regain their former glory in Westeros. What remains unknown, however, is the fate of the fisherfolk that Catelyn mentions. Aegon’s Conquest has dire consequences for the elite people of Westeros, but Catelyn’s omission of the “smallfolk” does not mean they were any less affected. Indeed, the fisherfolk may be rendered nearly illegible in Catelyn’s reading of the past, but one could assume that Aegon’s Conquest displaced them. Both forest and village have been usurped by political violence. Catelyn’s thoughts, then, point toward the temporal heterogeneity of the scar : its connection to both the (violent) past and the present. Despite being symbols of healing, scars are also memorials to old wounds – and a landscape can be scarred as easily as a body. Even the name “Aegon the Conqueror” marks the necessity of an originary wound that remains only in the form and name of King’s Landing. Aegon did not arrive a king: his conquests made him one. In this sense, the books themselves might be seen as a kind of temporal archive, albeit one that relies on a fictional – or fictionalized – landscape.38 And 36 Martin, A Game of Thrones, 141. 37 Ibid. 38 My thoughts on such fictionalization are drawn, in part, from Geraldine Barnes’ essay on “Nostalgia, medievalism, and the V&nland voyages,” in the abstract of which she writes “Whereas American poets celebrated an ideal of Viking heroism and nostalgia for the moment of ‘discovery’ as the basis of a myth of national foundation, British fiction of the same period is infused with regret at the failure of a promising venture that speaks to anxieties about empire. For both American and British writers, the ‘medievalism of nostalgia’ is less for an imagined ideal of the medieval than for the potential of a medieval

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yet, the repeated assertion that Martin’s epic novels are somehow also medieval demonstrates what is arguably a peculiarly American disposition toward the use of the term. By viewing Martin’s novels the way he does – as an amalgam of alternative histories and pasts – we can begin to tease out the metaphorical scar that they indicate is present in the American psyche. The popularity of Game of Thrones is part-and-parcel of a fictive American relationship to a medieval past. The impulse toward the creation of alternative histories, ways of being-in-theworld that do not necessarily map onto the linear narratives that link past and present begets a strange relationship between an American-produced book series and the fictionalized European past. Martin’s own assertions about fantasy as a genre begin to demonstrate the stakes of this impulse toward medieval-fantasy writing. Martin’s meditation, included in the section of his website On Writing, begins with some commonplaces about fantasy literature and its place as work that is purely of the imagination: “The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real … for a moment at least … that long magic moment before we wake.”39 The suggestion that fantasy is “more real than real” suggests that Martin’s vision of this world as “real” harbors more than a passing relationship to medieval theological readings of the world as a fallen, pale reflection of God’s eternal glory. It is also fundamentally, if paradoxically, nostalgic: an infinitely receding object of desire that can never be regained because it was never possessed in the first place. Fantasy, Martin suggests, shows “us” as “we” really are – or were. And yet these first person plural pronouns do not actually indicate a real community. The purpose that fantasy actually serves is to show us how Martin thinks we should be, or how we should (or do) long to be: Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true? We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to venture to shape the history of the modern world.” See Barnes, “Nostalgia, medievalism, and the V&nland voyages,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2 (2011) 141 (doi:10.1057/pmed.2011.2). 39 George R. R. Martin, “On Writing,” http://www.georgerrmartin.com/about-george/on-wri ting-essays/on-fantasy-by-george-r-r-martin/ accessed 4 October 2015.

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something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.40

The equivalencies – or oppositions – that Martin sets up here between reality and fantasy are telling. Fantasy is color and taste and architectural wonder, consisting of “strong spices” and “the songs the sirens sang.” The fetishization of fantasy bears some commonalities with the fetishization of the East in Orientalist reading practices – not least of all through those bold colors and strong spices. In the case of A Song of Ice and Fire, this conceptual violence is paired with a very real emphasis on physical violence and carnage, one that some medievalists have argued far outstrips the medieval past, despite its obvious brutality.41 Martin’s musings range from considering the purely fictional places of Minas Tirith and Oz to the shadowy, legendary worlds of Camelot and Icarus’ Cretan prison, both of which have analogues that we could position in the “real world.” That so many time periods and degrees of reality blur together is not surprising: one of the key traits of fantasy is that it allows us to imagine a time, or a world, where we lived not only differently but more.42 As with medievalisms of all stripes, that world can only ever really exist in the past because its existence in the present would render moot a work like Martin’s. As he puts it: “there is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us.” The implication of this equivalence is clear : while in our lifetimes we might only ever see Burbank, Cleveland, Newark – places, importantly, where manufacturing still happens and things are made in the real world – fantasy allows us to dwell (imaginatively at least) in a world where there is meaning.43 Fantasy admits no 40 Martin, ibid. 41 See, for example, Kathleen Kennedy’s discussion of the rape of Sansa Stark and the permissibility of its inclusion in the television show because of the “reality of the times.” Kathleen E. Kennedy, “What Sansa Stark’s Rape Tells Us About Our Culture,” Vice, May 22, 2015, accessed October 4, 2015, http://www.vice.com/read/a-medievalist-responds-to-san sas-rape-on-game-of-thrones-585. 42 For a more thorough understanding of the relationship between fantasy and the “more real than real” (as Baudrillard would have it), see Helen C. Dell, “‘Yearning for the Sweet Beckoning Sound’: Musical Longings and the Unsayable in Medievalist Fantasy Fiction,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2 (2011), 172–3 (doi:10.1057/ pmed.2011.3). 43 Martin is not alone in his identification of the “old and true” with a more vibrant way of living. Take, for example, Johan Huizinga’s opening meditations on The Waning of the Middle Ages, where he writes, “To the world when it was half a thousand years younger, the outlines of all things seemed more clearly marked than to us. The contrast between suffering and joy, between adversity and happiness, appeared more striking. All experience had yet to the minds of men the directness and absoluteness of the pleasure and pain of child-life.” See Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (London: Edward Arnold & Co, 1924), 1.

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technological mediation or loss of authenticity through simulacra – the only simulacra we need is fantasy itself. The equivalence of the “old” with the “true” allows fantasy to bypass historical truth in its imaginative mode. That we insist Martin’s world is somehow “medieval” begins to demonstrate how this supercession works. Martin has spoken repeatedly about his dissatisfaction with many writers of fantasy-fiction, declaring that they wrote about “a sort of Disneyland middle ages, where they had castles and princesses and all that. The trappings of a class system, but they didn’t seem to understand what a class system actually meant.”44 This use of a period without clear understanding of it is Martin’s presumed area of intervention into modern fantasy. Rather than a “Ren Faire” Middle Ages, where everyone can be upper class and healthy, Martin’s work tries to bring the techniques of historical fiction to bear on fantasy, combining the “gritty realism of the best historical fiction” with “the imagination and the sense of wonder that you get in the best fantasy.”45 Yet as with historical fiction, fantasy set in a “medieval” period can just as easily push readers, or students, into recreating the Middle Ages in the image of such texts. The techniques of historical fiction – and even, one might say, of historical analysis – create the sense of the old in Martin’s “medieval fantasy epic,” but where can we find the true? Perhaps the most pronounced correlation between the ostensibly “real” world of medieval Europe and the fantasy world of A Song of Ice and Fire is “the Wall,” a gigantic structure that lies at the far north of Westeros. The Wall is a structure made entirely of ice, 700 feet tall. It was built to protect the Southern lands of Westeros from the Wildlings and the Others, a kind of zombie reanimated through a vaguely described magic. The Wall is a remarkable device for protection: “Almost seven hundred feet high it stood, three times the height of the tallest tower in the stronghold it sheltered.”46 Eight thousand years old, the wall stands with “spells woven into it . . . old ones, and strong.”47 Located on the border of Westeros, it serves a protective and delimiting function – it separates the Wild Lands from civilization. And yet, rather famously, the Wall was imaginatively created by Martin’s visit to the the late antique construction called Hadrian’s Wall, which was built to keep the Scots from invading British territory during the Roman period. Mar-

44 Sean Sampson, “Transcript: George R. R. Martin, Author of ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ Series: Interview on The Sound of Young America” September 19, 2011, accessed October 4, 2015, http://www.maximumfun.org/sound-young-america/george-r-r-martin-author-song-iceand-fire-series-interview-sound-young-america#transcript. 45 Ibid. 46 Martin, A Game of Thrones, 154. 47 Ibid.

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tin’s description of its genesis demonstrates the imaginative contours of his borrowing: The Wall predates anything else. I can trace back the inspiration for that to 1981. I was in England visiting a friend, and as we approached the border of England and Scotland, we stopped to see Hadrian’s Wall. I stood up there and I tried to imagine what it was like to be a Roman legionary, standing on this wall, looking at these distant hills. It was a very profound feeling. For the Romans at that time, this was the end of civilization; it was the end of the world. We know that there were Scots beyond the hills, but they didn’t know that. It could have been any kind of monster. It was the sense of this barrier against dark forces – it planted something in me. But when you write fantasy, everything is bigger and more colorful, so I took the Wall and made it three times as long and 700 feet high, and made it out of ice.48

Martin’s reading of his Wall as a cipher for Hadrian’s – albeit it one that is seven hundred feet higher made of a far less quotidian material – exceeds the similarity of their placement in the beleaguered north of an island-nation. It also partakes of some of the same assumptions that characterize Martin’s designations of the “old” and the “true.” Martin begins by situating the experience as imagining himself as a Roman in that world: “For the Romans at that time, this was the end of civilization; it was the end of the world. We know that there were Scots beyond the hills, but they didn’t know that.” In fact, of course, the Romans did know that there were Scots beyond the hills – they were precisely who the wall was supposed to keep out of the Roman territories.49 Martin himself has elsewhere rephrased this point: “You were looking off the end of the world. Protecting the civilized world against whatever might emerge from those trees. Of course, what tended to emerge from those trees was Scots, and we couldn’t use that.”50 Yet the relationship between these two versions of Martin’s creative inspiration is revealing: the reality of Scots that threatened Roman hegemony stands in stark contrast to the imaginative questions about what the Romans might have 48 Gilmore, “George R.R. Martin: The Rolling Stone Interview.” 49 His alternative formulation of the Wall’s genesis occurs in his interview with Sound of Young America. He frames his creation of the Wall as part of the process of writing fantasy : “That’s the general process for doing fantasy, is you have to root it in reality. Then you play with it a little; then you add the imaginative element, then you make it largely bigger. Like the Wall in my books, of course, was inspired by Hadrian’s wall, which I visited on my first trip to the United Kingdom back in the early 80s. We climbed to the top of Hadrian’s Wall and I looked north and tried to imagine what it was like to be a Roman soldier stationed there in the first century. At the end of the known world staring at these distant hills and wondering what lived there and what might come out of it. You were looking off the end of the world. Protecting the civilized world against whatever might emerge from those trees. Of course, what tended to emerge from those trees was Scots, and we couldn’t use that. So I made the Wall considerably bigger and made it of ice, that’s the process of fantasizing” (Sampson, ibid.). 50 Sampson, ibid.

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thought was “out there.” The juxtaposition indicates a key moment of interpretation in Martin’s work. Martin’s inconsistent account of his own knowledge of history in the midst of telling and retelling the narrative of his encounter with Hadrian’s wall suggests part of his larger agenda in using this particular historical referent. Martin begins with reality : the Scots lived beyond Hadrian’s Wall. However, he quickly dismisses that reality, noting that for his novels, he “couldn’t use that” – perhaps, ultimately, because it is too realistic, too consonant with his readers’ understanding of “everyday” geopolitics. In Martin’s interpretive agenda, however, that indigenous landscape that is not yet Roman becomes (in both Martin’s memory and reality) an uncivilized void. The historical Scots disappear to be resurrected as White Walkers and other creatures of magical darkness. The “real” inhabitants of the void seem ultimately secondary to Martin. In a fantasy world, the work of the wall is less important than its resonance, its ability to provoke that very sense of foreboding that Martin sensed – fictively or not – on the Yorkshire moors at Hadrian’s wall. That aboriginal inhabitants of various locales are turned, legendarily, into monsters is well-attested, as is the impulse to conquest that fictionally renders them as such.51 Martin’s use of the White Walkers and the Wildlings who dwell north of the Wall is rather more complex. On the one hand, Martin’s vision of the lands beyond the wall are multifaceted – they force the reader to empathize with, even root for, the “free” Wildings, if not for the White Walkers who threaten both Wildings and the Westerosi. Yet, on the other hand, the resonances with Westerosi history are clear : historical change only comes with invasion, whether by Aegon the Conqueror, Daenaerys Targaryen, or the hordes of the frozen, reanimated dead. The lands beyond the wall, however inhabited, must also be put under threat, and thence must acquiesce to Westerosi demands. The White Walkers precipitate the crisis that forces “civilized” people to come together. They can only do so if the alternative is non-existence.52 In Westeros, the land functions as a temporal archive – in the deep history of the land at King’s Landing or in the ancient Wall of Ice, woven with magics to ward off the darkness. Characters can read the past in the scars inflicted on the landscape: Catelyn sees Aegon the Conqueror, metaphorically, when she looks at King’s Landing, much as Martin himself looked out from Hadrian’s Wall and 51 See, for example, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen Of Giants: Sex, Monsters and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 52 One such moment in the Song of Ice and Fire mythos is the defeat of the Night’s King, a legendary leader of the Night’s Watch – the group tasked with protecting Westeros from the White Walkers and the Wildlings – who had fallen in with the White Walkers himself, becoming a monster. In order to defeat him, Wildings and the Night’s Watch had to work together. See Martin, A Storm of Swords.

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could imagine the feelings of a Roman soldier standing in the same place two millennia before him. The landscape points to a past that the people looking at it share in. Yet one wonders what the fisherfolk or the Scots had seen. For them, these structures are temporal archives too, but of a different sort. The memory of violence inheres in this landscape and its scars, similarly to how Tyrion’s scars – both literal and metaphorical – link him, irrevocably and legibly, to the past. A Song of Ice and Fire succeeds as an exercise in world-building because it creates a compelling illusion: that of a fictional realm that has a realistic sense of historical depth. Martin’s recourse to the medieval past as providing the initial impulse for the series is deeply intertwined with that illusion. By creating an alternative medieval world – one which is safely fantastic, replete with dragons and magic – he both distances and denies the reality of the actual past despite claiming a certain authority that is explicitly derived from it. The temporal archiving effect of the Song of Ice and Fire series ultimately recreates the Middle Ages, marking it not only as distant from modernity but also fundamentally cut off from it. In so doing, the medievalism of Martin’s vision eclipses the historicity of the period he drew it from, fundamentally reshaping both the old and the true.

Scars of History: Toward the American/Medieval One interpretation of the American relationship to the Middle Ages that resonates with the historical fantasy of George R.R. Martin can be found in an excursus appended to Ernst Robert Curtius’ English translation of European Literature and Latin Middle Ages. In a lecture titled “The Medieval Bases of Western Thought,” Curtius traces the genealogies of humanistic and philosophical thought in Europe and North America. Of the American relationship to the medieval European past, he observes that while “the American mind might go back to Puritanism or to William Penn [. . .] it lacked that which preceded them. It lacked the Middle Ages.”53 In a particularly fascinating simile, Curtius suggests that the relationship between the United States and the Middle Ages is like “a man who has never known his mother. The American conquest of the Middle Ages has something of that romantic glamour of that deep sentimental urge which we might expect of a man who would set out to find his lost mother.”54 Curtius’ reading of the American fervor for the medieval suggests a kind of nostalgic desire for a familial relationship – a maternal one – that is always 53 E.R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 587. 54 Ibid.

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already lost. His understanding of American temporal imperialism – its “conquest” of the Middle Ages as a useful interlocutor for American literature – raises an intriguing possibility. Martin’s unabashed plundering of a fictionalized European Middle Ages simultaneously participates in something very old and strangely new. By rewriting and refashioning Hadrian’s Wall into a sevenhundred-foot wall of legendary magic, or creating a version of the “medieval” world that is meant to be somehow more real than other fictional renderings of either the period or the fantasy that serves as a cipher for it, Martin belatedly performs the conquest that Curtius describes. The equivalence of the “old” and the “true” that Martin makes in his writing replaces the reality of the Middle Ages with a fantastic and utterly remote version of them. When considering Martin’s own musings alongside Curtius’ familial imagery, an even more fantastic possibility emerges. Martin’s peculiarly American medievalism participates in what might well be described as a fantasy of sharing both temporality and geography with a continuous past. It recreates a medieval world: one that in the American imaginary could potentially supercede a more realistic rendering of history, of either the European Middle Ages or the indigenous North American cultures that existed in the same time period. Read in its correct historical milieu, for a European-descended American audience, they are the invaders to Native American populations. In a version of this story based on the historical past, the Europeans who conquered North America are the White Walkers, the Scots – the uncivilized force restrained by a mighty wall made of Atlantic water rather than Westerosi ice. Only with a fictional referent – a fantasy of medieval Europe – can this audience identify with the desirable side of this story. In order for the “old” to be “true,” it must be safely distant from its audience, but sufficiently familiar that the audience can see in it its own image. Admittedly, this interpretation is more impressionistic than definitive. However, it inspires a fruitful mode of analysis for exploring the “American/ Medieval” of this volume’s title. Much like the “medieval fantasy epic,” American/Medieval implies the coexistence of terms that cannot in a literal sense work together. Medieval does not solely designate a time period: it designates a time period tied to a geography. Nor does American solely designate a geography. Rather, it implies a culture that relates to the land but is not reducible to it. “Medieval America” does not makes sense as a conceptual category describing “actual” history – not in the way that “Medieval Europe” does. Similarly, Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire purports to recreate a fantastic version of what is arguably intentionally presented as an essentially historical period. “Medieval fantasy epic” only makes sense as a genre because A Song of Ice and Fire creates it through its imaginative reworkings of putatively “real” history. In the same sense, what we call American/Medieval reifies its own existence: it becomes legible only through the imaginative acts that give it form. If scars are the legacy

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of a single moment from the distant past, embodying a connection to that past in a form that belies how much has changed, the creation of these new genres might be understood as the reworking of a specific communal past into a fictive narrative of historical continuity.

Bibliography Barnes, Geraldine. “Nostalgia, medievalism, and the V&nland voyages,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2 (2011): 141–154. (doi:10.1057/pmed.2011.2). Bellafonte, Ginia. “A Fantasy World of Strange Feuding Kingdoms.” The New York Times, April 14, 2011. Accessed October 4, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/arts/ television/game-of-thrones-begins-sunday-on-hbo-review.html. Carter, Bill. “‘Game of Thrones,’ not ‘Mad Men,’ had the Bigger Sunday Night.” New York Times, April 9, 2013. Accessed October 4, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/10/ business/media/game-of-thrones-not-mad-men-had-the-bigger-sunday-night.html. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Monster Theory : Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. ________. Of Giants: Sex, Monsters and the Middle Ages. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Curtius, E.R. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953. Dell, Helen C. “Nostalgia and Medievalism: Conversations, contradictions, impasses.” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2 (2011): 115–126. (doi:10.1057/ pmed.2011.6). ___________. “‘Yearning for the Sweet Beckoning Sound’: Musical Longings and the Unsayable in Medievalist Fantasy Fiction.” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2 (2011): 171–185. (doi:10.1057/pmed.2011.3). Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Dinshaw, Carolyn. How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. Genzlinger, Neil. “They Just Can’t Wait to Be King: ‘Game of Thrones’ on HBO.” The New York Times, March 29, 2011. Accessed October 4, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/ 03/30/arts/television/game-of-thrones-on-hbo.html. Gilmore, Mikal. “George R.R. Martin: The Rolling Stone Interview.” The Rolling Stone, April 23, 2014. Accessed October 4, 2015. http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/news/georger-r-martin-the-rolling-stone-interview-20140423. Huizinga, Johan. The Waning of the Middle Ages. London: Edward Arnold & Co, 1924. Itzkoff, David. “A Heroic Fantasy for Skeptics.” The New York Times, April 10, 2011. Accessed October 4, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/arts/television/gameof-thrones-on-hbo-from-george-r-r-martin-novels.html.

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Kennedy, Kathleen E. “What Sansa Stark’s Rape Tells Us About Our Culture.” Vice, May 22, 2015. Accessed October 4, 2015, http://www.vice.com/read/a-medievalist-responds-tosansas-rape-on-game-of-thrones-585. Martin, George R.R. A Clash of Kings (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 2). New York: Bantam, 1999. _________. A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire Book 1). New York: Bantam, 2011. _________. “On Writing.” Accessed 4 October 2015. http://www.georgerrmartin.com/ about-george/on-writing-essays/on-fantasy-by-george-r-r-martin/. __________. A Storm of Swords (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 3). New York: Bantam, 2003. Sampson, Sean. “Transcript: George R. R. Martin, Author of ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ Series: Interview on The Sound of Young America. September 19, 2011. Accessed October 4, 2015. http://www.maximumfun.org/sound-young-america/george-r-r-martin-authorsong-ice-and-fire-series-interview-sound-young-america#transcript. Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works. Edited by Stanley Wells, et al. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Strohm, Paul. Theory and the Premodern Text. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Trilling, Ren8e. “Medievalism and its discontents.” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2 (2011): 216–224. (doi: 10.1057/pmed.2011.7).

Gale Sigal

At What Price Arthur? Academic Autobiography, Medieval Studies, and the American Medieval “Medieval: feudal, primitive, out-of-date, old-fashioned, unenlightened, barbaric, pass8, benighted.” Microsoft Word’s Thesaurus

Introduction The joys of engaging American students in a study of the European Middle Ages are matched by the challenges presented by the physical inaccessibility of things medieval in America. This essay explores how the awareness of place comes into play both literally and figuratively for a medievalist teaching in North America. “Teaching medieval” often initially involves combatting common negative stereotypes of the period that have long permeated transatlantic Western culture. At the same time, however – and possibly as a consequence of the typical disdain and resistance by the general public to our period – medievalists often create a community of our own. Indeed, interdisciplinarity, and the collegiality it necessitates, have been fundamental to many medievalists’ educational and academic experiences. Through an exploration of what is lost and what gained by teaching medieval studies to North American students, especially those in the South of the United States, this essay will contend that where one teaches matters almost as much as what one teaches. An American choosing to specialize in the European Middle Ages necessarily embraces a time period and cultural domain others may dismiss. Temporally remote and regularly disparaged, the medieval period is an era about which most people in the US have received little to no formal education. Deeply related, the dominant academic attitude towards medieval studies may be less than enthusiastic, whether in administrative circles or among the professoriate. The majority of scholars, including many historians, have excised the medieval from their syllabi and research programs. Within the community of academic literary critics, my own affiliation, medieval literature may often be considered alien, disconnected, or insignificant.1 Medievalists tend to be stereotyped as pedantic 1 Lee W. Patterson, “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History and Medieval Studies,” 65 no.1 Speculum (Jan. 1990), 87–108, 91.

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and old-fashioned, or as escapists from the tensions, demands, and realities of modern life.2 A former high ranking administrator at my university thought of medieval courses as “boutique courses” despite well-filled medieval studies classes. The administrator judged the courses as less valuable, i. e., more arcane and trivial, than most other fields. He appreciated, however, that offering such “niche” courses would differentiate the university from some of its peer institutions and potentially enhance the university’s ranking in the US News and World Report. In a society in which the highest academic officers of a university as well as a large number of scholars do not recognize the significance of teaching and studying the Middle Ages in its varied forms, medievalists are among the scholars most threatened by the public’s rejection of intellectuality in general but especially in the humanities. The second point I wish to make in this introduction is to underscore that Medieval Studies is by its very genealogy and definition Eurocentric. In contrast to their US colleagues, European medievalists benefit from the fact that most of their students will be familiar with the time period as part of their general living experience. For students and faculty alike, the temporal dimension of the Middle Ages is palpable in the extant physical dimension of its architecture and impact on the land. The medieval can easily be “found” on a ride in the English countryside, where the ruins of medieval Cathedrals materialize on the horizon or by excursions to preserved medieval encampments, medieval monuments, or the ancient stone circles in which Celts held their ceremonies. Majestic Gothic cathedrals are still in use, ghost towns abandoned during the plague can be visited, and excavated sites and reconstructed medieval artifacts are not hard to find.3 In contrast, especially for those Americans who have not had the opportunity to travel abroad, and many of our students are among them, the Middle Ages is more likely an imaginative construct, enhanced, diminished or created by whatever representations they encounter in the media, as several of the essays in this volume demonstrate. North Americans have little access to any tangible medieval artifacts except for visits to a few special museums and quasi-historic reconstructions or adaptations. The skewed perception of the past, briefly sketched above, is therefore the 2 Ibid., 87. 3 As Patterson notes, “The past history and current status of medieval studies in Europe is very different [than in the States], largely because of the greater integration of the Middle Ages per se into European life and education. This is in turn a function of many variables: the palpability of the Middle Ages in the European urban environment that remains both spatially organized according to medieval patterns and liberally endowed with medieval monuments: the use of medieval culture in the nineteenth century as an agency for the definition of national identity ; and, in many places, the absence of the kind of sharp political and religious division between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance that characterized England, with its Tudor Myth and state-supported Reformation” (ibid., 101, n. 51).

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first task most medievalist professors confront when we begin the semester. Our students, exposed to the unflattering or slanted pictures of the age, come to us often with a dismissive attitude along with the very limited knowledge that accompanies it. But if we are to reach our students, we must be responsive to their (mis)conceptions, interests, and questions. In the sections that follow, I will review how these misconceptions have been formed historically and continue being shaped in the present. As I consider some of the problems that face medievalists pedagogically, I will dwell on the rise of medievalism, a peculiar phenomenon that surfaced in late 18th century Europe and America. The medievalism celebrated and sometimes also invented by its 19th century adherents highlights the passion and pull of medievalism. As I argue below, some proponents of medievalism were “possessed” by the dark and fear-inducing mystery of what was called “the Gothic,” while others esteemed the piety and organic nature of the age. Through the prism of medievalism, we thus arrive at a more nuanced, more ambivalent American/Medieval than first seems possible. Even though the overall American attitude towards the Middle Ages circulating today trends towards the unflattering as demonstrated by Microsoft’s thesaurus definition, US culture as a whole presents a broader and more multi-layered perspective than the stereotypical binary views take into account.

In the Middle or On the Margins? “It is necessary to know the history of that [medieval] age only in order to scorn it.”4

As argued in the introduction, American medievalists seem to be perpetual intellectual outsiders, caught in their work between two epochs long ago considered far more significant and vital – the classical and Early Modern eras. The American students that medievalists encounter in the classroom are frequently misinformed about all things medieval. The reason is fairly simple. High School history texts and references tend to skimp on the subject, disregard it, or worse. The Thesaurus in the current edition of Microsoft Word, a quintessential resource to which American students would undoubtedly turn, lists only negatively charged synonyms for “medieval” as quoted in the opening to this essay.5 Perhaps this list derives from books like William Manchester’s AWorld Lit Only

4 Voltaire pseudonym of FranÅois-Marie Arouet, Essay on Customs, cited in Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought (Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1948), 89. 5 See Patterson, 92.

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by Fire,6 “recommended by the national AP Development Committee,”7 an arm of the College Board associated with the Educational Testing Service (ETS). As Barbara Newman, current President of the Medieval Academy of America, notes in the organization’s newsletter in the summer of 2015, the national AP Development Committee’s guidelines “state explicitly that the European History course begins in 1450. Clearly, some intervention by medievalists is needed!”8 A World Lit Only by Fire is one example of how the grotesque stereotypes of the medieval period continue to shape student perspectives even though more accurate studies are readily available. Manchester, a successful popular historian and biographer, notes in his introduction to AWorld Lit Only by Fire that he has “no scholarly pretensions” and that he did not research recent scholarship about pre-16th century Europe. Manchester started out his career in journalism and his academic credentials terminate with a Master’s Degree in English. No doubt his success as a writer led to his position as editor of university publications at Wesleyan, then as a Fellow at Wesleyan’s Center of Advanced Studies and as an adjunct professor of history there. Nonetheless, A World Lit Only by Fire is esteemed as a work of the history of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and as Newman notes, is taught in high schools today as reliable history.9 The book’s current publisher, Hatchette Books, advertises A World Lit Only by Fire as “the preeminent popular history of civilization’s rebirth after the Dark Ages.”10 In describing the progression from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, Manchester represents the former age as a savage, floundering era that miraculously gave birth to the illustrious and energetic dynamism of the Renaissance, a time when some of the greatest artists, thinkers, explorers, and rogues of all time flourished.11 Manchester pronounces medieval Europe a stale and static age, indeed, a “failure.”12 The Hatchette advertising on Amazon’s site for AWorld Lit Only by Fire continues to describe the period as dominated by political oppression, war, and corruption. The importance of medieval society, the publicity statement goes on to declare, despite its wastefulness, is that it provided the foundation for the extraordinary creative explosion of the Renais6 William Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age (Little, Brown and Company : Boston), 1992. 7 Barbara Newman, The Medieval Academy Newsletter at The Medieval Academy, (May 2015) [email protected] via auth.ccsned.com (accessed June 15, 2015). 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Hachette Book Group http://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/william-manchester/aworld-lit-only-by-fire/9780316082792/ (accessed Oct. 30, 2015). 11 “Amazon” http://www.amazon.com/World-Lit-Only-Fire-Renaissance/dp/0316545317/ref= tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8& qid=1437937830& sr=1–1 (accessed May 10, 2015). 12 “Amazon” http://www.amazon.com/World-Lit-Only-Fire-Renaissance-ebook/dp/B000SEW J0M (accessed May 10, 2015).

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sance. Hatchette’s blurb concludes: “Drawing on a cast of characters numbering in the hundreds, Manchester does a solid job of reconstructing the medieval world, although some scholars may disagree with his interpretations.”13 That final sentence not-so-subtly indicates that Manchester’s “reconstruction” has fallen short of universal scholarly acceptance. In contrast, the Publishers Weekly recommendation on Amazon states that Manchester’s “portrayal of the Middle Ages as a time when the strong and the shrewd flourished, while the imaginative, the cerebral and the unfortunate suffered, rings true.”14 In sum, Manchester’s portrayal of the divisive, depraved, superstitious, avaricious, bloodthirsty, oppressive and destructive medieval era boasts some of the most abusive, ruthless, and lecherous scoundrels in history, many of whom were clergy. American High School students, assigned AWorld Lit Only by Fire, have no reason to doubt the validity of what is, in fact, a caricature. Thanks to the popularity of authors such as Manchester, many of our students are and will continue to be influenced by this poorly-researched, damaged, and damning portrait. Manchester’s American characterization seamlessly takes up the rhetorical stance of European Renaissance scholars. With an agenda of their own, Renaissance scholars branded the medieval era as an age of dullness, conformity and intolerance in contrast to the freer and more sophisticated ethos of the classical age that preceded it: “…sixteenth-century writers in some sense ‘created’ the Middle Ages, in order to highlight what they saw as the brilliance of their own time.”15 It was Renaissance thinkers who first denigrated the Middle Ages as onedimensional, moribund and fearful.16 For example, John Milton (1608–1674) begins the second edition of his great opus Paradise Lost with a paragraph on “The Verse” in which he justifies his use of blank verse over rhyme as a privileging of his era’s liberty over the “tyranny of rhyme, the product of a barbarous age.”17 Milton rejects the practice of rhyme for Paradise Lost as an emblem of the despotic Catholic and monarchic age he loathes. Views such as these served to bolster Renaissance thinkers’ assessment of the exceptional nature of their own age. Historians as well as popularizers of later 13 “Amazon” http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316545562?keywords=a%20world%20lit% 20by%20fire& qid=1454194970& ref_=sr_1_1& s=books& sr=1-1 (accessed May 10, 2015). 14 Ibid. 15 Stephen Greenblatt, Gen. Ed. et.al. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Ninth Edition, (WW Norton & Co: NY, 2012), 4. 16 Manchester, 27: “[T]hey trudged into the sixteenth century in the clumsy, hunched, pigeontoed gait of rickets victims, their vacant faces, pocked by smallpox, turned blindly toward the future … gullible, pitiful innocents who were about to be swept up in the most powerful, incomprehensible, irresistible vortex since Alaric had led his Visigoths and Huns [sic] across the Alps, fallen on Rome, and extinguished the lamps of learning a thousand years before.” 17 John Milton, Paradise Lost. A Critical Edition, ed. Scott Elledge (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1975), 4.

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ages leveraged this one-sided view of the Middle Ages with the intent to glamorize and idealize the epoch that followed it. From the seventeenth century onwards, highly-regarded historians, art historians, anthropologists and literary scholars of the Renaissance period followed in the ideological footsteps of the Renaissance men they studied.18 The marginalization of medieval studies, then, originates in what Lee W. Patterson termed the Renaissance master narrative that negotiates the (medieval) past. It is one that those of us in the field of Medieval Studies have to interrogate with each new class of students that we teach.

The Rise of Medievalism: England as a European Prototype The emergence of medievalism in Western Europe and North America from the mid-eighteenth through the nineteenth century led to a more positive examination of medieval culture and institutions. For reasons detailed by Alice Kenney and Leslie Workman, the rise of medievalism began in England, which supplied the model for other European nations when they became interested in researching their own medieval past.19 Antiquarians collected and researched artifacts from the past. Religious and political reforms in England led to a deepening interest in a singular national identity rather than a universalist and cosmopolitan humanism, precisely founded in medieval traditions “so that the very ruin of castles and convents came to be venerated as symbols of the antiquity and continuity of English culture.”20 The nineteenth century viewed and created medieval culture as the foundation for the definition of a distinct national and ethnic identity. The revival of “the Gothic” in art and architecture engendered a sufficiently differentiated view of the medieval, one that emphasized not its barbaric but its ornate and picturesque elements. Architects were at the forefront of the Gothic Revival, an age newly perceived as more decorative and artistic than their own. A.W. Pugin, one of the architects for the rebuilding of the Parliament buildings in London, saw the Gothic Age not only as more beautiful, but also as more principled, honorable and pious than his own secular Victorian culture. Gone were the lecherous clergy and absurd superstitions invoked by Renaissance scholars. For Pugin and others, the Middle Ages were a Golden Age in which resplendent stained glass and radiant statuary animated the

18 For example, Claude Levi-Strauss, Thomas Greene, Erwin Panofsky, Jacob Burckhardt, Stephen Greenblatt, etc. 19 Alice Kenney and Leslie Workman, “Ruins, Romance, and Reality : Medievalism in AngloAmerican Imagination and Taste, 1750–1840,” Winterthur Portfolio, 10 (1975), 131–63, 132. 20 Ibid.

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interiors and exteriors of cathedrals, an age which achieved the most gracious synthesis of “art, religion, and society.”21 For English social activists such as John Ruskin (1819–1900) and William Morris (1834–1896), the Middle Ages were regarded as a preindustrial epoch of wholesome authenticity. Medieval life bound people together in relationships strengthened by mutual interests and affections; feudal life bound people together in an organic, unified and orderly system, as did the church; agrarian life bound people to the earth. And romantic impulses strengthened close bonds between the sexes. Imitation and restoration of Gothic designs became fashionable and stimulated historical research into medieval methods of fabricating church materials and household goods such as stained-glass making, fabric dyeing, book making, carpet- and tapestry-weaving, textile and furniture design and construction. The English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in 1848 as a secret society of artists who preferred the artistic technique and methods of the late medieval painters over the academic art tradition introduced by Renaissance painter and architect Raphael (1483–1520). In the works of artists such as Blessed Fra Angelico (ca. 1395–1455), they found the masterful blend of faith, stability and creativity which they sought to emulate in a minuteness of detail, a “luminous palette[s] of bright colors,”22 and medieval subject matter. They were proud of their art as serious, sincere and true to nature and thought nostalgically of “Merry England” as a time unscarred by the political upheavals, mass industrialization, and social ills of their own time. Many of the English Pre-Raphaelites’ themes arose from medieval literary sources such as Sir Thomas Malory’s (ca. 1415–1471) Le Morte D’Arthur. After a lapse of 182 years, Malory’s work was reprinted in 1816.23 A new audience responded to his chivalrous and passionate tales. Scottish Sir Walter Scott’s (1771–1832) historical novels, “whose effect on his readers’ visualization of the medieval past was incalculable,”24 also greatly influenced Victorian artists, writers and historians. Celebrated as Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland, Sir Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) transformed an ancient British king into a best-selling poetic reimagining of the Arthurian legend, his Idylls of the King. This series of “little epics” popularized the conception of a deeply moral and Christ-like King Arthur, presented as a national hero. His chivalry was upheld as a social ideal. 21 Mordaunt J. Crook, The Dilemma of Style: Architectural Ideas from the Picturesque to the Post-Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 22 Jennifer Meagher, “The Pre-Raphaelites.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000, http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/praf/hd_praf. htm (accessed Oct. 25, 2015). 23 No editions were printed between 1634 and 1816. 24 Kenney and Workman, 131.

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The increased nationalistic pride led to a celebration of a newly-recognized illustrious past that generated further inquiries into “the native” and ancient ruins. Once ignored, these ruins engendered new developments in archeology. Historical preservation movements sprang up. Some buildings were undergoing such zealous “restoration” that by 1877, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) was founded to keep architects from destroying the historic fabric of ancient buildings. The SPAB is today “the largest, oldest and most technically expert British pressure group fighting to save old buildings from decay, demolition and damage.”25 Other societies also played a vital role in encouraging and maintaining new standards of historical accuracy.26 Although the picture that emerged was often romanticized, medievalism likewise initiated more accurate scholarship of the age. Thus, while some of the impact of medievalism led to fashionable fads and fantasies, other trajectories of scholarship and pedagogy made it possible to develop a more accurate picture of the past. Paradoxically, nineteenth century British medievalism raised up false images of an orderly, organic and democratic England while simultaneously providing an avenue for truths to emerge.

Medieval Studies and Medievalism in the United States: A Transatlantic Conversation The challenges of teaching Medieval Studies in America stem not only from lack of artifacts and educational opportunities, but also from the type of impact the European import of medievalism had on the United States. Americans, having no medieval European ruins or relics, and having rejected or lost contact with things English for some time after the American Revolution, learned about Gothic architecture from immigrant architects and from descriptions of medieval structures brought to the States by tourists.27 The rise of the Gothic style in architecture and literature in North America, coupled with the introduction of Sir Walter Scott’s immensely popular novels, prompted American writers to imbue their works with medieval and romance themes.28 The appeal was strong enough to engender the scorn of the quintessential American author Mark Twain (1835–1910), who attempted to “free American literature from medieval influ-

25 “What is SPAB?” http://www.spab.org.uk/what-is-spab/ (accessed July 25, 2015). 26 See Kenney and Workman, 32: “Between 1834 and 1836 alone, twelve new antiquarian societies were founded, all of which produced journals to document their findings.” 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 145.

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ence,” and “to put medievalism in its place.”29 Twain was highly critical of tyrannical medieval political structures as well as of the carefree morals of medieval courtly love. He was scandalized by the sympathetic portrayal of illicit sexual relationships in courtly romances and he lampooned chivalry, an ethic he found absurd.30 Twain’s vehement denunciation of the age attests to its popularity among Americans. Explored in depth by American medievalist Lee W. Patterson, a more recent trend in post-modern literary and social theory has imposed on the study of the Middle Ages a new mode of stereotyping, harkening back in some way to an earlier European impulse that worked to disengage the public from the Middle Ages. Today’s Renaissance scholars, Patterson contends, have declared the Middle Ages to be once again an old order overcome, while the Renaissance is elevated as the age of the Euro-American present, the modern, in short, of “us.” The oppositional set-up between an us and a them reasserts the centuries-old inferior value of the medieval, while once again building up the Renaissance as the all-important age of creativity, art, science, and humanism if not human rights. However, assertions such as that the Renaissance initiated the humanistic era of individuality, for example, are demonstrably inaccurate. For example, in his seminal study of Love in the Western World (1939), transatlantic scholar Denis de Rougemont (1906–1985) characterizes amour courtois as a “kind of advance Renaissance individualism” that arose in the 12 th century and constituted “a complete revolution of the Western psyche.”31 Attributing the significance of courtly love to a Renaissance which was yet to come misses the point that the ideas about love, subjectivity and individuality formulated in the twelfth century were part of the medieval, not Renaissance, “discovery of the self” (as Colin Morris terms it).32 A full twelve years before de Rougemont’s book was published, a major historiographical study by American historian Charles Homer Haskins (1870–1937), The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1927) countered Swiss cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt’s (1818–1897) premise that in the Middle Ages “man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family or corporation – only through some general category.”33 Haskins’ ex29 Kim Ileen Moreland, The Medievalist Impulse in American Literature (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 42. 30 Ibid., 35–37. 31 Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World (Pantheon Books: NY, 1941), 12. [Translation of L’amour et L’occident. Librairie Plon Edition, 1972]. 32 See Colin Morris’ The Discovery of the Individual, 1050–1200 (Harper and Row: N.Y., London, 1972). 33 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Trans. S.G.C. Middlemore (London: Phaidon, 1960), 81. The book was originally published in 1860.

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amination of medieval art and science, universities, philosophy, architecture and literature provided a far more nuanced and affirmative view of the period.34 Colin Morris’ more recent The Discovery of the Individual, 1050–1200 (1972) further examined the many ways in which medieval society developed and explored the idea of the self and of self-consciousness in medieval culture.35 Major works of medieval art and literature, such as the portrayal of Christ as the man of sorrows, the first person subjectivity of the “I” in medieval lyric, and the exploration of the dynamics of love on sense of self in romances serve as additional examples. Renaissance historians seem also unaware of Irish-born Oxford and Cambridge Professor C. S. Lewis’(1898–1963) work, including his assertion in the Allegory of Love (1936) that the changes which occurred during the twelfth century in Europe “touched every facet of our ethics, our imaginations, and our daily lives. Compared with this revolution, the Renaissance is a mere ripple on the surface of literature.”36 Despite the long trajectory of the Medieval/Renaissance binary sketched out briefly above, today’s medievalists have many opportunities to demonstrate the “modernity” and contemporary relevance of Medieval Studies. Medieval life is not merely the bridge between the Classical and Early Modern Ages, but it is also central: the beginning of the modern vernacular languages and the formation of a new concept of the “self.”

American “Medieval Times”: Commerce, Contemplation, and Entertainment Contemporary British scholar David Matthews proposes that a new dual vision of the medieval has established itself in the popular consciousness today : the grotesque versus the romantic.37 Derived from its Renaissance stereotype, “medieval” is the adjective regularly used in the news to refer to the most recent and most inhumane atrocities, whether or not the particulars were common in the Middle Ages.38 Medieval characters populate our airwaves: Vikings are depicted in advertisements for a variety of products as uncouth, drunken slobs or 34 Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (: Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1927); other works influenced by Haskins followed, such as Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable, eds., Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991). 35 Colin Morris’s The Discovery of the Individual, 1050–1200 (New York and London: Harper and Row, 1972). 36 C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study of Medieval Tradition. (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), 4.. First published in 1936. 37 David Matthews, Medievalism: A Critical History, (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2015), 63. 38 Witchcraft trials and punishments, or beheadings, for example.

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as brawny muscle-bound warriors; scantily dressed medieval “wenches” likewise turn up in ads on TV; and fire-breathing dragons currently inhabit fantasy and children’s films. Hence, the Middle Ages can be seen as the age of what is “obscure, difficult, strange, alien”39 or more simply, as the age encompassing “anything of which one disapprove[s].”40 Ask any class of American undergraduates about King Arthur, Merlin or Excalibur, and there is invariably some familiarity ; most students have a favorable conception of chivalry. There are occasional TV series about things medieval: BBC One’s Merlin, a fantasy drama based on the legend of King Arthur and Merlin, was a hit not only in Britain, but internationally, “selling to over 50 broadcasters in 183 countries internationally.”41 The world of the Vikings is being brought to life in the Vikings TV series on the History Channel and was nominated for numerous primetime Emmys between 2013 and 2015. The 2010 mini-series based on Welsh author Ken Follett’s (b. 1949) thirteenth-century historical novel, Pillars of the Earth (1989), was followed two years later by the sequel, World Without End (2007), and nominated for three Golden Globe awards and a primetime Emmy. The broadcast was a German, British, American, and Canadian financial co-production. If friendly dragons populate stories and animated children’s films, such as Shrek or How to Train Your Dragon, dragons also appear in grand and terrifying scale (as Smaug in Tolkien’s Hobbit, in the Harry Potter series, or in Game of Thrones). A continuous stream of films set in the Middle Ages bring the period to life, even if many of the details are not historically accurate. Films often present a wonderland version of the age with modern or ironic twist. In these depictions, medieval peasants may dwell in grimy hovels and the castles may be drafty, but the heroes and heroines are regal, alluring and glamorous and the landscapes brimming with perils and marvels. Commercial products, such as King Arthur’s sword, Excalibur, is even for sale despite the fact that, according to the Old French La Morte D’Artu and English versions of The Death of Arthur, Excalibur was returned to the lake from whence it came upon Arthur’s demise. This “replica,” advertised in the widely-circulated Parade magazine in 1991, is “wrought of stainless steel, 24 karat gold, sterling silver, hand-set crystal cabochons, inserted in crystal-clear rock.”42 The reader is offered this 43” “authorized re-creation…from Europe,”43 with its dragon39 Patterson, 92. 40 Kenney and Workman, 133. 41 “BBC: Media Center” “Merlin to cast final spell as creators reveal that current series will be the last.” http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2012/merlin-final.html (accessed July 16, 2015). 42 Parade Magazine, Aug. 1991, 3. 43 Ibid.

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headed pommel “ablaze with fiery-red crystals,” and was offered at the time for the bargain price of $675 from The International Arthurian Society, c/o The Franklin Mint.44 American author George R.R. Martin’s book series A Song of Fire and Ice (1991 to present) and Game of Thrones, the HBO series based on it (see this volume’s essay by Mary Kate Hurley), the Harry Potter series, and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy disclose a popular transatlantic yearning for the epic grandeur of a lost mythology. C.S. Lewis’ children’s stories may present our students with their first introduction to allegory ; Benjamin Bagby’s academically informed rendering of Beowulf in Old English performed to the accompaniment of his hand-made lyre keeps audiences riveted.45 These and similar works attest to the attraction that medievalism still holds for many in a Northern transatlantic if not wider international context.46 Moving beyond Matthews’ proposition of a new transatlantic binary emotionality, I suggest that even fantastical visions of the medieval provide a multi-layered rather than binary view of the age. As is true for the nineteenth-century Gothic Revival era, such complexity encourages a continued interest in – and demand for – academic pursuits that create a feed-back loop to the popular and non-academic. Despite institutional and administrative challenges, as of 2015, one hundred Medieval Studies programs (sometimes combined with the Renaissance or Early Modern Studies) are active throughout the US and Canada. Americans wishing to take the Pilgrim’s Road to Compostela can apply for “credentials” at an association called “American Pilgrims on the Camino” in Olympia, Washington. The College of William and Mary and Franklin Pierce University, among other institutes of higher learning in the States, sponsor college courses or credits for students who join their pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela (see Sol Miguel-Prendes’essay in this volume).47 A recent ad in the Sunday Travel Section of the New York Times offers the opportunity to “Hik[e] the Pilgrims’ Footsteps at El Camino de Santiago” in an eleven-day hike with “beautiful scenery and luxury accommodations, many of them as old as the pilgrimage itself.” Prices start at $6,595.48 Other initiatives hover at the boundaries of the popular and the academic. The California-based Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), an international 44 Ibid. 45 The supertitles in English translation add to the accessibility of this amazing performance, the DVD of which has just been released. Benjamin Bagby, Beowulf: The Epic in Performance http://www.bagbybeowulf.com/dvd/ (accessed May 29, 2016). 46 And we note that more and more sessions on these kinds of media presentations are held at academic conferences. 47 “Franklin Pierce University” http://www.franklinpierce.edu/academics/studyabroad/cami no/ (accessed July 16, 2016). 48 New York Times, Sunday Sept. 12, 2015, 9.

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organization that claims over 30,000 members and twenty “kingdoms” around the world, devotes itself to “researching and re-creating the arts and skills of pre17th century Europe”49 although many academic medievalists consider the organization to be idiosyncratic in its pursuits. Medieval Times, another organization, though much smaller with only nine current locations in the US, boasts that it is “the No. 1 dinner attraction in North America: our unique combination of a medieval banquet and thrilling competition between Knights captures the imagination of all ages.”50 The largest of these is, perhaps appropriately, in Orlando, Florida, close to the fantasy playgrounds of Disneyworld and Universal Studios. Outside of the academy, crowds flock to ever-expanding live encampments of Medieval (and Renaissance) Fairs (often with little distinction made between the two eras!). As of 2015, there are at least fifty-five Medieval and/or Renaissance Fairs in the United States.51 The Travel Channel boasts a ten “best” list of such fairs on its website.52 In North Carolina, the Carolina Renaissance Festival started out in 1994 with six acres and has now expanded into a twenty-five acre “village” called Fairhaven, set on a clearing surrounded by woodland, framed by welcoming gateways and banners, towers and “medieval” privies. “History comes alive” the website tells us, inviting the visitor to “time travel to the greatest party since Camelot!”53 This fair, which I explored as part of my research for this essay, is gigantic, with over one hundred purveyors of crafts and food housed in an “Artisan’s Marketplace.” Over five hundred costumed street entertainers stroll the grounds along with storytellers, “street” magicians and falconry experts. There are manually-run rides and village lanes “full of peasants” and wayfarers singing sea-chanties.54 Twelve stages feature non-stop shows. The highlight and center space of the Festival is reserved for the live Tournament of Champions where jousting knights challenge one another on horseback with the royals in attendance. At this Renaissance Festival, many events and activities are in fact more medieval than Renaissance, but the two periods run fluidly together, 49 “SCA: The Society for Creative Anachronism, Inc.” http://www.sca.org/ (accessed July 16, 2015). 50 “Medieval Times: Dinner and Tournament” http://www.medievaltimes.com/corporate/ about-us.aspx (accessed July 16, 2015). 51 Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. “List of Renaissance Fairs” https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/List_of_Renaissance_fairs (accessed July 16, 2015). 52 The Travel Channel: Arts and Culture: “Best Renaissance Fairs in the US” http://www. travelchannel.com/interests/arts-and-culture/photos/best-renaissance-festivals-in-the-us/ page/3 (accessed July 16, 2015). 53 “The Annual Carolina Renaissance Festival and Artisan Marketplace” http://www.carolina. renfestinfo.com/; in a perfect blend of cutting age technology and ancient times, they provide a video at http://www.carolina.renfestinfo.com/detailed-overview/. (accessed July 16, 2015). 54 Ibid.

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joined by more than a bit of fantasy. High quality objects, such as hand-made leather goods, artisan paper products, crafted weapons, pottery wares, and historical maps are all for sale. Some activities and characters are not from either historical period. Figures from fantasy literature and films, such as Ents (greenclad men on stilts), were strolling the grounds the day I attended. Animals are an integral part of the attractions. Camel rides and a petting zoo are on offer. Although the “privies” (port-o-potties), are neither historically accurate nor pleasant, people don’t seem to mind. The carnivalesque atmosphere invites guests to come in costume, some historical and others drawn from fantasy and science fiction. I saw witches, star troopers, hobbits, royals, knights, archers and pirates.55 It’s clear that some of the Festival’s attendees have been loyal “guests” for years. North Carolina features more than the Renaissance fair, however. I recently attended a medieval-themed wedding at a venue called Castle McCulloch in Jamestown, NC, a neo-medieval compound with a large stone hall that may be rented for parties and weddings. At dark, the walkway to the castle is lined with blazing torches that lead to a drawbridge and a huge oaken front door. Inside the great timber-vaulted hall are massive wrought-iron chandeliers and candlesticks, guarded over by a statuesque resident knight in armor. Moving west, Las Vegas hosts a hotel named Excalibur, at which guests can attend the “Tournament of Kings,” a dinner show “experience.”56 The 2015 special Thanksgiving to Christmas holiday show, “’Twas the Knight,” is comprised of “legendary battles, a mythical Merlin, and a three-course feast (eaten by hand) for the price of $63.23 plus tax (or less if one foregoes the repast).” An advertising video short about the show is available at the website. This property boasts thirty horses in the “King’s Stable,” ten of which are used in each performance. Although the website offers email and contact information if one wants to “contact the castle,” as far as the visitor to the site can tell, there seems to be nothing else about the hotel that is relevant to the medieval. The popularity and ubiquity of these user-friendly medieval places across the United States is perhaps their most surprising characteristic. Moving from Las Vegas to the West Coast of the United States, about a half-hour drive from Seattle, Washington, lies Camlann Medieval Village (Carnation, in King’s County, Washington), “a living history museum project portraying rural England in the year 1376.”57 The stated goal of the Village is to provide visitors interactive 55 The site boasts of “Fairies, Pirates, Knights, Nobles and more!” Ibid. 56 “Excalibur Hotel Casino Las Vegas” Produced by Patrick Jackson, “Tournament of Kings” http://www.excalibur.com/entertainment/tournament_of_kings.aspx (accessed July 16, 2015). I thank my student, Ashley Laughlin, for bringing this hotel and its show to my attention. 57 “Camlann Medieval Village” http://www.camlann.org/ (accessed July 19 m 2015).

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personal experiences, deepening their understanding of the relationship between “historical events and western society.”58 A hybrid of academic and popular culture, and based on research of rural communities in fourteenthcentury England, this Camlann offers the public opportunities to take seminars in Middle English, participate in workshops on constructing “medieval” clothing and shoes, or on cooking on the open hearth, and even on “developing a medieval character” theatrically. The village is open May through September and hosts various festivals and fairs during the year. The village’s Boar’s Hede Inne offers “feasts” year round, prepared from “authentic” fourteenth-century recipes. Eating from individual bread trenchers and drinking from earthen pitchers, the guests are regaled with minstrel songs and tales accompanied by a lutenist. Visitors are ushered through a “heavy wrought-iron-hinged door”59 into a timbered room, which is warmed in winter by the great fireplace. In summer, the $5 entrance fee will allow visitors to tour Camlann’s Village Days and meet volunteer interpreters acting as medieval villagers. The volunteers demonstrate various arts and crafts (archery, blacksmithing in the blacksmith forge, textile production, animal care, artwork, gardening, candle-making, hearth-cooking, shoemaking, spinning, weaving, clothing design and other household skills). Demonstrations of cider pressing are held at the Cider Mill. At the Clothier Shoppe, guests can rent medieval garments for the day and can wander among the new and used books and other objects in the Scribes Shoppe. These examples of American venues from coast to coast, speak to a striking new aspect of the American/Medieval: they are interactive. People come with a desire to “visit” and experience the past sensually, to mingle with their favorite characters, to “feast” on delicacies like bread bowls, giant roasted turkey legs (to be eaten, of course, with one’s hands), sausage on a stick, steak on a stake, complemented with “Medieval Margaritas” to wash them down. David Matthews notes that “the romantic concept of the Middle Ages intensified the idea that the period might be thought of as a place one could recreate and revisit.”60 Not only do these sites provide recreated as much as recreational places for participants to consume the past,61 they also respond to their participants’ desire “to inhabit a medievalised space,” a setting in which they “can recreate themselves.”62 Through the lens provided by the legends and arts of the medieval past, people find ways to reimagine themselves, to engage with their own desires and fears. This third turn of medievalism, wholly different from its predecessors, is one of

58 59 60 61 62

Ibid. Ibid. Matthews, 63. Ibid., n. 58. Ibid.

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“Western” identity experimentation on the sensual level, openly and unabashedly sustained by commercial interests.

Contemplative American Medieval Places: Quietly Hosting the Authentic Recreated/Recreational village life is plentiful across the United States, but sites offering the historically authentic medieval in a more contemplative framework do exist even if less numerous. New Yorkers, for example, have at their fingertips some exceptional medieval collections offered in historically more accurate spaces that invite reflection and quiet meditation. Nestled within Fort Tryon Park, one of New York’s hidden gems of a park and garden, is the Cloisters, the medieval division of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum was designed by the American architectural firm Allen and Collens, which specialized in Gothic Revival, between 1934 and 1939. This marvel of engineering and architecture, built atop a large outcropping above the Hudson River in Upper Manhattan, is out of the way of most tourists (but actually easily accessible by local bus and subway). Rarely crowded, the museum seems to extend out from the stones themselves. Devoted to the art and architecture of medieval Europe, the Cloisters is built as a series of reconstituted medieval monasteries. The artworks, of which there are about two thousand, were painstakingly transported from various European religious and domestic locations. Medieval artifacts, sculptures and ornaments are set within the same stone walls that formerly served the clergy. The gardens are designed on plans found in medieval manuscripts and herbals; the justly famous Unicorn tapestries and the Merode Altarpiece can be viewed in contemplative calm, a rarity in New York City). The various medieval gardens offer a unique panoramic view of the Hudson River and the Palisades. “A trip to The Cloisters,” the website notes, “is commonly described as a way to be transported to the Middle Ages or – for locals seeking a ‘staycation’ – a chance to get out of New York without leaving the city.”63 The Cloisters offer visitors a medieval place that no longer seems so very distant, a place, as the website proclaims, that “you can make … your own.64 Like its more elaborate cousin, the centrally located Metropolitan Museum of Art houses an extraordinary permanent display of fourteen hundred objects, including silver and gold treasures, early medieval art, and glowing suits of armor. Both museums offer regularly scheduled early music concerts and me63 “The Met Cloisters” http://www.metmuseum.org/visit/met-cloisters (accessed July 21, 1015). 64 Matthews, 64.

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dieval lecture series. The Medieval Club of New York provides a nexus of scholarly exchange to academics, students, independent scholars and nonspecialists on interdisciplinary medieval topics. It offers free public lectures by specialists and sponsors paper sessions at the most important medieval studies conferences in the States.65 As a native New Yorker and someone who frequented these accessible riches, I must admit that scholars and those with deep interest in the medieval have these unique places to themselves. Indeed, the medieval rooms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in which I have spent many hours, are some of the least visited rooms in the institution. Paradoxically, people flock in droves to medieval festivals and films while the medieval rooms of museums echo with few footsteps. The contemplative, academic, and recreational American conception of the Middle Ages is nonetheless broad and varied enough to encompass a wide variety of perspectives. Detractors, advocates, scholars, idealizers, imitators, entrepreneurs, thinkers, writers and musicians together compose an American mosaic of the medieval, more refined and multi-dimensional than either the wholly deplorable or entirely laudatory binary visions of many previous generations.

Going to the American South: At What Price Arthur? Moving from my native New York City to North Carolina for a new tenure-track Assistant Professorship, I planned my first medieval course on “The Legend of Arthur.” I did not imagine that medieval literature would be more popular in the south than in New York, which offers so many more venues for contemplating the Middle Ages. To my shock and surprise, if not utter delight, the eagerly anticipated seminar-style course I had planned had an enrollment of sixty-three students, which was then the number of available seats in the largest classroom in the English department. Not only was the class full (the sixty-three seats had sixty-three English majors in them), but there was a waiting list! Even as subsequent classroom renovations reduced the number of seats in the larger classrooms, “The Legend of Arthur” is always filled to capacity. But whether it was because my predecessor who taught the Arthurian course had made the course as popular as it was when I began, or whether it was the subject matter itself (or a combination of both), it struck me that there might be something about the perception of history in the south that made the world of Arthur that much more appealing and evocative than in the north. What follows is spec-

65 “Medieval Club of New York” http://medievalclubofnewyork.blogspot.com/ (accessed July 21, 2015).

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ulation about why this may be. This final section brings my essay full circle to the introduction and grounds it in my own work and life as a medievalist. My students’ curiosity about the legend, their receptivity to the readings and their thirst for historical facts brought our focus more steadily onto an exploration of historiography itself. Reviewing the Latin chronicles that provide the first “historical” references to a great warrior-leader inevitably led my students to a larger inquiry, unusual perhaps for a literature course, about what historical records are. Since most of the chronicles, although ancient, were written long after the events recorded, how can we assess their veracity? How does who records and who keeps records make a difference? How does history come about in an age before literacy (and does literacy make a difference)? What creates a legendary hero? And how does a legend evolve? All of these queries became central to our exploration of the Arthurian materials we were studying. If, as the oft-repeated phrase goes, “history is written by the winners,” who wrote the legend of Arthur? According to the experts who have studied its origins, tales about King Arthur were preserved and circulated orally by the conquered Romano-Celts, inhabitants of Britain who were routed and dispersed to the outer regions of what is now Great Britain–Wales, Scotland and Cornwall– or fled across the Channel to Brittany during and after the Germanic invasions. Their yarns told of a valiant hero who protected the native peoples from various invaders and who, for a time, was said to have united the island. However, once this fabled leader was slain and the island no longer unified and defended, Britain was attacked and overcome by the Saxons, Jutes and Angles. And yet, this hero’s legend seems to have only grown over time, well after Britain became England. And tales of this leader’s heroism and of those gallants who fought beside him came to be written down long after the purported events happened. Thus, the myth of the triumphant champion has always been inextricably linked to his ultimate downfall and that of his people. I have always wondered if a nostalgic yearning for a lost flourishing southern white culture could be the reason why the Arthurian legend resonates so strongly in the south. White southerners whose families have lived in the States since before the Civil War treasure a storied past. They developed the concept of “southern chivalry,” a term in use, at the very least, by the 1850s, as a cartoon image entitled “Southern Chivalry : Argument versus Club’s (sic),” published in 1856, shows. The cartoon portrays a South Carolinian representative striking a Massachusetts Senator with his cane because the Massachusetts Senator berated a relative of the South Carolinian representative in a speech: “The violent episode fueled antipathy between anti-slavery northerners and pro-slavery

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southerners.”66 The fact that the cartoon mocks the concept of southern chivalry suggests that the term was in common use in 1856. In his biography of Robert E. Lee, Thomas writes of a paper found in Lee’s effects in which Lee’s definition of a gentleman harkens back to a chivalrous ideal: The power which the strong have over the weak, the magistrate over the citizen, the employer over the employed, the educated over the unlettered, the experienced over the confiding, even the clever over the silly – the forbearing or inoffensive use of all this power or authority, or a total absence from it when the case admits it, will show the gentleman in plain light. The gentleman does not needlessly or unnecessarily remind an offender of a wrong he may have committed against him. He can not only forgive, he can forget; and he strives for that nobleness of self and mildness of character which impart sufficient strength to let the past be the past.67

Years later, during the Civil War, The New York Times published several editorials satirizing southern chivalry. On Nov. 8, 1863, the Times’ editors derided the idea of southern chivalry by describing how wealthy southern soldiers’ adherence to the courage and perseverance of the chivalric code was disintegrating as life in the military camp disagreed with them.68 The editors noted that rampant favoritism was given to the wealthier soldiers, deriding these “flower[s] of chivalry”69 who, the editors claimed were “withdrawing” from the field.70 The editorial concluded by claiming that “the true history of … Southern chivalry” was a faÅade: the wealthier southern soldiers abandoned the field, casting the battle of upholding the distinctions of caste onto the shoulders of the “poor dupes” left to continue the fight.71 Six months later another editorial in The Times, under the headline “A Word to the European Admirers of Southern Chivalry,” scolded the enthusiastic English and French defenders of the Confederacy for sympathizing with what they had been led to believe was “the gallant and heroic chivalry of the South,” in which noble warriors were fighting for independence, their slaves bound by affection to their masters, while the North was “sordid, vulgar and low-born.”72 66 John Magee, “US Capital Visitors Center,” “Building a More Perfect Union,” New York Public Library, https://www.visitthecapitol.gov/civilwar/html/slide_9a.html. (accessed July 21, 2015). 67 Emory M. Thomas, Robert E. Lee: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton & Company ; Reprint edition, 1997); Scribner ; Reprint edition (1997), 397. 68 New York Times “The Southern Chivalry,” Nov. 8, 1863, 4. The article can be found at http:// www.nytimes.com/1863/11/08/news/the-southern-chivalry.htm (accessed July 25, 2015). 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid. 72 The New York Times, April 19, 1864. The editorial can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/ 1864/04/19/news/a-word-to-the-european-admirers-of-southern-chivalry.html (accessed July 25, 2015).

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The Times’ editors explained that “[t]he gilding and tinsel which covered the barbaric reality of southern society, have long been rubbed off to Northern eyes.” Instead, they proposed that the true condition of southern chivalry was merely a pretense of culture and refinement, and that the proponents should be exposed as an example that power, “without limits or responsibility, must beget cruelty and tyranny.”73 The south’s distinctive character was formed, in part, by the cultural weight of losing the Civil War. The subsequent introduction from England of the Gothic literary mode particularly appealed to southern authors although it was picked up first in short stories by the New Englanders Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe.74 The southern Gothic genre, employed by Faulkner in the 1920s, reached its zenith of popularity between 1940s and 1960s. Its dark humor, complex characters, and psychic and social decay, offered a depiction of life as a horror story. Residing within the shell of an old homestead or decimated plantation, southern Gothic characters are alienated, damaged or delusional. The tales present a catalogue of the bizarre and ghastly, the obsessive and insane, the supernatural or grotesque combined strangely with the romantic, and the desensitized acquiescence to the degeneracy and fragility of the social order. In the 1930s, southern Gothic novelists were criticized as “merchants of death, hell and the grave,” or as “horror-mongers in chief.”75 The return of the past, the repressed, the buried family secrets led to the exposure of concealed social, familial, and racial denials and suppressions, including most conspicuously the hidden genealogies of mixed-race descendants. Southern Gothic stories explore the tensions between the dark legacy of slavery and the construction of the myth of past glories and current progress.76 Indeed, the south created a myth of itself, a narrative in which everyone partook of a peaceful and thriving chivalric culture.77 In 2015, the nation has witnessed a powerful reminder of southern white nostalgia for a halcyon but vanished way of life in the controversy over the flying of the Confederate flag by state officials. The dispute about flying the flag also concerns what the flag symbolizes: states’ rights; heroic glorious warriors, defeated; idyllic, pastoral life; or slavery itself. 73 Ibid. 74 Born in Boston, Poe at the age of three was adopted and moved to Richmond, Virginia. For more on the origin of the Gothic style in American literature, see Kim Ileen Moreland, The Medievalist Impulse in American Literature, 42, and n. 3; See also Joseph M. Flora, ed., The Companion to Southern Literature: Themes, Genres, Places, People, Movements and Motifs (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001). 75 See William Hughes, David Punter, and Andrew Smith, eds., The Encyclopedia of the Gothic (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 18. 76 Ibid. 77 For changes and developments in Southern Studies, see the collection of short essays in PMLA 131, no. 1 (2016), 153–196.

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The Arthurian legend likewise revolves around an image of a glorious but vanquished civilization, one that its descendants believe epitomized the nobility and idealism of the human spirit. If our southern students are more drawn to the Arthurian legend than elsewhere in the country, perhaps it is because – as in the medieval past – history may also be recorded and circulated orally among the conquered who commemorate their heroes and memorialize their culture’s former triumphs. The power and privilege that attend the leaders of such vanished societies and the romantic passion of their striving still calls out to our southern students. As I have suggested, these are speculations based on my own experience, and bear further exploration and analysis. A final observation, which is both a result of “going south” and of being a medievalist, focuses on community. In the introduction, I noted that perhaps one fortunate consequence of the outsider status of the medievalist is that it makes us perhaps more desirous than other scholars to congregate. At every institution I have attended since college, medievalists from various disciplines have convened to share their work. As a graduate student at the City University of New York Graduate Center, I had access to a vibrant interdisciplinary Medieval Studies Center that had its own library and was run by a student rector. As the A/M project demonstrates, medievalists at Wake Forest University created something similar – an intellectual space in which we would discuss our work, bring in speakers and plan events and activities for ourselves and our students. Such collaborations led to the creation of a WFU Medieval Studies Program and a Masters level Certificate in Interdisciplinary Medieval Studies. In 2014, seven medievalists collaborated in an American/Medieval Seminar sponsored by Wake Forest University’s Humanities Institute and directed by the editors of this volume. Our group explored the medievalists’ outsider status as one facet of our undertaking. The A/M group focused on medievalist identity in terms of disciplinary specialization and identity, including ethnicity and religious and non-religious allegiances, but also on how we do our work on American soil. As medievalists who study disciplines which, in the Middle Ages, were not so severed from one another, we find it comfortable to collaborate and cross disciplinary borders. Working in the United States, we discovered, offers yet another pleasure. We experience the delight of exploring with our students the manifold wonders of finding mirrors of our human selves in the achievements of a Beowulf or King Arthur, in the transcendent visions of Dante or the mystics, in the virtuoso verses of a Guilhem IX or Walther von der Vogelweide, in the romances of Chr8tien de Troyes or Gottfried von Strassburg, and in the characters who make Boccaccio’s, Chaucer’s and Malory’s tales come alive. And in studying all of these works and more with our students, we know that our understanding of the medieval past is relevant to our comprehension of the American present.

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Bibliography Armour, Shannon. “Turkey Legs and Roasted Corn at the Renaissance Festival.” Phoenix News Times. Friday Mar. 20, 2012 http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/restaurants/ three-things-to-eat-drink-and-bake-this-weekend-6519424 (accessed July 15, 2016). Benson, Robert Louis and Giles Constable, eds., Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy: An Essay. Translated by S.G.C. Middlemore. London: Phaidon Books, 1960 [1860]. Crook, J. Mordaunt. The Dilemma of Style: Architectural Ideas from the Picturesque to the Post-Modern. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. De Rougemont, Denis. Love in the Western World. Pantheon Books: NY, 1941. Translated from the French by Montgomery Belgion. Revised and Augmented Edition. New York: Pantheon Books, 1956. Ferguson, Wallace K. The Renaissance in Historical Thought. Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1948. Flora, Joseph M., ed. The Companion to Southern Literature: Themes, Genres, Places, People, Movements and Motifs. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. Greenblatt, Stephen, et al. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Ninth Edition. New York: WW Norton, 2012. Haskins, Charles Homer. The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1927. Hughes, William, David Punter, and Andrew Smith, eds. The Encyclopedia of the Gothic. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015. Kenney, Alice and Leslie Workman. “Ruins, Romance, and Reality : Medievalism in AngloAmerican Imagination and Taste, 1750–1840.” Winterthur Portfolio 10 (1975): 131–63. Lewis, C. S. The Allegory of Love: A Study of Medieval Tradition. London: Oxford University Press, 1976 [1936]. Manchester, William. A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1992. Matthews, David. Medievalism: A Critical History. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2015. Meagher, Jennifer. “The Pre-Raphaelites.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/praf/ hd_praf.htm htm (October 2004) http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/praf/hd_praf. htm (accessed Oct. 25, 2015). Milton, John. Paradise Lost, A Critical Edition. Edited by Scott Elledge. NY and London: W.W. Norton, 1975. Moreland, Kim Ileen. The Medievalist Impulse in American Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996. Morris, Colin. The Discovery of the Individual, 1050–1200. New York and London: Harper and Row, 1972. Newman, Barbara. The Medieval Academy Newsletter at The Medieval Academy (May 2015) [email protected] via auth.ccsned.com (accessed June 15, 2015).

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Patterson, Lee W. “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History and Medieval Studies.” Speculum 65, no. 1 (1990): 87–108. Thomas, Emory M. Robert E. Lee: A Biography. New York: W. W. Norton. Reprint edition, 1997.

Part Three: Creatures on the Move

Clare A. Lees

In Three Poems: Medieval and Modern in Seamus Heaney, Maureen Duffy and Colette Bryce Above the ruled quires of my book I hear the wild birds jubilant (Seamus Heaney, “Hermit Songs”)

American/Medieval encourages critical breadth and disciplinary risk. Encouraged to examine how medieval and modern are engaged at sites of cultural transfer both European and American, I’m tempted to risk some thinking both small and peripheral instead. Small in the sense that this chapter offers a reading of just three contemporary poems: by Seamus Heaney (1939–2013), Maureen Duffy (1933-) and Colette Bryce (1970-). One of these poets, Heaney, has attained the kind of global stature that commands major critical attention in North America as well as Europe. Duffy and Bryce are well-established figures in contemporary British poetry and Duffy, in particular, has a long-standing European following; both have read as poets and taught in the United States.1 These poets therefore offer some small sense of the global movement of contemporary poetry across, in this case, the United Kingdom, Europe and North America. Yet my thinking tends to the peripheral as well as the small. Each of my three poems addresses modernity from what is still sometimes thought to be the European periphery of Northern Ireland, in spite of the worldwide standing of so many of its writers, the transatlantic importance of Irish culture, and the significance of Irish and Celtic Studies as academic disciplines.2 Peripheral too in that for their creative reflections these poems draw on the cultural history of the early medieval kingdoms of Ireland, Britain, Scotland and England in the sixth and seventh centuries, on the cusp of the conversion to Christianity.3 My argument is 1 Maureen Duffy, e. g., held a visiting lectureship at Amherst in 1967; her poetry is has been translated into Italian, Dutch, German and Swedish, and she holds a Medal of Honour from the Portuguese Society of Authors; Colette Bryce was a Keough Fellow and Writer in Residence at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame, 2015. 2 For broad discussion of contemporary Irish culture in particular, see Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 3 For discussion, see M#ire N& Mhaonaigh, “Of Bede’s “Five Languages and Four Nations”: The Earliest Writing from Ireland, Scotland and Wales,” The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature, ed. Clare A. Lees (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 99–119.

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that, in understanding this small corpus of poems of apparently peripheral content, medievalists might be encouraged to share further their expertise with modern and contemporary critics for the better illumination of both present and past literary cultures. The risk, or wager, of this essay is that work such as this, standing to some extent outside the familiar academic categories of Medieval Studies, Irish Studies, and Contemporary Literature will produce insights of multi-disciplinary American/Medieval value. What the three poems share is evidence for how early medieval culture resources the modern poetic imagination. In so doing, they offer evidence too for a sustained attention to histories of place – as environment and as poetry – in the cultural writings of the present as well as the past. These poems witness how poetic understandings of place and environment are marked by a temporality both medieval and modern. And they challenge the discreteness of conventional chronologies, periods and disciplinary specializations.4 Accordingly, this chapter traces the working of early medieval Irish literature into Heaney’s creative imagination in the lyric sequence of “Hermit Songs” from his final collection, Human Chain (2010).5 But I also take the measure of two other creative encounters with the sixth and seventh centuries: Duffy’s “Lex Innocentis 697” from Environmental Studies (2013); and Bryce’s “Asylum” in The Whole & RainDomed Universe (2014).6 In choosing these three poems, my intent is to suggest just how present is early medieval literary culture in contemporary Englishlanguage poetry, whether in that by long-established writers such as Heaney or Duffy, both of whom have drawn on medieval literature throughout their careers, or in the more recent generation of poets such as Colette Bryce, born like Heaney in Northern Ireland although some thirty years after him. Complex currents of poetry and culture flow between the sixth and the twenty-first century across what is now modern-day Northern Ireland, Scotland and England. In as much as these currents have attracted the attention of medievalists, they have been charted largely by attending to the evidence of translations from medieval literature into the idioms of modern poetry.7 The 4 I am grateful for ongoing conversations with Josh Davies and Gillian R. Overing in exploring these general points. For a more particular resonance, see Davies, “Relocating Anglo-Saxon England: Places of the Past in Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts and Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns,” in Locating the Middle Ages: The Spaces and Places of Medieval Culture, ed. Julian Weiss and Sarah Salih, (London: Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, King’s College London, 2012), 199–211, and his forthcoming book, Visions and Ruins: Medieval Texts, Modern Readers and the Production of the Past. 5 Seamus Heaney, Human Chain (London: Faber & Faber, 2010), 74–9. 6 Maureen Duffy, Environmental Studies (London: Enitharmon, 2013), 47; Colette Bryce, The Whole & Rain-Domed Universe (London: Picador), 45–6. 7 See, e. g., Conor McCarthy, Seamus Heaney and Medieval Poetry (Cambridge: D. S Brewer, 2008) and Hugh Magennis, Translating ‘Beowulf ’: Modern Versions in English Verse (Cam-

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three poems by Heaney, Duffy and Bryce, however, argue for something more than translation and reception history alone to elucidate their creative engagement with the medieval past. For the purposes of illustrating my general argument about the creative use of early medieval literatures by modern writers, therefore, I concentrate on a particular thematic condensation evident in each of these poems in the form of the two figures of Colm Cille or Columba (c. 521–597) and Adomn#n (c. 627/8?-704). Colm Cille is the patron saint of Derry~Londonderry, one of the Twelve Apostles of Ireland and founder of the Christian community on Iona, an island off the north-west coast of what is now Scotland. The community on Iona had a major influence on the conversion to Christianity of those peoples living in Scotland, Northern Britain and England in the early Middles Ages. Those who lived and worshipped on Iona went on to found other early medieval communities such as Lindisfarne, another important centre of Christianity in the early medieval period.8 Adomn#n, the ninth Abbot of Iona, was the seventh-century author of the earliest Latin Life of Columba, which survives in an early eighth-century manuscript in Schaffhausen, Stadtbibliothek, MS Generalia 1.9 Each of my three poems draws on and works with allusions to Colm Cille / Columba or Adomn#n – saints, scribes and scholars – as well as the places in which they did their work. In this way, Colm Cille enters the contemporary poetic imagination and, as we shall see, academic currency. Alert to the implications of American/Medieval and its commitment to the idea of cultural transfer, I start in North America in 2009 with the first of my modern writers, Heaney, and with a literary critic, Helen Vendler. Heaney’s taking up of the world in his poetry and his close attention to environment and place, global and local, Irish and English, in his world-making, together with Vendler’s promotion of Heaney’s poetry as an instance of North American literary discourse is a good place to start.

bridge: D.S. Brewer, 2011). For broader views, see Chris Jones, Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) and David Matthews, Medievalism: A Critical History (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2015). 8 I refer to the saint by his Latin name of Columba when discussing the earliest Latin Life and by his Irish name (Colm Cille, cf., the variants of Colum Cille, Columcille and Colmcille) in all other contexts. Both Latin and Irish names play on associations with the dove (“Columba,” “colm”) and with the church (“ecclesia,” “cille”). For Columba’s life and influence see, e. g., M#ire Herbert, Iona, Kells and Derry : the History and Hagiography of the Monastic Familia of Columba (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). For the most recent translation of the Latin Life and useful introduction, see Adomn#n of Iona, Life of St Columba, ed. and trans. Richard Sharpe (London: Penguin, 1995); all subsequent references are to this translation, unless otherwise specified. 9 For further details about the manuscript and the most recent facsimile, see Damian Bracken and Eric Graff, ed, The Schaffhausen Adomn#n, 2 vols. (Cork: Cork University Press, 2015).

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The Poet and the Critic: Seamus Heaney and Helen Vendler In 2009 Seamus Heaney’s lyric sequence, “Hermit Songs” was published in the festschrift for the distinguished North American literary critic, Helen Vendler.10 Again dedicated to the critic, “Hermit Songs” was included in Heaney’s awardwinning final collection, Human Chain, in 2010. Vendler, who had identified Heaney’s practice of returning to and reworking earlier themes and material as a form of “second thoughts” in her 1998 study of the Irish poet, would certainly appreciate the chain of allusions in “Hermit Songs.”11 For readers of Heaney, the title of the sequence most obviously recalls an earlier poem, “The Hermit,” from the Sweeney Redivivus lyric sequence in Station Island (1984).12 Medievalists and Irish Studies scholars alike might be equally alert to the fact that Sweeney Astray, Heaney’s adaptation of one of the best known cycles of the kings in Middle Irish, Buile Suibhe (The Frenzy of Sweeney), had first appeared in 1983.13 Buile Suibhe, assigned to the twelfth century by most scholars, is set in seventh-century Ireland – a period also worked into “Hermit Songs” – although the earliest manuscripts date from the seventeenth century.14 Sweeney Redivivus draws in part on the “bird-man” and mad king Sweeney as he encounters early medieval Christian culture in the form of St Ronan and is exiled as a result. But the sequence, perhaps more emphatically than the translation before it, also offers Heaney a chance to explore in Sweeney’s revivified or reborn voice the role of the poet and his place in culture and society. What, the sequence asks, is a poet’s environment? As a result of translating the medieval Irish work, Heaney became Sweeney, to paraphrase Vendler.15 The mask of the exiled king forged a way for Heaney to explore the writing of poetry across time, in which the early medieval past, with its conflicts about faith and belief, writing and poetry, grounds lyrical access to a more immediate, personal and differently conflicted present. Thematically, these preoccupations of culture, poetry and personal history in Sweeney Redivivus are also those of Station Island overall, notwithstanding other 10 Something Understood: Essays and Poetry for Helen Vendler, eds. Stephen Burt and Nick Halpern (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 32–7. With thanks to Gillian Overing for her assistance with this reference. 11 Vendler, Seamus Heaney (Boston, Massachussetts: Harvard University Press, 1998), which includes reflections on Heaney’s ‘second thoughts.” 12 Heaney, Station Island (London: Faber & Faber, 1984), 97–121: the “stations” of the title refer to the pilgrim site also known as St Patrick’s Purgatory on Lough Derg (Ulster). 13 Heaney, Sweeney Astray (London: Faber & Faber, 1983, rev. ed. 2001). 14 For details and prose translation, see CELT: The Corpus of Electronic Texts: http://www.ucc. ie/celt/published/T302018/. Accessed 1 August 2015. 15 Vendler, Seamus Heaney, 91; see also “Seamus Heaney’s ‘Sweeney Redivivus’: Its Plot and Its Poems,” reprinted in Vendler, The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry (Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2015), 332–55 (at 335).

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complex transcultural allusions to, for example, Dante, James Joyce and Patrick Kavanagh. The paradox of the four three-lined verses of “The Hermit” is that it is the exiled king, Sweeney, who is the hermit, not the Christian cleric of the preceding lyric, and it is work of exile, the labour of ploughing the field – a familiar enough trope for Heaney – and “the more brutal the pull” of digging that sustains him, not Christian faith or, apparently, poetry.16 By the close of this deeply felt, often angry and bitter sequence, which has brought into creative collaboration the legends of the past and its “masters” of poetry and song, the bird-man turned poet has flown – migrated – but without easy resolution or settlement.17 “Hermit Songs” from Human Chain returns to and re-engages the Sweeney material indirectly through the allusion to “The Hermit” in its title, but it does so from a more settled or steady lyrical gaze on this multiplied past – that of the poet, of his tradition and his culture. Steadiness is in fact one of its major themes. No longer explicitly haunted by Sweeney’s voice, “Hermit Songs” also has a tighter focus on its exploration of learning and writing, poetry and the spoken word. These are distilled from allusions to early medieval Irish scholar-saints, legendary heroes and poets with their books, and memories of the poet’s early schooling. But the lyric sequence also measures up to two of Heaney’s own poetmasters and fellow Nobel prize-winners, Czesław Miłosz and Yeats, both of whom are quoted in lyric IX of the sequence (first, Miłosz’s “Meaning” of 1991; and then Yeats’s “The Tower” of 1928).18 Nor is the punning epigraph for “Hermit Songs,” which also stands as an epigraph for this chapter (in Heaney’s reworking, “[A]bove the ruled quires of my book /I hear the wild birds jubilant”) adapted from the Sweeney material. This Old Irish lyric “Dom-fharcai fidbaide f#l” [A Hedge of Trees Overlooks Me], is recorded in the margins of one of the most important witnesses to Old Irish, the ninth-century St. Gall Commentary on Priscian.19 As well-known as the Sweeney material in Irish culture, this poem is translated as “Writing Out Of Doors” by James Carney in the Penguin Book of Irish Poetry (2010), where it appears as the first and only poem in Irish as well as

16 “The Hermit,” Station Island, 109, c.f., “The Cleric,” 107–8 and the earlier, iconic poem, “Digging,” the first poem in Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), 1. 17 For a discussion, see Bernard O’Donoghue, “Introduction,” The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney, ed. O’Donoghue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 6–8. For the theme of migration, see the final lyric “On the Road” in “Sweeney Redivivus,” Station Island, 119–21. 18 Miłosz, New and Collected Poems (London: Penguin, 2006), 569; Yeats, “The Tower,” The Tower (London: Macmillan, 1928). 19 See the useful description in the online database for Celtic Studies, CODECS, by A. G. Van Hamel: http://www.vanhamel.nl/codecs/Dom-fharcai_fidbaide_f%C3%A1l (accessed 1 August 2015).

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English.20 Rather than the flight of the frenzied Sweeney, then, “Hermit Songs” offers the promise that the “wild birds,” with their Yeatsian echoes, will sing jubilantly, as Heaney puts it, and that the lines of the book – or punning quire –are already ruled. The praise poems attributed to early medieval Irish hermits thereby inaugurate a lyric sequence on the long history of poetry, learning, and writing, dedicated to the critic Vendler, another kind of writer and scholar. One final allusion in Heaney’s title to yet another, early Irish lyric, “The Song of the Hermit,” anchors his human chain of associations medieval and modern.21 This “Song of the Hermit” celebrates the close fit between the ascetic and the natural, pastoral, almost edenic world that supports him, and it is this figure that offers Heaney a more settled image of the poet as a longtime writer out of doors and maker of songs in his own “Hermit Songs.” Helen Vendler is a formalist critic and her work on Heaney – fellow colleague at Harvard University for several years – is scrupulously detailed in its readings of his lyrics and in tracing of his poetic development.22 Few would describe Vendler as at all interested in cultural criticism, however, and the critic stands apart from other strands of mainstream North American literary discourse, whether inflected by gender studies, Irish Studies, colonial and postcolonial studies or the more fluid and dynamic inter-relationships of mind and environment offered by American/Medieval.23 Nevertheless, Vendler’s academic promotion of Heaney has been formative in the reception of his poetry, both in North America and in Europe. Heaney’s engagement with early medieval literary traditions, Irish or English, which attends both to mind and nature (as his use of the genre of the hermit’s songs demonstrates so well), are backdrop only in Vendler’s explications de texte. This is a critic who takes close reading and literature from Shakespeare on as her terrain, her critical environment. Heaney’s poetry, however, as Vendler well knows, has a very wide chronological range, shaped from a long familiarity with medieval and modern, classical and com20 Patrick Crotty, ed., The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry, with Preface by Heaney (London: Penguin, 2010), 1, 10. The poem in Old Irish stands as the epigraph for the first section, also entitled “Writing Out of Doors: Earliest Times to 1200.” The poem has also been translated by Ciaran Carson, using its more familiar title of “The Scribe in the Woods”; see The Finest Music: Early Irish Lyrics, ed. Maurice Riordan (London: Faber & Faber, 2014), 4. 21 See The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry, 11–13 (where the poem is translated by Frank O’Connor); the poem appears as “A Hermit Song” in Early Irish Lyrics, Eighth to Twelfth Century, ed. and trans. Gerard Murphy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 18–22. Some of these lyrics were set to music by Samuel Barber, whose “Hermit Songs” of 1953 has been recorded many times. 22 Heaney began teaching at Harvard in 1982; he held the Boylston Chair of Rhetoric and Oratory there from 1984–96; see the useful chronology included in B. O’Donoghue, ed, The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney, xiii–xviii. 23 See, e. g., the review of Vendler’s Festschrift, Something Understood, by Andrew Epstein, Modern Philology 110 (2013): 143–7.

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parative literary traditions. His influence on the reading public has been dramatic. This is, after all, the poet whose translation of Beowulf was a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic.24 Indeed, it was the publication of Heaney’s translation of Beowulf in 1999 rather than the earlier translation of Sweeney Astray in 1983 that marked the moment when the Irish writer first captured widespread attention in Englishlanguage Medieval Studies. And it remains the case that it is his translation of the early English, Anglo-Saxon poem for which Heaney is best known in this field.25 There is some irony here in the centrality of Beowulf in medievalists’ interest in Heaney’s poetry. Heaney claimed the poem as only one aspect of his engagement with an early Northern literary culture, crossing over and through more modern, nationally derived Irish, English and Scottish traditions.26 Heaney’s interest in the broad cultural history of the earliest medieval centuries in Ireland, Scotland and England might encourage a complementary critical attention by medievalists to the ways in which the modern poet – and others beside him – have engaged this literary history. The next section of this chapter, therefore, proposes a modest redress of this imbalance between the medievalists (or clerics), the American formalist critic who works from the medieval to the modern in her reading of Heaney, and the contemporary scholar-poet himself.

First Poem: “Hermit Songs,” Scribes and Scholars “Hermit Songs” meditates on a human chain of creativity, on the craft of poetry and of the art of learning; writing in both senses of the word. This chain of scholarship and the arts connecting medieval and modern also recapitulates some of Heaney’s most favorite themes in Station Island and Human Chain. Its nine lyrics, in quatrains in iambs of trimeter or dimeters reminiscent of early Irish verse and song, are supple in their use of alliteration and assonance, and structured enough overall to encourage the kind of steadiness of perspective and settled resolution appropriate to its main themes. Steadiness is a saintly virtue in “Hermit Songs,” associated in the second lyric with St Mac =ige of Lismore, who 24 Seamus Heaney, Beowulf‘: A New Translation (London: Faber & Faber, 1999); Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000). Heaney’s translation was commissioned for the Norton Anthology of English Literature, eds. M. H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt, 7th edition, vol. 1 (New York and London, 2000), 29–98. 25 Although see Conor McCarthy, ‘Beowulf ’ and Medieval Literature, and Heather O’Donoghue, “Heaney, Beowulf and the Medieval Literature of the North,” in The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney, ed. Bernard O’Donoghue, 192–205. 26 See further Heather O’Donoghue, “Heaney, Beowulf and the Medieval Literature of the North.”

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singled it out as a measure of character, at least according to the history of the monastery of Tallaght.27 But it is also the steadiness of the writing hand – the order of those “ruled quires” – and of the poetic task that the saint of this famous early medieval monastic school and the modern poet has in mind. The sequence works to persuade its readers that the best response to change – the passing of time – is to trust to the pen and to a steady-handed writing life. This view of the writing life is counterpoised in the ninth and final lyric with that of Miłosz’s confidence in his poetry to withstand the test of time by means of its immanence – in “Meaning,”the word will continue to scream and protest after the death of the poet – and with that of Yeats, who made his peace with “Poet’s imaginings / And memories of love” in “The Tower,” a poem as expressly concerned with age and the legacy of poetic knowledge as Miłosz’s “Meaning.” By contrast with Miłosz and Yeats, Heaney’s “Hermit Songs” displaces any anxiety about aging and legacy into a resounding or better put, perhaps, given the poem’s epigraph, jubilant assertion of cultural traditions that persist in the face of apparent obsolescence, steadily resisting the passing of time. Early medieval manuscripts last, so too does penmanship. The final verse of the lyric sequence invokes a list of the great medieval Irish manuscripts: “Books of Lismore. Kells. Armagh,” the Yellow Book of Lecan and the “battler” or cathach, the psalter traditionally associated with Colm Cille, reputed to have been carried into battle as a sign of promised victory, together with their evidence of “much tried pens.”28 In further contrast to Yeats’ birds with their “sleepy cry” in the final lines of “The Tower” and Miłosz’s questioning of whether there is meaning “beyond bird” or the thrush on the branch in “Meaning,” “Hermit Songs” begins, as I have already mentioned, with birdsong and with the hermit-like pleasures of writing out of doors. The association of personal learning with that of medieval saintly scholars and modern poets is formalized – enchained – in the second lyric when the young boy-scholar learning to read is put together with the Irish saints and hermits Fursa and Colm Cille, both of whom left Ireland for ascetic exile in 27 “The Monastery of Tallaght,” ed. and trans. E. J. Gwynn & W. J. Purton, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 29C (1911–12): 115–180; an electronic version is available from the Thesaurus Linguae Hibernicae, University College, Dublin: http://www.ucd.ie/tlh/header/ gp.pria.29.001.header.html. 28 For the seventh-century psalter or cathach associated with St Columba, see Dublin, Royal Irish Academy MS 12 R33; for the Book of Kells, a gospel book dated to the early ninth or late eighth century, see Trinity College Dublin, MS 58; for the ninth-century Book of Armagh, see Trinity College Dublin, MS 52 (it includes works relating to St Patrick as well as a copy of the New Testament); and for the late fourteenth-early fifteenth century miscellany, the Yellow Book of Lecan, see Trinity College Dublin, MS 1318. For the fifteenth-century Book of Lismore, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, see CODECS for further details http://vanhamel.nl/ codecs/Chatsworth_(Derbyshire),_Book_of_Lismore.

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Britain and a different kind of “writing out of doors.”29 Colm Cille, dove of the Church, patron saint of Derry~Londonderry and of Heaney’s school (St Columb’s College),30 surfaces again in the fifth lyric by means of his association with that battling cathach (which reappears itself in the final lyric), but a story about Colm Cille also takes up the whole of the eighth lyric. The eighth and penultimate lyric of “Hermit Songs” rehearses the story of the spilled ink first reported in Adomn#n’s seventh-century Life of the sixth-century saint (although Heaney appears to have used a later vernacular version for this poem).31 In the early medieval versions, Columba foretells that a stranger – a “loudmouth,” in Heaney’s rewording – will come to Iona and, in leaning over to give the saint the kiss of peace and careless of his task, will knock over his inkhorn.32 Among other things, this is a story about the relationship of the spoken and written word – the clumsy “harbour shouter” (Lyric VIII), who hails across the Sound to announce his arrival on Iona but then knocks over the ink, and the steady-handed sacred scribe, Columba, dedicated to the Word of God. What precedes this story in “Hermit Songs,” however, is another about ink – this time the making of it, rather than its spilling. Lyric VII freezes in the continuous present a scene from Heaney’s days as a school boy when he was sent “[o]ut in the open” to fill a beaker with water from a stream to mix ink, excused from a class on singing to do so. This story of the nascent poet, a writer out of doors, in a kind of exile from his singing classmates, crystallizes a chain of associations in “Hermit Songs”: the early medieval songs of the hermits, the books of the saints, the exiled poet-figure of Sweeney and the modern poets like Miłosz who stand apart from their culture and society. In these ways, “Hermit Songs” sets up a formal parallel between personal, individual and cultural memory, the learning of the past and that of the poets. Read together with the other verses in the sequence, the lyrical retelling of filling the beaker from the twentieth century before that of the spilling of the inkhorn from the sixth, offers a kind of secular veneration of, or joyful song for, the ancient arts of writing and of poetry.

29 For a brief account of St Fursa’s life (d. 649), visionary, pilgrim and evangelist to East Anglia, and textual sources, see Paul Fouracre, “Fursa (d. 649),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 (http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/10252, accessed 24 May 2016). Writing, learning and making books are central themes in the earliest Latin Life of Columba. 30 Heaney boarded at St. Columb’s College, Derry, 1951–1957; see “Chronology,” The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney, ed. Bernard O’Donoghue, xiii. 31 See Herbert, Iona, Kells and Derry, for discussion, edition and translation of the Middle-Irish Life of Columba, 217–88. 32 Life of Columba, ed. Sharpe, Book I, chapter 25.

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Second Poem: “Lex Innocentis 697,” Maureen Duffy and the Law of the Innocents When Adomn#n laid down his law, calling together the princes and the warriors, that the deaths of civilians, women and children, non-combatants should be paid for in blood money, wergild (compensation our half-hearted word) the law of the innocent in that seventh century we dub the Dark Ages, he appointed guardians overseers to make it stick. So when my aunt my mother’s sister was killed by a stray Nazi bomb she’d have had a hide of land, a couple of goats, her weight in gold, by rights, in those barbarous times. And the thousands now in our civilized century brought out from rubbished homes laid in mute rows like bundles of old carpet some longer, some childishly small, what should their price be, beyond the dreams of avarice? Only these bitter fruit, enough to make a saint weep. (Maureen Duffy, “Lex Innocentis 697”)33

Heaney’s “Hermit Songs” is preceded in Human Chain by “Colum Cille Cecinit” [Colm Cille Sang], three short lyrics adapted from early medieval Irish lyrics attributed to or associated with Colm Cille by, roughly speaking, the twelfth century ; the first on the scribal arts (“Is sc&th mo chrjb jn scr&bainn” [My hand is cramped from penwork]; and the other two adapting “Is aire charaim Doire” (an angelic hymn or praise-poem to “Derry”) and “Fil sfflil nglais” [A Gray Eye Will Look Back] – a song of about exile and return associated with the Irish saint.34 “Hermit Songs” is in evident harmony with these earlier lyrics, although the schoolboy and future poet is excused his “singing class,” and the “wild birds” are only “jubilant” in the poem’s epigraph. Although the earliest Life of Columba, that other bird of the Church, suggests that the saint was no particular friend to poets, later vernacular traditions such as these make rather more of Colm Cille’s

33 I would like to thank Maureen Duffy for permission and rights to reprint “Lex Innocentis 697,” from Environmental Studies, 47. 34 “Colum Cille Cecinit,” Human Chain, 72–3; see also The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry, ed. Crotty, 36–7 (where the poems are translated by Kuno Meyer and Patrick Crotty respectively). For brief contextual discussion, see Thomas Owen Clancy, “Gaelic Literature in Ireland and Scotland, 900–1150,” The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature, ed. Lees, 637–59 (654–5).

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appetite for singing as well as his patronage of writing, poetry and the making of books.35 A different song and an altogether different voice are evident in Maureen Duffy’s “Lex Innocentis 697” [“The Law of the Innocent 697”], although this poem draws on similar early medieval cultural traditions. In Duffy’s poem, these traditions are associated with the author of the earliest Life of Columba, Adomn#n of Iona, rather than Columba himself. As its Latin title suggests, the poem is prompted by Adomn#n’s authorship of the first law protecting civilians, the Ca&n Adomna&n (the Law of Adomn#n) also known as the Lex Innocentium. This law was firmly associated with Adomn#n by the ninth century, but there also appears to be an indirect allusion to it in an episode in the Life of Columba itself.36 This episode recounts a prophecy of the death of a “persecutor of innocents” by Columba while he was still in Leinster. According to Adomn#n’s account, a “pitiless persecutor of innocent folk” murdered a girl right at the saint’s feet where the girl sought protection, in blatant disregard of the future saint or his companion, his teacher, Gemm#n. Urged by Gemm#n to make amends, Columba predicts the death of the persecutor at the same hour that the soul of the girl ascends to heaven. And so it happens.37 The Law of the Innocent does not legislate for divine retribution but it does have the protection of women and civilians firmly in mind. Whether or not this law was ever used, it represents a major effort to legislate on behalf of those so often caught up in war – women and the young pre-eminently. It is also an early effort at international justice in that the protection offered crosses the boundaries of the early kingdoms of D#l Riata (of Ireland and Scotland) and Pictland (Scotland). Both the international dimension of Adomn#n’s medieval law and its emphasis on women are central in understanding Duffy’s modern poem. “Lex Innocentis 697” reminds us of the turbulence of early medieval society, as does Heaney’s battling cathach in a more allusive register in “Hermit Songs” but, unlike “Hermit Songs,” it also gives us some insight into the lives of others aside from saints, scribes and poets. Indeed, this modern poem is an elegy for the high price and “bitter fruit” of those innocently killed and persecuted 35 See Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery, ed. and trans. Thomas Owen Clancy and Gilbert Markus (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), and compare Life of Columba, ed. Sharpe, I. 42. Heaney’s “Colm Cille the Scribe,” written on vellum, was presented to the Royal Irish Academy in 1996 when he was inducted as a Fellow. My thanks to Josh Davies who points out that it hangs at the entrance to the library in the Academy as another interesting intersection of environment, poetry and language. 36 For the Law of the Innocent, see Kuno Meyer, ed. and trans., Ca&n Adomna&n: An Old Irish Treatise on the Law of Adamnan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905) and the relevant bibliography in CODECS (http://www.vanhamel.nl/codecs/C%C3 %A1in_Adomn%C3 %A1in). See also the useful summary in Sharpe, ed., Life of Columba, 50–2. 37 Life of Columba, ed. Sharpe, Book II, chapter 25.

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whether in war or for gender, ethnicity, race or faith, medieval and modern. The song the poem alludes to in its final line – “Only these bitter fruit, enough to make a saint weep” – is of course the iconic “Strange Fruit,” on the horrors of lynching and the inhumanity of racism, its lyrics by Abel Meeropol (who wrote under the name of Lewis Allan), sung so evocatively by Billie Holiday, where black bodies hang in the breeze for the crows to pluck.38 A writer of the same generation as Seamus Heaney, Maureen Duffy is as comfortable in poetry as in prose, drama as in fiction, and has long taken the medieval past and the contemporary present as her purview. More usually it has been London and the south of England that has captured her attention, not the northerly regions of Britain and Ireland.39 Her work is characterized by a robust gender politics, willingness to experiment with form and style, deep engagement with the past – personal, cultural, literary – and a resolute commitment to the voice of the all-too-often unrepresented. This is illustrated by That’s How It Was (1962), a canny “memoir” with an illegitimate working-class girl as its subject and the otherwise “invisible” stories of gay women in the city of The Microscosm (1966).40 The second novel in her London trilogy, Capital (1975), in many ways a response to Virginia Woolf ’s Between the Acts (1941), intercuts episodes from the history of the city, including both earlier and later medieval periods, with its twentieth-century present.41 In the third, Londoners: An Elegy (1983), the main figure is writing a book on the fifteenth-century French poet FranÅois Villon.42 Duffy’s novels about London, articulated using multiple voices, temporally distinct, alert to class, gender and race, are patterns of interest throughout her later career as well. Illuminations (1991), for example, brings together an account of the travels of an eighth-century Anglo-Saxon nun, Tetta, in medieval Germany with that of a twentieth-century historian, Hetty, on her way to a conference on the idea of Europe held in Frankfurt.43 One of the mysteries in The Orpheus Trail (2009), as other medievalists have noted, turns on the discovery of

38 See David Margolick, Strange Fruit: the Biography of a Song (London: Harper, 2001) for the song’s cultural significance. 39 See the chapter on Duffy in Sebastian Groes, The Making of London: London in Contemporary Literature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 17–41. 40 That’s How It Was (London: Hutchinson, 1962); The Microcosm (London: Hutchinson, 1966). 41 Capital: A Fiction (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975); cf., Woolf, Between the Acts (London: Hogarth Press, 1941). The first novel in Duffy’s London trilogy was Wounds (London: Hutchinson, 1969). 42 Londoners: An Elegy (London: Methuen, 1983). 43 Illuminations: A Fable (London: Sinclair Stevenson, 1991); for Anglo-Saxon nuns associated with the Bonifacian mission, see Lees and Gillian R. Overing, Double Agents: Women and Clerical Culture in Anglo-Saxon England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001; repr. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), 41–2.

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an early Anglo-Saxon royal burial very similar to that of the so-called Prittlewell Prince in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, discovered in 2003.44 More recently, however, Duffy has moved north. Her novel, In Times Like These (its title alluding to Yeats’ “On Being Asked For a War Poem” of 1919) was published in the same year as Environmental Studies, which includes “Lex Innocentis 697,” in 2013.45 The novel (or “fable,” as Duffy subtitles it) intercuts an account of the travels of Columba across the pre-national kingdoms of Ireland, Scotland and England with the post-national story of two women – an artist and an historian-turned politician who meet in London and travel north – in a presciently near and troubled future after the break-up of the Union of Britain and Scotland. The international focus on the global inhumanity of humanity of “Lex Innocentis 697” and the post-national vision of In Times Like These draw on material about Adomn#n and Columba to explore debates about gendered and ethnic violence worldwide. But at stake too are more local debates about the law and independence in the run-up to the Scottish referendum in 2013. That 2013 also saw the UK City of Culture celebrated in Derry~Londonderry, a city as much associated with the Troubles of Northern Ireland in the twentieth century as it is with the saintly Columba in the sixth is also relevant. Duffy’s writing often works creatively with political, historical and cultural events that are not always directly implicated in the work itself. Capital was published on the cusp of Margaret Thatcher’s election to Prime Minister in 1975, for example, and Illuminations appeared in the run-up to the European Treaty of Maastricht of 1992. So the particularity of dating and the selection of allusions to events in “Lex Innocentis 697” matter. Written in iambic pentameter, using the frequent enjambment, assonance and unobtrusive alliteration characteristic of Duffy’s verse, this compact poem acknowledges the universal and the particular, the historic and the contemporary, the innocent individual caught up in violence and the collective people. The Law of the Innocent, traditionally dated to 697 and the only date mentioned in the poem, is thought to be have been promulgated at an assembly of clerics and kings at Birr (present-day Offaly, Ireland), called by Adomn#n in response to the endemic violence of the warring kingdoms in this period. This date, this time, matters, the title of the modern poem insists. But so too does its legacy. What, the poem asks, is the “wergild” or blood money, “compensation our half-hearted word,” the price of a life in the face of repeated violence 44 The Orpheus Trail (London: Arcadia Books, 2009); see Martin B. Shichtman, Laurie A. Finke and Kathleen Coyne Kelly, who credit this novel with inspiring a special issue of postmedieval on mobility studies: “”The world is my home when I”m mobile”: Medieval Mobilities,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 4 (2013): 125–35. The important royal burial at Prittlewell is the subject of ongoing research by the Southend Museum. 45 In Times Like These: A Fable (London: Jonathan Clewes, 2013).

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throughout time? What the protection offered by law for the barbarities of then, “in that seventh century we dub / the Dark Ages,” or now for “thousands now in our / civilized century brought out from rubbished homes”? Evincing a powerful sympathy for lives destroyed in all times, the poem links the sixth to the twenty-first century via the horrors of war in the twentieth, using a personal loss to anchor in the particular the loss of the otherwise anonymous many, “these bitter fruit, enough to make a saint weep,” as the final line puts it. The personal loss at the heart of the poem is that of the death of Duffy’s aunt in the Second World War, “[s]o when my aunt / my mother’s sister was killed by a stray Nazi bomb / she’d have had a hide of land, / a couple of goats, her weight in gold, by rights, in those / barbarous times” (my emphasis). The death of one woman – unnamed but family – is a way to register the deaths of those thousands of innocent civilians across time. In the context of the poem overall, what looks like a colloquial and passing reference, “by rights,” in a dry and tensely humorous contrast between medieval and modern war reparations turns out to be the poem’s central pivot. Rights – human rights, civil rights – are the unexpressed subjects here. In just seventeen lines, “Lex Innocentis 697” evokes the loss of life in seventh-century Ireland (with reference to Adomn#n’s Law), twentieth-century England (with reference to Duffy’s aunt) and America (with its allusion to “Strange Fruit,” racial persecution and Civil Rights), and in the twenty-first century in what looks like Palestine and Syria, judging from those “laid out in mute rows like bundles of old carpet, / some longer, some childishly small.” Given the poem’s historical breadth, its kinship with the human and its insistence on the particular as well as the universal, it is reasonable to explore further the meaning of reference to the saint who weeps in the final line of the poem, “Only these bitter fruit, enough to make a saint weep.” Adomn#n would appear to be the most obvious candidate. He is named in the first line of the poem, for one thing, but we might also bear in mind the contrast of his Law of protection and compensation with the vengeful behaviour of the saintly Columba, who called down divine retribution and death for a persecutor of innocents in his Life. I wonder too if there is more to ponder in Duffy’s adaptation of that colloquialism, “enough to make a saint weep” (and its variants of trying and testing the patience of saints)? The poem does not name Duffy’s aunt any more than its saint either, insistent though it is on connection and family in its reference to “my mother’s sister,” on the one hand, and its reference to the saintly Adomn#n as a law-maker, on the other. Nor does the poem identify any particular conflict, war, ethnicity or religion “by rights,” working instead by allusion and implication – by an assumption of shared knowledge – all the way to the “bitter fruit” of the final line, enough to make any or all saints weep. All history, the poem argues, is caught up in violence; each of us “in our civilized century” needs to think about the rights of others – and weep. Civil society and

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human rights are this poem’s wager in bringing together the medieval and the modern. Like Heaney’s “Hermit Songs” in its secularity and breadth of cultural reference, “Lex Innocentis 697” is trans-national in its ethical, humanist and environmental stance, facing the violence of the sixth, seventh and twentieth centuries head-on.

Third Poem: Colette Bryce’s “Asylum,” Iona, Ireland and Exile There is no birdsong in “Lex Innocentis 697,” although the poem’s allusion to “Strange Fruit” with its final line, “Here is a strange and bitter crop,” is certainly apposite. This crop is for the crows, the song points out. “Lex Innocentis 697” is included in Duffy’s most recent collection, Environmental Studies of 2013, in which history and literature are as much poetic environments – homes as well as places – as the more familiar environmental rights of animals; woodlice, slugs and pigeons included.46 Much like “Lex Innocentis 697” itself, the collection uses the lyric form to pull together the personal and the cultural, the historical and the environmental. This breadth of cultural reference, poetic allusion and historical knowledge is as much part of Duffy’s poetic imagination as it was, albeit differently, Heaney’s. The collection includes a set of variations on Old English poems (“Marginal Glosses”), meditations on the First World War, family, and on her poetic kinship with, for example, John Gower, John Donne and Shakespeare.47 Duffy’s style, attentive to those who would be lost otherwise to history, relatives and slugs included, alongside such canonical writers acknowledges a deep literary past in its capacious and empathic attention to the present. “Asylum,” the final of my three poems, is similarly sharply aware of environmental issues, taking longstanding questions of home and its leaving, and nature, whether human or avian – in new directions. “Asylum” by Colette Bryce is contemporary with Duffy’s “Lex Innocentis 697,” published first in 2013 and a second time in 2014, drawing once again on the earliest medieval centuries of Irish literary culture. The poem directly reworks a third episode from Adomn#n’s Life of Columba to put beside Heaney’s retelling of the spilt ink in “Hermit Songs” and Duffy’s allusion to the murderous (and murdered) persecutor of women in “Lex Innocentis 697.” Bryce’s poem engages with a prophecy of Columba about a bird – a heron, perhaps, or a crane – and a story about exile and return (Life of Columba, ed. Sharpe, Book I, chapter

46 “Woodlouse,” “sluggish” and “Pigeons Dancing” in Environmental Studies, 10, 26, 35. 47 For Duffy’s reworking of Old English poems, see “Marginal Glosses” in Environmental Studies, 55–63.

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48).48 Like so many before her including Columba, Bryce left Derry, her home, and the Troubles through which she grew up as a Catholic for London.49 She has recently lived and worked in various places in Scotland and northern England (Dundee, Newcastle and Manchester among them).50 “Asylum” with its associations of safety, sanctuary, exile and the impossibility of return, have a particular resonance in Bryce’s poetry, connected with but extending beyond the more familiar concerns with migration and exile in Irish literature into poems expressly addressing hiding and escape, vanishing and running off.51 For this reason alone, Bryce’s poetry cannot be easily accommodated as just another second generation Northern Irish poet, in the shadow of the generation of, for example, Tom Paulin or Michael Longley. Rather, Bryce is crafting a body of work remarkable for its own aesthetic of longing and belonging, and for its range of cultural reference. The poetry is woman-centered in its perspective and keenly aware of conventions of form and style for their capacity to startle and surprise.52 “Asylum” appears in The Whole & Rain-Domed Universe, whose title refers to the first line of second verse of the longest poem of the collection, “Derry.” And “Derry” announces its affiliation with Louis MacNeice’s similarly autobiographical “Carrickfergus” of 1938, the eve of the Second World War with its allusion to “I was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries”:53 I was born between the Creggan and the Bogside to the sounds of crowds and smashing glass, By the river Foyle with its suicides and rip tides. I thought that city was nothing less than the whole and rain-domed universe.

In “Derry,” Columba appears in his familiar role of patron saint of the city, hymned by the young woman in “O Derry mine” at masses, which also hailed Mary, “mother of mercy,” hypnotically. “Asylum,” in many ways a companion poem to “Derry,” returns to the early medieval stories about the saint in more detail, offering Bryce the opportunity of another, quite literal, long look back at

48 For discussion of the bird, see Sharpe, Life of Columba, 311–12, n. 203. 49 For a short but important reflection on Bryce’s childhood and her poetic kinship with Seamus Heaney, see her, “Omphalos: Returning to the troubles of a Northern Irish Childhood,” in Poetry (2014); http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/248810. 50 For a relevant discussion, see Susan Haigh, see “An Interview with Colette Bryce,” Dundee Review of the Arts (2016): https://dura-dundee.org.uk/2016/01/14/interview-with-colettebryce/ (accessed on 25 May, 2016). 51 See, e. g., the poems in The Full Indian Rope Trick (London: Picador, 2004). 52 As in “Helicopters,” The Whole & Rain-Domed Universe, 16. 53 Louis MacNeice, The Earth Compels (London: Faber & Faber, 1938), 7. For “Derry,” see Bryce, The Whole & Rain-Domed Universe, 2–5.

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the environment of Northern Ireland, this time from the perspective of early medieval Iona. Columba’s prophecy about the heron in the Life of Columba reports that the saint said to one of his fellow brothers that in two days he must go to the west of the island to keep watch. For, the saint says, after the ninth hour, a guest, a heron will arrive from the north of Ireland, “buffeted by the wind,” tired and exhausted, and fall to the shore in front of the brother. Columba instructs him to lift the bird carefully, carry it to the nearest house, and feed and care for it as a guest for three days and nights. At the end of the three days, he predicts, it will no longer want to “stay as a pilgrim with us” and its strength recovered, will fly “to the sweet district of Ireland from which it came.” The reason the saint is so solicitous of the bird, the Life tells us, is because it comes from his homeland. The monk obeyed and at the ninth hour of the third day, he waited for the guest. When the bird arrived weak and hungry he carried it from the shore and fed it. The brother returned in the evening to the monastery, where the saint acknowledged the day’s events not by asking what had happened but by blessing the monk for looking after the “pilgrim guest”54 so well, and by repeating that, after three days, it will return home. And so it happened. After three days as a guest, the bird first got up in sight of his host, flew up into the air, selected its path and set off over the ocean in a straight line, returning to Ireland in fine weather. Adomn#n’s story about Columba and the heron comprises one of the final chapters of the first book of the Life, on the saint’s prophecies and revelations. The chapter does not appear in the table of contents in the earliest manuscript, Schaffhausen Stadtbibliothek MS Generalia 1, and the rubric describes it as another matter, although small, concerning the happy foreknowledge and prophecy of the saint, which “I think” should not be silenced. The subject of this verb, “I think” (“puto”), appears to be Adomn#n himself and, by the time Adomn#n was putting together the Life, presumably for the monk-scribe Dorbb8ne who wrote this manuscript and succeeded Adomn#n as its tenth abbot, he was working with some very old stories, oral and written, about Columba.55 The absence of an entry for this chapter in the manuscript’s table of contents suggests that this story was added to those collected about Columba in the process of its compilation.56 The rubric, perhaps by Adomn#n, makes a case

54 Life of Columba, I, 48, 150. 55 See William Reeves, ed., The Life of St. Columba (Dublin: Irish Archaeological and Celtic Society, 1857), 90–91 (at 90). 56 The Life acknowledges these earlier stories in Book III, chapter 5, crediting the seventh Abbot of Iona, Cumm8ne, with an account of the saint’s prophecy about King Aed#n (in this section of the manuscript, the script is visibly smaller). And the manuscript, including this copy of a seventh-century life of this sixth century saint is one of the few eighth-century

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for the inclusion of the prophecy (as does the reference to not being silent) and perhaps too draws attention to the assumption that the chapter would be read aloud. The fact that the story includes direct speech from the saint also argues for an oral dimension to the telling of this story. Perhaps this story was to be understood as a crafted memory of a saint’s words? It manifestly illustrates Columba’s foreknowledge and prophetic abilities and is pre-eminently about time – about the rhetorical power of prophetic utterances to fly through time like a bird, like a dove perhaps, through storms and reach fine weather; like words. So much is borne out by the episode’s obsessive charting of time. The Latin narrative comprises three sections, each of which reprises the preceding section: the story of the bird is first told as prophecy, next as event, and third as confirmation of prophecy. The obedient monk is told to wait until the ninth hour of the third day for the arrival of the bird and we are told three times that the bird will recover and return to Ireland, from whence it came. However symbolic these sacred numbers might be (and I am sure they are), there’s no doubting that this is a well-worked tale, crafted to be held in memory and retold. In giving lyrical voice to this early medieval prophecy (itself about voice), Bryce’s modern poem foregrounds its emphasis on generosity and hospitality – the care for a stranger or guest, pilgrim or traveller so central to early medieval monasticism. Care for another is here offered to all created life, including birds, in the same way that pilgrimage is – the bird is repeatedly described as a pilgrim, like Columba. While early medieval life on Iona is a symbolically religious, at least according to the Life of Columba, it is also a strikingly rich natural environment of sea, sound, bird and shore. Like the bird, Columba arrived on Iona as a pilgrim and, perhaps, exile, judging by later medieval stories of him. Indeed, the second of the lyrics translated by Heaney in “Colum Cille Cecinit,” “A Gray Eye Looks Back” refers to this story of Columba’s exile and his apparent inability to return to his homeland.57 So, this early medieval prophecy tells us something about home, Columba’s home as well as the bird’s, in the “sweet district of Ireland,” and about the life of a pilgrim, away from home, exiled in the world on a journey to and for God. But it also tells us something about travel in a worldly sense, and the possibility of return – for the narrative does not explicitly state that the heron reaches the shores of Ireland – and care for those who arrive and for those who

manuscripts that can be dated with any certainty (Dorbb8ne is recorded as having died in 713). 57 For the later, Middle-Irish, poems of exile associated with Colm Cille, see “Colum Cille’s Exile,” translated by James Carney, in Crotty, ed., The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry, 34–6 and M#ire Herbert, “Becoming an Exile: Colum Cille in Middle-Irish Poetry,” Heroic Poets and Poetic Heroes in Celtic Tradition (A Festschrift for Patrick K. Ford), ed. Joseph Falaky Nagy and Leslie Ellen Jones, CSANA Yearbook 3–4 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2005), 131–40.

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will or wish to go back. Small wonder that the story of Columba and the heron remains to this day well known in Ireland. Bryce’s “Asylum,” subtitled “Iona,” which explicitly acknowledges Adomn#n’s Life of Columba, was first published in a small pamphlet by the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts in 2013. Shadow Script: Twelve Poems for Lindisfarne and Bamburgh, which Bryce edited, formed part of the cultural activities associated with the return (on loan) of the Lindisfarne Gospels from the British Library to Durham Cathedral that year and the associated creative arts events of Colm Cille’s Spiral, commissioned by the 2013 UK City of Culture, Derry~Londonderry.58 Bryce read part of the poem for “Antiphonal,” a sound installation of extracts from Shadow Script, composed by digital artist, Tom Schofield. “Antiphonal” was installed on Lindisfarne (in the Look-Out Tower) – the monastery founded by the Ionan monk Aidan –and Bamburgh (in the crypt of St Aidan’s Church) in Northumberland during the summer of 2013. To this sound-piece was added two films by Kate Sweeney, shown first in Newcastle (in the Sanctuary Artspace) in November 2013 and then in Derry~Londonderry (in the London Street Gallery) in December of the same year.59 “Asylum” was subsequently included in The Whole & Rain-domed Universe of 2014. The modern poem, “Asylum” responds directly to the early medieval narrative about Columba and the heron, therefore, with the important qualification that this early saint is never identified any more than was that saint directly associated with Adomn#n in Duffy’s “Lex Innocentis 697.” The three verses of “Asylum” (the first of six lines, and the second and third of four) alternate long and short lines of twelve and six syllables, or thereabouts – some of which are in fact alexandrines. Yet the carefully composed modern poem also echoes features from Adomn#n’s earliest iteration of the prophecy, adapting its tri-partite structure, for example, and re-working phrases from the modern English prose translation of the Latin Life by Richard Sharpe into the poem’s beginning, Should a guest blow in from the north of Ireland buffeted by the wind and end:60 58 Shadow Script: Twelve Poems for Lindisfarne and Bamburgh, ed. Colette Bryce (Newcastle: Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts, 2013). The other poets involved in this commission were: Gillian Allnutt, Linda Anderson, Peter Armstrong, Peter Bennet, Christy Drucker, Alistair Elliott, Linda France, Bill Herbert, Pippa Little, and Sean O’Brien. For Colm Cille’s Spiral, a set of contemporary commissions of the visual, performing and verbal arts exploring the legacy of St Columba for the UK City of Culture 2013, devised by Lees and the London Arts agency, Difference Exchange, see http://www.kcl.ac.uk/cultural/-/Past-Pro jects/ColmCillesspiral.aspx. 59 For Tom Schofield’s sound poem and Kate Sweeney’s film of the same title, see https://vimeo. com/85153105 and http://movingpoems.com/tag/tom-schofield/. 60 Compare the Life of Columba, ed. Sharpe, I.48, 150.

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ruling a line straight south to Malin Head and home, the sweet district of Ireland.

Malin Head, on the northern coast of Donegal is close to those northern isles such as Iona in Scotland to which Columba sailed as a pilgrim himself. The heron, once recovered from his long journey “far from the north of Ireland” ponders the route “to my old homeland,” as if using a medieval verbal map, and the poem’s association of the saint with the bird, whose arrival is heralded by “a shadow of a cross, afloat on the water” and who is described as “stern as a cleric” seems complete. We seem to be back in an early medieval world of bird-men much like Sweeney, in short. Yet Bryce draws on observation in addition to learning for these images: a large bird flying over water can indeed create a shadow that resembles a cross, while Middle-Irish traditions describe Columba as a crane-cleric or stooping cleric.61 A similarly careful charting of the medieval and the modern is evident in the ways in which the lyricism of Bryce’s modern poem also speaks back not just to the Latin prose of its first iteration nor to the Modern English of its translation, but to the broader tradition of medieval Irish lyrics, especially those about the natural world. Stripping back the narrative prose to its core elements, “Asylum” uncovers a powerful lyricism in its use of rhythm, half-rhyme and alliteration, repetition and conditional clauses, striking in its use of imagery from its first few lines: Should a guest blow in from the north of Ireland buffeted by the wind, Should the shadow of a cross, afloat on the water Mirror the flight of a pilgrim guest Pitching an effortful course through the buffeting gusts This far from the north of Ireland.

Lulled by the lyrical voice in these opening lines (which is even more evident in Bryce’s readings for “Antiphonal”), the poem tempts us to think about a past that is wholly present. Note, for example, the use of the conditional tense oriented towards the future, as in prophecy. If this happens, then the poem says, do this: “you must,” for example, “lift this creature and carry it, gathered / in your arms over the field to the bothy.” Now. This conditional future of a past made present is also startlingly Irish – note “bothy” in the quotation above – and surprisingly modern. The bird loses altitude like a plane; lands like a parachutist “trailing magnificent wings like a cape”; and swallows herrings like pills. “Asylum,” in short, uses the lyric as a place where both medieval and modern coexist, juxtaposed and held, the one in acknowledgment of the other. If the heron 61 Life of Columba, ed. Sharpe, 311–12, n. 203.

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is the ostensible subject of the poem’s compassion and environmental care and home its unattainable object, then so too is the past itself. This effect is rendered all the more powerful because “Asylum” withholds any knowledge about its speakers and its addressee. The poem does not identify the prophecy formally as Columba’s, although both Columba and Adomn#n are acknowledged at the foot of the poem, nor does it identify the “you” of the addressee as a monk or brother. The religious setting is pared back to just one image of the shadow, like a cross. The lyric voice of the poem, and its addressee, “you,” speaks to “us” in its immediacy and so the poem finds a kinship between this old prophecy about a bird, the poet, her poem and her audience. To the extent that The Whole & Rain-Domed Universe is partly a reflection on life in the Troubles of the 1970s and 80s, “Asylum” with its themes of care and cure as well as pilgrimage take on pointedly new meanings. After all, it is asylum that is at stake here, safety as well as hospitality, in a home that might be temporary (“your small island”) away from the “sweet district” of Ireland, from which return may or may not be possible. At the same time, the lyricism of “Asylum” contrasts powerfully with “Derry,” that other key poem in the collection. “Asylum” breaks into the first person and present tense only once, when the voice of the poem solicits kindness from “you” because both heron and human share the same homeland. Lifted out of the idiom of prophecy, vocalizing instead a kind of wisdom literature – this is a poem which demands to be read aloud – “Asylum” offers another homeland to set alongside that signposted by the bird’s flight directly to that most northerly point of Malin Head. This home, I think, is a literary one, where the long craft of words and stories, past and present, shadow one another, moving from place to place, breathing new meanings into old ones, sharing both a home and a desire for one, acting with generosity and care for the world, hosts and guests to one another, however buffeted by the winds of time.

In Three Poems Bryce’s “Asylum” is the third and final of my modern poems that engage creatively with explicitly Christian early medieval literature from a post-Christian, secular context. These poems are acts of imaginative travel – flights through time and space – re-working old stories in new contexts in startlingly lyrical ways, and they demonstrate the extent to which early medieval literature is available for poetic reflection today. If hermits and herons, maddened bird-kings, blood money and war, exile and prophecy do not seem the most contemporary of poetic subjects, these poems leave us in no doubt about the importance of their arguments about writing, learning and poetry, the rights of the innocent and care for the other – avian or human – as well as the importance of a safe home,

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sheltered from violence and war. Taken together, “Hermit Songs,” “Lex Innocentis 697,” and “Asylum” argue that the genres of the lyric, the song and the elegy are places where the medieval and the modern can meet. “Hermit Songs” is most explicitly engaged in understanding and celebrating the relationship between the medieval and the modern in terms of continuity and steadiness. “Lex Innocentis 697” and “Asylum” draw out from old material new perspectives, and both poems are concerned with forms of protection. Duffy’s elegy centers on women – a contrast which makes Heaney’s masculine focus in “Hermit Songs” all the more evident – while the anonymity of the lyrical voice of “Asylum” moves it away from the voice of the saintly prophet into a shared future, where “you” and “I” are called on to engage with the necessity of caring for others.62 Each of these poems, in sum, curates new homes for the past in the lyric present, but they do so in ways far removed from those of the heritage industry or forms of medievalism invested in recreation and reconstruction. What they offer instead is a poetic awareness of the long reach of the literary past, the importance of taking care “by rights,” and environmental compassion. We might understand that jubilant birdsong at the beginning of “Hermit Songs,” those unexpressed crows with their “Strange Fruit” in “Lex Innocentis 697,” and that exhausted heron in “Asylum” as expressions of this lyrical engagement with and care for the world. Thinking small and peripherally about American/Medieval turns out to be a route into a re-examination of how modern English-language poetry can start in a place and time –the early medieval past of the kingdoms of Ireland and the early Christian community of Iona – and end in another apparently far removed – modern Ireland, Scotland, England and indeed America. And, along the way, uncover a kinship with and respect for the past in all its varieties in the present. Put differently, these poems argue for a postdisciplinary criticism, generous in its awareness of the importance of multiple approaches to poetry, place and culture. This, I would argue, is one expression of the American/Medieval.

Bibliography Adomn#n of Iona. The Life of St. Columba. Edited by William Reeves. Dublin: Irish Archaeological and Celtic Society, 1857. . Life of St Columba. Edited and translated by Richard Sharpe. London: Penguin, 1995.

62 A preliminary account of Heaney’s emphasis on men, including a critique of Vendler’s dismissal of feminist criticism is Fran Brearton’s “Heaney and the Feminine,” The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney, ed. Bernard O’Donoghue, 73–91.

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Riordan, Maurice, editor. The Finest Music: Early Irish Lyrics. London: Faber & Faber, 2014. Shichtman, Martin B., Laurie A. Finke and Kathleen Coyne Kell.y. “’The world is my home when I”m mobile’: Medieval Mobilities.” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 4 (2013): 125–35. Vendler, Helen, Seamus Heaney. Boston, Massachussetts: Harvard University Press, 1998. . “Seamus Heaney’s ‘Sweeney Redivivus’: Its Plot and Its Poems.” Reprinted in The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar : Essays on Poets and Poetry, 332–55. Boston, Massachussetts: Harvard University Press, 2015. Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. London: Hogarth Press, 1941. Yeats, W. B. The Tower. London: Macmillan, 1928.

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The Fox and the Furry: The Animal Tale and Virtual Narrative in Rhetorical Narrative Analysis

Introduction The very idea of an “American/Medieval” begs the questions, in what way can cultural traits, practices and predilections be seen as stemming from similar medieval roots? Do similarities between two cultures, one of which may only exist in memory, imply antecedents, or mere quotes, or do they rather point to a more universal pattern that gave rise to both? Can a distinction be made between a survival and simple continuity? Does the transposition of space as well as time (from Europe to the Americas) play a significant role in our assumptions about continuity of culture, and its simultaneous fracturing? This essay will answer none of these questions satisfactorily, but offers a perspective from rhetorical narrative analysis as a first step toward an answer. Taking as an example of such frustration, hope, and indetermination an enduring narrative form, the animal tale, this essay tracks how the animal tale genre “evolves” from the ancient fable to the carnivalesque trickster parables of medieval Europe and America, to its latest incarnations in the virtual world. The animal tale serves throughout as a fascinating example of the way fact and fiction intertwine in narrative form in the minds of a public audience, and in a medium where little distinction can be made between speaker or writer and audience or reader – whether in the electronic public sphere or in the medieval commons. One might reasonably expect a break between European and American folk traditions given the change in social and historical contexts. Yet in the example to follow, we can see as much continuity as break, not only between Europe and America, the Old World and the New, the Medieval and the Modern, but also between oral and literate forms. Especially in postmodernity, the resurgence of folk narrative as post rather than pre-literate social practice, made possible by the rapid proliferation of social media, allows pre-literate forms that have always been with us to flourish in a new redrawing of the lines between the sacred and the profane.

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Noting the surprising continuity in the narrative sequence of animal tales, we observe a stability that was first identified by Vladimir Propp1 for the Russian fairy tale. To make an argument for such stability, I begin with Aesop, and continue with the development of a consistent animal character in the medieval tradition of Reynard the Fox and in the American folk tales of Brer Rabbit. I then show how this stability in the sequence of tales in the oral tradition also links and encourages narrative invention and collaboration in contemporary electronic media. Throughout this journey, I will show that within a particular narrative type, for instance the animal fable or the trickster cycle, or the coming out narrative, there is a stable sequence that allows for collaborative contributions and endless variation. At the same time, individual elements, characters, motifs and themes can be transferred from one type to another as discrete components from the sequence in which they were previously embedded.

Animal Tales and Narrative Theory in Western Civic Tradition The Animal Tale is seemingly as old as human culture, with examples to be found all over the world, both in ancient and modern times. Animals in folklore and myth are often treated as mirrors of human society, as metaphors, and as bridges between human and divine worlds. We see ourselves and read ourselves in animal form. An ancient poem in the book of Amos eloquently captures the mirror function of the animal world, in this case portraying the acts and intentions of God. Amos 3:3 3:4 b 3:5 b 3:6 b 3:8

Do two walk together unless they agreed to meet? Does a lion roar in the scrub when it has taken no prey? Does a young lion give voice from its lair unless it has made a catch? Does a bird drop to the earth when there is no lure for it? Does a trap spring up from the ground and yet catch nothing? If the shofar is blown in the city then won’t the people shiver? If harm befalls a city then hasn’t YHWH done it?[…] The lion has roared; who will not fear?

1 Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folk Tale, ed. Louis A. Wagner, trans. Laurence Scott, 2nd ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968).

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YHWH has spoken; who will not prophesy?2

This remarkable prophetic poem presents a series of rhetorical questions. The meaning of the poem depends on its audience knowing “the way of” an animal in its habitat to indicate that God is just as inexorable in his providence as the lion’s roar or the trap shutting on a bird. The animal with its habits reflects the order of things. The great myths are told in a world where human beings and divine beings interact in a timeless cycle. Most narrative theory has dealt with the great stories, the myths of the seasons of earth and the hero quest. Albert Lord in The Singer of Tales3 took on the Homeric cycle. Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, suggested large scale parallels among the great hero stories of the world from Hercules to Jesus as narrated in the myth of the dying and rising god.4 As noted above, Vladimir Propp worked with the material of the Russian structuralists who collected, dissected and enumerated the elements of Russian fairy tales. After analyzing thousands of elements previously known as motifs vs. themes (fabula v. sujet), Propp discovered that while functions might appear or disappear in thousands of stories, the sequence in which they occur is remarkably stable. Identifying and sequencing a total of thirty one character functions, Propp speculated that there may be “only one story” into which all the folktales may be fitted at some point in the sequence. Propp derived four principles from his research, three of which can be cross-applied with only small adaptation. To begin with, character functions are the stable elements of a tale, no matter how or by whom they are applied. Secondly, within a specific type (the fairy-tale) the number of functions is always limited. Thirdly, the sequence of functions is always identical. The fourth principle simply states that all fairy tales in all their variations nonetheless constitute a single type. I argue that this can be said for fables as well. Propp did not investigate other narrative forms, yet it seems clear that the animal tale or fable represents a distinct type which cannot be reconciled to another type and which has its own set of stable functions.5 While I will demonstrate the fabular sequence below in more detail, it may be stated here that the differences between the fable and the epic or hero quest are many. Among the most salient are that the fabular sequence is much shorter than the epic or hero quest; there is no central character (“hero”); the animal fable 2 Author’s translation. Cf. New Revised Standard Version. 3 Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales, 2d ed.. Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 24 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). 4 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: Pantheon, 1949). 5 Propp, Morphology, 21–24.

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centers on a single obstacle or dispute followed by a moral which may be incorporated in the story or left to the hearers to educe. Most importantly, the hero quest is tragic or high romance, while the fable is essentially comic and satirical in its tone.6 To exemplify his thesis in his essay on the “narrative paradigm,” Walter Fisher, like Campbell, Propp and Lord, turned to the great epics.7 Fisher’s model is the epic of Gilgamesh – another hero journey. Fisher situates narrative in the realm of rhetoric by treating it as a means of public judgment. He noted that audiences generate reasons based on narrative probability and fidelity. Both criteria entail the accessibility of narrative memory in collective audience knowledge. Rhetorical treatments of narrative thus diverge from literary narrative by their emphasis on publicity, collectivity, and collaboration in the invention of tales. Narratives break down into motifs that offer a standpoint for judgment in the way that these motifs exist in public memory, and in the way they can be threaded together in various themes or arrangements forms distinct tales. Narratives exist as virtual frames in public memory, thus in the mind of the audience, where they are used to form judgments about the stories we tell. Because his work focuses on narrative as a means of making judgments, Fisher’s approach to narrative is necessarily audience-centered. He provides us with a simple rubric by which audiences make judgments. Fisher’s emphasis on the publicity of narrative judgment identifies the moral matrix where speaker and audience are one, that is, the world of public memory. The two axes formed by narrative frames used to produce judgments are probability, i. e., does the story produce an intelligible narrative arc from beginning to end? And fidelity, i. e., does the story resolve itself to an existing narrative frame, does it belong to a family of stories?8 These two axes have the simplicity of a natural structure because they conform to time and space: to the time it takes to tell a single story and to the space in our storehouse of memory in which many stories are held. Importantly, rhetorical narrative theory also prepares a way to view how fictional narratives and social realities interact. Burke noted this interaction when he observed that “symbols are verbal parallels to a pattern of experience.”9 In other words, symbols move audiences because they key into, replicate and amplify the patterns of common, shared experiences. The stability of narrative sequence exists because it mirrors the stable courses of human life. Lives, like stories, have beginnings, middles and ends. Victor Turner noted that the pat6 Kenneth Burke, Attitudes toward History, 3rd ed., (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1984). 7 Walter R. Fisher, ”Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument,” Communication Monographs 51 (1984): 1–22. 8 Fisher, “Narration,”16. 9 Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement, 2nd ed. (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1968).

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terns of social drama in an African community mirrored the “character functions” of their stories. He proposed a “feedback loop” between fictional roles and social positions such that “social drama” informs the plots of stage drama while the characters and elements of stage drama in turn feed our responses in social situations (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Social Drama and Stage Drama according to Victor Turner. Source of Image: Victor Turner.10

The long history of literary narrative may favor the long form, the epic scale, and the hero journey of the singular artist. Yet stable narrative sequence also inhabits a smaller-scaled world, where animals reflect human qualities in a more satirical, didactic but friendlier and funnier voice. Narrative in virtual worlds, with its collaborative, ad hoc design where audience and authorship merge, has more in common with this short form. The approach to narrative that best illuminates this world, then, is a view where stable narrative sequence allows for shared narrative and audience judgment. Writing in the 4th century BCE, Apthonius gave to the world the “who what when where how and why” of classical narrative theory in his magnum opus Progymnasmata.11 The influence of this work far exceeds its name. It became a standard textbook of rhetoric throughout the medieval period. Apthonius’ work takes the form of distinct exercises for which he needed identifiable narrative forms that could be named and incorporated into larger orations as called for. Thus there is a mimetic function to the tales of Aphthonius. They are meant to be imitated and used as templates for similar narratives to be inserted into speeches as already structured mnemonic devices for both speaker and audience. Among the many narrative types Apthonius defines that still have currency are the fable, including the “ethical fable,” which is a story with a moral set in the animal world, and the civil tale, “which is the type the public orators use in their cases.”12 Apthonius also collected a volume of animal tales from the legendary Aesop. The animal tales recorded by Apthonius always had a civic function. In Progymnasmata, however, Apthonius distinguishes them from the civic tale as 10 Victor Turner, “Social Dramas and Stories about Them,” Critical Inquiry 1 (1980): 141–168. 11 Apthonius, “The Progymnasmata of Aphthonius in Translation,” trans. Ray Nadeau, Speech Monographs 19, no. 4 (1952): 264–85. 12 Ibid., 265.

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told by the orators. Apthonius prefaced each animal tale with a subject heading and added an explanation with a suggested audience at the end of each tale. Implicitly or explicitly, these stories were intended as direct object lessons in human character. The term “character” requires some examination. The Greek ethos is the term from which we derive ethics. Even in Aristotle, however, ethos does not refer exclusively to matters of virtue and vice, good and evil. Instead, Aristotle discusses the “character” of the speaker as the strongest form of proof.13 Apthonius used the term to define the “moral” tale; most, but not all of the tales ascribed to Aesop had animal heroes, and Apthonius explicitly defines his moral tale as a narrative with animal subjects. In archaic Greek, in fact, ethos referred to the habits or “lay” of an animal in its native habitat, much as in the Hebrew example above.14 After Aristotle, Theophrastus wrote the primer On Characters, a collection of stock characters possibly from the theater, exemplifying various virtues and vices to be used in oratory.15 In the animal tale, the character functions as observed by Propp thus have always included a character judgment, that is, a civic and social meaning that engages narrative judgment. Animal tales as such do not always have “morals” and not all tales with morals are about animals. Yet there is a rightness to the notion that animal “habits” hold up a mirror to human character. A brief look at Aesop’s Fables reveals a stable sequence analogous to that found by Propp et al. in the Russian fairytale.16 Without delving into an exhaustive inventory of all possible variations on the form, I propose that the five step sequence can be roughly defined as I. Character Entry ; II. Action / Obstacle / Conflict; III. Conversation with Opposing Character ; IV. Resolution and V. Insight (Moral). An example of this five-fold sequence is the well-known story of the Fox and the Grapes. Two of the oldest versions of this fable are recorded by Phaedrus, a Latin author of the 1st century, and as an anonymous Greek fable collected by Chambry. Version one involves the fox alone; version two introduces an opposing character, a mouse. The outline of the sequence is as follows: [I Character Entry] Driven by hunger, a fox tried to reach some grapes hanging high on the vine. [II Action/Obstacle/Conflict] Although she leaped with all her strength, she couldn’t manage to reach the grapes. 13 Aristotle, Gorgias and Art of Rhetoric, trans. Joe Sachs (Newburyport, MA: Focus Books, 2009), 1356a. 14 Charles Chamberlain, ”From Haunts to Character : The Meaning of Ethos and Its Relation to Ethics,” Helios 11 (1984): 97–108. 15 Theophrastus, The Characters, trans. J. M. Edmonds, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967). 16 Laura Gibbs, Aesop’s Fables (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

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[IV Resolution] As she went away, the fox remarked, “Oh, you aren’t even ripe yet! I don’t need any sour grapes.” [V Insight] People who speak disparagingly of things that they cannot attain would do well to apply this instructive little story to their own lives.

Note that in this brief fable a character function is omitted, the Conversation. The second version of the story includes it: [I Character Entry] A fox saw a cluster of grapes hanging from a trellis and wanted to eat them, [II Action/Obstacle/Conflict] but the grapes were too high and she could not find a way to get at them. [III Conversation] A mouse saw the fox and grinned as he said, “You’ll have to go hungry!” [IV Resolution] The fox didn’t want a mouse to have the last word, so she replied, “Those grapes are sour!” [V Insight] The fable indicts wicked people who refuse to listen to reason.17

We can quickly conclude that there is indeed a stable sequence in these stories. Moreover, with insight supplied from the field of rhetoric, we can state that this sequence exists in public knowledge and plays a determining role in generating new examples of the type. Examine the two tales placed first by Laura Gibbs in her recently compiled edition of Aesop’s Fables. Both are meta-narratives, that is, stories about the story. One is told of Demades, another of Demosthenes, both orators. Both are fables embedded in surrounding narratives about these famous orators. In the Demades story collected by Chambry, Demades is trying to address his audience and cannot get their attention until he offers them a fable. The sequence analysis is as follows. [I Character Entry] The goddess Demeter, a swallow, and an eel were walking together down the road. [II Action/Obstacle/Conflict] When they reached a river, the swallow flew up in the air and the eel jumped into the water.18

At this point Demades stops. Note that not only has he stopped before the resolution, but he started with three characters and only gave actions to two out of the three. This prompts the audience to as what happens to Demeter, and gives Demades his punch line: “she is angry at all of you for preferring Aesop’s fables to politics!” The second of these meta-fables is given to Demosthenes, collected by Perry from pseudo-Plutarch’s Lives of the Ten Orators. Demosthenes, known for his

17 Gibbs, Aesop’s Fables, fables 255 and 256. 18 Ibid., fable 1.

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copiousness, is prevented from giving his speech, and so he tells a fable. The sequence analysis is as follows: [I Character Entry] It was summertime, and a young man had hired a donkey to take him from Athens to Megara. [II Action/Obstacle/Conflict] At midday, when the sun was blazing hot, the young man and the donkey’s driver both wanted to sit in the donkey’s shadow. They began to jostle one another, fighting for the spot in the shade. [III Conversation] The driver maintained that the man had rented the donkey but not his shadow, while the young man claimed that he had rented the donkey and all the rights thereto.

Once again there is no resolution. At this point in the story, Demosthenes starts to walk away. The audience demands to hear the rest of the fable, and he turns it on a play on words: the “donkey’s shadow” is an expression for trivial subjects: “You wanted to hear all about the donkey’s shadow but you refuse to pay attention when someone talks to you of serious matters!”19 In each story, the audience is reluctant to listen to the serious message of the politician/orator. And in each story, the orator punishes his audience by cutting the story short of the expected resolution, thus prompting the audience to demand it. From this we can establish that there exists a stable sequence in which each version is embedded, and that this sequence is accessible to audience knowledge.

American/Medieval: Stories of Reynard the Fox and Brer Rabbit We reach a “new” type of animal tale with the medieval stories of Reynard the Fox.20 Animal tales with a moral are one form; an animal trickster figure is closely related only on two points of comparison: the characters are animals and the animals are drawn from their habits as they appear to us when translated to human characters. In this type, a single animal is the hero, with a character that is partially drawn from the animal’s behavior in nature, but given human characteristics and foibles. So Reynard the Fox could be drawn from Aesopian fables about the trickster fox, yet becomes the subject of a beast epic where he is called to account for his crimes at the court of the Lion King. We might postulate that a collection of fables revolved in oral tradition around the trickster fox to be given literary form around the device of a court trial, where each animal who encounters the fox may tell its story. The interesting aspect of the Reynard stories for our purpose is that there is yet again a civic dimension to these stories, 19 Ibid., fable 2. 20 James Simpson, Reynard the Fox: A New Translation (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015).

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since the traditional stories are grouped around the narrative sequence of the courtroom trial as drawn from medieval society. The main character of the fox takes on a carnivalesque quality, since throughout the cycle he thumbs his nose at the “authorities” who are haplessly attempting to dispense justice and restore order. In the process, the hypocrisy of the authorities stands revealed. This portrayal can still be traced to roots in the observed “character” of the wily fox. The American tradition of the animal tale, however, probably owes as much or more to Brer Rabbit as to Reynard. The origins of the Brer Rabbit stories are disputed. Joel Chandler Harris, who first published his written version of the stories, portrayed them as told by African slaves, and many have associated them with the West African Ananse stories.21 Yet, at least one scholar makes a convincing case for a Native American origin of these stories.22 Once again, attempts to trace a genealogy of cultural affinities with animal tales ends in yet another question. The Brer Rabbit cycle, similarly to Reynard’s beast epic, revolves around a single animal “hero” who survives on its wits. Undeniably, Brer Rabbit is a trickster figure, but rather than depicting the triumph of outrageous wickedness over inept authorities, it portrays the escape of the weak from wicked, more powerful enemies in keeping with the animal character of the rabbit. It is Brer Rabbit, rather than Reynard, who no doubt represents the most immediate influence on Disney’s short animated cartoons using animal tales. Yet as is true for Reynard’s epic, Mr. Fox is a prominent character in the Brer Rabbit stories. Both fox and rabbit appear in Aesop, and like Reynard, Brer Rabbit is a trickster animal who is the focal character of a group of tales with clear character judgments and social lessons. From this point of analysis and comparison, we are ready to look at the Animal Tale in virtual worlds.

Animal Tales in Virtual Worlds I first encountered the world of “furries” – carnivalesque portrayals of anthropomorphic animals – in the role play communities of Second Life. One of the features that makes Second Life (SL) and other user operated 3D graphic interfaces unique among social networks is that they combine aspects of game with aspects of social media. The free-form universe of Second Life allows users within it to create their own space, and to some extent control access to it within 21 Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1906); Molefi Kete Asante, “Ananse,” Encyclopedia of African Religion, ed. Molefi Kete Asante and Ama Mazama, Vol. 1, 44–45. (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2009). 22 Jay Hanford C. Vest, “From Bobtail to Brer Rabbit: Native American Influences on Uncle Remus,” American Indian Quarterly 24, no. 1 (2000): 19–43.

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the framework of the SL medium. Yet, because users can move around at will in the virtual space while remaining within the same viewer experience and in simultaneous communication with other users anywhere in Second Life, many online enclaves that have created outposts in Second Life have been forced to adapt to encounters with strangers. More so than with other enclaves in the virtual world, Second Lifers interact almost at random with avatars from every corner of the globe and many different persuasions, lifestyles, and kinks. In this environment, the exchanges take place in a virtual analog of face to face communication and real time chat. Moreover, chat is somewhat moderated by Community Standards – users who feel there has been a violation may file an abuse report, and the most efficient response from the parent company, Linden Labs, is a passive one, that is, to delete the account of the offending avatar much as YouTube will take down offending material once a complaint has been filed.23 There are dozens of distinct role play communities each with their own identity and various extensions in and out of Second Life, intersecting with fictional forms from science fiction, fantasy, and historical fiction. They include elaborate BDSM (Bondage/Dominance/Sadism/Masochism) scenarios and fictional fan worlds based on the Gor novels of John Norman. Norman published the first book in his series, Tarnsman of Gor, in 1966 and went on to turn out dozens of them, leading to a distinct fan fiction subculture of its own.24 This fan fiction BDSM community entered Second Life around 2003–2004 and there has mingled with urban themed capture role play, owing as much to Grand Theft Auto as it does to BDSM; fantasy creatures from the themed gamer universe of Dungeons and Dragons, modern and steampunk scifi, Gothic horror including vampirism, Neko and Anime, and furry fandom.25 Conflicts arise among these groups as they each struggle to maintain their factual or fictional integrity as coherent worlds. Yet unlike the world of discussion boards and blogs, a certain interpersonal decorum persists and is adhered to by most. In what is about to follow we discover very little such decorum. The postmodern cultural niche occupied by furries may be differentiated from its modern antecedents – cartoons and stories depicting anthropomorphic animals – by the prominent addition of adult content. Important antecedents include the comic strip Fritz the Cat,26 and George Orwell’s Animal Farm.27 23 Community Standards (Linden Research, Inc., 2014). 24 John Norman, Tarnsman of Gor (New York, Ballantine, 1966). 25 Damon Brown, Porn & Pong: How Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider and Other Sexy Games Changed our Culture (Los Angeles, CA.: Feral House, 2008); Rosa Mikeal Martey and Mia Consalvo, “Performing The Looking-Glass Self: Avatar Appearance And Group Identity In Second Life.” Popular Communication 9, no. 3 (2011): 165–180. 26 Robert Crumb, The Complete Fritz the Cat (New York: Belier Press, 1978). 27 George Orwell, Animal Farm (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1946).

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While many volunteer furry historians connect the furry sensibility all the way back to Aesop, more concrete accounts cite the 38th World Science Fiction Convention, held at Boston in 1980. At the convention, artist Steve Gallacci entered a painting of an anthropomorphic feline in a modern combat situation.28 The ensuing discussions led to meetings at subsequent conventions and eventually conventions devoted exclusively to furry fandom were established. Full blown carnevale ensued as furry conventions took off from these roots, complete with displays of fan fiction and art, and elaborate costumes. These conventions offered opportunity for participants to leave behind normal existence and for a week or a weekend inhabit a world shaped only by the limits of the imagination. It is less clear at what point the narrative of furry civil rights surfaced. In a way, the opening for it was latent, ready to be occupied before furry fandom existed as a group. In 1969, the second episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus featured a sketch titled “The Mouse Problem.”29 The sketch brilliantly parodies the then current issue of gay coming out and the criminalization of homosexuality by portraying coming out as a mouse lover, mouse identifier, complete with costumes and clubs, arrests and so forth. It has been flagged as a tongue-in–cheek “antecedent” for online participants in the furry saga. Whenever it began, by the time Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) aired an episode titled “Fur and Loathing,” in October 2003, the narrative of human rights for furries was embedded. Faced with a request to remove their masks for interviews, a furry artist announces, “You wouldn’t ask a human lady to take her make-up off. If you want to talk to me, this is the ‘me’ you’re going to talk to.”30 Despite its clearly fictional, parodic origins, by about 2007 the fur was flying on both sides of the furry civil rights debate, with players on both sides blending civil and fictional roles seamlessly. At Anthrocon 2007, parodists staged a small protest outside the doors of the hotel and met resistance from the furries inside. Two opposing sites both describe the “YouTube Furry War” of 2007–2008, when some fur fans got tired of being the butt of internet humor and organized a resistance campaign.31 Both sides of this semi-parodic controversy stepped into roles prepared for them by civil rights campaigns, especially respecting sexual orientation as a civil rights issue. As the wars rolled on, they filtered out sincere lifestylers from gamers, and straightforward haters from parodists. In rhetorical narrative analysis, the unfolding furry story emerges as a tale of 28 Fred Patton, “Retrospective: An Illustrated Chronology of Furry Fandom, 1966–1996,” Flayrah: Furry Food for Thought (15 July 2012). 29 “The Mouse Problem,” Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Season 1. Episode 2, Sex and Violence (BBC. Aired 12 October, 1969). 30 “Fur and Loathing,” Crime Scene Investigation, Season 4 Episode 5, @19:20 (CBS, Aired 30 Oct. 2003). 31 “YouTube Furry War,” Encyclopedia Dramatica; and “YouTube Furry War,” Wiki-fur.

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individuation. Reactivating the foundation of animal tales, it hybridizes two prior animal narrative types – Greek moral fable and American/Medieval trickster cycle – and adds a third, the furry identity or coming out story. In the resulting complex, we can easily observe the character functions of the narrative of alternate identity in sequence. For instance, in a post to Democraticunderground.com a furry known as undergroundpanther states the sequence analysis manifests as follows: [I. Discovery] “Everyone gets a fake identity(ies) IMPOSED upon us from childhood on.. and some who are creative… will invent their own damn identity” [II. Oppression] “Bigotry always has the same ugly preferences” [III. Resistance] “Humanity often makes me sick inside. I do not like feeling sick. So I reject society, reject my gender role, the sexuality I was born in and I reject the human species,” [IV. Organization] “And I found other furries others who also walk beside me outside the wall.” [V. Backlash] “Every time a person transgresses a popular cultural lie, or ‘role’ there is backlash aimed at them.”32

These elements move around from one theme to another, but true to Propp’s observation, almost always in the same order once omissions and variations are taken into account. “The Mouse Problem,” for instance, begins with “Discovery” in the first scene, only to stop the first person narrative and switch to a narrative of explanation and liberal acceptance, which type in its turn becomes the target of parodic “furry hate.” In contrast to the furry individuation story, the anti-furry theme is one of group bonding around a common hate. An article by the parodic wiki, Encyclopedia Dramatica, appears to be a parodic anti-furry manifesto. Its narrative elements, despite occupying the character function of communal rejection, use the same sequence as the tale of individuation but adopts the opposite role within it. The sequence analysis for one of the postings used as an example is as follows: [I. Discovery} “If all furries were firm-bodied seventeen-year-old girls in bunny suits, with nice tits and a preference for the better race, there’d be no need for an ED article and we’d be too busy to write one. Unfortunately, furries are just the opposite and they want to convert you…” [II. Rejection] “Furries are the scum of the earth, and the surest candidates for dying alone” (and ad lib.) [III. Confrontation omitted]… [IV. Censorship] “Since furry existence revolves around WikiEdit Drama, many of Wikipedia’s admins are furfags,” 32 Undergroundpanther, “Why Furry Is a GBLT Issue,” Democraticunderground.com (6 April 2008).

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[V. Backlash] “What to do if a friend is infected: They’ll need help. Not mental help, but the kind of help where you take them to a concealed area and shove both barrels of a 12gauge into the back of their oblivious fursuit-covered head and pull both triggers without remorse.”33

This article, on a site known for its offensive speech, is a distillation of a great volume of anti-furry speech to be found on the net. Taken together, the stable narrative sequence across these two opposing narratives functions as stases – existing stages in the sequence at which the two narratives meet to “argue.”

Conclusions What can we learn from these examples? It is disturbing to see issues of basic identity formation and sexual orientation carnivalized and perhaps trivialized by the adoption of a civil rights narrative to justify a highly selective fictionalized identity, and at the same time to see how freely others around the net step into the character position of bigotry and pursue it purely for amusement. Some of this may be due to the nature of the net forums. With no physical or virtual proximity and no real time interaction with the other, posts to blogs and discussion boards become speech, not to the other, but about the other, addressed to an implied audience of like-minded readers. Without authority, carnival streams unchecked and becomes mere anarchy. Nevertheless, we can discern in both subtypes a stable sequence that lends a measure of predictability to the path by which the stories will propagate. We see that we have traced the motif of the animal character along with many of its traits across multiple narrative types, from the animal fable to the trickster cycle and medieval epic to the comic furry identity tale and its parodic shadow, furry hate. In each type, the animal form imports its character to a new story and a new narrative sequence. We can also discern, in the oppositional character of the animal narratives, a means of judgment. We can then judge it based on fidelity to the underlying elements of the narrative, as well as on the probability of a particular theme. Let us not, then, pass judgment on the players. Let us rather use this example to examine the animal narratives we construct and hold in public memory in order to learn more about the role of imagination in memory, and the way civil and fictional elements combine in the field of public judgment. The animal tale lives on, acquiring new meanings in every epoch. Remarkably, it does so without losing its ancient purpose as a focus of narrative judgment.

33 “Furfag,” Encyclopedia Dramatica.

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Bibliography Aphthonius. “The Progymnasmata of Aphthonius in Translation.” Translated by Ray Nadeau. Speech Monographs 19, no. 4 (1952): 264–85. Aristotle. Gorgias and Art of Rhetoric. Translated by Joe Sachs. Newburyport, MA: Focus Books, 2009. Asante, Molefi Kete. “Ananse.” Encyclopedia of African Religion. Edited by Molefi Kete Asante and Ama Mazama. Vol. 1, 44–45. (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2009). Gale Virtual Reference Library, accessed 10 Jan. 2016. Brown, Damon. Porn & Pong: How Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider and Other Sexy Games Changed our Culture. Los Angeles, CA.: Feral House, 2008. Burke, Kenneth. Attitudes toward History. 3rd ed. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1984. ____. Counter-Statement. 2nd ed. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1968. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York: Pantheon, 1949. Chamberlain, Charles. “From Haunts to Character : The Meaning of Ethos and Its Relation to Ethics.” Helios 11 (1984): 97–108. Community Standards. Linden Research, Inc., 2014. https://secondlife.com/corporate/cs. php.(accessed July 2016). Crumb, Robert. The Complete Fritz the Cat. New York: Belier Press, 1978. Fisher, Walter R. “Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument.” Communication Monographs 51 (1984): 1–22. “Fur and Loathing.” Crime Scene Investigation. Season 4 Episode 5. CBS. Aired 30 Oct. 2003. “Furfag.” Encyclopedia Dramatica. .(accessed July 2016). Gibbs, Laura. Aesop’s Fables. Edited and translated by Laura Gibbs. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002. Harris, Joel Chandler. Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1906. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/22282/22282-h/22282-h.htm. Lord, Albert B. The Singer of Tales. 2d ed. Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 24. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2000. Martey, Rosa Mikeal and Mia Consalvo. ”Performing The Looking-Glass Self: Avatar Appearance And Group Identity In Second Life.” Popular Communication 9, no. 3 (2011): 165–180. “The Mouse Problem.” Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Sex and Violence. Season 1. Episode 2. BBC. Aired 12 October, 1969. Norman, John. Tarnsman of Gor. New York: Ballantine, 1966. Orwell, George. Animal Farm. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1946. Patten, Fred. “Retrospective: An Illustrated Chronology of Furry Fandom, 1966–1996.” Flayrah: Furry Food for Thought. 15 July 2012. .(accessed July 2016). Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folk Tale. Ed. Louis A. Wagner. Translated by Laurence Scott. 2nd ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968.

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Simpson, James, trans. Reynard the Fox: A New Translation. New York: W. W. Norton, 2015. Theophrastus. The Characters. Translated by J. M. Edmonds. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967. Turner, Victor. “Social Dramas and Stories about Them.” Critical Inquiry 1 (1980) : 141–168. undergroundpanther. ”Why Furry Is a GBLT Issue.” Democraticunderground.com. 6 April 2008. http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all& address=221x70717 (accessed July 2016). Vest, Jay Hansford. “From Bobtail to Brer Rabbit: Native American Influences on Uncle Remus.” American Indian Quarterly 24/1 (2000): 19–43. “YouTube Furry War.” Encyclopedia Dramatica. https://encyclopediadramatica.se/You Tube_Furry_War.

Ulrike Wiethaus

The Black Swan and Pope Joan: Double Lives and the American/Medieval “My image of History would have at least two bodies in it, at least two persons talking, arguing, always listening to the other as they gestured at their books; and it would be a film, not a still picture, so that you could see that sometimes they wept, sometimes they were astonished, sometimes they were knowing, and sometimes they laughed with delight.” Natalie Zemon Davis1

Introduction During my graduate studies in the US in the early eighties, the second feminist wave was in full force – exhilarating, energizing, and, as was gradually discovered, also laced with plenty of blind spots. From coast to coast, US activists worked to undo a gendered system of interlocking habits of economic, legal, and social discrimination derived from European practices and ideologies. In an act of male solidarity and anything but an insistence on “femfog”, Religious Studies scholars John C. Raines and Daniel C. Maguire convened an international group of male colleagues to critically assess gender injustice in world religions. The title of the ensuing essay collection still rings activist and urgent today given the intersectional persistence of gender inequality and the rise of new anti-feminst men’s movements: What Men Owe to Women.2 In his introduction to the volume, John C. Raines summarized the group’s main findings about gender oppression in world religions. One, world religions mirror 1 Natalie Zemon Davis,“History’s Two Bodies,” The American Historical Review, 93 no.1 (1988), 1–30, 1. This essay is a revised version of an earlier paper published electronically as part of an electronic Festschrift at http://www.cla.temple.edu/religion/seeking-justice-the-journey-ofjohn-raines/, “Pope Joan and the Black Swan: Medieval Christianity as a Resource for Gender Justice in the Church” www.cla.temple.edu/religion/…/Ulrike-Wiethaus.pdf. 2 John C. Raines and Daniel C. Maguire, editors, What Men Owe to Women. Men’s Voices from World Religions (Albany : State University of New York Press, 2001). On the recent controversy about Allen Frantzen’s critique of feminism as “femfog” and his efforts to re-capture male agency, see http://www.allenjfrantzen.com/Men/femfog.html (n.d., accessed February 2nd, 2016).

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social constructions of gender and vice versa; two, that the analysis of religious power is always a choice of political allegiance; three, that culturally specific and culturally competent academic work is needed in order to be accurate and persuasive; and four, that gender justice activism in religious domains demands multiple culturally appropriate tools and tactics.3 The contributors posited that all world religions carry their own seeds of positive change within. In John C. Raines’ words, “each of these religious traditions has a strong theory of social justice, and these resources can be harnessed to contemporary issues of gender. We ask, how can our Scriptures, how can our founding Prophets, how can our ancestors be used today to further justice in relations between genders?”4 This essay offers resources from within medieval European Christianity in a feminist reading of the Christian dogma of hypostatic union, medieval political theory on royal twinning, and medieval legends on the numinous double. Pulling these strands together as a feminist hermeneutics of double lives, the popular medieval story of a ninth century female Pope and the myth of a shape shifting Fairy Lover have served to unhinge hegemonic claims of male and/or Christian superiority, whether in the Middle Ages or in contemporary US culture, as I will argue below.5 As acts of subversive storytelling or a truth to be believed, the story of a female Pope reconnoiters the possibility of a woman’s benevolent reign in the highest ecclesiastical office, and thinks up ingenious ways beyond institutional networks through which women might gain access to male dominated spaces – reimagined as estrogen-free “manospheres” today. The Fairy Lover tales imagine a liberating sexuality and shift perspectives beyond socially imposed restraints of partner choice and sexual identity. Positioned in part or in whole in the dreamlike realm of the numinous and the supernatural, the narratives of doubling invite their audience to undo false consciousness. They insist that women deserve better and deserve more than what a misogynist status quo has to offer. The key to unlock the subversive possibilities of these medieval resources is embedded in the premodern understanding of the self as multiplex rather than unitary, in itself a conceptual phenomenon that reaches deeper into the European past than the medieval period. A medieval self is constructed of a natural and thus mortal body and of an uncanny supernatural double, its soul or spirit. Such medieval doubling has survived in various discursive domains into the modern era. The supernatural double makes appearances in the arts as uncanny Doppelgänger, as evil twin with supernatural powers, and more recently, as free 3 Raines and Maguire, What Men Owe to Women, 5. 4 Ibid., 1. 5 An earlier version of this essay, entitled “Pope Joan’s Two Bodies: Toward a Hermeneutics of Double Lives” has been presented at the 47th International Congress on Medieval Studies in 2012.

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roaming avatar in virtual communities. Margaret D. Zulick’s study of furries in this volume maps the power of and need for such alternative selves.

The Doppelgänger in Religion and Secular Culture In contemporary American Christianity, the composite model of personhood has endured as the divinely ordained union of natural body and supernatural soul, with the soul deserving utmost care in spiritual development.6 In psychoanalytic theory and depth psychology, the axiomatic dyad of conscious and unconscious mind replicates earlier composite structures of the self. It manifests in the Freudian dynamic between ego, super ego, and id, in the Jungian relationship between ego and its shadow, and in the Lacanian process of mirroring. Contemporary neuroscience has confirmed the centrality of the mirroring process for the constitution of a sense of self.7 Seemingly ubiquitous cultural formations of the uncanny double are observable in recorded dreams, fantasies, and the arts. The boundaries between individual fantasy, psychological processes of transformation, and genres of cultural creativity such as film and literature are porous. Indeed, psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas has defined dreams as night fiction and primal theatre. Dream work transforms the self into an observable Other by elaborately and artfully staging a nocturnal “intrasubjective rendezvous” between the subject and the ego.8 In a raw existential reading, the figure of the double points to the paradox of our existence as human beings as we pursue the wish for immortality and avoid the acknowledgment that our demise is unavoidable. Psychoanalyst Otto Rank (1884–1939) was the first to explore this underlying psychological tension in a wide range of literary and religious sources.9 Rank interpreted the function of a double as a coping mechanism to curtail the self ’s fear of death.10 Whether it is perceived through a religious lens as the Chalcedonian dogma of hypostatic union, or seen as the Doppelgänger motif in secular literature and the 6 Soul care is a recognized category among Christian counselors. See Tim Clinton and Ryan Carboneau’s entry on soul care in the Popular Encyclopedia of Christian Counseling, http:// www.aacc.net/2015/01/26/soul-care/. (Accessed February 2nd, 2016). 7 On neuroscience & mirroring processes to establish a self, see J.M. Kilner and R.N. Lemon “What We Know Currently about Mirror Neurons,” Current Biology 23:23 (Dec 2, 2013), 1057–1062. 8 Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object. Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (London: Free Association Books 1987, impression 1999), 64. 9 Otto Rank, The Double. A Psychoanalytic Study. Translated by Roy Huss (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971). 10 In Rank’s summary, “the thought of death is rendered supportable by assuring oneself of a second life, after this one, as a double,” in Rank, The Double, 85.

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arts, or understood as a global spiritual belief in a personal and numinous soul, the numinous twin protects against the threat of physical death by surviving it.11 Preceding physical death, there is also the threat of social death as Orlando Patterson has so forcefully argued.12 In the lives of the subaltern, social death is experienced as systemic social, economic, cultural, and political erasure. In a contemporary secular context, the politically charged function of the subaltern double is elucidated in critical race theory, post-colonial theory, and queer theory through key concepts such as double consciousness, passing, masquerade, mimicry, drag, and impersonation. From nocturnal theatre to queer theory, the double’s ubiquitous appearances are a measure of the vitality of our human need for processes of gemination or twinning and a persona mixta. Transposed into a feminist frame, the concept of a numinous doubling of the self allows for a range of creative moves to counter the threat or the reality of social death. Counter narratives of a potent female double challenge the truth claims of an ideological construction of female selves hemmed in by purportedly immovable social structures. For example, the allure of a numinous female Doppelgänger such as the quintessential American Superwoman can be harnessed as strategic narrative subversion. Lois Lane and her legging-clad double hit the United States comic book market in 1943, a time when women entered the work force in large numbers due to World War II labor shortages (Action Comics #60 May 1943). Within Western religious discourse, medieval miracle stories abound with such doubling. Stories of a female Pope impersonator or of the Virgin Mary who takes the place of a female nun bent on exploring the world beyond monastic walls model subversive acts of medieval female solidarity as much as they convey alternative social realities.13 In a psycho-theological stance of death denial and defiance, medieval Christianity worked the concept of the double into dominant discursive practice as well. The double as figure of thought attained official recognition through the evolution of ecclesiastical dogma. In the fifth century, the Council of Chalcedon created a theological foundation of doubling in the dogma of hypostatic union, which pronounced that the person of Jesus Christ was fully human and fully divine in equal parts. The dogma, never quite without its challengers, eventually 11 In his study, Rank suggested that the Christian concept of the soul is a potent example of religious doubling. He hypothesized that the concept of soul began as the numinous experience of a physical body double and only gradually lost its materiality. Sigmund Freud in turn depended on Rank’s study in his work on the Uncanny. 12 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). 13 For an example of the Virgin Mary as numinous double, see the Dutch legend Beatrijs, printed in E. Colledge, Mediaeval Netherland’s Religious Literature (London and New York: London House & Maxwell, 1965), 123–189. On the development of the Virgin Mary as an icon of compassion, see Rachel Fulton Brown, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia Press, 2005).

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found its way into theocratic ideologies. Medieval historian Ernst H. Kantorowicz brilliantly argued this process of cultural transfer for political and ecclesiastical offices.14 As illustrated in the proclamation “The King is dead, long live the King,” a belief in royal twinning mirrored the dogma of hypostatic union by splitting a king’s identity and authority into a mortal body natural and a supernatural body politic. Royal gemination theory articulated the reasons for the divinization of male monarchs, and Kantorowicz noted that a similar mystification of office shaped the ideological justification of papal and priestly rule as well. Kantorowicz summarized the historical arc of royal and ecclesiastical twinning as an extension of the logic of the Council of Chalcedon as follows: The corporational, non-Christological concept of the Two Bodies of Christ [encompasses]… a body natural, individual, and personal (corpus natural, verum, personale); the other, a super-individual body politic and collective, the corpus mysticum, interpreted also as a persona mystica. Whereas the corpus verum developed a life and mysticism of its own, the corpus mysticum proper came to be less and less mystical as time passed on, and came to mean simply the Church as a body politic or, by transference, any body politic of the secular world.15

The cultural and political Rezeptionsgeschichte (reception history) of the ecclesiastical and royal doubling extended well into the seventeenth century. Although the theological concept of royal gemination eventually lost cache in political history, its pseudo-mystical charisma on the popular level never quite disappeared. In each social domain, however, a byproduct of such royal and ecclesiastical gemination was the legitimization of the exploitative structures of sexism. Not surprisingly, second wave Christian and post-Christian feminists took on the task to deconstruct the ideologically saturated persona mixta mystique of male ecclesiastical authority. Its place of origin were university campuses across the United States. Among the first to do so, radical US theologian Mary Daly articulated some of the feminist implications of an ideological office/person gemination. Daly, who had completed three Ph.D. programs in the United States and Europe with a focus on theology, philosophy, and religion, outlined the implications of such deconstruction in her pioneering study Beyond God the Father : Towards a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation.16 Daly taught at the Jesuit institution of Boston University, and integrated her fight for women’s liberation with animal rights and lesbian empowerment. As is well-known, African 14 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies. A Study in Medieval Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957, seventh edition 1997). 15 Ibid., 206. 16 Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Towards a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973).

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American writer and activist Audre Lorde challenged Daly on her exclusionary focus on whiteness and an ethnocentrism that left unexamined white privilege. Pointing to the need for a change in consciousness through creative reimaginings, Daly famously noted that I [Daly] have already suggested that if God is male, then the male is God. The divine patriarch castrates women as long as he is allowed to live on in the human imagination. The process of cutting away the Supreme Phallus can hardly be a merely “rational” affair. The problem is one of transforming the collective imagination so that this distortion of the human aspiration to transcendence loses its credibility.17

The Supreme Phallus did get cut in the collective imagination, and much earlier than the seventies and eighties. Although religion reproduces racial, political, and economic gender privilege, as Audre Lorde noted even for US radicals such as Daly, and as has been analyzed in a broader global context in studies such as What Men Owe to Women, the social relationships through which such privilege is created and maintained are antagonistic and structurally unstable, and not always fully visible when and where they are stable. The array of “weapons of the weak” is extensive, and as Daly understood, it includes subversive narrative strategies and imaginative counter narrative. Since structural injustice is couched in an idealization of the exploitative status quo, it “inevitably creates the contradictions that permit it to be criticized in its own terms.”18 A European medieval resistance to the social prerogatives of male divinization took narrative shape on the local and communal level, coagulated in cultic practices with a focus on the holiness of female twinning, and traveled widely through story telling. For example, medievalists Vern and Bonnie Bullough, Valerie Hotchkiss, and others have documented the cultural presence and function of cross-dressing women, including the veneration of over thirty female transvestite saints.19 Despite Deuteronomy 22:5, Christian women’s masculine doubling eventually became encoded as a sign of saintliness and the object of cultic veneration on the ground. A sacred icon, the cross-dressed female “body natural” daringly displays an alternate spiritual “body politic,” a critical gemination practice that taunts the exclusionary claims of institutional patriarchal rule. St. Wilgefortis, the celebrated bearded medieval female saint, made a visual comeback in the stunning performance of Conchita Wurst (Tom Neuwirth) at the Eurovision Festival 2012. The media’s embrace of Conchita Wurst signaled a 17 Daly, Beyond God the Father, 19. 18 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak. Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), 317. 19 Vern L. Bullough and Bonnie Bullough, Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993); Valerie R. Hotchkiss, Clothes Make the Man: Female Cross Dressing in Medieval Europe (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996).

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European embrace of LGTBQ communities and a rejection of heteronormative masculinity ; how conscious this move constitutes the re-activation of a centuries-old counter-narrative is difficult to measure. The medieval folk narrative that targets the center of ecclesiastical power is the story of the successful but short-lived reign of a female Pope. Frequently known by the name of Johannes Anglicus, she is said to have reigned in the 9th century. The written version of the story of Pope Joan began to be circulated in local clerical circles in the thirteenth century. Retold and remembered through a range of printed media, including Tarot cards, the story has continued to live on in film, music, and novels. Following James C. Scott’s insight, I am reading the female Pope legend as undermining the idealization of the papal office on its own terms by the creation of a counter twinning. In this narrative move, the structure of the papal office remains intact, but is radically redefined as an allegedly “superior” male natural body that is replaced by an allegedly “inferior” female body. In several medieval versions, the destabilizing threat of a female Pope becomes identified in the story itself. From a misogynist point of view, Joanna could embody the papal corpus verum et mysticum only through magic and witchcraft, yet even clerical authors could respond sympathetically. For example, cleric Dietrich Schernberg’s play Fraw Jutta absorbs Pope Joan’s Two Bodies into the more forgiving template of female transvestite saints’ lives (mid-16th century).20 The Fairy Lover legend constitutes a third type of medieval mutinous counter narrative with a focus on supernatural twinning and female empowerment. The core of the story expands the terms of exchange of power for love. A source of numinous strength and liberation, the Fairy Lover, a shape-shifting being fond of assuming animal form, is attracted to a human. When the human reciprocates the Fairy Lover’s affection or interest, the supernatural companion bestows special gifts on her or his beloved. In its patriarchal and anti-pagan Christian version, the devil takes the place of the Fairy Lover, as is evident in some versions of the Pope Joan legend. In all versions of this story, however, the lover’s miraculous gift is that which is forbidden to women under patriarchy. Once received, the gift turns into life-changing transgressive knowledge and practice, an exuberant jouissance that is simultaneously carnal and intellectual. In the medieval Christian telling of the tale, a young and beautiful lay woman chooses to be the devil’s sexual companion in exchange for wealth and extensive knowledge in the liberal arts, which were taught by and for men.21 The devil/fairy 20 On Dietrich Schernberg and the medieval to modern trajectory of the Pope Joan legend, see the recent review article by Thomas F.X. Noble, “Why Pope Joan?” in The Catholic Historical Review XCIX:2 (April 2013), 219–23. 21 For a literary context, see Eric Jaeger, The Tempter’s Voice: Language and the Fall in Medieval Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 191–241.

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lover’s tale is better known in its desexualized male version as the story of Dr. Faustus, but a medieval Dutch text with a female lay protagonist named Mariken van Nieumeghen (Mary of Nijmegen) precedes the Dr. Faustus legend in print by at least two hundred years. Mary of Nijmegen lives as the devil’s mistress for seven years in exchange for knowledge, the mastery of foreign languages, and material abundance. She eventually repents of her choice, and begins the life of a holy woman.22 Processes of gemination are central to the Fairy Lover mythologem. Not only does the power of the Fairy Lover manifest in his or her shape shifting abilities by moving back and forth between a human and animal body, but as in the case of Mary of Nijmegen and Pope Joan, the bounteous gift changes the receiver. Whether as fairy or fallen angel, the shape shifting lover endows her or his mortal partner with ontological potency, knowledge, and agency. Ignorant but determined Mary becomes knowledgeable and worldwise Emma. Impoverished but gifted Joanna becomes all powerful Pope Johannes Anglicus. A stronger and bolder female double does not just daydream, but fully lives the life of freedom desired. To rephrase Mary Daly, such a woman sins big.23

Contemporary Film: Transatlantic Crossings The medieval stories of Pope Joan and the demonic fairy lover have resurfaced in three recent films, She…who would be Pope/Pope Joan (British, Michael Anderson, 2009).24 Die Päpstin/Pope Joan (German, Sönke Wortmann, 2009),25 and Black Swan (United States, Darren Aronofsky, 2010). As contemporary works of Euro-American art, the films add a fresh layer of commentary on the gendered relationship between office and person, between private and public life, between female desire and the rule of the fathers. The Pope Joan films remain anchored in the medieval diegetic world. Black Swan, in contrast, transposes the theme of uncanny Fairy Lover from Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake fairytale to a con22 See E. Colledge, Mediaeval Netherland’s Religious Literature (London and New York: London House & Maxwell, 1965), 189–225. 23 Mary Daly, Amazon Grace: Recalling the Courage to Sin Big (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 24 For more information on the double life of the film, see its website at http://shewhowould bepope.com (n.d., accessed February 2nd, 2016). Originally produced in 1972, it became reissued with previously omitted scenes in 2009. Anderson’s film is an adaptation of Emmanuel Royidis’ 1886 novel Papissa Joanna, translated into English by Lawrence Durrell. Royidis was excommunicated for having written the novel as a satire of the Greek Orthodox Church. 25 Sönke Wortmann’s 2009 Die Päpstin/Pope Joan, with Johanna Wokalek in the title role, is based on Donna Woolfolk Cross’ best-selling novel by the same name, which was published in 1996.

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temporary New York City ballet company. As in the medieval template, a silver screen female Doppelgänger exuberant with determination and talent transgresses taboos and relishes what her subaltern female self cannot experience. In both Pope Joan movies, Johannes Anglicus is committed to social reform and an activist return to Christian roots by helping the poor and heal the sick, implementing education for women, missionizing pagans (Anderson) and exhorting fellow Christians. Apart from being an activist “people’s pope,” Wortmann’s Pope Joan also writes books, revises unspecified doctrines, and pushes more resolutions through administrative channels “than ever before.”26 Sexual repression and the challenge to single-mindedly pursue professional goals shape the plotline of Black Swan. As in a hallucination, the ballet roles of the Swan Queen and the Black Swan become synonymous with protagonist Nina’s (Natalie Portman) repressed ego and its potent and liberated shadow self as embodied by her rival and Doppelgänger Lily (Mila Kunis). The Swan Queen persona is propelled by a mix of sexual desire and ambition to break the confines of her status as dutiful daughter and subordinate member of a ballet company. By emotionally shape shifting into the aggressive and libidinous Black Swan, Nina fulfills her desire for artistic excellence, adulthood, and sexual freedom. The film’s Fairy Lover motif plays out bisexually – both company director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) and Lily exchange erotic encounter for professional knowledge, sexual pleasure, and freedom from pre-adolescent dependency. As any truth-telling tale does, the films and legends do not hide the cost for claiming a fuller life beyond systemic gender injustice. The function of stories about a gendered double is neither utopian nor dystopian, but to assess possibility and danger. The potent double activates swift social punishment for its transgressions: the female Pope is savagely murdered, a triumphantly successful ballerina self-immolates at the height of her newly discovered powers, and Tchaikovsky’s White Swan self-sacrifices in the name of love. As a creature of the imagination and the world of spirit, the double’s material manifestation can only be episodic and theatrical. Success is only possible for as long as the fiction of the numinous double can be maintained in an unchanged social environment of unequal power relations. When the double’s success pries open a social space for the reemergence and reality of the subaltern self, the dynamics of oppression reassert themselves. As the body natural is discovered as the “true” self, it becomes re-inscribed as patriarchal object. The corpus verum returns to the world of suffering like her sisters. For the audience, the hard work of changing the socio-economic and political environment begins at the moment of recog-

26 Wortmann, 2009.

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nizing the reentry of the corpus verum and the public discovery of the fictitiousness of the double.

Conclusion When compared with gemination processes that consolidate patriarchal hierarchies of domination, gemination processes from below differ in substantial ways. Unlike the institutionalized and collective formation of a royal, papal, and priestly persona mixta as described by Kantorowicz, the films and medieval legends depict self-generated processes that are triggered by confronting a female subject’s gender limitations and the threat of her social and/or physical death. Instead of a homosocial ideological practice of the royal, papal, or priestly double, female twinning bridges male and female social domains, and must engage a mix of male and female support networks. As pointed out by Audre Lorde, the case of Mary Daly’s critique of Christian sexism demonstrates that targeted social domains and relied-upon support networks still replicate unexamined structures of oppression that afford some measure of privilege to European-American women, whether via racism or economic stratification. Aronofsky, Wortmann, and Anderson show the protagonist crossing private and public spaces alike. Wortmann’s film locates female support at the level of family and home to gender women’s knowledge of herbs and the healing arts. Wortmann and Anderson stage a female Pope who moves with the same ease among the poor, the sick, and the elites. Despite the protagonist’s demise, the strategic practice of doubling is shown to have future use. Bishop Arnalda, the narrator of Joan’s story, is revealed to be a female transvestite herself. She evokes the possibility of a mystical body politic of female ecclesiastical transvestites. In a voice-over at the very end of Pope Joan, Arnalda muses, “I wonder whether I met other women like her – how many are there?” In She… who would be Pope, a contemporary female evangelical preacher in the US knows herself to be the reincarnated Pope Joan. It is left open at the end of Black Swan whether Nina, unlike Tchaikovsky’s Swan Queen, will survive her abdominal wound. Yet even the masculinist twinning discourse that began at Chalcedon contains its own gynocentric subtext and subversion. In 451 CE, the Council members who convened at Chalcedon fasted and prayed for a miracle from St. Euphemia (martyred ca. 304–307) to learn whether the Monophysite or Orthodox position was true. St. Euphemia communicated through a miracle that she favored the Orthodox position of hypostatic union. She must have known how handy her concept of dual natures would be one day to support other women in the Church and to remind men what they owe to women.

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Bibliography Black Swan. DVD. Directed by Darren Aronofsky. Century City, CA: Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2010. Bollas, Christopher. The Shadow of the Object. Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. London: Free Association Books, 1987. Bullough Vern L. and Bonnie Bullough. Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. Clinton, Tim and Ryan Carboneau. “Soul Care.” In Popular Encyclopedia of Christian Counseling, edited by Time Clinton and Ron Hawkins. http://www.aacc.net/2015/01/ 26/soul-care/. Colledge, E. Mediaeval Netherland’s Religious Literature. London and New York: London House & Maxwell, 1965. Cross, Donna Woolfolk. Pope Joan: A Novel. New York: Broadway Books, 2009. Daly, Mary. Amazon Grace: Recalling the Courage to Sin Big. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Daly, Mary. Beyond God the Father : Towards a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1973. Davis, Natalie Zemon.“History’s Two Bodies.” The American Historical Review 93, no.1 (1988): 1–30. Hotchkiss, Valerie R. Clothes Make the Man: Female Cross Dressing in Medieval Europe. New York: Garland Publishing, 1996. Jaeger, Eric. The Tempter’s Voice: Language and the Fall in Medieval Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Kantorowicz, Ernst H. The King’s Two Bodies. A Study in Medieval Political Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957, seventh edition 1997. Kilner, J.J., and R.N Lemon. “What We Know Currently about Mirror Neurons,” Current Biology 23:23 (Dec 2, 2013): 1057–1062. Noble, Thomas F. X. “Why Pope Joan?” In The Catholic Historical Review XCIX: 2 (April 2013): 219–223. Die Päpstin/Pope Joan. DVD. Directed by Sönke Wortmann. Munich: Constantin Film, 2009. Raines, John C. and Daniel C. Maguire, editors. What Men Owe to Women. Men’s Voices from World Religions. Albany : State University of New York Press, 2001. Rank, Otto. The Double. A Psychoanalytic Study, translated by Roy Huss. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971. Royidis, Emmanual. Papissa Joan. Translated by Lawrence Durrell. New York: The Overlook Press, 1997. Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak. Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985. She…who would be Pope/Pope Joan. DVD. Directed by Michael Anderson. Culver City, CA: Columbia Pictures, 1972.

Author Biographies

TINA MARIE BOYER (PhD, German Medieval Literature, University of California Davis) is an Assistant Professor of German at Wake Forest University. Her primary research focuses on medieval German literature. She is particularly interested in depictions of monstrous identities in Middle High German epics and romances. Another passion is to link these medieval representations with modern pop culture. Other research interests include historical linguistics, translation of German immigrant documents, and German folklore and fairy tales. JOSHUA DAVIES (PhD, King’s College London) is a Lecturer in Medieval Literature at King’s College London. His research explores cultural memory in and of the British Middle Ages and he has published essays on the medievalist poetic landscapes of the modern poets Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill and Basil Bunting, the architectural and cultural history of a memorial to an Anglo-Saxon archbishop, and the environmental imagination of medieval hagiography. He is currently working on his first book, Visions and Ruins: Medieval Texts, Modern Readers and the Production of the Past, which will be published by Manchester University Press. MARY KATE HURLEY (PhD, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University) is an Assistant Professor of English at Ohio University. Her areas of interest include Medieval Literature, Old English and Middle English Language and Literature, and the History of the English Language, as well as Translation Theory, Network Theory, Eco-criticism, and Media Studies. Her recent publications include “Alfredian Temporalities: Time and Translation in the Old English Orosius” in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology (October 2013) and ”Why We Blog: An Essay in Four Movements” with Jeffrey Cohen, Eileen Joy, and Karl Steel, in a Literature Compass special issue (December 2012).

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Author Biographies

CLARE A. LEES (PhD, Liverpool) is Professor of Medieval Literature and History of the Language and the director of Graduate Studies at King’s College in London. Lees is a medievalist who works mainly in early medieval literature from the perspective of contemporary Medieval Studies. Research projects include studies of gender and the history of women’s writing, religious literature and cultural studies, especially issues of place and landscape, relations between textual and material culture and, increasingly, reworkings of Anglo-Saxon literature by writers of modern, contemporary literature. She is editor of the The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature (CUP 2013). Her recent publications include a chapter titled “’In Æelfric’s words,” in A Companion to Ælfric (2009) and the chapter “The Ruthwell Runes and The Dream of the Rood” in Fragments of history. Rethinking the Ruthwell and Bewcastle monuments (2007). SOL MIGUEL-PRENDES (Ph.D., Spanish, UNC-Chapel Hill) is Associate Professor of Spanish at Wake Forest University. She conducts research in Medieval Spanish literature with a particular focus on sentimental fiction, the Latin tradition, and contemplative practices and pilgrimage for which she received an ACLS Contemplative Practice Fellowship. She is Editor in Chief of La corjnica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures and Cultures and VicePresident of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. She has written on latemedieval literary theory, the commentary tradition, and the contested Iberian genre known as sentimental fiction. She is currently working on a book titled Narrating Desire in Late Medieval Iberia: Sentimental Fiction and Moral Consolation. GILLIAN R. OVERING (PhD, SUNY University at Buffalo) is Professor of English at Wake Forest University. Her research interests include Anglo-Saxon literature, cultural geography, and gender studies. She has published various studies of Beowulf, ranging from Language, Sign and Gender in “Beowulf” (SIU Press, 1990) to most recently “Beowulf: A Poem in Our time,” in The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2013). She is the co-editor of A Place to Believe In: Locating Medieval Landscapes (Penn State Press, 2006) and co-authored Double Agents: Women and Clerical Culture in Anglo-Saxon England with Clare Lees (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001, reprinted by University of Wales Press, 2009). GALE SIGAL (PhD, Graduate Center, City University of New York) is Professor of English and co-director of Medieval Studies at Wake Forest University. In her research, she explores such areas as medieval poetry, the legend of Arthur, Victorian medievalism, and Chaucer. Sigal’s publications include the book

Author Biographies

233

Erotic Dawn-songs of the Middle Ages: Voicing the Lyric Lady (University Press of Florida, 1996). She also co-authored Voices in Translation: The Authority of “Olde Bookes” in Medieval Literature with Deborah Sinnreich-Levi (AMS Press, 1992) and was the assistant editor of The Collected Letters of William Morris, Volume II (1881–1888) (Princeton University Press, 1988). ULRIKE WIETHAUS (PhD, Religious Studies, Temple University) currently holds a joint appointment as full Professor in the Department for the Study of Religions and the Program in American Ethnic Studies. Her research interests focus on the history of Christian spirituality with an emphasis on gender justice and political history, and most recently, historic trauma, religion, and the longterm impact of US colonialism. As the inaugural director, she has guided the creation of the Religion and Public Engagement concentration in Religious Studies. The author of numerous edited and co-edited monographs and essays on medieval Christian mysticism, her most recent book-length publication is German Mysticism and the Politics of Culture (Peter Lang, 2014). MARGARET D. ZULICK (PhD, Religious Studies, Northwestern University) is Associate Professor of Communication at Wake Forest University. Her research brings together her studies in the language of the Hebrew Bible with rhetorical theory and criticism. She continues to pursue theories of rhetoric and religion in ancient texts as well as in American public discourse. She has published essays in Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetorica, and numerous book chapters, including an essay on Rhetoric of Religion in the Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies.

Index

actor-network theory 51 Adomn#n 179, 185–187, 189–191, 193, 195, 197 Aesop 20, 204, 207–209, 211, 213 – Aesopian 210 African American 92, 125, 224 Altschul, Nadia 10, 53, 56, 60, 65, 119 American Indian 14seq., 17, 21, 33, 76, 83–87, 89, 91, 94, 118seq., 124, 146, 148, 211 – Abenaki 14 – Haudenosaunee League 83 – Pine Ridge Indian Reservation 30 anti-Semitism 78, 80–82, 87–90, 92seq., 97 – pogrom 87 Aphthonius 207–208 archive 13, 15–18, 22, 47, 103, 123, 125, 132–135 – architectural 16, 105, 114, 118seq., 122, 143, 157, 166, 231 – internet 13seq., 17, 20, 22, 27–31, 33–38, 43, 45, 57, 62, 75, 96, 213 – spatial 47 – temporal archive 132–135, 140seq., 146seq. Arthurian Studies 10 Auerbach, Erich 17, 59, 62, 134 Bauman, Zygmunt 14, 47, 50, 64, 66 Berger, Peter 75seq., 79, 95 Bhabha, Homi 59, 118 Black Elk, Frank 85, 95

Bryce, Colette 18seq., 177–179, 191seq., 194–197 Burckhardt, Jacob 156, 159 capitalism 15, 47, 50, 75–83, 85–92, 95, 97, 111 Castro, Am8rico 52–55, 59–62, 65 chivalry 157, 159, 161, 169 – Southern chivalry 168–170 Christianity 15, 81, 177, 179, 219–222 – Catholicism 115 – monasticism 194 – pilgrimage 54seq., 162, 194, 197, 232 – Prophecy 106, 124, 187, 191, 193–197 – Puritan 35, 75, 77, 87, 89, 93, 123 – Puritanism 147, 181 Chronotrope 50, 58seq., 61–64, 66, 69 Coates, Ta-Nehisi 77, 105, 126 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 10, 37, 126, 139, 146, 231 Columba (Saint) 19, 179, 184–187, 189–197 convivencia 14, 49, 52seq., 55seq., 59seq. Daly, Mary 21, 223seq., 226, 228 D’Arcens, Louise 11 Davis, Kathleen 10, 113 Davis, Alexander Jackson 117–120, 125 Davis, Natalie 219 Deloria Jr, Vine 85 democracy 55 Duffy, Maureen 18seq., 177–179, 186–191, 195, 198

236 Engels, Friedrich 83–86, 88, 91 Enlightenment 78, 80, 95, 114 ethnicity 10, 12, 19, 78, 90, 171, 188, 190 – ethnocentrism 224 – Euro-centrism 85 Evagrius Ponticus 82 Fisher, Walter 206 folklore 33seq., 36, 38, 45, 204, 231 – animal tales 20, 204, 207seq., 210seq., 214 – Brer Rabbit 204, 210seq. – Doppelgänger 21, 221seq., 227 – fairy tales 39, 41, 45, 205, 231 – folk narrative 203, 225 – Mammon (Demon) 79, 82 – Reynard the Fox 204, 210 – shape-shifting 18, 20seq., 111, 225 – Swan Lake 21, 226 – witches 17, 79, 164 Ford, Henry 15, 31, 97, 194 Freud, Sigmund 32, 88, 94, 114, 222 – fetishism 88seq., 94 – psycho-analysis 94 Furries 13, 20, 22, 211–214, 221 gender 10, 19, 62, 83, 85, 118seq., 182, 188, 214, 219seq., 224, 227seq., 232seq. – femfog 219 – feminism 20seq., 219 – postfeminism 21 Gendlin, Eugene 13 Gothic 9, 16, 38, 106–120, 122seq., 125, 152seq., 156–158, 170, 212 – American Gothic 109, 117seq., 122, 124 – Gothic revival 107, 110, 114–116, 156, 162, 166 – Machine Gothic 15, 105, 118 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 122–126, 170 Heaney, Seamus 18seq., 177–188, 191seq., 194, 198 hegemony 109, 145 Holiday, Billie 164, 188 Holsinger, Bruce 10

Index

humanism

156, 159

Iberian Studies 13seq., 47seq., 51seq., 57seq., 61, 63–68 Internet Role-playing Games 12, 33 – Avatar 212, 221 – Second Life 22, 211seq., 221 Islam 55, 81, 97 – al-Andalus 14, 53, 55, 59 Judaism 15, 63, 81seq., 88seq., 97 – conversion 56, 177, 179 – converso 59 Kantorowicz, Ernst 20seq., 223, 228 Knudsen, Eric 31seq., 38, 41, 44 Lara, Jaime 11 Latin American Studies 49 Le Goff, Jacques 11 Lorde, Audre 224, 228 Lynch, Andrew 11 Mann, Barbara Alice 14, 37, 85, 133 Martin, George R.R. 10, 16, 54, 67seq., 97, 131–148, 162, 189 marxism 85 Marx, Karl 78seq., 81, 84, 87seq., 91, 93seq. Matthews, David 9seq., 160, 162, 165seq., 179 Medieval Studies 9, 12, 17, 47seq., 50seq., 57, 61, 66seq., 151seq., 156, 158, 160, 162, 167, 171, 178, 183, 220, 232 – Hispanomedievalism 14, 47–49, 51–54, 58, 59, 60seq., 63, 66 – Medievalism 9–11, 13seq., 17, 19, 44, 54, 58seq., 63, 109, 113, 119, 127, 131, 134seq., 141–143, 147seq., 153, 156, 158–160, 162, 165, 179, 198, 232 meme 14, 27, 29–31, 43, 45, 97 Menocal, Mar&a Rosa 50, 53–56, 62–65, 68 migration 56, 64, 107, 181, 192 modernity 10seq., 14, 47, 49seq., 64, 75, 109seq., 116, 122seq., 132, 147, 160, 177 – industrialization 80, 86, 111, 157

237

Index

– postmodernity 43, 203 – technology 16, 29, 35, 57, 110, 120, 124, 163 – urbanization 33seq., 111 monster 14seq., 22, 27–39, 41seq., 44seq., 139, 145seq. – Skeleton Man 14 – Slender Man 13–15, 22, 27–45 – Wendigo 33 Morgan, Lewis Henry 83seq., 86, 88, 91 Newman, Barbara 95, 154 Nietzsche, Friedrich 82, 87seq. nostalgia 59, 133seq., 141seq., 170 orality 42 – Gutenberg parenthesis 22, 28 – oral tradition 28, 41, 42, 204, 210 – storytelling 14, 28–30, 33, 35seq., 42, 65, 220 Parker, Ely S. 84 Patterson, Lee 151–153, 156, 159, 161 Patterson, Orlando 79, 222 Pettit, Tom 28 Pidal, Ramjn Men8ndez 52, 54seq., 57, 65 Pugin, Augustus Northmore 115–118, 156 racism 13, 15, 125, 127, 188, 228 – lynching 188 – race 10, 12, 19, 77seq., 86seq., 89–93, 109, 125–127, 159, 170, 188, 214, 222 – social death 222 Raines, John C. 219seq. religion 7, 13, 15, 52, 75seq., 78seq., 81seq., 84seq., 88, 90seq., 95, 157, 190, 211, 219–221, 223seq., 233 – usury 80, 82, 88

Renaissance 11, 17, 62, 68, 105, 109seq., 152–157, 159seq., 162–164 settler 12seq., 15, 17, 21seq., 118 – settler colonialism 13 – settler culture 20 – settler nation 13 – settler trauma 14 slavery 83, 92, 95, 97, 118, 124seq., 168–170, 211, 222 Sombart, Werner 78, 81seq., 87, 89–93 tourism 15 trauma 13–17, 22, 25, 40seq., 48, 54, 94, 233 – childhood trauma 28seq., 45, 93 – paranoia 28 – post-traumatic stress disorder 33 – suicide 30seq., 92, 192 – victimization 28seq., 35, 39–42, 45 – violence 17, 19, 21, 40, 84seq., 89, 133–136, 138, 140seq., 143, 147, 189–191, 198, 213 Vendler, Helen

179seq., 182, 198

war 10, 19seq., 33, 37seq., 45, 48, 52seq., 55, 59, 61, 77, 131, 154, 164, 187–192, 197seq., 213 – Civil War 48, 52, 59, 119, 126, 168–170 – Spanish-American War 14, 52 – War of the Roses 131 – World War II 45, 61, 77, 190, 192, 222 Weber, Max 15, 75, 77–81, 87, 89–92, 94seq. Weinstock, Jeffrey 29seq. Wilgefortis (Saint) 224 Wurst, Conchita (Tom Neuwirth) 224 Zipes, Jack

39, 41