Studies in Medievalism XXIV : Medievalism on the Margins [24] 1843844060, 9781843844068

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Medievalism on the Margins

Studies in Medievalism XXIV 2015

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

Medievalism on the Margins

Edited by Karl Fugelso with Vincent Ferré and Alicia C. Montoya

Studies in Medievalism XXIV 2015 Cambridge D. S. Brewer

©  Studies in Medievalism 2015 All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2015 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN 978–1–84384–406–8 ISSN 0738–7164

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

Studies in Medievalism Founding Editor Editor Advisory Board

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

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

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

Studies in Medievalism List of Illustrations

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Editorial Note

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Karl Fugelso

I:  Medievalism on the Margins: Some Perspective(s) Medievalism in the Margins: Paratexts and the Packaging of Medieval French Literature

Elizabeth Emery

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Richard Utz

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Pop Medievalism

Erin Felicia Labbie

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Ecomedievalism: Applying Ecotheory to Medievalism and Neomedievalism

Valerie B. Johnson 31

Medievalism Studies and the Subject of Religion

Whiteness and Time: The Once, Present, and Future Race A Desire for Origins: The Marginal Robin Hood of the Later Ballads

Helen Young 39 Alexander L. Kaufman 51

Women, Queerness, and Massive Chalice: Medievalism in Participatory Culture

Serina Patterson 63

“Constant inward looking,” Medieval Devotional Literature, and the Concordium-Fruitlands Library

Vickie Larsen 75

II:  Trans-Atlantic Medievalism(s) Speaking of the Middle Ages Today: European Vincent Ferré 89 and Transatlantic Perspectives and Alicia C. Montoya

Echoes from the Middle Ages: Tales of Chivalry, Romances, and Nation-building in Spain (1750–1850)

Juan Gomis

Antiquarianism over Presentism: Reflections on Spanish Medieval Studies Medievalism and the Contemporaneity of the Medieval in Postcolonial Brazil

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Jaume Aurell 115 Nadia R. Altschul 139

III:  Other Interpretations The Middle Ages Are within Your Grasp: Motor Neurons, Mirror Neurons, Simulacra, and Imagining the Past Alfred the Little: Medievalism, Politics, and the Poet Laureate

Jeff Rider 155

Megan Arnott 177

Swords, Sorcery, and Steam: The Industrial Dark Kevin Moberly 193 Ages in Contemporary Medievalism and Brent Moberly Modern-day Ring-givers: MMORPG Guild Cultures and the Influence of the Anglo-Saxon World

Lindsey Simon-Jones 217

Contributors 237

Illustrations Medievalism in the Margins 1. Paratext swallowing up the Chanson de Roland (a black box has been inserted to distinguish the Old French verse from the commentary) in a 1908 student textbook, Chrestomathie du Moyen Age, ed. Paris and Langlois (Paris: Librairie Hachette). New page layout and annotations by Elizabeth Emery Whiteness and Time 1. London Court, Perth, Australia. August 2013

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Alfred the Little 1. Alfred the Little, Punch (photo: Punch, by permission)

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Modern-day Ring-givers 1. Why do you raid?

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Table 1  Mmorpg.com “raid” guilds’ loot-systems of choice

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Volume XXIV 2015

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

Editorial Note Margins have long been central to the history and identity of medievalism. Indeed, the field was born on the margins of medieval studies. As Kathleen Verduin has chronicled in the pages of Studies in Medievalism XVII: Defining Medievalism(s),1 Leslie J. Workman, an independent scholar, largely initiated the field with his 1975 article in the Winterthur Portfolio, “Ruins, Romance, and Reality: Medievalism in Anglo-American Imagination and Taste, 1750–1840,” and a 1976 session at the Tenth International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo), “The Idea of the Middle Ages in the Modern World.” He and a handful of colleagues, including Verduin, who was a newly minted assistant professor at Hope College (Holland, Michigan) when they met in 1980, then built on this success by publishing additional papers, establishing sessions at other conferences, and landing prestigious grants. But they were not without their detractors. Indeed, they were increasingly attacked by not only scholars in other fields but also many who claimed to be medievalists themselves. The outsiders tended to question whether medievalism was really exterior to other fields, and the (supposed) insiders questioned whether medievalism has a clear focus of its own, what that center might be, how it relates to other areas, and who is qualified to judge such matters. They and others struggled with the paradox that the core of medievalism is, to some degree, its very marginalism, its identity as a nexus of multiple disciplines, periods, and sometimes regions. Particularly in response to those recurring questions, Workman and other medievalists have tended to be extraordinarily transparent about their identity, methods, and goals. Many have explicitly defined what they do, what constitutes legitimate subject matter for the field, and how it can and should be investigated. And those who have not done so explicitly have often done so implicitly while, say, arguing that medievalism encompasses video games about the Middle Ages. As they oppose critics who would deny that medievalism has flexible borders and perhaps even a distinct identity, they have insisted that the field is in fact defined by the ability to accommodate subjects in many different divisions of academia. 1

Kathleen Verduin, “The Founding and the Founder: Medievalism and the Legacy of Leslie J. Workman,” in Studies in Medievalism XVII: Defining Medievalism(s), ed. Karl Fugelso (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2009), 1–27 (6).

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This approach was particularly obvious at the 2013 and 2014 annual conferences of the International Society for the Study of Medievalism, where the very themes – center vs. periphery, and medievalisms on the move, respectively – invited re-evaluation and expansion of the field. At the 2013 conference, which gave rise to multiple papers in this volume, scholars concentrated on lacunae and (other) biases that they felt medievalists need to address. And at the 2014 conference, many speakers addressed not only the past expansion and mobility of the field, but also the current and probably future instability of its center, as well as the potential spread of the field as a whole. Indeed, that recognition of medievalism’s fluidity and expanding scope inspired not only the theme of this volume but also the extraordinarily wide distribution of my call for papers. I saturated every academic outlet I could find with the following, deliberately broad invitation: Studies in Medievalism, a peer-reviewed print and on-line publication, seeks 3,000-word essays about medievalism on the margins. Submissions may concentrate on the borders of the field and its relationship to neighboring disciplines, such as medieval studies, on the traditional geography of its focus and its relationship to other territory, particularly outside of Europe, on the relationship of medievalism to traditionally marginalized groups, such as the LBGTIQ community, or on some combination of the three. Contributors are welcome to give examples but should focus on the theoretical implications of those examples rather than the examples themselves. Authors should also anticipate a wide-ranging audience comprising generalists as well as specialists, including non-academics [. . .]. And as with SiM 23, which had a similarly broad call for papers, the number and range of responses were tremendous. Among the essays we accepted are five that directly address the nature of medievalism’s margins. In “Medievalism in the Margins: Paratexts and the Packaging of Medieval French Literature,” Elizabeth Emery exposes biases among medievalists in the scholarly use of paratexts for editions of medieval literature. In “Medievalism Studies and the Subject of Religion,” Richard Utz proposes possible explanations for why religion has rarely been directly addressed by medievalists. In “Pop Medievalism,” Erin Felicia Labbie argues that, despite conspicuous exceptions, medievalism remains on the margins of “academic culture.” In “Ecomedievalism: Applying Ecotheory to Medievalism and Neomedievalism,” Valerie B. Johnson suggests how these fields could profit from an approach that, as she notes, has already been embraced by traditional medieval studies. And in “Whiteness and Time: The Once, Present, and Future



Editorial Note

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Race,” Helen Young examines how colonization expressed through medievalism depends on “discourses that claim to establish white racial superiority over all other people.” The other short essays in this section address medievalism’s margins by extrapolating from a particular figure or monument. In “A Desire for Origins: The Marginal Robin Hood of the Later Ballads,” Alexander L. Kaufman examines the history and possible motives for the marginalization of Robin Hood and Robin Hood studies relative to medieval studies. In “Women, Queerness, and Massive Chalice: Medievalism in Participatory Culture,” Serina Patterson explores a specific example of the ways in which women and queer individuals may be depicted when medievalist (and other) games are developed through vehicles that allow fan participation, such as the website Kickstarter. And in “‘Constant inward looking,’ Medieval Devotional Literature, and the Concordium-Fruitlands Library,” Vickie Larsen investigates how medieval writers may have inspired Amos Bronson Alcott and other illustrious New Englanders to marginalize themselves by departing from contemporaneous mores, values, and expectations. Through these various subjects and approaches, all of the essayists invite the reader to think about the role that margins play in relationship to the subjects and approaches of our longer papers, which comprise 6,000 to 12,000 words each, are open to any topic in or related to medievalism, and pointedly come after the short essays. In many instances, such considerations are not particularly difficult, for the full-length articles often address marginalism directly. The three papers Vincent Ferré and Alicia C. Montoya cover in their introduction, “Speaking of the Middle Ages Today: European and Trans­atlantic Perspectives,” come from the 2010 ISSM conference in Groningen, which Ferré and Montoya hosted, and closely revolve around marginalizing related to the conference theme, “Transatlantic Dialogues/Speaking of the Middle Ages.” In “Echoes from the Middle Ages: Tales of Chivalry, Romances, and Nationbuilding in Spain (1750–1850),” Juan Gomis traces how erudite Spanish elites marginalized historias caballerescas breves (short tales of chivalry), the values those stories represented, and their lower-class audiences in favor of medieval ballads that the elites perceived as faithful to the essence of “the true Spanish nation.” In “Antiquarianism over Presentism: Reflections on Spanish Medieval Studies,” Jaume Aurell surveys the twentieth-century history and many factions of Spanish Medieval Studies, particularly the tensions between the two groups represented in his title. And in “Medievalism and the Contemporaneity of the Medieval in Postcolonial Brazil,” Nadia R. Altschul notes parallels between Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands), which she describes as “Brazil’s national-foundational text,” and current academic medievalism, as she argues that Brazilian medievalisms “can point to a more spacious and ethically alert meaning for our field.”

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Jeff Rider’s essay, “The Middle Ages Are within Your Grasp: Motor Neurons, Mirror Neurons, Simulacra, and Imagining the Past,” does not directly address a trans-Atlantic theme, but it sprang from that same conference and does involve marginalism, as it explores the science behind the distancing of ourselves from ourselves (and at least some of our contemporaries) when we visit the Middle Ages by way of artifacts. And the other essays in our open section, none of which have a direct relationship to the Groningen conference, at least touch on the margins of medievalism. In “Alfred the Little: Medievalism, Politics, and the Poet Laureate,” Megan Arnott traces the marginalization of Alfred Austin, particularly in relationship to his fellow celebrant of the Middle Ages, Alfred (“the Great”), Lord Tennyson. In “Swords, Sorcery, and Steam: The Industrial Dark Ages in Contemporary Medievalism,” Kevin and Brent Moberly urge medievalists to address the “unprivileged and largely unrecognized labor that takes place in factories [. . .], power plants, agriculture, and any number of other sites that are implicated in [. . .] the contemporary culture industry.” And in “Modern-day Ring-givers: MMORPG Guild Cultures and the Influence of the Anglo-Saxon World,” Lindsey Simon-Jones discusses how medieval social structures, with all of the potential alienation they entail, have been replicated in the modern gaming communities of massively multiplayer online role-playing games. This volume therefore serves not only to update the reader on the status of the field, especially with regard to medievalism’s borders and its potential, but also to provide tools and models for addressing these issues. It points to related subject matter that calls for further examination, and it invites further exploration and acceptance of that which has hitherto been marginalized in relationship to medievalism. That is to say, it reaffirms the centrality of the marginal to medievalism.

Medievalism in the Margins: Paratexts and the Packaging of Medieval French Literature Elizabeth Emery In the current academic milieu [. . .] medieval studies is a marginalized institution. Most literary scholars and critics consider medieval texts to be utterly extraneous to their own interests, as at best irrelevant, at worst inconsequential; and they perceive the field itself as a site of pedantry and antiquarianism, a place to escape from the demands of modern intellectual life. Lee Patterson, “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies” In 1990 Lee Patterson lamented the marginalization of medieval studies, urging colleagues to emphasize its social relevance.1 Twenty-five years later medievalism – the study of the medieval period and its reception – still hovers at the periphery of academia.2 This essay proposes that the scholarly use of paratexts in editions of medieval literature has played a major role in this marginalization. The decisions made in publishing editions or excerpts of medieval works are a form of medievalism, revealing what particular editors think about the Middle Ages. What kinds of medieval texts are considered important and for 1 2

Lee Patterson, “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies,” Speculum 65:1 (January 1990): 87–108. Readers of this series will be familiar with the concept that medieval studies – whose critical approaches vary from one scholar and generation to another – is a subset of medievalism. For more on this, see the essays in Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, ed. Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014).

Studies in Medievalism XXIV, 2015

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what reasons? How are they reproduced (in their original language and form; in translation)? How are they classified for students? How have such choices been influenced by tradition? In the French context the answers to many of these questions can be found in the prefaces, introductions, footnotes, and tables of contents that have guided the reception of medieval texts from the nineteenth century – when anthologies of French literature began including medieval works – until now.3 Paratexts, as Gérard Genette has noted, are not anodyne. They function as “thresholds” that open doors to readers. Like Philippe Lejeune, Genette represents the paratext as “a fringe of the printed text which in reality controls one’s whole reading of the text.” Tables of contents, prefaces, and marginal notes are “the privileged place of a pragmatics and a strategy” that profoundly influences readers.4 Given the challenges of interpreting old and middle French, this “fringe” exerts a disproportionate influence. It is thus particularly unfortunate that the paratexts of medieval anthologies and literary histories often undercut the work of anthologization they perform. Introductions and footnotes may insinuate that medieval texts have been placed there for historical and linguistic reasons, characterizing medieval literature as challenging without translations and editorial notes.5 As a result of such heavy glossing, medieval studies has come to be seen as full of “pedantry” and “antiquarianism,” as “irrelevant” and “inconsequential,” as Patterson noted (88). I will cite a few examples from student anthologies and “histories” of French literature published from the early nineteenth century until the early twenty-first century to provide a sense of the ways paratexts have contributed to the marginalization of medieval literature, even within those anthologies seeking to glorify it. In France, as in other countries that proclaimed neoclassical literature written in the vernacular as a “Renaissance,” a rebirth from a dark linguistic period, most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century histories of French literature begin with the sixteenth century. This was the case in Désiré Nisard’s 1841 Précis de l’histoire de la Littérature française depuis ses premiers monuments jusqu’à nos jours, a book so influential that it was republished in 1878 and 1885 (Nisard became a member of the Académie Française in 1850):

3 4 5

This essay focuses primarily on anthologies for French students, though many of the points made here can be extrapolated to other contexts. Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2. See, for example, Anne Berthelot and François Cornilliat’s “Introduction littéraire” to the anthology Littérature: Textes et documents: Moyen Age/XVIe siècle (Paris: Nathan, 1988), 6–8.



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We see evidence of literary language only in the few pages where the last of the Gauls began to stammer noble late sixteenth-century language. It was in the sixteenth century and during the first years of the seventeenth that French literature developed [. . .].6 Nisard’s vision of medieval texts as unworthy of literary consideration persisted among classicists until the end of the nineteenth century, to the extent that a scholar eager to give medieval literature its due, the Sorbonne professor Louis Petit de Julleville, had to rationalize its inclusion in his 1896 Histoire de la langue et de la littérature française, des origines à 1900: Critics can no longer consider those centuries preceding the Renaissance as undeserving of attention, as characterized by vague and formless productions not worthy of being classified in our national literature [. . .]. Like the facts of our national life, of our institutions, of our laws, of our beliefs, of our morals and of our arts, they [those centuries preceding the Renaissance], too, deserve a place in the history of the forms our thought has taken.7 Petit de Julleville clearly sets out his authorial and editorial strategies, seeking to convince his readers of the value of medieval literature by attributing it a prominent space in his eight-volume series. And yet, this introduction was accompanied by another paratext that undercut this argument: a twenty-two-page “Preface” written by prominent medievalist Gaston Paris. Paris begins by praising Petit de Julleville’s project for giving medieval literature its due and then backtracks by echoing classicist colleagues’ comments about medieval literature as “vague and formless.” Oddly, the rhetorical strategy Paris adopts to challenge those who critique medieval language and style is to agree with them. He argues that the merits of medieval literature lie not in its style, but in its imaginative content, a 6

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“C’est dans le seizième siècle et pendant les premières années du dix-septième, que se développe la littérature française.” Précis de l’histoire de la Littérature française depuis ses premiers monuments jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1878), 8. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the French are mine. “Le temps n’est plus où l’on considérait tous les siècles qui ont précédé la Renaissance comme indignes d’attirer l’attention de la critique, comme occupés par de vagues et informes productions qui ne méritaient pas d’être classées dans la littérature nationale, et où on les abandonnait à une érudition dont les recherches n’intéressaient que ceux qui s’y livraient [. . .]. Ils figurent dans l’histoire des formes qu’a prises notre pensée au même titre que dans celle des faits de notre vie nationale, de nos institutions, de notre droit, de nos croyances, de nos moeurs et de nos arts.” Petit de Julleville, Histoire de la langue et de la littérature française des origines à 1900 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1896): a–b.

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reflection of “national spirit.” Paris states that medieval writers fail as artists because they are, at heart, chatterboxes enslaved to their childlike material (“esclaves de la matière”).8 By associating medieval texts with oral storytelling (non-written) he reinforces the stereotype of them as simple and essentially non-literary. Indeed, nearly every preface from the nineteenth century measures medieval literature by modern standards and finds it lacking, presenting it, as did Nisard, as the oral “stammerings” or “stutterings” that would develop into eloquent written modern French.9 Paris’s preface does not advocate for medieval literature on its own terms; rather, he justifies its inclusion for historical and patriotic reasons. If we look more closely, Petit de Julleville did, too. He argued for the importance of the medieval period without mentioning “medieval literature” directly. This focus on content – on the stories told, on the history of the French language or the history of French ideas – allowed a literary establishment still obsessed with classical forms and uneasy about calling medieval texts “literature” to excuse stylistic shortcomings in the name of patriotism, which was rampant in the last decades of the nineteenth century in France. Whether Paris believed medieval texts were childlike or not, this was a compelling argument for their social relevance. He and his colleagues brought medieval literature from near-oblivion to the margin of mainstream literature. Gustave Lanson’s  Histoire illustrée de la littérature française (1894), now known for having established the French literary canon, also portrayed French writing as an anthropological process from which the “simple” or “primitive” interests of medieval ancestors (stories about heroism, love, and the supernatural), expressed in “embryonic” written French of the tenth through twelfth centuries, evolved into the serious, well-structured, and stylistically superior compositions of the nineteenth century.10 Though Lanson overtly acknowledged the value of medieval literature and announced that he was dedicating much more space to it than had any previous literary critic,11 his choice of adjectives – “humble,” “naïve,” “simple” – and depiction of medieval audiences as unintelligent, illiterate consumers of stories, negated his explicit praise: “These good people, true children, who knew nothing and thought hardly at all, liked nothing better than to have someone tell them 8 9

10 11

“Préface,” in Louis Petit de Julleville, Histoire de la langue et de la littérature française, des origines à 1900 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1876), I: a–v, q, and s. See Elizabeth Emery, “Le Berceau de la littérature française: Medieval Storytelling as Child’s Play in Nineteenth-Century France,” Telling the Story in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Evelyn Birge Vitz, ed. Kathryn Duys et al. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, forthcoming 2015). Gustave Lanson, Histoire illustrée de la littérature française (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1923), 4. Lanson, Histoire illustrée, xi.



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stories.” 12 He further argued that if someone could just “fix” the spelling and grammar of medieval texts one might consider them “literature.”13 This stereotype of the Middle Ages as the “birthplace” of modern France leads to the kind of paternalistic paratexts evident in one of the first anthologies of medieval texts for school children, Gaston Paris and Ernest Langlois’s 1895 Chrestomathie du moyen âge.14 In this textbook, which includes lengthy extracts in Old French and Middle French, followed by modern translation, the paratextual material – introduction, translation, footnotes – visually overwhelms the texts (Fig. 1). The introductory paragraphs systematically praise the historical or imaginative content of the medieval stories told or point out their importance as “first” representative of an accepted genre, but do not stress the quality of their composition, style, or authorial vision. Furthermore, the entire volume is prefaced by a ninety-page introductory section laying out the complexities of old French language, pronunciation, and vocabulary. While this is useful information, placing it at the beginning directs readers’ interpretation of what follows, often transforming the medieval texts into examples of historical linguistics rather than works that might be enjoyable or interesting in their own right. Remy de Gourmont complained about excessive paratexts in a 1911 essay about Guillaume de Machaut, lambasting scholars for marginalizing medieval literature by “enveloping” it in a dense critical apparatus that “discouraged” readers.15 Despite such criticism, heavy-handed editorial approaches have hardly changed over the last hundred years (see Patterson’s remark about “pedantry and antiquarianism”). The best-known anthology series in France, the “Lagarde et Michard,” whose subtitle indicates its pedagogical intent (“The Most Important French Authors on the Program: Anthology and Literary History”), similarly begins with a historical and linguistic overview. Here, too, critical commentary overwhelms the skimpy extracts of La Chanson de Roland, which do not appear in verse. The editors explain their use of modern French prose without any irony whatsoever: it is a “way of making such

12 13 14

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“Ces bonnes gens, vrais enfants, qui ne savaient rien et ne pensaient guère, n’aimaient rien tant que de se faire conter des histoires.” Lanson, Histoire illustrée, 46. Lanson, Histoire illustrée, xii. Roger Fayolle traces the long and problematic debates concerning the introduction of medieval studies into French school curriculum in “La présentation du moyen âge dans les histoires de la littérature française (de Nisard à Lanson),” Littérales 6 (1990): 67–68. “Ce qui rend suspectes au public les études littéraires sur le moyen âge, c’est surtout l’appareil d’érudition dont on se plaît à les entourer. Il semble que tout poème ne puisse être présenté ou expliqué au lecteur qu’enveloppé de notes et de recherches savantes dont le premier effet est de décourager les élémentaires curiosités.” Remy de Gourmont, “Guillaume de Machaut et son amie,” Le Temps (3 December 1911): 2.

Figure 1.  Paratext swallowing up the Chanson de Roland (a black box has been inserted to distinguish the Old French verse from the commentary) in a 1908 student textbook, Chrestomathie du Moyen Age, ed. Paris and Langlois (Paris: Librairie Hachette).



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vibrant and attractive literature accessible to young spirits.”16 The “vibrant and attractive” content (the story it transmits) is thus valorized over its form (old and middle French, verse or prose). This is a remarkably pragmatic response to Lanson’s call to “fix” medieval language, yet a step backward with regard to medieval literature. The twelfth-century verse and script of the Chanson de Roland have been entirely replaced by a paratext: a printed prose translation. While modern translations do work well with students to transmit the sense of the stories, what does the use of such translations say about the value of medieval writing? Is it really so impenetrable (so “other”) that it can be understood only in a modern translation fortified by an army of footnotes? Because earlier scholars had rationalized the inclusion of medieval texts in terms of their imaginative and patriotic content, the next generation of anthologists found it perfectly normal to replace the original texts with modern French translations faithful to the “national spirit” they were said to transmit. André Lagarde and Henri Michard would have been aghast at the idea of rewriting Corneille or Racine, who were lauded for their style, but Lagarde and Michard did not think twice about rewriting the often unsigned works of “stammering” medieval authors, important less as literature than as historical documents. This historicizing of medieval literature led, in turn, to the tendency to associate knights in armor, damsels in distress, and evil sorcerers with the medieval period, even if these subjects were themselves fictions used to entertain the people of the Middle Ages. This trend continues in popular manifestations of medievalism today as stories inspired from medieval literature – like Perrault’s fairy tales about kings, queens, and evil fairies or Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose – are labeled “medieval” because of their imaginative content. It is unfair to single out the Lagarde and Michard anthology for criticism since it is a series first published in 1948 and which continues to be reissued with new paratexts (especially illustrations) every few decades. Yet its focus on content rather than style or form is also true of other modern literary anthologies like that published by Nathan in 1988 to compete with the Lagarde and Michard text. Entitled Littérature: Textes et Documents, this book sought to revise the limited canon established by Lagarde and Michard, and it did so very well, bringing attention to many more texts. The visual references to modern and medieval art (including stills from movies set in the Middle Ages) attempt to make the medieval texts “accessible” to

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“rendre accessible à tous cette littérature si vivante et si attirante pour de jeunes esprits,” Lagarde et Michard, “Avant-Propos,” in Moyen Age (Paris: Bordas, 1985), i.

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students, but they also insinuate that students should be more interested in the surrounding images and documents than in the texts. The problems of anthologies extend to critical editions. The Lettres Gothiques series directed by Michel Zink for Livre de poche has successfully resolved many of the linguistic issues by printing original texts with facing-page translations. But even here, footnotes distract from an appreciation of the medieval French and reinforce the sense of it as so “difficult” that it needs translation. Should good literature need so much justification? There is value in presenting texts on their own terms. My own introduction to medieval French literature, thanks to Henri Rey-Flaud at the Université Paul Valéry Montpellier III, suggests as much. When he assigned Chrétien de Troyes’ Le Chevalier de la Charrete in Mario Roques’s Old French edition (Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, 1990) students revolted: how could they understand this foreign language? Rey-Flaud urged us to persevere in exploring the Old French text (Roques’s edition has no footnotes, though it is bookended by an ample critical apparatus): we were to sound things out and pay attention to language and poetic form before consulting a modern translation. This was invaluable advice. We understood much more than we thought we would, and by taking the time to examine the text rather than immediately consulting a translation we learned to appreciate Chrétien’s poetic skill. Because most new editions are packed with accessible, albeit marginalizing, paratexts, I suspect Rey-Flaud’s method may no longer be widespread, though I hope I am wrong. Portrayed alternately as too easy (entertaining children’s stories in modern French drawn from romance and epic)17 and too hard (old and middle French language for college students), medieval French literature drowns in a sea of paratexts – introductory gloss, footnotes, translations, images – seeking to explain it and to justify its importance. How can medievalism ever be taken as a mainstream scholarly field if its own specialists package it as “difficult,” “primitive,” or “archaic”? If I call for increased reflection about our use of paratexts in creating editions and teaching students, it is because they have long served as an insidious form of medievalism, purporting to further the understanding of medieval literature while unwittingly calling into question its intrinsic value. All editing reflects personal choices, which become particularly influential 17

Marie-Thérèse Chemla traces the status of medieval literature in the elementary-school curriculum in France today. It is fascinating to learn that medieval editions directed to children far surpass those marketed to adults. “Littérature du Moyen Age et imaginaire médiéval dans l’édition pour la jeunesse,” Le Français dans tous ses états 36 (Le Moyen Age),   [accessed September 2013].



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in student editions and anthologies where prefaces, footnotes, and other materials impose readings authorized by the scientific reputation of the specialist editor. Medievalists can unendingly debate what to include in the medieval literary canon, but until we pay closer attention to the accompanying paratexts, to the ways in which we present this material in textbooks and anthologies, we risk perpetuating the methods of nineteenth-century philologists for whom the marginalization of medieval literature as “primitive” was a useful tool for emphasizing the superiority of their own cultural achievements.

Medievalism Studies and the Subject of Religion Richard Utz In 2013, Cynthia Cyrus published a monograph entitled Received Medievalisms: A Cognitive Geography of Viennese Women’s Convents in Palgrave’s “The New Middle Ages” series.1 In her study, Cyrus describes and examines the complex cultural history of reception of women’s monastic communities from the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1529 through the nineteenth century. Focusing mainly on Augustinian, Premonstratensian, Clarissan, Penitent, and Cistercian monastic houses, she investigates an extensive panoply of multimodal references (visual: as in cartographical plans and various ­pictorial representations; verbal: as in travel literature, topographies, anecdotes, and legends) and fully fledged “foundation stories” (formal histories told to relate the origins of a specific community), to present readers with the urbanhistorical background for the evolving attitudes toward the city’s past. While the women’s convents: lack the quaintness of the Viennese fiaker, they substitute their own enacted ritual of liturgy for the whirl of the waltz with its emphasis on imperial and urban pleasures. Thus, they do not partake directly in the theme of “gay Vienna.” These institutions do, however, capture a sense of the Viennese past that generated its own sense of longing and belonging. The convents, as portrayed in a range of post­medieval genres, function as easily recognizable symbols of the medieval and the spiritual ancestry of a proud city, though how they do so can vary according to narrative preference and authorial perspective. With 1

Cynthia J. Cyrus, Received Medievalisms: A Cognitive Geography of Viennese Women’s Convents (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

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enduring walls of stone and an ongoing presence in everyday religious life, the monasteries could stand directly for the “old” and for the “Catholic” nature of the city, skyline markers of a historical Christian past. (2) Cyrus’s project is exceptional in several ways. First of all, it focuses for the most part on early modernity, a time period in which the concept of the medieval past was yet unsettled. Thus, unlike the majority of the existing academic work in medievalism studies, she explores forms of medievalism “still closer” to the Middle Ages itself, when much of “what we today identify as the medieval may have continued unobserved and uninterrupted.”2 Secondly, she combines the theoretical and methodological areas of literary studies, urban history, monastic studies, gender history, and topographical and cognitive geography with some of the notions central to medievalism studies: authority, dis/continuity, genealogy, Gothic, heritage, identity, nostalgia, preservation, revival, ritual, and romanticism, coming very close to what Jonathan Hsy has recently described as medievalism’s “co-disciplinarity.” This furthers a “shared intellectual and creative zone” that allows individuals or groups of people “to test the very conventions of academic disciplines and to experiment across diverse modes of artistic production.”3 Finally, while Cyrus’s goal is not an in-depth exploration of the Viennese nun’s religious faith, she is fully inclusive of religious and theological matters as they converge with the postmedieval cognitive geography of Vienna’s women’s convents. It is the exceptional nature of this third feature of Received Medievalisms I would like to consider in this essay. Specifically, I would like to ask why it is that, despite the obvious co-disciplinary nature of medievalism and the essential role of religion in medieval culture, so few practitioners of medievalism studies delve into examining the enduring presence and influence of religion per se?4 Perhaps the reason is to be found with what Randy Cohen, the New York Times “Ethicist” blogger, has diagnosed as part of general cultural etiquette: Most of us have been educated to believe that 2

3 4

Alicia Montoya, Sophie van Romburgh, and Wim van Anrooij, “Introduction: Questioning Early Modern Medievalisms,” in Early Modern Medievalisms: The Interplay between Scholarly Reflection and Artistic Production, ed. Alicia Montoya, Sophie van Romburgh, and Wim van Anrooij (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 3. Jonathan Hsy, “Co-disciplinarity,” in Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, ed. Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), 43–51 (43). For a short summary assessment of the general eschewal of religious subject matter in medievalism studies, see Richard Utz, “Can We Talk About Religion, Please? Medievalism’s Eschewal of Religion, and Why It Matters,” forthcoming in Medievalism Now, special issue 28.1 (2013) of The Year’s Work in Medievalism, ed. Karl Fugelso, E. L. Risden, and Richard Utz.



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“religion, especially another person’s religion, should be treated with deference or, better still, silence by nonbelievers.”5 Cohen, who holds many of his own secular political convictions on social justice as dear as others do their religious beliefs, defines the difference in the public reception toward his blogs on religious and secular matters: When I take up a secular question that provokes broad disagreement, I typically receive a few hundred responses by e-mail that begin: “Dear Sir, I am appalled . . .” When I write about religion, I cause a tidal wave. The week I rebuked an Orthodox Jewish real estate agent whose beliefs forbade his shaking the hand of a female client, I stopped counting after receiving 4,000 ferocious messages, lambasting not only my argument but my character, my appearance and my parentage: it was speculated that dogs played a part. While it is undoubtedly true that some of us prefer to avoid conflict with those to whom our scholarship on religious topics might be anathema, there are just as many scholars of medievalism who wholeheartedly embrace their role as public intellectuals whose specific task it is to add research-based commentary to the usable medieval pasts we encounter. After all, scholars of medievalism do investigate and take positions on gender, sexuality, abortion, education, politics, etc., positions that religious individuals find objectionable. Then again, many medievalism-ists live with more than one subject position and somehow balance an allegiance to the ideals of academic study with the mandates of religious denominations and their traditions and beliefs. From these preliminary observations I conclude that there must be additional reasons for the avoidance of religious subject matter in Medievalism Studies, and I believe the main reason may be the radically different approaches to temporality proposed by these two ways of conceptualizing the world and the relationship between past and present. As cultural and semantic historians have demonstrated, time itself and a consciously temporalizing perspective on all subject matter become lead indicators for the advent of modernity.6 In fact, since the early nineteenth century temporalization has become the central weapon in the arsenal of historicism, the thought paradigm that not only can dissect and structure the present and the past, but also guide all academic study at the modern 5 6

[accessed 1 August 2014]. See Richard Utz, “Coming to Terms with Medievalism,” European Journal of English Studies 15.2 (2011): 1–13, for a detailed discussion of this claim.

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university toward distinguishable periodicities. This process is what makes new fields in the humanities occupy intellectual territory by organizing their curricula and their hiring according to historical periods and to develop as quickly as possible a course on the field’s own history. Even science and technology studies – fields in which new results are expressly developed to erase older ones – offer courses on the history of their subject matter.7 The very same process made art and cultural historians, from the 1830s onward, abandon the vague term “antiquities” to describe that which had come before their own period and initially replace or specify it by using a more clearly defined “medieval” period and “Middle Ages” (a term later particularized into “early,” “high,” and “late”). Soon thereafter, in what Kathleen Biddick has termed a “traumatic” process for university study, the new academic specialists replaced “medievalism” with “medieval studies” to wrest responsibility for researching the past away from “antiquarians,” “dilettantes,” and “journalists,” and locate it with themselves, that is, professional scholars at colleges and universities.8 In a parallel development, diachronic principles were made to dissect linguistic periodization.9 As a byproduct of this intense and accelerated temporalization, institutionalization, and particularization, and need for a distanced view of the past, the chasm between scholars and their subjects of investigation grew ever larger, to the point where the historian Leopold von Ranke’s (in)famous dictum to write history as it “actually happened” came to mean that an almost insurmountable epistemological boundary had been built against anyone who sought to bridge the increasingly non-contiguous historical periods of past and the present.10 Even the academic subject of “Theology” succumbed to the pressure of historicizing, establishing Church History as an essential element of its degree programs. However, these theological faculties’ subject matter, “religion,” conceived of “temporality” in terms diametrically opposed to those of the fully historicist rest of the academy. Consider, for example, one of the 7

8 9 10

In Grammars of Creation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), George Steiner explained best this difference between science/technology and human-centered fields of endeavor: “In the arts, in literature, in music, duration is not time. Formal and metamathematical logic does move forward and amend prior findings. Philosophy does not” (257). The Shock of Medievalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); see further Biddick’s essay, “Trauma,” in Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, 247–53. David Matthews, The Making of Middle English, 1765–1910 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). According to J. D. Braw, “Vision as Revision: Ranke and the Beginning of Modern History,” History and Theory 46.4 (2007): 45–60, Ranke’s intentions were originally much more aesthetic–experiential than positivistic.



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most enduring disputes in the history of Christianity: transubstantiation. A majority of Christians maintain that the person of Christ is spiritually present in the Eucharist. Roman Catholic Christians affirm what they term “real presence” of the body and blood of Christ as resulting from a change of the elements of bread and wine. Lutherans agree with them in a real eating and drinking of the body and blood of Christ except that they define it as happening by sacramental union: “in, with, and under the forms” of bread and wine. Methodists and Anglicans tend to avoid the controversy surrounding the question by relegating Christ’s presence to the realm of religion’s mystery.11 More significant than these denominations’ differences is their common desire to bridge two non-contiguous points in time. At the center of their teachings is the recognition that a congregation’s celebration of the Eucharist in remembrance (anamnesis) of the Last Supper is insufficient to express the sempiternal nature of Christ and God and help believers enter into as close a union with the divinity as possible. Basic intellectual “recalling” following Luke 22.19, “Do this in remembrance of me,” is reinforced through a whole host (no pun intended) of liturgical actions and formulae, all forms of ritual reenactment, that culminate in the consecration of the host by the priest. The full, final, and momentous, albeit momentary, suspension of human historicity is to be reached when the consuming of the shared bread and wine allows for a direct physical and spiritual experience. Hence, the individual believer’s communion with Christ can become a living reality rather than remain a mere symbolic re-present-ation. This example of the sempiternality of religion offers, I believe, a good answer to the question why scholars of medievalism studies find it difficult to engage in a critical (and “critical” has been synonymous with “historicizing”) discussion of religion. Most of us may feel comfortable with dissecting Michael Crichton’s narrative device of the multiverse, which in his 1999 science-fiction novel Timeline enables twentieth-century scientists to experience the “real” Middle Ages by moving back and forth between two parallel historical periods.12 Religion, however, because it resists historicity’s epistemological predominance, may remain too difficult a topic for most academic scholars, which is why they have responded to this foundational epistemological aporia in variety of ways. Here are three examples of such different approaches:

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P. J. Fitzpatrick’s In Breaking of Bread. The Eucharist and Ritual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), offers a historical survey of Christian positions on transubstantiation. See Louise D’Arcens’s essay, “Presentism,” in Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, 181–88, for additional examples of time travel and presentism as a mode of historicist reception.

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(1) Mette Birkedal Bruun, who teaches church history at the University of Copenhagen, has advanced the possibility of challenging historicity’s primacy in a number of articles on the seventeenth-century Cistercian reception of Bernard of Clairvaux.13 Discussing the biography and writings of Armand-Jean de Rancé (1626–1700), a courtier turned monk and abbot of the Cistercian monastery of La Trappe in Normandy, she offers a convincing example of his deep and direct connection with Bernard’s religious teachings not as a form of historicizing “medievalism,” but as a synchronistic religious act. Intent on reforming his own monastery and the entire Cistercian order, Rancé revitalized the medieval Bernardine ideals of the love of God, the humility of the soul, and the role of obedience into his own presence without any qualms about their “fit” into his own day and age. Bruun explains: To Rancé, Bernard was part of a monastic tradition that was ever potentially vibrant and alive – and accessible on a synchronic note. The constitution of the monastic genealogy [between him and Bernard] is not a matter of temporal progression but of spiritual affinity. The legitimization of the reform through constant references to Bernard is not a matter of reviving an earlier golden age but of associating his own ideals with those of this epitome of Cistercian spirituality. In other words, Rancé’s project appears to be almost contra-temporal. [. . .] In Rancé’s view, history is a discipline that belongs way out of the monastic focus (unless, he admits, one has received an unequivocal call from God to that effect!). His revitalization of Bernard is not a revitalization of the medieval monk, but of a set of ideals synchronically present.14

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See Mette Birkedal Bruun, “Mellem lectio divina og kildekritik. Om striden mellem Armand-Jean de Rancé og Jean Mabillon,” in Reformation. Universitetet – Kirkehistorie – Luther: Festskrift til Steffen Kjeldgaard-Pedersen, ed. Tine Reeh and Anna Vind (Århus: C. A. Reitzel, 2006), 51–70; “A Case in which a Revitalization of Something Medieval Turned out not to be Medievalism,” in Falling into Medievalism, ed. Anne Lair and Richard Utz, special issue of UNIversitas: The University of Northern Iowa Journal of Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity, 2.1 (2006), [accessed 1 August 2014]; “The Wilderness as ‘lieu de mémoire’: Literary Deserts of Cîteaux and La Trappe,” in Negotiating Heritage: Memories of the Middle Ages, ed. Mette B. Bruun and Stephanie Glaser (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 21–42; “‘Un autre Saint Bernard’: Representing Bernard of Clairvaux in the Age of Louis XIV,” in Resonances: Historical Essays on Continuity and Change, ed. Nils Holger Petersen, Eyolf Østrem, and Andreas Bücker (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 173–98; “Jean Mabillon’s Middle Ages: On Medievalism, Textual Criticism, and Monastic Ideals,” in Early Modern Medievalisms, 427–44. Bruun, “A Case in which a Revitalization…”



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Bruun, although at a church historian’s investigative distance from her religious subject matter, nevertheless acknowledges how religious belief may successfully bridge the roughly 500 years separating Rancé from his medieval model. For her, this “contra-temporal” view should not be subjected to a historicizing perspective and, thus, not be called an example of medievalism. (2) Carla Arnell, who teaches medievalism and early English literatures at Lake Forest University, explains how she manages to inhabit two apparently mutually exclusive subject positions as scholar and Christian.15 Among her reasons for balancing the demands of academic temporality and Christian sempiternality are that: (a) she worships regularly out of a desire “to give thanks to the divine source of all life – what Dante calls ‘the love that moves the sun and other stars’”; (b) “because the formal words and music, the ritual seasons, and the constant practice of religious conformity make life beautiful”; and (c) because of the “link between past and present [. . .], that last invisible tie religion makes possible.” And she continues in a vein similar to that of presentist scholars: Why say the same words over and over each Sunday, the spiritual but not religious might ask? Why not do something new and different? Why not devise one’s own words? Maybe there’s some value in tracing the words of those who have gone before and being reminded that, as diverse as our identities are, we share such common human experiences as childbirth, friendship, love, suffering, and death. Arnell probably speaks for a good number of practitioners of medievalism studies, especially those who find a habitat in which the paradox of historicist temporality and religion does not lead to conflict, but rather yields a rich harvest of academic study. More often than not, these colleagues are guided by the scholars who lived similarly seemingly paradoxical lives, like C. S. Lewis, and find an intellectual home in journals accepting of religious belief as part of academic discourse, like Christianity and Literature. (3) There is also space and work for those who, unlike Arnell, reveal those continuing ritual, liturgical, and cultural ties not as “beautiful,” but as powerful obstacles to ending some of the religious traditions that developed when Christianity’s all-too-human involvement with history led its members and leaders astray. In the early 1990s, Manfred Eder, then a PhD student of Catholic Church History at the University of Regensburg, Germany, brought about the interdiction of the “Deggendorfer Gnad,” a more than 15

Carla Arnell, “An Academic Among the Pews,” Chronicle of Higher Education (14 October 2013). [accessed 1 August 2014].

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500-year-old annual pilgrimage based on an alleged “Jewish desecration” and “miracle of the host.”16 In his dissertation, Eder demonstrated conclusively how late-medieval citizens and clergy had colluded in fabricating the legend, and how highly effective religion-based re-present-ation techniques, including the annual processions, indulgences, rituals, music, plays, etc., had so deeply and lastingly shaped the small Bavarian town’s identity that it took more than 200 years, from the first critical voices during the Enlightenment until 1992, to make it cease. The interdiction came from Bishop Manfred Müller, a full ten years after his appointment in Regensburg, and twentyseven years after the end of the Second Vatican Council, which actively encouraged Christian–Jewish reconciliation. Müller’s predecessor, Rudolf Graber, had refused to concede, against better knowledge, the historical facts behind the medieval legend and rejected calls for the cessation of the annual Deggendorf pilgrimage.17 In 1992, when the diocese honored his memory, Bishop Gerhard Ludwig Müller attested to Graber’s “incorruptibility” in the face of an “apparently omnipotent Zeitgeist,” thus praising his active contra-temporal and anti-historicist stance.18 This appreciation closely resembles an earlier one by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI), who had underlined Graber’s resistance against “the winds of time,” which in his view are “really the winds of Satan,” in a homily on the occasion of Graber’s 60th priesthood jubilee.19 Perhaps it is helpful to mention that Graber was responsible for Ratzinger’s 1968 appointment to a chair in Dogmatic Theology, a line he redefined from one originally slated for an appointment in Judaic Studies? We seem to come full circle. To me, this example leaves no doubt that scholars in medievalism studies have an ethical obligation to investigate and historicize religion and theology, 16

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Manfred Eder, Die “Deggendorfer Gnad”. Entstehung und Entwicklung einer Hostienwallfahrt im Kontext von Theologie und Geschichte (Passau: Passavia, 1992). Since 1993, the Deggendorf city museum includes a permanent exhibit that contrasts the legends with the historical facts surrounding the “Gnad” narratives. See Rabbi Nathan Peter Levinson’s letter of 15 March 1967 to the executive board of the city of Munich’s Society for Christian–Jewish Collaboration (Gesellschaft für Christliche– Jüdische Zusammenarbeit), accessible in the Munich Stadtarchiv, Aktenmappe GCJZ 52. “Die Kirche von Regensburg gedenkt Bischof Dr. Rudolf Grabers – ‘Unbestechlich gegenüber der scheinbaren Allmacht des Zeitgeistes,’” Official Statement of the Diocese of Regensburg (31 January 2010), [accessed 1 August 2014]. “Das Eine Notwendige tun – und reich werden vor Gott. Zum 60-jährigen Priesterjubiläum von Bischof em. Rudolf Graber in der Abteikirche zu Plankstetten am 2.8.1986,” cited according to R. J. Werner, “Anmerkungen zum geschichtstheologischen Opportunismus bei Rudolf Graber,” haGalil.com: Jüdisches Leben online (20 July 2011), [accessed 1 August 2014].



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at least in all its temporal manifestations. Such manifestations might include the abuse of substantial church funds (c. €31 million and $2.2 million, respectively) in part earmarked for charitable use by the Bishop of Limburg, Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst (Germany), and the Archbishop of Atlanta, Wilton Gregory (USA), who recently purchased, built, and lavishly furnished residences for themselves.20 They might also include the Vatican’s ongoing intervention against the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, which represents approximately eighty percent of Catholic sisters in the U.S., and which the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith accuses of practicing a religious renewal dangerously close to radical modernist feminism. In most of these cases, scholars of medievalism studies can point out the specific and often troublesome continuities between current positions held by Church representatives and their demonstrable medieval origins. Such medievalist scholarship can historicize the abuse of church funds for personal uses by church leaders as a long-standing systemic difficulty leaders of a spiritual institution will face in a world governed by secular values. And such scholarship can unveil the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s disciplining of U.S. Catholic sisters’ attempts to “reformulate” and “rethink” Catholic teachings and interpretations of the faith “in light of the world we live in” as originating from the same desire to centrally control the faith and to brand variant interpretations as heretical that characterized medieval instantiations of the Inquisition.21

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About these cases, see Alison Smale, “Vatican Suspends German Bishop Accused of Lavish Spending on Himself,” New York Times, 23 October 2013, [accessed 1 October 2014], and “Mark Davis, “Archbishop Apologizes for 2.2. Million Dollar Home,” Atlanta Journal Constitution, 21 March 2014, [accessed 1 October 2014]. The statement about the necessity of adapting Catholic faith traditions to their contemporary social and cultural contexts was made by Sister Pat Farrell in an interview (“An American Nun Responds to Vatican Criticism”) with National Public Radio, 17 July 2012, [accessed 1 October 2014]. The Vatican’s current Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith is the direct successor institution to the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition, which, established in 1542, consolidated various regional and local forms of religious inquisition in the Middle Ages.

Pop Medievalism Erin Felicia Labbie Medievalism abounds in contemporary culture. One need look no further than the Capital One advertisements in which knights battle the commodity fetish,1 the Altoids’ billboards commanding consumers to “Get medieval on your mouth,” or Quentin Tarantino’s use of medieval torture as a threat and a paranoid homophobic wish-fulfillment in Pulp Fiction (“I’m gonna get medieval on your ass”), which is contextualized and analyzed by Carolyn Dinshaw in her foundational text, Getting Medieval,2 to find examples of medievalism in popular culture. Thematically, one of the most common genres in medievalism, Arthuriana, produces narratives that continue to entice viewers and readers of popular texts. One need not mention the mass consumption of fairy tales that are derived from the Middle Ages, the medievalism in Disney films, heavy-metal music, and video games, nor the dominance of the medievalism fundamental to work by J. R. R. Tolkien, as a means of gaining a foothold among any skeptics who might dare to doubt the centrality of medievalism in popular culture.3 1

2 3

For an analysis of the Capital One advertisements that foreground medieval Vikings and corporate medievalism, see Kevin and Brent Moberly, “Reincorporating the Medieval: Morality, Chivalry, and Honor in Post-Financial-Meltdown Corporate Revisionism,” in Studies in Medievalism XXI: Corporate Medievalism, ed. Karl Fugelso (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), 10–25 (11–12). Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Post-Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 184. For explorations of Tolkien’s medievalism, see esp. Jane Chance, Tolkien the Medievalist (New York: Routledge, 2003), and with Alfred Siewers, Tolkien’s Modern Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2008). For Disney’s medievalism(s), see Disney’s Middle Ages: A FairyTale and Fantasy Past, ed. Susan Aronstein and Tison Pugh (New York: Palgrave, 2012). Also see, Digital Gaming Re-imagines the Middle Ages, ed. Daniel T. Kline (New York: Routledge, 2013); Neomedievalism in the Media: Essays on Film, Television, and Electronic Games, ed. Carol L. Robinson and Pamela Clements (New York: Edwin Mellen, 2012);

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Given medievalism’s prevalence in visual culture and its popularity among consumers, the argument that medievalism is marginal or marginalized within popular culture may seem counter-intuitive. Indeed, one might argue that hierarchical distinctions between high and low have been settled in debates within cultural studies. Yet, despite the apparent prominence of medievalism in popular culture, my argument is that pop medievalism remains on the margins of academic culture. Although it is socially acceptable to speak of popular medievalism, in the movement toward thinking about how the pop is a form of political and aesthetic resistance (which is a fundamental feature of cultural studies­), the pop medieval continues to be perceived by medievalists as a form of scholarly barbarism: it is neither civilized nor sophisticated, and it adheres to neither the old nor the new philology.4 Even among those who dismiss the old or the new approaches to philology, it is difficult to find a balance between what has come to be seen as fan scholarship and what is bona fide academic scholarship.5 In the contemporary climate, when the humanities in general and medieval studies specifically are under attack, medievalists must consistently make a case for the significance of the study of the Middle Ages. In this context, it is important to recognize that pop medievalism is a double-edged sword: it maintains investment in the past and urges a study of medieval literature and culture; yet, it simultaneously lauds the mediations and remediations that are recognized as popular medievalism.6 As histories of medievalism attest, it exists in a symbiotic relationship with medieval studies. One version of the genealogy of medievalism asserts that the genre grew out of popular culture and became a subject in its own right in the nineteenth century.7 In this narrative, the distinction between

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Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present, ed. Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl (New York: Routledge, 2012); Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages, ed. Eileen Joy et al. (New York: Palgrave, 2007). Exceptions to this generalization include those texts listed in note 3 as well as Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture, ed. Gail Ashton and Daniel T. Kline (New York: Palgrave, 2012); International Medievalism and Popular Culture, ed. Louise D’Arcens and Andrew Lynch (New York: Cambria Press, 2014). The old and the new philology are addressed in Rethinking the New Medievalism, ed. R. Howard Bloch, Alison Calhoun, Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, Joachim Küpper, and Jeanette Patterson (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), esp. R. Howard Bloch, “Introduction: The New Philology Comes of Age,” 1–11, and Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Reflections on The New Philology,” 39–50. Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman characterize this remediation by way of cinematic reproducibility and the belatedness of the real in the simulacrum; see Cinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages on Film (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), esp. 53–54. Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998),



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medieval studies, which idealized a scientific and philological approach to medieval texts, and medievalism, which focused on cultural products that, in one way or another, idealized or fantasized about the Middle Ages, led to the development of the field of medievalism.8 However, a different genealogical narrative suggests that medievalism begins immediately in the Middle Ages with intertextual and self-referential responses to earlier medieval texts and cultural products. In this view medievalism is an umbrella term for any aesthetic, political, or ideological appropriation of, or response to, texts, culture, and ideas important to the Middle Ages. Both definitions and genealogies agree that medievalism is founded upon popular culture. Nonetheless, despite the steps that have been taken to dismantle the boundaries between interior and exterior, center and margin, high and low, and even alterity and identification, when it comes to the study of the Middle Ages, medievalism continues to be seen as an anti-discipline: it resists the particular disciplinary structures that dominate the study of medieval literature. In so doing, although it seems to resist becoming a dominant hegemonic force, medievalism unwittingly reproduces the structures that determine it – medievalism seeks to be a legitimate enterprise that supersedes the status of the popular and becomes legible by the pseudo-scientific disciplines that have been branded as objective, empirical, and productive.9 As Laurie Finke and Martin Shichtman state in their work on medievalism and film, Cinematic Illuminations, “medievalism repeats this initial gesture of exclusion, reinscribing the same rigid topography of interiority and exteriority that constituted the field of medieval studies one hundred years earlier.”10 Yet, this reproduction of the institutions that it resists limits the potential of medievalism to determine the discourses and narratives that accompany the status inhabited by those who are considered to be marginal. In this essay I suggest that, although the discourse of medievalism pervades mass culture,

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4. Also see Clare Simmons, Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain (New York: Palgrave, 2011). See Leslie J. Workman’s initiation of the journal Studies in Medievalism. Also see Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, ed. Stephen G. Nichols and R. Howard Bloch (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 49, and The New Medievalism, ed. Marina S. Brownlee, Kevin Brownlee, and Stephen G. Nichols (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). John Ganim, in Medievalism and Orientalism (New York: Palgrave, 2005/2008), 33, and Carolyn Dinshaw in How Soon is Now? (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), highlight J. S. Furnivall’s role in the establishment of medieval studies and medievalism. Dinshaw notes that Furnivall’s position on the margins of the academy allowed him to shape and popularize scholarly fields. Finke and Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations, 11.

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pop medievalism remains marginal by way of its resistance to disciplinarity and singular temporality. Popular vs. Pop Medievalism The question of the “popular” and the genre within visual art that is known as “pop” modify “medievalism” in different ways. As a medievalist it is tempting to define the popular by way of its etymology: the Latin populus, meaning “of the people,” transforms to the Latin popularis and becomes the late Middle English term popular. Unfortunately, this etymological trace exposes the limits of one sort of medievalism and requires a different line of inquiry. “Popular,” in the sense that it means of the people (as in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Clerk’s Tale when the “people” demand that Walter, the ruler, take a wife), resists location in contemporary culture. When technology dictates attraction and produces spectacle at a lightning pace with little apparent logic other than that of the degrees of separation (or proximity) at play in social media, it is nearly impossible to determine what is considered to be popular; popular culture today may alternately signify both that which is produced by the people, and that which is agreed upon and recognized by the mass population. In both cases, popular culture is both consumerist and dictatorial. The “pop,” on the other hand, is defined by a particular genre that dominated avant-garde circles at the temporal and philosophical intersections of late-modernism and post-modernism. Pop was epitomized in visual culture by Andy Warhol, whose play with repetition and mechanical reproduction foregrounded the manipulated character of art in an era without authenticity.11 Most scholars today would agree that the debates about high and low distinctions within and across culture have been resolved by cultural studies analyses of value, or rendered moot by technological reproducibility and the leveling of access to modes of aesthetic production based on class systems. The popular is distinct from the pop in a precise sense. Pop remains a genre even when it is not popular. One can no longer define the popular without reference to Raymond Williams’ scheme of ideological dominance characterized by movement among the arenas of the dominant, transgressive, emergent, and regressive (also known as residual).12 Due to these shifts in cultural

11

12

Hal Foster diagnoses the traumatic kernel within pop, showing how its repetition and reproduction is a crucial feature in its aesthetic and political statements. See The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1996). Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).



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hegemony and the mass production of entertainment by the populous today, pop has regained popularity.13 Alex Ross, a cultural critic for The New Yorker, describes this phenomenon as “pop hegemony.” In “The Naysayers: Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and the critique of pop culture,” Ross presents the significance of the Frankfurt School for contemporary popular culture.14 He suggests that the contemporary climate of technological homogenization in which cultural products are not only filtered by, but also produced through, popular methods of mass sharing reinforces Theodor Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s thesis that the culture industry numbs consumers; further, he remediates Walter Benjamin’s assertion that the emptying of the aura of the work of art produced by technological reproducibility gives rise to a materialist dialectic between art and politics. In order to show the dialectical importance of popular culture today, Ross appropriates Walter Benjamin’s famous statement: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”15 Benjamin’s thesis signals the commodification and colonialization of the subject who undergoes the process of becoming “civilized.”16 As John Guillory puts it in Cultural Capital, “Institutions of reproduction succeed by taking as their first object not the reproduction of social relations but the reproduction of the institution itself.”17 Medievalists and scholars of medievalism are quite familiar with the claims that the Middle Ages is the most barbaric historical epoch. Benjamin’s view of the barbarism of civilization maintains the medieval within the modern, suggesting that we have always been medieval. Further, he locates a central feature of popular culture in the practice of ritual that dominated the rise of institutions of power in the Middle Ages.18

13

14 15 16

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For the theoretical and political implications of medievalism, see Bruce W. Holsinger, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), and Neomedievalism, Neoconservativism, and the War on Terror (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007). Alex Ross, “The Naysayers: Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and the Critique of Pop Culture,” The New Yorker, 15 September 2014, 88–94. Alex Ross, “The Naysayers,” 94. The original statement may be found in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Henry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 256. Contemporary with Benjamin, Norbert Elias also pointed out that the “civilizing process” imposes ideological structures on those being dominated, in The Civilizing Process (repr. New York and London: Blackwell Press, 2000). John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 57. See also Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture (New York: Sage, 1990), 32. The importance of ritual and cult in cultural practice is outlined in Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility,” in The Norton Anthology

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The persistence of the medieval within the contemporary is one explanation for the popularity of medievalism in our late-late-capitalist moment. Indeed, as he discusses the relevance of the Frankfurt School to popular culture today, Ross references “The Game of Thrones” in the context of Kanye West’s and Jay-Z’s album “Watch the Throne” to show the juxtaposition of different sorts of popularity and commodity culture; as a medievalist, I see in this juxtaposition a medievalism on the part of the cultural critic whose focus is on the pop.19 My repertoire determines what I glean from Ross’s investigation into popular culture, and an awareness of this urges a reconsideration of the popular that is determined by the reader’s (or viewer’s, or auditor’s) repertoire. Such a view is also a reminder of Roland Barthes’ view of cultural myths, popularity, and the reader’s repertoire as a determining factor in what is perceived and understood.20 It also encourages repetition (of reading, viewing, listening). Pop and medievalism are both predicated on repetition, returns, and remediation; therefore, pop medievalism becomes a method of thinking across historical epochs. Surrealism and Pop Medievalism The rapturous satisfactions of consumption surround us, clinging to objects as if to the sensory residues of the previous day in the delirious excursion of a dream. As to the logic that regulates this strange discourse – surely it compares to what Freud uncovered in The Interpretation of Dreams? But we have scarcely advanced beyond the explanatory level of naïve psychology and the medieval dreambook. We believe in “Consumption:” we believe in a real subject, motivated by needs and confronted by real objects as sources of satisfaction. It is a thoroughly vulgar metaphysic. Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign21 No one dreams that way. Theodor Adorno, “Looking Back at Surrealism”22

19 20 21 22

of Literary and Critical Theory, ed. Vincent Leitch et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 1046–71. Ross, “The Naysayers,” 94. See Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972); and “The Death of the Author,” in The Norton Anthology, 1322–35. Jean Baudrillard, For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (New York: Telos Press, 1981), 63. Theodor Adorno, “Looking Back at Surrealism,” in The Idea of the Modern in Literature and the Arts, ed. Irving Howe (New York: Horizon, 1967), 220–24.



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A “thoroughly vulgar metaphysic” indeed! In order to perceive how pop medievalism is a method of reading in late-late capitalism, it is important to return to the alternating fetishization and projection (or, the abjection) of the Middle Ages among the members of the Frankfurt School and their disciples. In his analysis of the power that ideology has to control the uses and consumptions of culture characterized in the epigraph above, Jean Baudrillard commits a crime that is familiar to medievalists and scholars of medievalism alike: that is to say, he projects onto the present a past that is at once full of naïve psychology and as simple as a medieval dreambook. Suffice it to say that medieval dreambooks are not simple and that what passes for naïve psychology – or, “pop” psychology – is not so easily dismissed as the underside of reason or logic. Similarly, popular medievalism – the broad umbrella category for medievalism within mass culture – began as the genre of “pop” art that is specific to the fault lines between late-modernism and post-modernism. Just as medievalism is a product of modernism, its marginal sub-genre pop medievalism is a particular method of thinking about the Middle Ages by way of a post-modernist critique of capital and its “vulgar metaphysic.”23 This “vulgarity” is that of belief, and, yet, Baudrillard’s own system is dependent upon belief – in fantasy, in reality, in the belatedness of the perception of the real as it takes on the form of the hyperreal and the simulacrum. Although Baudrillard’s view of “vulgarity” is not the same as Benjamin’s view of barbarism, both require a perception of popular culture and mass mobilization. Whereas medieval writers like Dante Alighieri and Geoffrey Chaucer lauded the vulgar for its supposed centrality to the dissemination of ideas in the vernacular, Baudrillard’s critique of the vulgar translates to his distaste for the political economy that fetishizes experience by relying on belief. When he says, “no one dreams that way,” Adorno’s response to surrealism may also be an anachronistic response to Baudrillard’s system. If Adorno is correct, then the surreal is not found in dreams; instead, it is found in popular culture. In her correspondence with Benjamin, Gretel Adorno’s comment, “There’s no need to search for the surreal here, for one stumbles over it at every step,”24 further supports Theodor’s view that the surreal is not in dreams; rather, for Gretel, it is the reality of American popular culture.

23 24

Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, 63. Gretel Karplus-Adorno in Correspondence, 1930–1940 (New York: Polity, 2008).

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Conclusion: Toward the Popular Marginal or Pop Medievalism Initially, I planned this essay to engage the question of the popular and the marginal by way of Jacques Derrida’s decentering of the text and deconstruction of the difference between the margins and the center. The question of temporal dislocation that is significant to medievalism is characterized by the deferral and delay, as well as the return, in Derrida’s famous (but often misused) term différance.25 I continue to maintain that certain forms of the marginal have much to learn from Derrida’s arguments.26 However, because medievalism itself was once marginal, and because it is predicated on remediation, repetition, reproduction, and commodification, which are all features that it shares with discussions of trauma, it became more urgent to address the history of its dialogue with popularity and to assert a new form of methodology by way of pop medievalism. Therefore, rather than centralize Derrida’s view of marginality, I reread Hal Foster’s brilliant account of the ways that art and psychoanalysis continue to influence popular culture and late-late capitalism, in his The Return of the Real. Foster’s reading of the traumatic kernel of the real in pop art motivated me to introduce this movement to medievalism, where the popular is central and dominant, but the pop has remained under-studied.27 It also signals the traumatic kernel of the stakes in the question of the marginal in the dialogue between art and politics. As Ross puts it: Benjamin’s heirs have suggested how messages of dissent can emanate from the heart of the culture industry, particularly in giving voice to oppressed or marginalized groups. Any narrative of cultural regression must confront evidence of social advance: the position of Jews, women, gay men, and people of color is a great deal more secure in today’s liberal democracies than it was in the old bourgeois Europe.28 Although one might easily contest the assumption that liberal democracies have rendered life more “secure” for marginalized groups, his focus on cultural regression introduces a temporal dimension to his reading of the culture industry.

25 26

27 28

Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 3–27. A longer version of this argument would engage Derrida’s response to Benjamin, Adorno, dreams, and surrealism that he presents in Fichus: Discours de Francfort (Paris: Galilée, 2002). Foster, The Return of the Real, esp. 130–36. Ross, The Naysayers.



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Indeed, the marginal is precisely about history and temporality. Ross recounts that: the NPR pop critic Ann Powers wrote last month about listening to Nico & Vinz’s slickly soulful hit “Am I Wrong” in the wake of the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, and catching the song’s undercurrents of unease. “Pop is all about commodification: the soft center of what adapts,” Powers writes. “But sometimes, when history collides with it, a simple song gains dimension.”29 What Powers calls a collision between history and a work of art, Roland Barthes might call “reaching into one’s repertoire to perceive the mutual implications that art and politics have the potential to bring to culture.”30 To create and maintain a repertoire that allows one to recognize medievalism, one must be familiar with Medieval Studies. The current awareness in the Humanities that Medieval Studies is in danger of being a marginal field of inquiry might gain fodder for responses to institutional structures from an awareness of pop medievalism.31 As Andrew Cole and D. Vance Smith have written, and as scholars (both amateur and professional) of medievalism know, “To forget ‘the medieval’ is to conjure a modernity that can never be known.”32 Medievalism continues to teach us about the Middle Ages, and pop medievalism has the potential to implicate art and politics in a dialectic that has the potential to create a future for medieval studies and medievalism. Perhaps the commodification of medievalism that already dominates certain corners of popular culture might employ that malleable soft center to maintain strength and power that exists on the margins.

29 30 31

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Powers in Ross, The Naysayers. Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 1324. Another route to achieve this might be to reconsider the scholastic debates about universals. For work on nominalism, see Studies in Medievalism X: Medievalism and the Academy 2: Cultural Studies, ed. David Metzger (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998), 97–102; and Literary Nominalism and the Theory and Practice of Re-reading Late Medieval Texts: A New Research Paradigm, ed. Richard J. Utz (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1995), 3–30. Frederic Jameson briefly gestures to the significance of nominalism and positivism in medieval studies and late-late capitalism in “On the Medieval,” in The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages, ed. Andrew Cole and D. Vance Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 243–46. For work on realism, see Erin Felicia Labbie, Lacan’s Medievalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Cole and Vance Smith, The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages, 28.

Ecomedievalism: Applying Ecotheory to Medievalism and Neomedievalism Valerie B. Johnson This essay applies ecocriticism to the study of neomedieval texts, an approach that I term “ecomedievalism.” Ecomedievalism interlaces study of neomedievalisms through the bifurcated lens of ecocriticism and ecomaterialism.1 Neomedieval texts continually deploy environmental descriptions and language to develop a sense of an authentic medieval setting, part of the worldbuilding process, yet little critical attention is devoted to analyzing these methods from an ecological perspective. Ecocriticism’s rapid theorization has allowed the field to move beyond the political activism that characterized its origins, and now offers an opportunity to begin academic study of the fictional environments in neomedievalisms.2 Consequently, this essay seeks 1

2

Ecocriticism has been a factor in medieval studies for decades: of note are Rebecca Douglass, “Ecocriticism and Middle English Literature,” Studies in Medievalism X: Medievalism and the Academy II: Cultural Studies, ed. David Metzger (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998), 136–63, and Gilian Rudd, Greenery: Ecocritical Readings of Late Medieval English Literature (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press and Palgrave, 2007). Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s editorial efforts have led ecomaterialism with postmedieval 4.1 (2013), and Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). Described by Greg Garrard in Ecocriticism (London and NY: Routledge, 2004), 3: “Ecocriticism is, then, an avowedly political mode of analysis. [. . .] Ecocritics generally tie their cultural analyses explicitly to a ‘green’ moral and political agenda. In this respect, ecocriticism is closely related to environmentally oriented developments in philosophy and political theory,” making ecotheory relentlessly present-oriented. While a green reading of Chaucer, Shakespeare, or a modernist poet helps articulate the past with immediate benefit to the present, such approaches clash with origin-driven scholarship dominating medievalism. Neither entirely accounts for transhistorical/neomedieval traditions like Robin Hood or even the continual consumption of authors like Chaucer. The underlying push toward universalized or naturalized thinking that underscores many ecocritical

Studies in Medievalism XXIV, 2015

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to demonstrate how neomedievalism can benefit from the ecocritical readings that traditional medieval studies are embracing. Eco-readings recognize and distinguish the role of the human in monolithic, romanticized visions of “nature” that otherwise lead to fantasies of a recoverable Edenic condition.3 These fantasies are dangerous because they produce a false nostalgia to legitimize modern oppressions rooted, and thus passively justified, in history or tradition. A retroactive myth of imperialism, for example, holds that prior to conquest and colonization native peoples did not exert (proper) agency upon their natural environments. By this logic, invasion civilizes land through cultivation but also gives the invaders more rights to environmental control than the original inhabitants.4 Ecomedievalism encourages interdisciplinary research to reveal and consequently problematize the constructed fantasies of nature that fill neomedieval stories. The root of ecomedievalism challenges the Anglo-American conviction that a pure “wilderness,” a primeval landscape completely (or largely) untouched by human hands, can exist. Ecomedievalism allows, through interdisciplinary methods, consideration of how the presentation of medieval landscapes in neomedieval texts constitutes a socially constructed ecology, one that has the potential to bridge the producer–consumer divide, skew critical reception of texts, and passively support existing cultural biases with real-world consequences. A definitive theorization of ecomedievalism is not the goal of this essay. Instead, my discussion will focus on a single ecological element, the forest, to trace the possibilities offered by a reading characterized by ecomedievalism.

3

4

approaches is inherently problematic for medievalism. Medievalism, in turn, presupposes the impact of historical and cultural context upon a work, yet – because of this focus on human-created systems – does not easily accommodate non-human factors like geography, ecology, even weather or the elements. By specifying ecomedievalism, I am following Elizabeth Emery’s descriptive examination of medievalisms (plural) as methods (and field of study) that are most efficient when continually sorted into new and dynamic sub-categories that ensure “a constantly evolving and self-referential process of defining an always fictional Middle Ages,” in “Medievalism and the Middle Ages,” in Studies in Medievalism XVII: Defining Medievalism(s), ed. Karl Fugelso (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer: 2009), 77–85 (85). See Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993) for a critical study of this impact, particularly his discussion of farming technologies, judgments by settled farmers against nomadic herdsmen, and Gerald of Wales’ description of the nomadic Irish as barbarians in the Topographia Hibernica. For a similar perspective on the consequences and process of European colonization practices, beginning in the fifteenth century, see Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (New York: Random House, 2005), and Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Ecomedievalism 33 I will briefly examine representations of medieval English forests from the transhistorical (and neomedieval) Robin Hood tradition to demonstrate how ecomedievalism may reveal unconscious assumptions that demonstrate the power of the medieval setting as a blank slate for modern fantasy.5 The forest, in this context, is imagined by modern audiences as a purely ecological habitat. A fully ecocritical reading of the Robin Hood forests would place primary emphasis upon the historical reality of the woodland, recognizing that forests were equally human-built and -defined political constructions as ecological zones characterized by trees. Yet the integrity of this human relationship to the forest is completely negated in the fantasy seen in medieval and modern Robin Hood stories. Ecomedievalism retains and centers the cultural impact of the neomedieval greenwood upon audiences. Modern use of the greenwood in cinematic contexts perpetuates the nostalgic view of a perpetual summer, marked by lush greenery. The fantasy setting of the green and sunny woodland appears in the first lines of the earliest surviving Robin Hood tales, “Robin Hood and the Monk” (“In somer, when the shawes be sheyne, / And leves be large and long”) and “Robin Hood and the Potter” (“In schomer, when the leves spryng, / The bloschoms on every bowe”), and these descriptions apply to nearly every Robin Hood film or television production from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.6 For the sake of brevity, I will take the recent television program Robin Hood (2006–9, starring Jonas Armstrong) as the main focus of this analysis, and I reference two other productions as bookends: The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938, starring Errol Flynn) and Robin Hood (2010, starring Russell Crowe). These three productions are representative of the trends in the modern Robin Hood tradition: all depend heavily on carefully groomed forest settings to frame narrative actions and create a sense of authenticity; all permit viewers to make connections between story elements and the context of production and reception; and all evoke the greenwood or other forests in advertisements, posters, and other ephemera surrounding the production. Furthermore, the Armstrong Robin Hood’s status as a television program demands a more concentrated formulation of the greenwood than single-story films, since the serial nature of television requires that each episode repeat the work of the last and contribute new material in each repetition. 5

6

John Howe and Michael Wolfe observe that “[t]he major stage for historical fantasy is now the Middle Ages [. . .] the medieval world remains a tabula rasa upon which we can inscribe our fantasies,” in “Introduction,” Inventing Medieval Landscapes: Senses of Place in Western Europe (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002), 1. Lines 1–2 of “Robin Hood and the Monk” and “Robin Hood and the Potter,” in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), 37 and 62.

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In constructing the rhetoric of greenery, producers of Robin Hood stories account for audience expectations. Indeed, since producers are themselves audiences, influenced by and referencing other productions, the desire for forests becomes a never-ending cycle of material inflected by creators’ participation in the circular process of production: an imaginary greenwood realized by producers (and landscaping specialists), consumed by audiences, and reconstituted in future cycles of production and consumption.7 The greenwood becomes constitutive of itself, and the human networks that create and maintain the greenwood are blurred or erased. In the Armstrong Robin Hood, the forests are richly green, presenting a visual balance between trees and undergrowth, and allowing clear sight-lines for the cameras. But how ecology is made to fit the fantasy is what ecomedievalism can uncover: these environments are part of an established and commercially cultivated ideal of what a medieval forest should be, and they visually communicate (from past Robin Hood productions) that thick forest cover equates to primordial and untouched states. But, as Howe and Wolfe note, such a: vision of a primordial landscape actually reveals more about the fantasies of United States conservationists than about medieval Europe. It embodies peculiar American ideas about untouched virgin wilderness, the forest primeval, and “old growth” forest, which even in this hemisphere make little sense unless we are prepared to deny all humanity and agency to the aboriginal inhabitants who had been interacting with the environment quite successfully long before Europeans arrived on the scene. It has little relevance to a western Europe that had been thickly inhabited for millennia, a place usually characterized by carefully managed arable pastureland, and forest. It has little correspondence to the ways people in medieval Europe saw their actual physical world, although it has some points of tangency with their literary fantasies.8 What Howe and Wolf help us see is that a primeval Robin Hood forest that looks and feels “right,” authentic, is not historically or ecologically accurate: the Flynn set-dressers famously built “trees” and painted existing leaves green. As Martha Driver observes:

7

8

Stijn Reijnders articulates this concept in the context of a “process-driven perspective” illustrating the relationship between artists and fans, or producers and audiences, and observes that the cycle “relates to how the imagination literally ‘takes place’”; see Places of the Imagination: Media, Tourism, Culture (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 17. Howe and Wolfe, “Introduction,” 2.

Ecomedievalism 35 Just as our perceptions of realism, of history, in medieval art are shaped by visual conventions, so too with films. As film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum commented to me some years ago, “It doesn’t matter if the historical details of the film are authentic. They just have to look authentic to the audience.”9 Instead, the virtue of this rhetoric of greenery is that it looks, and thus feels, right to producers and audiences and conveys what the story requires. The Robin Hood forests allow the traditional division between producers and audiences to be bridged by associating the forest with Robin Hood directly. Producers are able to draw upon their own experiences as audiences to use greenery to communicate directly with viewers. In the Armstrong program, helicopter vista shots of the forest introduce most forest scenes, particularly at the start of the series when the visual language of the forest is still being established. In these shots the primary impression is an abundance of green deciduous leaves; though the angle and level of focus is different from the Flynn film, the common language of “green trees, and lots of them” carries through. The forest is vast, untouched, and Robin Hood is part of its ecology. This rhetoric of greenery reaches its apex in the 2010 film where the brightly green forest appears only at the end of the story as Crowe’s Robin Longstride becomes Robin Hood. The Crowe Robin Hood thus builds upon the vividly green imagery famously established by the Flynn film (the first in color), realized and developed by the Armstrong program: the brightly green forest is a visual metonymy for Robin Hood. This image of the forest dominates critical thinking about medieval forests in two key ways: first, it is pervasively familiar from popular culture; second, this familiarity also resonates precisely with the forests of medieval romance that Jacques Le Goff describes.10 Between the popularity of the neomedieval greenwood imagery of Robin Hood and Le Goff’s discussion of (French) romance forests, this “inauthentic authenticity” skews critical interpretations and engagement away from the historical reality of English royal forests, which were ecologically diverse political constructs whose woodlands were highly managed and also included villages, roads, and bodies of water. Critics engaged with Anglo-American culture must also contend with the distinctly American fantasy of wilderness, identified by Howe and Wolfe, and which

9

10

Martha W. Driver, “What’s Accuracy Got to Do with It?: Historicity and Authenticity in Medieval Film,” in The Medieval Hero on Screen: Representations from Beowulf to Buffy, ed. Martha W. Driver and Sid Ray (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004), 19–22 (20). Jacques Le Goff, “The Wilderness in the Medieval West,” in The Medieval Imagination, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 47–59.

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sociological studies demonstrate dominates the experience of woodlands even by non-Americans.11 Ecomedievalism can allow scholars to break down the cultural structures of assumptions about the forest that dominate our thinking, and allow consideration of how neomedieval texts construct the forest. This variety is important since, as Driver observes, “Openness to a variety of representations, however, whether of medieval works of art or of moments in medieval history or of stories popular in the Middle Ages, can freshen our historical perspectives, awakening us as well to the cultural attitudes and agendas underpinning those interpretations.”12 We thus begin to see that, for Robin Hood, the visual rhetoric of the brightly green woodland is a powerful component in stories that often advocate reforms: the hope that audiences often feel in such a setting allows the inherently conservative messages of social reform to resonate with more radical audiences. These messages vary from production to production, and decade to decade, but the Robin Hood tradition always seems to advocate for the support of efficient yet ethical leaders (waiting for the king to return); the removal of corruption (opposing the Sheriff or Sir Guy); maintain the law in spirit if not letter (protect the poor by robbing the rich); and the greenwood is vital to the story. I have referred generically to the greenwood and forest, but a marker of neomedieval Robin Hood stories is a relentless determination to name the forest, translating the green space of outlaw rebellion into a place on a map. Like many neomedievalisms, this is not new: though the neomedieval tradition overwhelmingly prefers Sherwood, the medieval rotates among Barnsdale, Sherwood, and even Inglewood. Modern audiences overwhelmingly identify Robin Hood with Sherwood. Thus, every forest can become Sherwood, and Sherwood, conversely, becomes every forest, since attention to the details of the greenwood is extremely rare in any Robin Hood story, medieval or neomedieval. Through long association and expectation, the place of an audience’s local wood or a production’s setting becomes the greenwood space of Sherwood. Even a simple green background can (and does) suffice in promotional posters or DVD covers, as with the Armstrong Robin Hood. The real and historical ecologies of Sherwood matter less than the fact of a wooded space that could be called Sherwood.13 This can be seen in the Armstrong Robin Hood, a production aware that fans and scholars can 11 12 13

Gerd Lupp, Franz Hoechtl, and Wolfgang Wende, “‘Wilderness’ – A Designation for Central European Landscapes?,” Land Use Policy 28.3 (2011): 594–603. Driver, “What’s Accuracy Got to Do with It?,” 19. In this sense, the place of a local forest or woodland becomes the space of Sherwood in a transformative process outlined by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988).

Ecomedievalism 37 use Wikipedia to discover facts about contemporary Sherwood that a film’s rhetoric of greenery overrides. Filming occurred in Hungarian forests: the actual trees of Sherwood (historical or contemporary) are not those seen in the program.14 Instead, the forest feels authentic because it presents densely wooded cover. Driver usefully reminds us that “appearances of authenticity draw audiences into film and that film itself is interpretive, just as scholarship, history, and primary sources themselves are interpretive.”15 The consequences of uncritically perpetuating the neomedieval forest, with its green rhetoric of primeval abundance, seem harmless. However, Howe and Wolfe remind us that the fantasy of wilderness that the rhetoric of greenery fully embraces first removes humans from view and then allows audiences to believe the woodland environment is primeval (uncultivated), a blank slate inviting writing (cultivation). Ecological historians like Oliver Rackham have consistently demonstrated that the fantasy of “untouched wilderness” that the neomedieval Robin Hood promotes not only lacks any connection to a medieval English forest (a highly cultivated and politically regulated entity), but also to any English ecological reality after the end of the neolithic era. The implications in the Americas are even more dramatic. Research consistently indicates the longstanding and extensive cultivation and regulation of natural environments by native populations prior to European incursions in North, Central, and South America.16 Yet the fantasy of the untouched wilderness taught in American primary schools consistently fails to account for historical reality, and furthermore serves to actively and aggressively erase the presence of the peoples who did inhabit these cultivated landscapes. This erasure, in turn, encourages the dispossession of those peoples both historically and in the modern period. Ecomedievalism cannot overcome centuries of prejudice, but it can encourage recognition of fantasy and offer a means to understand how fantasy within fiction impacts life outside a story. Ecomedievalism allows us to see that these networks and relations exist, that they are not “natural,” and that the facts of our environments are as much a narrative as our own stories. 14

15 16

András Szepesi, “Forest Health Status in Hungary,” in Anderzej Bytnerowicz et al., Proceedings of the International Symposium on Air Pollution and Climate Change Effects on Forest Ecosystems at Riverside, CA, 5–9 February 1996 (Albany, CA: USDA Forest Service, 1998), 299–312. Driver, “What’s Accuracy Got to Do with It?,” 21. Mann’s 1491 offers a balanced and accessible survey of the research in this field, and archaeological research is continually discovering and pushing back dates for full agricultural development in specific localities.

Whiteness and Time: The Once, Present, and Future Race Helen Young Nestled among the concrete, glass, and steel skyscrapers in the central business district of Perth, Western Australia, the mock Tudor frontage of “Ye London Court” is, at first sight, a curious landmark. Completed in 1937, the cobbled pedestrian mall compresses history, time, and place. A plaque at the entrance commemorates 1997 as both the 60th anniversary of the space and the 600th anniversary of the election of Dick Whittington as Lord Mayor of London. “Ye London Court” is just one of the many examples littered throughout the Australian landscape of medievalism being employed to foster connections between the antipodes and the old imperial center.1 Along the walls portraits of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I overlook gothic-lettered shop-signs advertising everything from nail salons to lawyers’ offices, and the “Purely Australian Clothing Co.” The medieval(-ish) font overrides all other symbols, except the trade-marked brand name of the national postal service. The space as a whole, and its individual elements, are wide open to interpretation by scholars of medievalism. In its present form as a tourist curiosity, “Ye London Court” sees romantic nostalgic medievalism and neomedievalisms bleed into each other.2 One of the most incongruous of the advertising signs reads “Aboriginal Art Australian Gifts” (Fig. 1). It is relatively easily parsed: the gothic lettering takes possession of indigenous culture, even as the shop it advertises fragments it into commercial products, to be sold, bought, and 1

2

For an extended exploration of medievalism in colonial Australia, see Louise D’Arcens, Old Songs in the Timeless Land: Medievalism in Australian Literature 1840–1910 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011). I use David Marshall’s descriptions of these terms, outlined in “Neomedievalism, Identification, and the Haze of Medievalism,” Studies in Medievalism XXI: Corporate Medievalism, ed. Karl Fugelso (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), 21–34.

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Figure 1.  London Court, Perth, Australia. August 2013

owned by passing tourists. Australia, a Western nation in another hemisphere from England’s, provides a small piece of Europe with a tiny piece of local culture embedded within it. Neomedievalism serves commercial neocolonialism. This reading is typical, in some if not all ways, of the scholarship of medievalism in that it considers the cultural context of a manifestation of medievalism. But in doing so, it disengages the word “Aboriginal” from its history as a specifically racial – and not just cultural – category. That this is also a function of the sign itself, and of the commercialization of cultural products, does not obviate the need for academic medievalism to widen its



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frame of reference. The literal and cultural colonization of Australia, and other parts of the world, which were and are expressed through medievalism, depend first on discourses that claim to establish white racial superiority over all other peoples. Institutional and disciplinary boundaries, and the tendency of critical histories to consider race a specifically modern construct (despite significant research demonstrating the contrary), work to prevent medievalism from engaging directly with whiteness.3 There are important exceptions, including those that treat Anglo-Saxonism and medievalism together.4 Louise D’Arcens argues that racial theory in nineteenth-century Australia owed a “profound and troubling debt” to “historicism in general, and to medievalism in particular, especially in the form of [. . .] Anglo-Saxonism.”5 This is true in other times and places too: in this short essay I demonstrate connections between contemporary racial medievalisms and those of the nineteenth century, and argue that the nature of racial medievalisms poses challenges to the focus on temporality that is characteristic of theories of medievalism.

3

4

5

Helen Young, “Place and Time: Medievalism and Making Race,” The Year’s Work in Medievalism 28 (n.d.), forthcoming. For race in the Middle Ages see, e.g., Geraldine Heng, “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages I: Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages,” Literature Compass 8, no. 5 (2 May 2011): 315–31; Geraldine Heng, “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages II: Locations of Medieval Race,” Literature Compass 8, no. 5 (2 May 2011): 275–93; Thomas Hahn, “The Difference the Middle Ages Makes: Color and Race before the Modern World,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31, no. 1 (2001): 1–38. E.g., Tison Pugh, Queer Masculinity: Medievalism and the Myth of White Masculinity in Southern Literature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013); Ilan MitchellSmith, “The United Princesses of America: Ethnic Diversity and Cultural Purity in Disney’s Medieval Past,” in The Disney Middle Ages: A Fairy-Tale and Fantasy Past, ed. Tison Pugh and Susan Aronstein (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 209–24. Finke and Shichtman variously take up the issue: Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages on Film (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, “Inner-City Chivalry in Gil Junger’s ‘Black Knight’: A South Central Yankee in King Leo’s Court,” in Race, Class, and Gender in “Medieval” Cinema, ed. Lynn Ramey and Tison Pugh (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 107–22; Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, King Arthur and the Myth of History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002). For medievalism and Anglo-Saxonism, see Andrew Galloway, “William Cullen Bryant’s American Antiquities: Medievalism, Miscegenation, and Race in The Prairies,” American Literary History 22, no. 4 (13 September 2010): 724–51; Louise D’Arcens, Old Songs in the Timeless Land: Medievalism in Australian Literature 1840–1910, 28–29; Louise D’Arcens and Chris Jones, “Excavating the Borders of Literary Anglo-Saxonism in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Australia,” Representations 121 (2013): 85–106. D’Arcens, Old Songs, 28.

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Anglo-Saxonism and Medievalism European ethnic nationalist identities have, since the late eighteenth century, been widely constructed as having their roots in the Middle Ages. Ethnonationalisms tied the physical, mental, moral, cultural, and political nature of a people, or volk, to the geographical boundaries of their territory.6 From the late eighteenth century, “historical philology precipitated a new way of conceiving race” that could reach beyond geographic boundaries and had the flexibility to account for the movement of people at the height of European imperial and colonial power.7 At the same time as European nations competed to construct histories, language histories, and literary canons rooted in the Dark and Middle Ages that could arguably prove one culture – and nation – was superior to others, developing racial formations created pan-national Anglo-Saxonism, later developed into “Whiteness,” and with it notional superiority over the rest of the world and its peoples.8 The “white man’s burden” required subjugation of peoples at the same time as it allowed annexation of their land and resources. Multiple, sometimes contradictory discourses around Anglo-Saxonism operated around the globe as new nations developed their own identities at varying levels of competition and antipathy with Britain.9 Yet new ethno-national identities in countries like Australia and the United States were founded on firm belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority over not only local indigenous people, but in the case of the Americas, the Africans who were enslaved and transported there. Anglo-Saxonism cleared the ground so that medievalism could supplant indigenous cultures as the history of colonies and former colonies. Where Anglo-Saxonism justified the dispossession of indigenous peoples by white settlers, medievalism provided narratives of European cultural identity and progress for new geographical locations. According to modern constructs of ethno-nationalism and race theory, the Middle Ages were the time period during which the racial character of a people coalesced. Anglo-Saxonism, a racial and inescapably racist construct, is inherently also a medievalist one, despite the fact that it traces the supposed 6 7

8 9

Patrick Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 55. Robert J. C. Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 54. See, for a historiographical perspective, Hugh A. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons (Montreal: Harvest House Press of New England, 1982). E.g., Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: Norton, 2010). Galloway, “William Cullen Bryant’s”; D’Arcens and Jones, “Excavating.” See also, for the American context, Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).



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ultimate roots of that race back past the Middle Ages to the Classical period and beyond. Publius Cornelius Tacitus’ writings on the Classical-era Germani could be attached to the Anglo-Saxons without his ever having mentioned them because it was believed that during the early medieval period that tribe of Germani settled in England and took on the characteristics that supposedly distinguished them from other peoples.10 These characteristics included a certain martial masculinity, racial purity stemming from the long practice of endogamy, and inherent love of freedom tending towards political democracy.11 Anglo-Saxonist works are not necessarily overtly medievalist in content, as Andrew Galloway recently observed.12 The racial construct, however, was heavily dependent on medievalism, particularly once it took on a philological dimension. Medieval manuscripts crucially furnished evidence for the linguistic and cultural continuity that was necessary for the maintenance of the fiction of essential racial superiority. Thomas Jefferson, now best remembered as a political thinker and one of the founding fathers of the United States, was an ardent proponent of medievalist Anglo-Saxonism,13 and a firm believer in white superiority on the grounds of appearance and mental and moral capabilities.14 His 1789 “Essay on the Anglo-Saxon Language” equated language with biological descent and asserted that “the pure Anglo-Saxon constitutes at this day the basis of our language,” and argued for “the necessity of making [. . .] [it] a regular branch of academic education.”15 To this end he donated his personal collection of medieval manuscripts to the University of Virginia. Sharon Turner’s The History of the Anglo-Saxons from the Earliest Period to the Norman Conquest (1799–1805) was a core popular text of Anglo-Saxonist 10

11 12

13 14 15

For an exploration of the legacies of Tacitus’ ideas in the race thinking of the modern era, see, for example, Christopher B. Krebs, A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2011). Both American and Australian independence from Britain were portrayed as acts of “ethnic loyalty.” D’Arcens, Old Songs, 44. Galloway, “William Cullen Bryant’s,” 727. Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles went further in the late 1990s, remarking that: “the adjective Anglo-Saxon [. . .] parts company from such adjectives as medieval and feudal in its relative freedom from sinister overtones. [. . .] at worst [. . .] Anglo-Saxon can carry a negative aura that derives from its association with speakers who are irritatingly smug about their own racial superiority.” Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles, “Anglo-Saxonism and Medievalism,” in Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), 2. E.g., Stanley R. Hauer, “Thomas Jefferson and the Anglo-Saxon Language,” PMLA 98, no. 5 (1983): 879–98. Thomas Jefferson, “Notes on the State of Virginia,” in The Complete Jefferson, ed. Saul K. Padover (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1943), 661–62. Thomas Jefferson, “Essay on the Anglo-Saxon Language,” in The Complete Jefferson, 856–57.

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thought on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, and helped shape widely held beliefs. Turner invoked a progressivist model of race, and made increasingly strong links between his own time and the past in his prefaces to each edition. In the first edition, he wrote that one of his purposes was to “exhibit the gradual advances of the Anglo-Saxon intellect; display the savage pirate slowly ameliorating into the civilized, moral, and scientific man.”16 In 1836, the preface to the sixth edition closed with an expanded version of this idea: The Anglo-Saxons were deficient in the surprising improvements which their present descendants have attained: but unless they had acquired and exercised the valuable qualities, both moral and intellectual, which they progressively advanced to before their dynasty ceased, England would not have become that distinguished nation which, after the Norman graft on its original Saxon stock, it has gradually been led to.17 The Middle Ages, both before and after the Norman Conquest,18 are the key period in the progression of the Anglo-Saxon race according to his account; its history reaches back beyond them to the Classical era, but the Middle Ages make the transition from racial infancy to maturity possible. This progressivist model of race may have been shed in theoretical and academic writing in the twenty-first century, but it remains very strong in the medievalisms of popular culture. Western popular culture “whitewashes” the Middle Ages, rendering its peoples racially white in ways that ignore historical detail and evidence while actively claiming to be historically authentic.19 This belief attaches both temporal and geographical limits to “medieval” so that it explicitly denotes “the European Middle Ages,” which are taken to be the exclusive cultural inheritance of those individuals and groups who claim membership of the white race, a social construct that expands and contracts according to context. Challenges to this equating of whiteness and medievalness are often met with vehement and at times violent opposition. In January 2014, Warhorse 16 17 18 19

Sharon Turner, The History of the Anglo-Saxons, from Their First Appearance above the Elbe, to the Death of Egbert (London, 1799), viii. Sharon Turner, The History of the Anglo-Saxons from the Earliest Period to the Norman Conquest (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1841), vi. That the Normans descended from Vikings and could thus be considered Germanic and not French was an important point in this construct. Helen Young, “‘It’s the Middle Ages, Yo!’: Race, Neo/medievalism, and the World of Dragon Age,” The Year’s Work in Medievalism 27 (2012): 1–9; see also Kathryn Wymer, “A Quest for the Black Knight: Casting People of Color in Arthurian Film and Television,” The Year’s Work in Medievalism 27 (2012); Finke and Shichtman, “Inner-City Chivalry.”



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Studios launched a crowd-funding appeal for their forthcoming video-game title Kingdom Come: Deliverance. The game’s creative director, Daniel Varna, was quoted as saying: “we want to make the experience as authentic as possible: real locations, real castles, period-decorated costumes and armour, combat and fencing designed by the best swordsmen around, and a story based on real historical evidence.”20 In response to this claim, a user on the Tumblr site “People of Color in European Art History” asked if people of color could be realistically included in the game. Malisha Dewalt, who runs the Tumblr site, suggested that medieval Europe was not universally white and offered a range of medieval art and academic sources as evidence of “how diverse and well-travelled the general population was at that time.”21 She received a wave of abuse, including multiple death threats in response to the post.22 This is just one of multiple similar examples of extreme reactions to the whiteness of the European Middle Ages being challenged.23 The violence of colonial and imperial history, built over by but nonetheless foundational to Perth’s London Court with its gothic-lettered signage, coalesces in new locations but old racist patterns in the twenty-first-century digital world. Pointing out the errors in popular-culture texts – including their whitewashing of the Middle Ages that inevitably excludes, for example, Moorish Spain and its population – is something of a pleasurable pastime for professional medievalists, but has potentially very serious implications outside the world of academia. The principal source of whitewash, we should remember, are the nostalgic medievalisms of Anglo-Saxonist thought that helped shape nations, academic institutions, and disciplines. 20

21

22

23

“Dungeons, but No Dragons: New Video Game Wants to Give a Realistic Portrayal of the Middle Ages,” Medievalists.net, 2014, . Malisha Dewalt, “Hi! I’ve Been Looking at a Kickstarter for a ‘Realistic’ Medieval-Era Game Called ‘Kingdom Come: Deliverance’ and Realized It Looked Rather . . . White,” People of Colour in European Art History, 2014, . Given that the Tumblr blog is run anonymously and the serious nature of these events, I asked for and received permission to use Dewalt’s name in this article. Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, “Is a Medieval Video Game Historically Accurate without People of Color?,” The Daily Dot, 2014, . See also Malisha Dewalt, “On Telling the Truth,” People of Colour in European Art History, 2014, . Casting black actors in roles that are taken to be “white,” such as Idris Elba in the 2011 film Thor, sparks similar responses. E.g., Council of Conservative Citizens, “Marvel Studios Declares War on Norse Mythology,” Council of Conservative Citizens (St Louis, MO: Author, 2011), . See also Wymer, “A Quest for the Black Knight.”

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Pastism and Presentism Rendering of the Middle Ages as a “white” place and time by consumers of popular culture is essentially a pastist practice.24 Taking into account the close relationship between nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxonist medievalisms and contemporary racist medievalisms considerably complicates the issue, however. Progressivist models of race are not instances of pastism, as this, to use Kathleen Biddick’s influential formulation, “regards the past and present as bounded temporal objects that cannot come into contact.”25 Nor does presentism easily account for them. For Biddick, presentism “looks back into the mirror of the Middle Ages and asks it to reflect back histories of modernist or postmodernist identities”;26 it is ahistorical and at least potentially atemporal. Marshall, meanwhile, suggests that presentisms locate “parallels to the medieval in our own practice.”27 Formulations of presentism,28 to date, have not been able to entirely shed the language of dichotomy: a reflection in a mirror is still different from the original, and parallels never come into contact. Racial medievalisms do not allow for a divide, for separate temporal objects whether or not they can touch, but rather imagine a continuum between past and present. Medieval Anglo-Saxons may have been “deficient,” as Turner put it, when compared with their nineteenth-century descendants, but they are, in that account, still the same people. Neither temporal nor geographical distance created a breach. Theorizations of medievalisms and neomedievalisms are centrally concerned with the temporality of the relationship between post-medieval reimaginings and the Middle Ages. This is a product of several decades of disciplinary insistence on pastism;29 theorizations of presentist medievalisms, whether or not they use the rubric “neomedieval,” still speak to pastist formulations even when they are not constructed in opposition to them. As a result they retain a strong focus on time and temporality. Racial medievalisms are impossible to theorize on such terms because they do not accept the temporal divide that creates “past” and “present,” modern and medieval,

24 25 26 27 28 29

Young, “‘It’s the Middle Ages.” Katherine Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 83. Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism, 83. Marshall, “Neomedievalism, Identification, and the Haze of Medievalism,” 30. I take Biddick and Marshall as representative examples, separated by a decade and a half, of a strong trend in theorization. For a discussion of the history of medievalism as a scholarly discipline, see Richard Utz, “Medievalitas Fugit: Medievalism and Temporality,” in Studies in Medievalism XVIII: Defining Medievalism(s) II, ed. Karl Fugelso (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2009), 32–43.



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as either fundamental or structuring. That the pseudo-science of the nineteenth century that bolsters race theory has been disproven, such that race is acknowledged to be a social rather than a biological construct, has had little to no impact on racial medievalisms.30 A progressivist approach to race requires simultaneous acceptance of connection and difference, continuity and development. It is no accident that the scholarship that has considered Anglo-Saxonism and medievalism together to date has largely focused on colonial and postcolonial contexts in Australia and the USA; even where medievalisms could “serenely and only half-consciously” displace and replace indigenous culture,31 the violence and trauma of colonization tends to highlight otherwise relatively transparent cultural and social structures. In such spaces, where the physical residue of the Middle Ages is absent – unless imported in the form of artifacts such as manuscripts and archaeological finds – practices of medievalism are arguably always disconnected from the past.32 But racial medievalisms challenge this point precisely because Anglo-Saxonism, particularly in its most philological medievalist stages, specifically worked against any sense of alterity that space or time could create. They are neither pastist nor presentist, but rather accumulate aspects of medievalism usually associated with one or the other together, being nostalgic but simultaneously refusing to acknowledge loss. Conclusions Academic medievalism has, relatively recently, expanded its boundaries to include neomedievalisms that “no longer need to strive for the authenticity of original manuscripts, castles, or cathedrals, but [. . .] replace historybased narratives with simulacra of the medieval.”33 In both historical and contemporary iterations, discourses of whiteness, whether they employ or eschew the term “Anglo-Saxon,” are discursively medievalist. They pose new challenges to scholarly medievalism because they rely on the idea of the Middle Ages even when they are expressed without direct reference to either

30 31 32

33

See, for example, the “American Anthropological Association Statement on ‘Race,’” American Anthropologist 100, no. 3 (1998): 712–13. D’Arcens, Old Songs, 4. D’Arcens, Old Songs, 2; Paul Freedman and Gabrielle Spiegel, “Medievalisms Old and New: The Rediscovery of Alterity in North Americal Medieval Studies,” American Historical Review 103 (1998): 677–704, cited in D’Arcens Old Songs. Richard Utz, “A Moveable Feast: Repositionings of ‘The Medieval’ in Medieval Studies, Medievalim, and Neomedievalism,” in Neomedievalism in the Media, ed. Carol L. Robinson and Pamela Clements (Lewiston, PA: Edwin Mellen, 2012), v.

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a medieval original or a simulacrum. Given the vast array of references to the Middle Ages that litter contemporary popular culture and have been opened up to study by theorizations of neomedievalism, the prospect of locating even more is daunting. When the Middle Ages are more ghost than simulacrum, is it worthwhile exploring at all? Medievalism, as either a discourse or a single instance, necessarily overlaps with other social, cultural, and political discourses. Exploring one that fundamentally depends on medievalism offers a framework for making sense of the myriad individual iterations of neo/medievalism that abound not only now but in the past. The shifts of other discourses drive both the prevalence and shape of medievalisms, and the influence of one that is so intimately linked begs further exploration. Is the resurgence of medievalism linked to a defensive response to shifting global power dynamics that see Western nations becoming less influential in the face of the economic power of former colonies like India and Brazil? Is it a response to changing demographics and increased migration driven by desires to assert and defend ethno-national identities established in the nineteenth century? Racial discourses are far from alone in having potential impact, but their underlying medievalist foundations demand much closer consideration. Intellectual and moral grounds alike suggest further investigation of the varied medievalisms of Anglo-Saxonism and its contemporary descendants. Philology, a foundation of the humanities in the modern academy, was central to race-thinking throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The role of the academy in creating national canons is well attested, but the racial dimensions of such processes are one area that studies of early scholarly medievalism have not addressed in great depth. How much did medievalism in the academy do to create and maintain racial divisions, particularly in non-European countries like the United States and Australia where medievalism became a cultural focus erasing and supplanting local indigenous histories? Until the rise of postcolonialism in the late twentieth century, standard English, simultaneously linked by philology to the Middle Ages and by Anglo-Saxonism to white racial superiority, was all that was admitted to the canon and valorized through academic teaching and research. The previous two points are principally concerned with the practices of academic medievalism, but there are also theoretical implications: considering Anglo-Saxonism as a flexible discourse that changes according to time and place yet insists on its own continuity presents new challenges. How to account for a medievalist discourse that refuses to acknowledge the fundamental division between medieval and modern on which medievalism itself depends? One possibility is to move away from the central concern with temporality that has, to date, marked theories of medievalism and neomedievalism alike. Medieval Studies scholars frequently speak of the Middle



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Ages using geographical metaphors.34 L. P. Hartley’s aphorism – “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”35 – could be the motto of the field. Racial medievalisms present a very different view: the past is a country; it is where we are from. Thinking through the geographical as well as the temporal dimensions of medievalism – scholarly and non-scholarly – offers new ways of understanding how the Middle Ages remain so meaningful as they reach across both time and space.

34 35

Catherine Brown, “In the Middle,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30, no. 3 (2000): 547–74, esp. 548. L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2002), 17.

A Desire for Origins: The Marginal Robin Hood of the Later Ballads Alexander L. Kaufman Robin Hood is certainly one of the main figures whom we associate with medieval culture, medievalism, and neomedievalism. With each new age, it seems, there is a new Robin Hood who is quick to adapt to his contemporary surroundings (or, rather, his creators are purposeful in placing the outlaw into a contemporary political and social context, a space in which the outlaw can navigate the uncertain terrain). While Robin and his greenwood world are grounded signifiers of the Middle Ages, Robin Hood, and Robin Hood studies, have been on the periphery, on the margins, of medieval scholarship for a number of years. Perhaps we should, once and for all, blame William Langland for this unfortunate occurrence: the outlaw’s first literary appearance is in one of the most important texts of the Middle Ages, the B-Text of Piers Plowman, passus V, and the representation of the outlaw is none too flattering. Here, Will, the dreamer, encounters Sloth, who is represented as a priest. Sloth does not know his pater noster but he can, astonishingly, recite from memory the “rymes of Robyn hood and Randolf Erl of Chestrre.”1 We still do not know what Langland meant by “rymes”; nevertheless, that a slothful priest knows these works from memory points to their outsider, transgressive status.2 1

2

William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of the B-Text, Based on Trinity College Cambridge MS. B. 15. 17, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt, 2nd ed. (London: Dent, 1995), passus V, ll. 395–97, p. 230. For a discussion of this reference in Piers Plowman and a previously unnoted catalogue entry that records a lost manuscript copy of verses that recount the deeds of Ranulf III, earl of Chester, in London, British Library MS Cotton Otho B.iii, see John Spence, “A Lost Manuscript of the ‘rymes of [. . .] Randolf Erl of Chestre,’” Electronic British Library Journal (2010), Article 6, 8 pages, [accessed 28 August 2014].

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While Robin Hood and his literature have always been associated with the Middle Ages, there remain precious few textual remnants of Robin Hood literature that fit into the general timeframe of medieval Europe: Robin Hood and the Monk exists in one manuscript, Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.5.48, which dates to ca. 1465, and there is one manuscript fragment of that poem from the fifteenth century, London, British Library, Bagford Ballads, volume 1, article 6 (C.40); Robin Hood and the Potter (ca. 1468) is found in only one medieval manuscript, Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Ee.4.35; the play Robynhode and the Shryff off Notyngham (ca. 1475) is only found in Cambridge, Trinity College Library, MS R.2.64; no extant manuscript exists for the magisterial poem the Gest of Robyn Hode, yet eight whole and fragmentary versions in early printed books are extant, and the publication of these roughly span the years 1495–1590.3 These texts depict what Stephen Knight has termed the “bold” Robin Hood: he is an outlaw who is a social avenger, he is not at all connected to Saxon nobility, and he is not aligned with the moral and beneficent Richard I in a war against Prince John (or King John) and his nefarious doings.4 Moreover, outlaws were criminals, and many of them were guilty of serious crimes. When we examine the origins of Robin Hood in literature, we often notice a dichotomy – that of a good outlaw and that of a social bandit – and both are present in the medieval chroniclers’ accounts of him, too. Andrew of Wyntoun notes in his Orygynale Chronicle from ca. 1420 that Robin and Little John were outlaws who were “commendit gud” (“praised”).5 Walter Bower, in his Continuation of John of Fordun’s Scotichronicon, ca. 1440, has a much different view of Robin, calling him, in the entry for 1266, a “famous murderer,” who beguiles the foolish commons, who in turn sing songs about him and craft plays (dramatic and comedic) in his honor.6 The Robin Hood about whom most of us know as a media creation and as a character in film and television has his origins, and those of his fellow greenwood characters, in a number of loosely connected, post-medieval texts: Anthony Munday’s 3

4 5

6

For a study of these early poems and the dating of the texts, see Thomas H. Ohlgren, Robin Hood: The Early Poems, 1465–1560: Texts, Contexts, and Ideology (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2007). These early poems have recently been edited into a scholarly edition: Early Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Edition of the Texts, ca. 1425 to ca. 1600, ed. Thomas H. Ohlgren and Lister M. Matheson, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 428 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2013). Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2003), 1–3. Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, 2nd ed. TEAMS Middle English Language Texts (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), 24. Knight and Ohlgren, Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, 26.



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The Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntington and The Death of Robert, Earle of Huntington (both 1601);7 the multiple early printed editions of the Robin Hood garlands (an anthology of Robin Hood poems), the earliest of which dates to 1663; the many one-page broadsides that were printed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the Forresters Manuscript, which is London, British Library MS Additional 71158, a manuscript that contains nothing but Robin Hood ballads, twenty-two in all, and dates to around 1670, and thus the time of the publication of the first extant Robin Hood garland;8 and the first scholarly edition of the early and later Robin Hood poems, Joseph Ritson’s 1795 anthology Robin Hood: A Collection of All the Ancient Poems, Songs and Ballads Now Extant Relative to the Celebrated English Outlaw,9 which was highly influential in the ballad circles of the nineteenth century and on the efforts of two other individuals who sought to create a scholarly standard for Robin Hood poems, ballads, and broadsides, namely John Mathew Gutch10 and F. J. Child.11 7

8

9

10

11

The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon by Anthony Munday, 1601, ed. John Carney Meagher, Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964); The Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon by Anthony Munday, 1601, ed. John Carney Meagher, Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965). Robin Hood: The Forresters Manuscript (British Library Additional MS 71158), with a Manuscript Description by Hilton Kelliher, ed. Stephen Knight (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998). For an important examination of the manuscript’s place in the history of the book and in the creation of a Robin Hood corpus, see Carrie Griffin, “The Forresters Manuscript: A Book on the Margins?,” in Robin Hood in Greenwood Stood: Alterity and Context in the English Outlaw Tradition, ed. Stephen Knight, Medieval Identities: SocioCultural Spaces 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 119–33. Robin Hood: A Collection of All the Ancient Poems, Songs and Ballads Now Extant Relative to the Celebrated English Outlaw. To Which are Prefixed Historical Anecdotes of His Life, ed. Joseph Ritson (London: Pickering, 1795; repr. in 2 vols, 1832). A Lytell Gest of Robin Hode with other Ancient and Modern Ballads and Songs Relating to this Celebrated Yeoman, ed. John Mathew Gutch, 2 vols (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1847). Gutch’s collection contains the only serviceable edition of the Sloane Life of Robin Hood: 1: 379–89. The Sloane Life is a brief, prose biography of the outlaw and is a compilation of several Robin Hood plot elements from the Gest of Robyn Hode along with some other material found in the post-medieval ballads. Sloane Life is found in London, British Library, Sloane Manuscript 780 (formerly 715), on folios 46–48v. The hand is a difficult to read secretary script, dating to ca. 1600. Gutch comments that the hand “is by no means clearly to be deciphered, having very much the look of Arabic at a short distance,” 1: 379. Stephen Knight comments that the Sloane Life “greatly influenced Joseph Ritson,” in Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), 17. English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. F. J. Child, 5 vols (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin and Company, 1882–98; repr. New York: Dover Publications, 1965). For an examination of Child’s methods of selecting texts (and versions of texts) for his collection, see Mary Ellen Brown, “Child’s Ballads and the Broadside Conundrum,” in Ballads and Broadsides

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This essay will address the significance of some of these later, marginalized poems from the post-medieval period, primarily the seventeenth century, and how these works created biographical origins of Robin Hood, as the earlier, medieval poems did not offer an origins narrative for the celebrated outlaw. While these poems are significant in that they do provide readers with biographical details of the outlaw, they have often remained on the periphery, and for a number of reasons. Child himself, in his great collection of ballads and broadsides, was one who found many of the broadsides (on all subjects, not just Robin Hood) not aesthetically pleasing; nevertheless, he included them so as to present a literary record of popular subjects.12 Helen Phillips has described how the very popular Robin Hood ballads, broadsides, and plays were often condemned and othered through political and religious writings from the late-fourteenth to the seventeenth century, thus creating a division between sanctioned literature and outlawed texts.13 As such, this

12

13

in Britain, 1500–1800, ed. Patricia Fumerton and Anita Guerrinin (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 57–72. Fumerton is director of the excellent electronic resource English Broadside Ballad Archive. University of California at Santa Barbara, Department of English, [accessed 26 August 2014]. As of my last viewing, the archive contains “5975 ballads and counting.” Mary Ellen Brown, “Child’s Ballads,” 65, comments thus: “Broadsides then became a staple source [for Child’s collection]. But various comments – by Child and his correspondents – suggest that despite their age, and many of them were seventeenth-century and thus older than the published collections whose manuscripts Child sought, broadsides were considered sub par. Clearly some aesthetic sense played a part in Child’s distinction between the broadsides and the truly traditional, a sense that broadsides sometimes told the story differently and in a way that was not aesthetically pleasing. Child preferred short, lyrical narratives, with their elliptical way of telling or referencing a story, beginning in the middle of things, using formulaic language and narrative tropes, being impersonal, and frequently employing a great deal of repetition.” Helen Phillips, “Reformist Polemics, Reading Publics, and Unpopular Robin Hood,” in Robin Hood in Greenwood Stood, 87–118. The Gest of Robyn Hode, considered by a number of scholars to be the apex of Robin Hood literature in the Middle Ages, was included, in abbreviated form, in the sixth edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature; however, its entrance into the unofficial canon of English literature was brief, as the text was pulled from the next edition and never reinstated, with no reason given for its removal. For essays that examine the aesthetical qualities of the Gest, especially its form, see the following, which generally praise the poem: Child, English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 3: 53; William H. Clawson, The Gest of Robin Hood (Toronto: University of Toronto Library, 1909), 128; Douglas Gray, “The Robin Hood Poems,” Poetica 18 (1984): 1–39 (22–23); Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study, 74–75; and Knight, Mythic Biography, 22. Questions of aesthetic taste are still a complex issue when examining a text’s (or a literary tradition’s, in the case of Robin Hood) canonical status. For example, the first fytte of the Gest appeared, briefly, in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, in the section “Popular Ballads”: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, gen. ed. M. H. Abrams, 6th ed., 2 vols (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1993), 384–89. The poem was pulled



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essay, much like Robin Hood’s character in the early poems, seeks to “right a wrong” and position these later, post-medieval texts as worthy of attention, especially to those who seek Robin’s outlaw origins in literature. Because the medieval literary texts (Monk, Potter, the Gest, and the plays/games) did not contain an origins story for Robin – where he was born, and why he was outlawed – the post-medieval literary community created a number of possible origins. These post-medieval Robin Hood texts are works of medievalism, and they deny any real sense of historicity of Robin Hood and instead present a multiplicity of origins, each unique, yet each one clearly about Robin Hood. Thus, one can say that the variation in Robin Hood’s “beginnings,” a variation that is ever-present in the media tradition of Robin Hood in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, has its own origins in medievalist texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Robin Hood’s birth and cause of outlawry are themselves a series of splintered and refracted literary moments, an origins story with no single point of origin that is concrete and authoritative. One of the earliest biographical moments of Robin Hood can be found in the garland tradition. Garlands were collections of ballads that were printed, bound together, and sold as small books; each contained woodcuts, and some had brief introductory notes on Robin Hood. The earliest extant edition of Robin Hood’s garland was printed in London in 1663 and contained sixteen poems.14 This edition was most certainly created from an earlier one that did not survive or that is waiting to be discovered.15 Robin Hood’s popularity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was exceedingly high, and so it is no surprise that another edition of the garland was printed in 1670.16 Two more dated editions are extant from the seventeenth century, and over thirty from the eighteenth century. Many of the eighteenth-century editions include twenty-seven poems as opposed to the sixteen in the 1663 edition, and many feature a woodcut for each poem. From the outset, the garlands attempt to create a biography for Robin Hood, an origin story, which is

14 15 16

from the next edition and has not reappeared. I am editing, along with Lesley A. Coote, a collection of essays that examines these very questions of canonicity and the Robin Hood literary tradition: Robin Hood and the Outlaw/ed Literary Canon. Robin Hood’s Garland: or Delightful Songs, Shewing the noble Exploits of Robin Hood and his Yeomandrie (London: W. Gilbertson, 1663). Knight, Mythic Biography, 34. Robin Hood’s Garland: Containing his merry Exploits, and the several Fights which he, Little John, and Will. Scarlet had, upon several occasions (London: Coles, Vere, Wright, 1670). Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren present an overview of the surviving copies and editions of the Robin Hood ballads and broadsides from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and why some were more popular widespread than others. See Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, 453–57.

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something that the late-medieval poems do not do.17 While we read about Robin Hood’s death at the hands of his cousin, a prioress, and her accomplice, Sir Roger of Doncaster, in the final fytt of the Gest of Robyn Hode and in the post-medieval The Death of Robin Hood, we do not know how Robin became an outlaw or why.18 Indeed, none of the early Robin Hood texts of the late Middle Ages notes Robin’s origins. The Early Modern garlands and broadsides of Robin Hood thus sought to formulate the outlaw’s genealogical history and the reasons behind his outlawry. We have the poem Robin Hood’s Birth, Breeding, Valour, and Marriage, which Knight and Ohlgren refer to as “patently a literary confection,” and which F. J. Child places late in the continuum of Robin Hood ballads (no. 149).19 The poem appears in three versions that date to the seventeenth century: one in the Roxburghe collection (ca. 1681–84), and two that Samuel Pepys possessed; it also appeared in three eighteenth-century collections prior to Ritson’s anthology, including the first of many editions of The English Archer, or Robin Hood’s Garland (1786), an expanded edition of the two earlier garlands. Robin Hood’s Birth is one of the poems that helped to transform the outlaw from the forest yeoman of the late-medieval poems into the gentrified hero of the post-medieval tradition. But this is not yet Robin of Locksley, for his noble connections are slight. Here, his connections are more in line with the gentry, as Robin is the nephew of Squire George Gamwell of Gamwell Hall; moreover, Robin’s mother was niece, we learn, to Guy of Warwick.20 So while Robin Hood’s breeding suggests gentrification, refinement, and manners, these are features 17

18

19 20

For an important essay on the significance of the Restoration play Robin Hood and His Crew of Soldiers (1661) within the context of popular garlands and broadsides (as well as the Forresters Mansucript), see Stephen Knight, “‘Quite Another Man’: The Restoration Robin Hood,” in Playing Robin Hood: The Legend as Performance in Five Centuries, ed. Lois Potter (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 167–81. The Death of Robin Hood is first recorded in the Percy Folio, and like many of the Robin Hood poems in it, it is badly damaged. The first complete version appears in the 1786 edition of The English Archer, one of the many late-eighteenth-century garlands: The English Archer, or, Robin Hood’s Garland (Paisley, Neilson, 1786). Child, English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 3: 214–17. Sir Guy of Warwick is a hero of medieval romance, though not necessarily “high” romance. Much like Robin Hood, he was a “hero” to many different people, such as the AngloNormans and the English. The literary history of the stories of Guy of Warwick also, in many cases, mirrors that of Robin Hood: medieval chronicle entries, fifteenth-century manuscripts, Renaissance drama, popular post-medieval romances and antiquarian historical accounts, and a host of children’s books and stories. The definitive study of Guy of Warwick is still Velma Bourgeois Richmond, The Legend of Guy of Warwick, Garland Studies in Medieval Literature 14, Garland Reference Library of the Humanities 1929 (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1996). See also Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor, ed. Alison Wiggins and Rosalind Field, Studies in Medieval Romance 4 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007).



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that are assigned to Robin Hood’s familial connections and not necessarily to Robin’s behavior or his activities. The action in Robin Hood’s Birth takes place during Christmastime at Gamwell Hall. Little John is not a member of Robin’s band but rather is a household servant to Robin Hood’s uncle, the Lord, who declares: “And now call ye Little John hither to me, For Little John is a fine lad At gambols and juggling and twenty such tricks As shall make you merry and glad.” When Little John came, to gambols they went, Both gentlemen, yeomen and clown; And what do you think? Why as true as I live Bold Robin Hood put them all down.  (73–80)21 Robin’s uncle, Lord Gamwell, is so impressed with how his nephew has put Little John in his place that he decrees that Robin will be his heir and shall reside in Gamwell Hall. Robin asks his uncle for a boon: “That Little John may be my page” (88), to which his uncle heartily agrees. Unknown to everyone in the poem, it seems, Robin has many yeomen in Sherwood Forest, and this is where Robin and Little John go. As the two are greeted by the yeomen, a woman passes by. She is Clorinda, queen of the shepherds, and is dressed in a green velvet gown with a bow in her hand and a quiver with arrows “Hung dangling by her sweet side” (112). As Robin and Clorinda head to the bower, 200 bucks are spotted, and Clorinda shoots the fattest one; she’s a good and powerful shot, as the arrow went “through side and side” of the deer (128). Robin proposes at once, but Clorinda informs him that she is expected at Titbury Feast. They proceed to the feast but are ambushed by eight yeomen who order Robin to hand over the buck; swords are drawn, and Robin and John kill five and send the rest “home to their wives” (172). The three move on to the feast at Titbury where they witness a bull-baiting, which seems at odds with Clorinda’s earlier description as one whose “visage spoke [of ] wisdom, and modesty” (115); nevertheless, a parson is summoned, and the two are married. What happens next to Robin, Clorinda, and Little John is left to the reader’s imagination. The poem concludes with a stanza that offers a prayer for the king:

21

All parenthetical citations refer to the line numbers of the poems that can be found in Knight and Ohlgren, Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales.

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Studies in Medievalism That he may get children, and they may get more, To govern and do us some good; And then I’ll make ballads in Robin Hood’s bower And sing ’em in merry Sherwood. (217–20)

In many ways, this poem works as a transitional entry in the Robin Hood canon. Robin’s backstory says nothing about his outlawry, which we presume is somewhere in the future. However, the greenwood (and his loyal yeomen who reside within it) play a significant role in creating Robin Hood’s habitus. While we do witness some violence (the killing of the five yeoman, the bull-baiting, for instance), Robin Hood is not represented as the malicious deviant about whom we read in some of the poems from the the medieval tradition. Instead, Robin and Little John kill to defend themselves and Clorinda (though she may have been able to take care of herself ). While there is violence, it is not graphic or excessive, unlike the gruesome scene in Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne, which sees Robin killing Guy and mutilating his face to such a degree “The hee was never on a woman borne / Cold tell who Sir Guye was” (169–70).22 The Robin Hood of Birth, Breeding, Valour, and Marriage is also one who seems to easily navigate both the world of the outlaw and the world of a respectable member of the gentry. As an origins story, Robin Hood’s Birth, Breeding, Valour, and Marriage is fairly vanilla when compared to another origins story, Robin Hood’s Progress to Nottingham. This poem appears in the seventeenth-century garlands and broadsides, and it also appears in the later eighteenth-century editions where it follows Robin Hood’s Birth, Breeding, Valour, and Marriage. In a sense, then, this is a prequel origin story: in the garlands, the first text, Robin Hood’s Birth, tells of Robin Hood’s life as an adult, while the text that follows it, Robin Hood’s Progress, concerns the life of a fifteen-year-old Robin, who in this poem is clearly an adolescent. Robin Hood’s Progress to Nottingham begins with Robin making his way to an archery contest in Nottingham, when suddenly fifteen foresters come up to him. The men have been drinking beer, ale, and wine and are irritated that the youth has suggested that he could even pull a bow string, let alone fire an arrow and hit the target. Robin 22

Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne exists in a single manuscript, the mid-seventeenth-century Percy Folio, London, British Library, MS Additional 27879. While the manuscript is post-medieval, scholars contend that the story itself is from the medieval period. Knight and Ohlgren state that the poem has “ancient motifs,” and Child, in his English and Scottish Popular Ballads, places the poem at No. 118, right after the Gest of Robyn Hode. D. C. Fowler also states that the poem “may be one of the earliest of all the Robin Hood ballads”; see D. C. Fowler, “Ballads,” in A Manual of Writings in Middle English 1050–1550, ed. A. E. Hartung, vol. 6, n.s. (New Haven, CT: Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1980), 1753–1808 (1782).



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declares that he can hit his mark at “a hundred rod, / And I’le cause a hart to dye” (20–21) and wagers twenty marks. Robin lets fly a broad arrow, and he hits the mark at 100 rod (550 yards) and kills the hart, some say breaking two or three ribs of the animal (31–32). The foresters are cross and threaten to beat Robin. In a malicious and surprising move, Robin laughs and smiles; he then takes up his bow, goes over to the plain, and fires his arrows, killing fourteen of the fifteen foresters. Robin grabs hold of the one forester who is trying to escape and tells him “You said I was no archer, [. . .]. But say so now again” (55–56). Robin does not let the man respond, for he sends another arrow “that split his head in twain” (58). Our good outlaw is certainly not the benevolent lord of the greenwood but rather a teenage psychopath, for when some citizens begin to arrive on the scene from Nottingham, Robin has them in his crosshairs: The people that lived in fair Nottingham Came runing out amain, Supposing to have taken bold Robin Hood, With the forresters that were slain. Some lost legs, and some lost arms, And some did lose their blood, But Robin Hood hee took up his noble bow, And is gone to the merry green wood. They carryed these forresters into fair Nottingham, As many there did know; They digd them graves in their church-yard, And they buried them all a row. (63–74) The brutality that this Robin Hood is capable of is not in line with many of the post-medieval representations of the good outlaw. In the medieval world of the greenwood outlaws narratives, however, this kind of sadistic violence is not uncommon. The anonymous author of Robin Hood’s Progress to Nottingham is perhaps reaching back to the brutal and bold medieval Robin Hood as the preferred character type, one who lacks true upper-crust gentility. As Stephen Knight observes, in “the very early texts [Robin Hood] is genuinely violent, capable of murder as well as robbery.”23 Robin Hood’s Progress to Nottingham is a brief, violent ballad at 74 lines, and it works well as a contrast to Birth, Breeding, Marriage, and Valour, the ballad that precedes it in many of the garlands: the tone is more “fierce,” as Knight 23

Knight, “‘Quite Another Man,’” 176.

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and Ohlgren note.24 Moreover, because Robin’s behavior in the ballad recalls his actions in the early ballads, plays, and games, and because the author supplies an origins story where one was lacking, Robin Hood’s Progress has potential to appear to be an authentic origins narrative for Robin Hood. Robin’s actions in this short ballad are memorable and recall his fight with Guy of Gisborne, where Robin is the mischievous, macabre outlaw and is the centerpiece of the action. That the later garlands of Robin Hood contain two contrasting portraits of Robin Hood’s origins and his youthful attitude in sequential order over two poems not only highlights the freedom that writers had when crafting Robin’s origins, but it also implicitly suggests that readers, then and now, continue to accept degrees of variation in Robin’s personality and biography. Of course, we must remember that Robin Hood is a forest outlaw, and that the rosy, cheerful, chivalrous, gentlemanly Robin Hood of many of the ballads and broadsides is a societal anomaly. Life for real outlaws in England in the Middle Ages was a hard life, as Barbara Hanawalt has shown.25 One of the more interesting origins of Robin Hood is found in Robin Hood and the Forresters, which appears in the Forresters Manuscript in two versions, and the two serve as the frame of the manuscript. Robin Hood and the Forresters 1 opens the manuscript: it is a reworking of Robin Hood’s Progress to Nottingham and thus a deliberate choice to open the manuscript with an origins story. In The Forresters 1, the poem begins with an unusual piece of information: Randolph kept Robin fifteen winters Dery dery downe Till he was fifteen years Old Hey downe dery dery downe Then Robin grew a big fellow A Big and eake bold Hey downe downe a downe. (1–7) The poem then, more or less, follows the narrative of Progress, but the inclusion of a Randolph character, one who has Robin as his apprentice for fifteen years, is interesting. Stephen Knight notes that this name is more than likely

24 25

Knight and Ohlgren, Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, 507. Barbara A. Hanawalt, “Ballads and Bandits: Fourteenth-Century Outlaws and the Robin Hood Poems,” in Chaucer’s England: Literature in Historical Context, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt, Medieval Studies at Minnesota 4 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 154–75.



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an allusion to the character in Piers Plowman.26 The final stanza of the poem finds Robin at Loxley Manor where he and Randolph “made much merry glee” (85), and the latter “to express his Joy / Was Drunck for Companie” (86–87). Robin Hood’s Progress, in contrast, ends on a grimmer note: the people of Nottingham, that is, those who survived Robin’s assault, bury the foresters in graves in the churchyard. The conclusion of The Forresters 1 is a proper frame, with Randolph making another appearance. Loxley as a place name is one that does not appear in the broadside versions of this ballad but which does appear in a number of later texts: the Sloane Life of Robin Hood (ca. 1600), Birth Breeding, Valour, and Marriage, as his alias in Robin Hood and Queen Catherine, and his name in Robin Hood’s Chase. Curiously, “Loxley” is the name of another outlaw in Robin Hood and the Priests (a version of which is in the Forresters Manuscript and appears elsewhere under the name Robin Hood’s Golden Prize, Child no. 147)27 and Robin Hood and the Valiant Knight (Child no. 153).28 The Forresters 1, then, is part of the continuum of post-medieval ballads that begins to assert a place for Robin Hood’s origin, even though such a place never existed. Martin Parker’s A True Tale of Robin Hood, which dates to around 1631 or 1632, is, by Robin Hood standards, a lengthy poem of 480 lines that combines plot elements of three later ballads, the Gest of Robyn Hode, Anthony Munday’s The Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntington, and Richard Grafton’s entry on Robin Hood in his 1569 Chronicle at Large.29 Parker’s Robin Hood displays none of the brutality or uncouth behavior that is present in the other origins narratives: This Robbin, so much talked on, Was once a man of fame, Instiled Earle of Huntington, Lord Robert Hood by name. In courtship and magnificence, His carriage won him prayse, And greater favour with his prince Than any in his dayes. 26 27 28 29

Knight, Robin Hood: The Forresters Manuscript, 2. Child, English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 208–10. Child, English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 225–26. Grafton’s Chronicle is a piece of historical literature that also served as a source for Munday and his two Robin Hood plays, and is more than likely the source that served as the origin for Robin as a gentrified outlaw. Grafton’s Chronicle declares that Robin was “decended of a nobel parentage [. . .] [and] was for his manhoode and chivalry advaunced to the noble dignité of an Erle,” in Knight and Ohlgren, Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, 28.

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As we can see, these post-medieval Robin Hood ballads are unique in that these are the narratives in which we find the origin (or, rather, origins) of Robin Hood. His literary origins are from the Middle Ages; however, his biographical origins are works of pure medievalism. While the Robin Hood poems that appeared in early printed form in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were extremely popular and sold well, the origins of Robin Hood that are found within these texts are on the margins, and for a number of reasons, and mainly these reasons are of a subjective or personal nature. Some simply prefer their Robin Hood to be a stout yeoman, some a social bandit, some a trickster, while still others like their Robin Hood to be a gentrified distressed nobleman. The twentieth- and twenty-first-century media representations of Robin Hood share this sense of a multiplicity of origins. Authorial intentions and audience expectations of Robin Hood’s biological and outlaw origins from the seventeenth century to today remain a decidedly mixed bag, and perhaps if there is one moment of time to which we should point as the nexus of this variation, it should be the time of the ballads and the broadsides of the seventeenth century.

Women, Queerness, and Massive Chalice: Medievalism in Participatory Culture Serina Patterson On 30 May 2013, the game studio Double Fine launched a campaign on the crowdsourcing website Kickstarter in order to raise funds for their next project: Massive Chalice, a neomedieval turn-based tactical strategy video game.1 Unlike a number of other game campaigns on Kickstarter, which often call for pledges close to a project’s release date, Double Fine decided to launch its campaign for Massive Chalice in the pre-production phase of the game’s development, and thereby encourage feedback on the game’s design from the website’s community at large. Double Fine’s invitation to involve backers in shaping the game’s development not only spurred overwhelming financial support (and a successful campaign), but also elicited discussions among gamers and critics concerning the game’s design philosophies, especially in regard to gender equality and same-sex representation in the game’s organization of generational bloodlines. This essay examines what can happen to the depiction of women and queer individuals in neomedieval games – characters who are typically underrepresented – when these games are thrust into a newly participative process of production and game development. Massive Chalice reflects a growing cultural shift in the production of video games. While neomedieval video games have existed for over thirty years, beginning with text-based games such as Colossal Cave Adventure (1976), primitive development tools and high production costs formed a rigid development process, making it difficult for developers (often large game studios) to alter a game’s design. Limited mass-communication tech1

“Double Fine’s MASSIVE CHALICE,” Kickstarter, [accessed 8 June 2013].

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nology also impeded any incorporation of player feedback. In the 1970s and 1980s, for instance, game companies adopted test-group models for determining player interest. As game historian Steven Kent explains: “[b]efore manufacturing games, Atari tested prototype games in selected arcades to gauge player response. If a game had strong earnings, the company sent it to manufacturing. If a game did poorly, its design team could either find ways to improve it or abandon it altogether.”2 Teams of (mostly male) programmers therefore envisioned an idea for a game in isolation and then developed a prototype; for neomedieval games, developers often borrowed tropes from role-playing, tabletop, and text-based adventure games. On the whole, player engagement in the design process was minimal. More recently, the rise of Web 2.0, creation of agile development tools, and accessibility of game engines such as Unity, together with the rise of social media and many-tomany communication applications across digital technologies, have fostered spaces for collaboration and rapid prototype design. This rise in community engagement has generated participatory cultures, which Henry Jenkins et al. describe as: a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).3 Examples of participatory culture include having active memberships in niche communities online (e.g., Facebook groups), creating media content as forms of expression (e.g., modding a game), participating in mass collaboration (e.g., Wikipedia), and disseminating media through digital technology (e.g., posting on a blogging website like Tumblr). While collaborative fan fiction and guild communities in games like Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft have been discussed previously by scholars, participatory culture as a mode of cultural production and representation is still currently under-

2 3

Steven L. Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games: The Story Behind the Craze that Touched our Lives and Changed the World (New York: Three Rivers, 2001), 136. Henry Jenkins et al. “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century,” Building the Field of Digital Media and Learning, The MacArthur Foundation, [accessed 14 January 2014].



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studied in the field of medievalism.4 Scholarly engagements with participatory culture have, thus far, often focused on spreading knowledge and awareness about the Middle Ages: Melissa Dewalt’s Tumblr blog, “MedievalPOC,” aims to challenge the perception that people of color did not live in premodern Europe; “Discarding Images,” found on various social media sites, posts images from medieval manuscripts every day; and Facebook groups like “Material Collective” offer alternative, informal spaces for discussing ideas and scholarship.5 Non-scholarly intersections between medievalism and participatory culture include, but are certainly not limited to, playthrough videos of neomedieval games on sites like Twitch and YouTube and recreations of neomedieval worlds, maps, and servers in the sandbox survival game Minecraft.6 As a funding platform launched in 2009, Kickstarter also embodies the criteria for participatory culture among players: by encouraging public 4

5

6

In his article on exploring gay identities in online medievalism, Steven Kruger acknowledges the representation of medieval sexualities in participatory cultures, and opts instead to analyze fiction published in online story archives, “Gay Internet Medievalism: Erotic Story Archives, the Middle Ages, and Contemporary Gay Identity,” American Literary History 22.4 (2010): 913–44 (916). Candace Barrington explores reinterpretations of Chaucer’s “The Prioress’s Tale” on the popular video-sharing website YouTube in “The YouTube Prioress Anti-Semitism and Twenty-First Century Participatory Culture,” in Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture, ed. Gail Ashton and Daniel Kline (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 13–28. For another study of medievalism in participatory cultures focused on games, see Serina Patterson, “Casual Medieval Games, Interactivity, and Social Play in Social Network and Mobile Applications,” in Digital Gaming Re-imagines the Middle Ages, ed. Daniel Kline (New York: Routledge, 2014), 243–56. For discussions of guilds in World of Warcraft, see, for instance: Bonnie Nardi and Justin Harris, “Strangers and Friends: Collaborative Play in World of Warcraft,” in International Handbook of Internet Research, ed. Jeremy Hunsinger, Lisbeth Klastrup, and Matthew Allen (New York: Springer, 2010), 395–410, and Dmitri Williams, Nicolas Ducheneaut, Li Xiong, Nick Yee, and Eric Nickell, “From Tree House to Barracks: The Social Life of Guilds in World of Warcraft,” Games and Culture 1.4 (2006): 338–61. Melissa Dewalt, “MedievalPOC: People of Color in European Art History,” Tumblr, [accessed 29 August 2014]. “Discarding Images” posts regularly on Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook. See: , , . “The Material Collective,” Facebook, . A “playthrough” (also called a “Let’s Play”) is a recorded video or a series of screenshots in a post that document playing a video game, often with commentary and reactions by the player. For medieval-themed Minecraft worlds and servers, see, for instance, “The Dark Age,” The Dark Age, < http://thedarkage.enjin.com> [accessed 1 September 2014], “Stone & Steel Europe: 843 A.D.”, Minecraft Forums, 17 July 2013, [accessed 1 September 2014], and “MassiveCraft,” MassiveCraft, [accessed 1 September 2014].

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support for creative projects posted by individuals and businesses, which will only be funded if the minimum campaign goal is reached, communities of backers rally around their niche interests, supporting projects through pledges, spreading awareness through social media, emailing the project creator, and participating in discussions on the project’s page or elsewhere. The project creator may in turn post updates on the project both during and after the development process, respond to backers’ queries, and join the discussion in the comments section of their page. This bi-directional flow of communication between project creators and their backers generates openly collaborative projects and products, which extends the concept of beta-testing (though beta-testing is often included as a reward) to other aspects of production and game design. Backers and, for our purposes, future players are suddenly no longer strictly on the receiving end of a company’s development process; they are invested and engaged in the future of the project. For independent (often called “indie”) game developers and game studios, this relationship is often critical to the successful marketing and launch of a game.7 While Massive Chalice presents an exemplary case for probing the collaborative nature of game projects on sites like Kickstarter, it was not the first neomedieval game funded on the site to discuss the role of women. On 14 September 2012, Torn Banner Studios’ Chivalry: Medieval Warfare (2012), a multiplayer combat game, began its Kickstarter campaign.8 Emulating firstperson shooter games, Chivalry does not include any women in its game, whether as playable or non-playable characters. In response to a forum user’s query about the lack of playable female characters, team lead Steve Piggott claimed that “adding female characters to a game like this would make it appeal less to females” due to the “maturity level of the internet and unfortunately the male-dominated FPS [first-person shooter] market,” and was resolute in developing a male-only medieval world.9 Fans of the game shared Piggott’s view, arguing that female models would create a great deal more work for the developers and jeopardize the game’s supposed authenticity.10

7

8 9

10

Digital and tabletop games are the most-funded category on Kickstarter, boasting 11,145 successful projects launched since 2009. Kickstarter’s Stats page, [accessed 21 July 2014]. Chivalry: Medieval Warfare, Torn Banner Studios, 2012. “Chivalry: Medieval Warfare developer says female characters would make the game less appealing to women,” Polygon, [accessed 27 January 2014]. Various players have questioned the lack of women in Chivalry on the Torn Banner Studio forums, but are overwhelmingly met with arguments in favor of male-centric combat.



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By the time Torn Banner Studios posted Chivalry on Kickstarter, the game was already nearing the post-production stages of development. Notably, the game’s later expansion, Chivalry: Deadliest Warrior (2013), also excludes female player characters.11 Paradox Interactive’s War of the Roses (2012), which is based on the eponymous war between the houses of Lancaster and York in the mid-fifteenth century, also decided to largely omit women from their game, ostensibly in order to create a sense of historical accuracy.12 Herein lies one of the main cruxes of neomedieval game design, and one that several scholars have previously discussed: a game studio’s belief that they are creating an authentic, historically accurate experience set against current political and cultural ideologies. For Chivalry and War of the Roses, the game content was already largely committed by the time both studios began marketing their respective games, so there was little room to incorporate player feedback prior to release. In her study of player debates about racial diversity in the Dragon Age franchise (2009–14),13 Helen Young points out that fans, who were frustrated about the lack of representative minorities in the game, not only engaged directly with perceived historical realities in fantasy games, but also showed “desire for post-race society redirected to the past so that the Middle Ages are imagined as a pre-race utopia.”14 Double Fine’s decision to involve players in Massive Chalice’s pre-production process on Kickstarter therefore created a new way in which to incorporate game content – and opened up other possibilities for the direction of the game. While other game studios and players attempt to recreate what they believe to be an authentic medieval past, the discussion surrounding Massive Chalice’s development reveals instead how people deal with the Middle Ages, especially when perceived political structures are no longer “politically correct.”

11 12

13 14

The developers have also been vocal about omitting women from their medieval world. See, for instance, “Add some ladies, why not?,” Torn Banner Studio Forums, Torn Banner Studios, 31 October 2012, [accessed 1 September 2014], “Extremely Sexist,” Torn Banner Studio Forums, Torn Banner Studios, 10 August 2013, [accessed 1 September 2014], “Possible female warriors in the future?” Torn Banner Studios Forums, Torn Banner Studios, 5 October 2013,  [accessed 1 September 2014]. Chivalry: Deadliest Warrior, Torn Banner Studio, 2013. War of the Roses, Fatshark, Paradox Interactive, 2012. Paradox Interactive has since shifted their perspectives on gender representation and developed a playable female warrior for the sequel multiplayer game War of the Vikings (2014). Dragon Age: Origins, BioWare, Electronic Arts, 2009; Dragon Age II, BioWare, Electronic Arts, 2011. Helen Young, “‘It’s the Middle Ages, Yo!’: Race, Neo/medievalisms, and the World of Dragon Age,” The Year’s Work in Medievalism 27 (2012): 1–9 (8–9).

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Envisioned by the project lead Brad Muir, Massive Chalice is a turn-based tactical strategy game set in an original fantasy world: assuming the role of an immortal ruler, the player manages families (called “houses”) of an entire kingdom on a geographical map. External forces (“demons”) will occasionally invade the kingdom, and the player must fend them off using heroes from various families, each with different abilities (“classes”) and traits (such as asthma). Unlike other role-playing games, Massive Chalice’s heroes eventually weaken, grow old, and permanently die. Players must strategically decide whether to keep a hero on the battlefield or retire him or her to sire future generations of heroes as the “regent” of a geographical area (a “keep”) or dedicate the rest of his or her life to research in the “Sagewright’s Guild.” While other games, like Rogue Legacy, operate on a simple auto-generating system that randomly allocates attributes and skills to new offspring, Massive Chalice’s bloodline system is more strategic and forms a primary element of gameplay.15 Players assign male and female characters of different houses and lineages to each other and place them together in a keep, thereby forming a marriage; based upon the fertility rate of the couple this pairing will lead to children, who in turn acquire traits from their parents via a hidden, coded Punnett Square system.16 Players can thus pair heroes strategically in order to produce hybrid classes or strengthen a hero’s abilities. As Muir notes, death will result from old age in the game, and “it should be something [the player is] dealing with all the time,” as players may experience the emotional effects of loss.17 Moreover, the player’s management of lords, ladies, and houses as the king or queen of the realm in Massive Chalice, a feature inspired by medieval manorialism,18 illustrates the studio’s desire to make forging marriages and generational bloodlines a more central component of strategic gameplay. By discussing the development of an inclusive, neomedieval world based upon generational bloodlines, marriage, and manorialism with players, Double Fine has created a possibility space for exploring current social, political, and civic issues with the game community and the relevance of such issues in video games.

15 16

17 18

Rogue Legacy, Cellar Door Games, 2013. A Punnett Square is a graphical method used for determining dominant and recessive genes. A grid displays all possible combinations of a trait based upon the maternal and paternal genes of each parent. “MASSIVE CHALICE Pre-production Design Chat,” YouTube video, 55:43, posted by “DoubleFineProd,” 6 June 2013, . Put simply, medieval manorialism is the vesting of legal and economic power in a lord, supported economically by his direct landholding and from the obligatory contributions of a portion of the peasant population under his jurisdiction.



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Gamers React After Double Fine launched their Kickstarter campaign, the community began discussing Massive Chalice’s themes and mechanics and suggesting ideas for the game’s development. Queries about the role of women in the game – and whether their primary function was to produce heirs – began just one day after the campaign’s launch on the website. The representation of women as warriors alongside men was questioned, and a number of commenters appealed to make a tactical strategy game without the involvement of what they considered to be gender politics. One backer on 9 June 2013 suggests that “it would be much more interesting gameplay-wise to have the sexes be different,” with separate positive and negative traits.19 Still others on Kickstarter and the Double Fine forums discussed possibilities for the inclusion of abortion and bonuses for two-parent families in the game. In a thread on the Double Fine forums, titled “How neutral can gender neutrality be?,” posters discuss the strategies for including monogamous marriage and maternity time, with suggestions for separating time on the battlefield from siring children.20 Backers also entered a heated discussion surrounding ideas for including same-sex couples in the game, much to the surprise of Massive Chalice’s game designers. The controversial debate, which arose on the forums of Double Fine’s website on 30 May 2013 and carried over to the campaign’s “comments” section on Kickstarter on 2 June 2013,21 quickly became the primary topic of discussion – increasing to a total of 29 pages and 722 responses on the forums – and pivoted at first around the perceived futility of including samesex marriage in light of the game’s core mechanics. As one commenter wrote: “[t]he point of the game and the main mechanic is to arrange marriages and ‘breed heroes,’ [and characters] can’t really breed with same sex marriages.”22 Naysayers speculated that the inclusion of same-sex couples would diminish the role of the game’s strategic goals as it morphed into a game espousing purportedly biased political views. In other words, they deemed multiple sexual orientations in the game to be unnecessary in a tactical strategy-based 19

20 21 22

Double Fine’s Kickstarter comments page for Massive Chalice, Kickstarter, posted by “kingcole225,” 9 June 2013, [accessed 8 June 2013]. “How neutral can gender neutrality be?,” Double Fine Action Forums, Double Fine, 9 June 2013, [accessed 8 June 2013]. “Massive Chalice and same sex couples,” Double Fine Action Forums, Double Fine, 31 May 2013, [accessed 8 June 2013]. Double Fine’s Kickstarter comments page for Massive Chalice, posted by “Devin,” 2 June 2013, [accessed 8 June 2013].

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neomedieval world. As another poster states, Massive Chalice occurs in a “different time, different world, [and] different values” – same-sex marriage does not make “economic” sense in a role-playing game.23 Such arguments commonly appear in threads on fan-forums, but often within the context of representing a perceived historically accurate medieval past.24 While Massive Chalice lies outside of any historical period of time, the desire among some players to recognize a seemingly familiar, authentic past still lingers in their discussion of the game: the Middle Ages, for them, is decidedly male and strictly heterosexual. Other commenters pointed out that the inclusion of same-sex couples could provide deeper strategies for gameplay within the neomedieval game, focusing on ways in which same-sex couples could adopt children and fulfill critical roles in the game’s world and overall narrative. A number of backers suggested omitting sexual relations from the game altogether by providing instead “instant offspring” via a magic spell; heterosexual and same-sex couples could then adopt the children. Other commenters proposed the ability for same-sex couples to adopt “war orphans.” “They could be a safety valve,” writes one commenter, “for raising legitimate children of the bloodline whose parents die [due] to war or invasion.”25 Advocating for proper representation of nature and nurture in the children’s acquired traits, commentators also argued that same-sex couples could “impart knowledge and abilities [. . .] onto the child, so [he or she] can then continue [the] bloodline.”26 This knowledge, backers argued, could also be instilled through combat training and other tutelage when the child becomes a ward of a same-sex couple’s house. Massive Chalice Game Designers Respond: The Role of Women Double Fine immediately responded to inquiries about the representation of women in Massive Chalice by updating the “Frequently Asked Questions” section on the main page of their Kickstarter campaign: Question: Are women in MASSIVE CHALICE only meant to have children and raise them?

23

24 25 26

Double Fine’s Kickstarter comments page for Massive Chalice, posted by “keto,” 2 June 2013, [accessed 8 June 2013]. See, for instance, Young, “‘It’s the Middle Ages, Yo!,’” 4–9. “MASSIVE CHALICE Pre-production Design Chat.” “MASSIVE CHALICE Pre-production Design Chat.”



Women, Queerness, and Massive Chalice 71 Answer: MASSIVE CHALICE will be a very inclusive game! It’s true that in the pitch video we reference an immortal King (drawn in the likeness of Brad) but in the final game we want the player to have the role of an immortal king or queen. And your bloodlines and fighting force will be made of both male and female heroes – equally capable of splitting demonic skulls!27

In a video update for the Kickstarter campaign on 6 June 2013, Muir and creative director John Swisshelm also reaffirm gender equality in the game and hypothesize ways in which backers and game designers can collectively create a gender-neutral neomedieval world. Based on community feedback, Muir and Swisshelm consider a number of possibilities for matchmaking, including the concept of pairing a hero with a “commoner” spouse and “royal matchmaking” whereby the player appoints a hero (male or female) as a steward of a keep. The player can then select a partner for the retired hero. The children would encompass a hybrid class by gaining the classes and abilities from both parents (the regent representing the primary class). “We want people to feel connected to their heroes’ marital relationships,” Muir remarks, “but without it being a bunch of scripted dialogue.” While most video games still uphold their own versions of modernized manorialism, Muir and Swisshelm note that Massive Chalice intentionally discards this organizational structure and instead creates a social system that promotes equality between the sexes. In  Massive Chalice,  men and women can fight on the battlefield together, and the player can grant anyone – male or female – land and a lordship. As Muir states, “[w]e really don’t want to have any differences between the sexes. They’re both going to be super bad-ass on the battlefield, killing demons together.” The only difference between men and women in-game is the character models, which appear in a variety of shapes and age over time. Therefore, if the player retires a hero to a keep, any children produced in the manor will gain the surname, class, and abilities of that hero (man or woman). There “really does feel like there is a solution” for the Massive Chalice bloodline issue, Muir explains, “we can have it be all about the surnames.” In a video update of the game’s development on 11 November 2013, Muir further reveals that partner matches will be sorted by fertility and maternity time will be upheld, as children are born after 290 days (nine months) in order to reflect realistic conditions for childbearing couples.28 27 28

Double Fine’s Kickstarter comments page for Massive Chalice, Kickstarter, [accessed 8 June 2013]. “Massive Chalice Teamstream #10 Part 2,” Twitch video, 1:07:36, posted by “DoubleFine,” , 11 November 2013.

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Massive Chalice Game Designers Respond: Queering the Middle Ages Pondering the inclusion of ideas such as same-sex marriage in Massive Chalice by game designers and players resulted in developing the game in unexpected directions. In his first video update on 6 June 2013, Muir divulges that feedback from Kickstarter backers inspired his team’s decision to include samesex relationships in the game: “we did not talk about [the possibility of gay marriage] until we launched the Kickstarter.”29 Muir adds that “[w]e were so focused on pure pragmatic mechanics and how it would work [. . .] that we hadn’t [considered it].” For Muir, the possibility of including same-sex couples in the game promotes tolerance and diversity, though, I will note, bisexualism, transgenderism, asexuality, and other types of sexual identities are not represented in the game. While the initial focus of Massive Chalice was to produce generational bloodlines for tactical strategy in turn-based combat, the discussion by backers about including same-sex marriage in the game suggested that same-sex characters could offer another level of strategic gameplay. “If you want to take two heroes,” Muir muses, “and put them in a keep together they won’t be able to produce children, but maybe couples don’t have to just produce children for you [. . .] couples could [become scholars] and focus on advancing technology to fight the demons.”30 The Double Fine team considered a number of possibilities in their effort to incorporate same-sex couples in Massive Chalice. Inspired by community feedback, the game designers began brainstorming other ways that same-sex couples could contribute to the realm, such as joining the “Sagewright’s Guild.” Keeping with the focus on producing generational bloodlines, later concepts deliberated instead on the impact of same-sex couples on childrearing and education. In his second video update, Muir suggests letting the player decide which keep can raise a given child, splitting traits between those inherited by the parents and those learned through the foster home.31 Muir and his team revised this concept to offer the player a choice between drafting or training a character when he or she comes of age at fifteen years old. The character could be trained in any keep: the home keep would grant more skill points for the primary class, and a foster keep would grant skill points for a secondary class. While the original game concept focused on genetics as the primary factor for distributing traits, Swisshelm notes in an update video posted on 14 October 2013 that feedback from Kickstarter 29 30 31

“MASSIVE CHALICE Pre-production Design Chat.” “MASSIVE CHALICE Pre-production Design Chat.” “MASSIVE CHALICE Teamstream 2: Brad’s Victorious Journey to the North(West),” Twitch video, 1:26:04, posted by “DoubleFine,” 19 July 2013, .



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commenters demonstrated that the game needed to balance both nature and nurture in the development of heroes; training heroes creates more strategic choices for the player and enables same-sex couples to have an influence on a character’s development through education.32 In another video update, Muir also discloses that players can adopt a baby from a magic Chalice; players assign the baby to a specific keep, and the baby assumes the classes, last name, and house colors of the parents. While the baby is born with random genetic traits, the parents can grant new traits through upbringing and training.33 The game is still in development at the time of writing, so these concepts are subject to change. Nevertheless, Double Fine’s inclusion of same-sex couples in the game demonstrates an effort to listen to their player-base and present a game that promotes diversity and a range of family units. A Tolerant Middle Ages? As the game community and Massive Chalice’s game designers have shown, ideas of the medieval past can bring about, and indeed highlight, current civic, social, and political debates, including a need for more tolerance. Young observes in her exploration of player comments in Dragon Age that “there is a very strong desire amongst fantasy fans – and authors and game-makers as well – for imagined worlds to reflect historical realities of the Middle Ages.”34 In the case of Massive Chalice, however, the game’s philosophy is not to recreate an authentic medieval world experience, like Crusader Kings II or (to a lesser extent) Dragon Age, but rather to provide answers within what many consider to be a social system at odds with arguably fundamental Western liberal values. As Muir states: we could go very realistic [and] historical with [this game] or we could do something neat. This is a fantasy. This is our world. This is maybe even an ideal way that some of these relationships could be set up. A man or woman, two men, [two] women can run a household and contribute to the kingdom, contribute resources, technology. That would be a world that I’d rather live in.35

32 33 34 35

“MASSIVE CHALICE – Teamstream #8 Part 1,” Twitch video, 1:03:32, posted by “DoubleFine,” 14 October 2013, . “MASSIVE CHALICE Teamstream #18,” Twitch video, 1:38:12, posted by “DoubleFine,” 28 March 2014, . Young, “‘It’s the Middle Ages, Yo!,’” 6. “MASSIVE CHALICE Pre-production Design Chat.”

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Just as fans of Dragon Age imagine a “pre-race utopia” in the game, Massive Chalice game designers and many players imagine a neomedieval utopia embracing gender equality and acceptance of same-sex marriage.36 Massive Chalice therefore questions the traditional iconic and philosophical markers characteristic of neomedieval role-playing games, re-envisioning fantasy worlds as places to mirror and shape our own modern cultural values. The debates surrounding Massive Chalice showcase the fact that people are yearning for worlds that reflect current cultural attitudes and a diverse array of players. Modern digital technologies such as Kickstarter enable game designers and players to collectively shape game worlds. In the end, Massive Chalice is more than simply a neomedieval world comprising noble families and tactical combat: it is about cultivating our own identities and a future world we want to shape – for our own generational bloodlines.

36

Young, “‘It’s the Middle Ages, Yo!,’” 8–9.

“Constant inward looking,” Medieval Devotional Literature, and the Concordium-Fruitlands Library Vickie Larsen In 1843 the transcendentalist Amos Bronson Alcott transported James Pierrepont Greaves’ theosophical library from the “Concordium,” an intentional community just outside of London, to “Fruitlands,” his own communal farm outside Harvard, Massachusetts. Henry David Thoreau would laud the collection as a great “cabinet of mystical and theosophic lore.”1 That cabinet contained, among books on Platonism, alchemy, witchcraft, occultism, veganism, and modern mysticism, three medieval devotional texts: Julian of Norwich’s Shewings, Bridget of Sweden’s Revelations, and Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ. The appearance of these three texts in Greaves’ library in the company of Roger Bacon, Cornelius Agrippa, and Paracelsus attests not only to a new readership outside of traditional Christianity for medieval devotional literatures but also to an emerging association between medieval devotion, the occult, and disciplines of the self. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, in response to the harsh social realities of industrialization and the intellectual aridity of enlightenment empiricism, the men and women at the Concordium and Fruitlands lived out an experiment in isolationist communal living and collective action under the leadership of Greaves and Alcott. In 1838 Greaves placed his library at the intellectual center of his community “The Concordium, or H ­ armonious Industrial College,” which he billed as “a home for the affectionate, skillful and industrious, uncontaminated by false sympathy,

1

Henry David Thoreau, “Catalogue of Books,” The Dial: A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion 3.4 (1843): 545.

Studies in Medievalism XXIV, 2015

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a­ varicious cunning, or excessive labour.”2 Greaves was a charismatic figure who attracted sufficient disciples from his life as a merchant and as a self-styled mystic to fund himself, a school, and a residential community, and to equip a library of a thousand carefully chosen books. Fruitlands was established in 1843 by Alcott and Charles Lane, one of Greaves’s English associates.3 The transcendental lifestyles and literacies undertaken at the Concordium and Fruitlands might be understood as efforts to form meaningful attachments to the things of an increasingly mechanized world. Jane Bennett argues that “technologies” or “tactics” of the self, including reading and ascetic disciplines, can cultivate a sensibility attuned to enchantment.4 Enchantment, Bennett continues, channeling Max Weber, whether it emerges from the magical, the aesthetic, or the ascetic, inscribes meaning into a disenchanted world.5 At Fruitlands and Concordium the affective force that transformed the self and by extension the world emerged by way of daily discipline, ritual, contemplation, and an intentional literacy. The library contained a collection of books that present the natural world as animated by a vital metaphysics that has the power to enchant the human occupants who seek a home there. Alcott describes Greaves’ library to Ralph Waldo Emerson: “his favorites were the chosen illuminated minds of all time, and with them he is familiar. His library is the most select and rare which I have seen, including most of the books which we have sought with so ill success on our side of the water.”6 Alcott’s daughter Louisa May Alcott describes the honor accorded to the collection once it arrived at Fruitlands: “to this rare library was devoted the best room in the house, and the few busts and pictures that still survived many nittings were added to beautify the sanctuary, for here the family 2

3

4

5 6

Brief Account of the First Concordium, or Harmonious Industrial College: a Home for the Affectionate, Skilful, and Industrious, Uncontaminated by False Sympathy, Avaricious Cunning, or Excessive Labour (Ham Common, UK: The Concordium, 1843), colophon. For a fuller description of the Fruitlands experiment, see Harriet Ellen O’Brien, Lost Utopias: A Brief Description of Three Quests for Happiness, Alcott’s Fruitlands, Old Shaker House, and American Indian Museum, Rescued from Oblivion (Boston, MA: P. Walton, 1929); F. B. Sanborn, Bronson Alcott at Alcott House, England, and Fruitlands, New England (1842–1844) (Cedar Rapids, IA: The Torch, 1908); Clara Endicott Sears, Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1915); and Bronson and Abigail Alcott’s journals in The Journals of Bronson Alcott, ed. Odell Shepard, 1st ed. (Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1938). Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics ­(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). Bennett theorizes the intentional “organization of affect” through a discussion of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, and Michel Foucault, 140–48. Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life, 8. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “English Reformers,” The Dial: A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion 3.2 (1842): 229–30.



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was to meet for amusement, instruction, and worship.”7 The collection, according to Thoreau, featured “undoubtedly a richer collection of mystical writers than any other library in this country.” Thoreau describes the holdings in auspicious terms: “The library is the commencement of an institution for the nurture of men in universal freedom of action, thought and being.” “We print this list,” he continues, “not only because our respect is engaged to views so liberal, but because the arrival of this cabinet of mystical and theosophic lore is a remarkable fact in our literary history.”8 Thoreau published in The Dial roughly 200 selections from the catalog of that library, including “Juliana’s Revelations of Divine Love. 1670,” “St. Bridget’s Revelations. Nuremberg. 1500,” and “Thomas a Kempis, Imitation of Christ; by Dr. Stanhope, London 1759.”9 As a whole, the collection informed and inspired transcendent methods of learning and knowing by theorizing and describing intuitive enlightenment and the visceral practices that facilitate it. Much of the collection was philosophical and included neo-Platonists Plotinus, Porphyry, and Proclus; Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s Works and Epistles; and the Cambridge Platonists Henry More, Peter Sterry, and John Norris. Julian and Bridget’s visionary texts were partnered with a large selection of post-medieval mystics and theosophists, most prominently the seventeenth-century Jakob Böhme, but also Emanuel Swedenborg, William Law, and controversial Quietists Madame Guyon and François Fénelon. In addition to philosophical and mystical texts, the collection contained treatments of the occult and alchemy, including the thirteenth-century Franciscan Roger Bacon’s Mirror of Alchemy and works by two heterodox scientists whom Mary Shelley had, twenty years earlier, credited with influencing her protagonist young Victor Frankenstein: Cornelius Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy and Vanity of the Arts and Sciences and Paracelsus’ Archidoxis Magica.10 Another significant portion of the collection 7

8

9 10

Louisa May Alcott’s description of the library appears in a modestly fictionalized account of the Fruitlands experience she published as a short story in “Transcendental Wild Oats,” The Independent 25.1307 (18 December 1873): 1569–71. Her story emphasizes the monastic nature of life at Fruitlands and contrasts the hard work of the women in the house against the inactivity of masculinized philosophical discussion. Thoreau, “Catalogue of Books,” 545. Some of these same books also found homes in mainline American Protestant collections, such as that of Thomas Cogswell Upham, indicating a wider interest in medieval devotional texts and theosophy both within and outside of orthodoxy. See Theodore R. Hovet, “The Interior or Hidden Life: Medieval Mysticism in Nineteenth-Century American Evangelicalism,” in Medievalism in American Culture, ed. Bernard Rosenthal and Paul E. Szarmach (Binghamton, NY: Medieval Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1989), 52–66. Thoreau, “Catalogue of Books,” 545. Bacon’s and Paracelsus’ authorship of these works has been disputed.

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examined magic and witchcraft, and offered practical information on pyrotechny, pneumatology, hydropathy, and veganism. Julian of Norwich, Bridget of Sweden, and Thomas à Kempis participated in a late-medieval surge in devotional literacies that Jennifer Bryan calls “self-conscious reformation.”11 “This literature,” writes Bryan, “taught generations of English readers in the period between 1350 and 1550 to ‘see themselves’ and to reflect on what they saw, initially as a habit of reading and then as a habit of mind.” In effect, the medieval texts in the collection at the Concordium and Fruitlands had long informed a process of “selfenvisioning, self-knowledge, and affective and rational self-transformation” that shares in what Bryan calls “the long, winding conversations about the nature, status, and potential of the private, literate self in England.”12 Bryan describes this form of literate self-transformation as originally Augustinian, modeled on Augustine’s critical self-analysis in his Confessions. This form of literacy imagines interiority not as fixed or inaccessible, but as “an orchard, where readers learn to toil mightily and busily at cultivating virtues out of stony soil.”13 While such arduous introspective reading may have taken shape with Augustine, by the late Middle Ages it had become widespread and fully integrated into English devotional culture. The library at Fruitlands contained three exemplary works out of what had been hundreds of the most widely circulated medieval texts. It remains to be seen how “English” the procedures of aggressive interiority were or continued to be, but the texts in the Fruitlands library came directly from England, most of them were in English, and Julian, Bridget, and Thomas’ texts all had strong links to the English devotional tradition. Despite living in Norwich and writing in Middle English, Julian may have had the smallest impact of the three on English devotional literacy. Her texts enjoyed a continual but narrow readership, while Bridget and Thomas, who were Swedish and German respectively, and wrote in Latin, were broadly popular both on the continent and in England, particularly after their fifteenth-century translation into English.14 Members of Syon Abbey, the only Bridgettine Abbey in England, owned both Thomas and Bridget’s texts on a site very near that upon which Greaves would establish his Concordium 11 12 13 14

Jennifer Bryan, Looking Inward: Devotional Reading and the Private Self in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 94. Bryan, Looking Inward, 3. Bryan, Looking Inward, 65. Bridget of Sweden’s and Thomas à Kempis’s fifteenth-century English translations are available in The Liber Celestis of S. Bridget of Sweden, vol. 1, ed. Roger Ellis, Early English Text Society o.s. 291 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), and The Imitation of Christ: The First English Translation of the “Imitatio Christi”, ed. B. J. H. Biggs, Early English Text Society 309 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).



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nearly four hundred years later.15 Thomas à Kempis, in fact, became what Jennifer Bryan calls “a runaway bestseller and perennial classic of Christian spirituality […] after the Reformation.”16 All three texts employ the Passion devotion that was such a significant aspect of late medieval pious literacy, but the remainder of the Fruitlands library would indicate that it was not Jesus or Passion devotion that interested the readers at the Concordium and Fruitlands, but the phenomenon of gaining transcendent knowledge of self and the divine, the work of intentional inner transformation, and the bodily regimes that facilitate such experiences. Gaining knowledge of the self and the divine was, in medieval practice, an intentional and reflective act of contemplative literacy. In the edition of Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ in Greaves’ library Thomas advises readers to “reserve a convenient Proportion of your Time for privacy and conversing with your self; and let this be spent in frequent and thankful Reflections upon the Mercies of God; and in reading good Books.”17 This conversing with oneself was at the heart of late-medieval devotional procedures. All three of the medieval devotional texts in the library collection are interested in the capacity of the self to know and transform itself through conscious and difficult contemplation and examination. Thomas à Kempis explains: The better acquainted any Man is with himself, the more he converses with, and retires in his own Breast; and the less he wanders abroad, and dwells upon things without him, the more extensive and sublime is his Knowledge, and the easier attained; because this Man receives immediate Illumination, and is directed by a Ray darted from Heaven into his Soul. (7) Here Thomas establishes a relationship between self-knowledge and received “Illumination.” Like Thomas à Kempis, Julian of Norwich addresses the importance of self-knowledge, but for her, knowledge of the self is knowledge of the divine because of a greater unity between the individual and the divine. She writes (in the language of the edition in the Fruitlands library), “we should be in longing, and in Penance, into the time that we be led so deep 15 16 17

Bryan, Looking Inward, 94. Bryan, Looking Inward, 28. Thomas à Kempis, The Christian’s Pattern: or a Treatise of the Imitation of Jesus Christ, trans. George Stanhope (London: for D. Brown et al., 1759), 44. Subsequent references are parenthetic.

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into God, that we verily and truly know our own soul.”18 The unity Julian describes is one through which devotional exploration of a divine Other (being led “deep into God”) leads to the self (“our own soul”). Her logic bespeaks a unity of creator and created. Greaves and Alcott posit an even broader unity as the foundation of self- and social transformation. For them, self-knowledge was individually transformative but also extended outward from the individual to an entire society because of a unity between beings. Greaves advanced a model that he called “Sacred Socialism” in reaction to the “Physical Socialism” being defined by economic theorists like Robert Owen.19 Owen’s own communities, Harmony in Tytherly and New Harmony in New Lanark, were experiments in strictly materialist socialism. Greaves would argue that “Owen conditionates for the outer man, and draws his resources from the outward world, I would ever conditionate for the inner man, and direct to the resources in the interior world.”20 For Greaves, social reform is a state of mind that begins with individual interior transformation and is spread throughout society by the emanation of love. While Greaves’ project relies upon a fundamental unity that emerges from Neo-Platonism, his vision of the work of transformation and reform calls upon the long history of Augustinian interior transformation, writing, “Constant inward looking is the most excellent tendency that we can have, as we are to be progressively organized to become one with Love.”21 Unitarianism, which was such an influential body of thought in the transcendental movement in America, had cultivated the concept of “self-culture,” which aligns nicely with Greaves’ medievalist notions of inward transformation. Both privilege the development of the self as a vehicle for transcendence and reform.22 In medieval devotion and the work of the Concordium and Fruitlands, removal from the larger social world facilitates this inward transformation. Thomas advocates isolation, writing that to 18

19 20

21 22

Julian of Norwich, XVI Revelations of Divine Love, shewed to a devout servant of Our Lord, called Mother Juliana, ed. R. F. S. Cressy (London, 1670), 145. The Fruitlands catalogue clearly identifies Cressy’s first edition of Julian’s as the text in the library. This book is almost certainly the one in the Alcott Collection at Houghton Library, Harvard, which is both autographed by Bronson Alcott and inscribed by Alcott’s heirs as a piece from the Fruitlands Library. Subsequent references are parenthetical. Alexander Campbell, ed., Letters and Extracts from the Ms. Writings of James Pierrepont Greaves, vol. 1 (Ham Common, UK: The Concordium, 1843), 30. James Pierrepont Greaves, The Sentiments of R. Owen and J. P. Greaves, as Contrasted by the Latter (Ham Common, UK: The Concordium, 1844), epigraph, as quoted in J. E. M. Latham, Search for a New Eden: James Pierrepont Greaves (1777–1842), the Sacred Socialist and His Followers (London: Associated University Presses, 1999), 18. Campbell, ed., Letters and Extracts, vol. 1, 146. Catherine L. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 161.



“Constant inward looking” 81 live thus abstracted and disengaged from the World, is a Perfection not attainable by every common Man; nor can the sensual Person taste the Delights, or enjoy the Liberty of a true spiritual State. For this requires a distance to be kept from all external Objects, that those things Human nature loves most tenderly should be renounced. (256–57)

Such “abstracted and disengaged” lifestyles were available in the cloistered monasticism that Bridget advanced or the anchorhold that Julian occupied. While the members of both the Concordium and Fruitlands were not religious communities, they performed agricultural labor and handcrafts in order to support their autonomy from the larger culture’s habits of consumption and exploitative labor. In July 1843, The Dial printed Alcott’s advertisement for Fruitlands in which he uses religious rhetoric to highlight the natural beauty, fertile soil, and perfect location of the site. He writes, “consecrated to human freedom, the land awaits the sober culture of devout men.” Through the marriage of “uncorrupted fields” and “unworldly persons, the cares and injuries of a life of gain are avoided”: inequality, poverty, crime, overwork, and alienation.23 This language idealizes the relationship between a “consecrated” isolated rural landscape and “devout” men in such a way that it becomes difficult to imagine that medieval monastic life was not one of Alcott’s models. Like a monastic community, both the Concordium and Fruitlands sought to redefine the traditional family; at Fruitlands the revised family was called the “Consociate Family.” The “Consociate Family” was bound not by the biological and sexual ties that define traditional kinship groups, but by shared spiritual pursuits and a shared domestic life. This structure was designed to eradicate the kinds of special obligations that oppress the individual within traditional family structures. Traditional marriage, an institution of both family and state, and sexuality were discouraged at both Concordium and Fruitlands. Greaves was celibate by choice and urged celibacy upon his followers.24 Within the context of Fruitlands, the Alcott family was expected to disassemble their special relationships to one another, their special responsibilities for one another, and integrate themselves into the new “Consociate Family.” Initially the Fruitlands family consisted of Charles Lane and his son William; Bronson Alcott, his wife Abigail, and their four daughters Anna, Louisa, Elizabeth, and May; Abraham Everett, who had recently been released from incarceration for mental illness and preferred to be called Everett Abram, and Samuel Larnard. Four other adults 23 24

Amos Bronson Alcott, “Fruitlands,” The Dial: A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion 4.1 (1843): 135. Latham, Search for a New Eden, 60–61.

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would join the community later: Isaac Hecker (who, like Bridget of Sweden, would found a religious order, the Paulist Fathers, and edit the first American edition of Julian’s XVI Revelations for Ticknor and Fields in 1864); Samuel Bower, who was rumored among the neighbors to be a nocturnal nudist; Anne Page, a particularly welcome addition to the female occupants of the house; and Joseph Palmer, an abolitionist.25 On these library shelves, Julian’s and Bridget’s visionary narratives are unlikely to have taught a particular Christian theology, as they had in the Middle Ages, but testified to the nature of transcendent experience. Julian, for instance, describes the process of forging a metaphysical connection between a material reality and an immaterial one, an experience that she calls “shewings.” During what Julian thinks to be her final illness, she receives a vivid vision of Jesus’ bleeding head and she simultaneously understands a difficult theological principle, feels an emotion of great joy, and hears the repeated words “Benedicite Dominis” (21). She writes, “sodeinlie I saw the Red blood running down from under the Garland, hott and freshly, plenteouslie and livelie, right as it was in the time that the Garland of Thornes was pressed on his blessed Head. [. . .] I conceaved trulie and mightilie that it was himself that shewed it me without any meane” (9). This will be the first of sixteen increasingly complex visions, many of which include dialogue with Jesus. Julian continues to describe the sensory impact of the visions, in this case, the “Red blood,” that is “hott,” fresh, plenteous, and flowing. She later compares observed material experiences to these immaterial visions, likening the abundance of the blood in her vision to “the drops of water that fall off the evesing of an House after a grete shower of Rain” (18). Importantly, Julian sees these images with what she calls her “bodily sight” (25), and she understands them by way of her experiences in the natural world, but she does not see them through any perceivable medium: illuminations, paintings, stained glass, or live performances. She is shown these images “without any meane,” which is to say, without the use of the empirical observation of an object. Bridget’s amanuensis describes her transcendence as a similarly extra-sensory phenomenon: “At once she was caught up in spirit and went, as it were, outside herself, alienated from the senses of her body and suspended in an ecstasy of mental contemplation. She saw then, in spirit.”26 It is not difficult to imagine the appeal of such narratives for Greaves and 25 26

Latham, Search for a New Eden, 209–10; Sanborn, Bronson Alcott at Alcott House, 54–55. The edition of Bridget’s text in the library at the Corcordium and Fruiltands was a second edition of the 1492 first printed edition in Latin. Bridget of Sweden, Revelationes (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1500). Quotations here have been taken from the English translation found in Bridget of Sweden, Birgitta of Sweden: Life and Selected Revelations, ed. Marguerite Tjader Harris, trans. Albert Ryle Kezel (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1990), 101.



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Alcott, who were firm believers in intuitive “fact.” One of Greaves’ aphorisms elevates extra-sensory discovery over the empirical modes being advanced in scientific discourses: “There is but one mystical fact for the spiritual and scientific man to realize, and this is, his conceptive union with spirit; a fact more certain than his union with matter.”27 We see in Greaves’ formulation the transcendence of the physical senses and it comes as little surprise that he appropriates the devotional culture of the late Middle Ages, a time when the function of somatic and visceral knowledge and procedures played such an important role in self-formation. Alcott closes his advertisement in The Dial with the aphorism: “The kingdom of peace is entered only through the gates of self-denial and abandonment.”28 Still relying upon religious rhetoric (“kingdom of peace”) and biblical syntax, Alcott invokes the notion of medieval apophatic devotion, “self-denial and abandonment,” a practice through which the subject empties itself in preparation of being filled by its divine object. We might think of this as the loss of the subject–object distinction and relation at the core of most Western epistemologies; Julian describes it as the “naughting” of the self (13). The apophatic tradition originated in the theology of Dionysius the Areopagite (a.k.a. Pseudo-Dionysius), an early medieval theological philosopher second only to Augustine in influence, who introduced mystical theology, both as a philosophy and a term in language.29 Dionysian thought undeniably runs through the entire pre-modern and modern mystical tradition. While Dionysius does not appear on Thoreau’s digest catalog of the Fruitlands library, it is difficult to imagine that his work was absent. In the unlikely event that it was, his primary Neo-Platonist source, Proclus, and a dozen of his protégés represent him well, as does Greaves’ and Alcott’s rhetoric of self-denial. Of course Greaves and Alcott were not contemplative monks; and neither would have pursued a mystical practice to its endpoint, to what fourteenth-century mystic John of Ruysbroeck described as “the dark stillness which always stands empty,” where the naughted self lies, “drunk with love and asleep in God in a dark resplendence.”30 Yet their language reveals their participation in this tradition. Greaves, in a letter to Alcott, describes his own mystical experience, writing, “some strong inte27

28 29

30

“James Pierrepont Greaves,” The Dial: A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion 3.3 (1843): 293. This unsigned article on Greaves includes aphorisms taken from his diaries. Alcott, “Fruitlands,” 135. Thomas Carlson traces Dionysian influence through medieval and modern thought in Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 154–89. John Ruusbroec, The Spiritual Espousals and Other Works, trans. James A. Wiseman (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1985), 265 and 267.

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rior visitations came over me, which withdrew me from the world, in a considerable degree, and I was enabled to yield myself up to Love’s own manner of acting, regardless of all consequences.”31 In this brief narrative of events, Greaves invokes the interiority of his experience (“strong interior visitation”), his consequent isolation (“withdrew me from the world”), and his procedures of self-negation (“yield myself up”), all of which are rooted in Dionysian theology. According to the tenets of self-culture adopted at both Concordium and Fruitlands, the individual establishes a bridge between the material and the immaterial by way of the regulated body. Greaves and Alcott instituted regimes of mental and physical discipline in their communities. The rule at the Concordium required that occupants rise at 5:00, work no more than eight hours per day, take a daily cold-water bath, go to bed at 10:00, remain celibate, eat a raw vegan diet, and drink only water.32 Consumption was perceived to be one of the primary sources of corruption of the individual. If one could free oneself from the need to consume, one could free oneself from commerce. They rejected the consumption of meat, alcohol, coffee, and tea. According to Lane, this would reduce their labor generally, and the vegetarian lifestyle would specifically free them from a system “which must depress the human affections so long as it continues, and overlay them by the injurious and extravagant development of the animal and bestial natures in man.”33 Members of both communities were identified by their alternative hygiene and apparel choices; at the Concordium the women refused corsets, the men grew beards, wore their hair long and parted in the center, and at Fruitlands the members wore only clothing made from spun flax, so as not to exploit animals or slave labor.34 In monastic fashion, the community heard readings at their meals that they followed with discussion. Some of the practices in these communities might best be understood as a disciplinary regime designed to regulate the self; others are clearly self-denial, intentional bodily suffering. Medieval devotion’s transformative procedures often utilized the careful inspection and molding of the self in relation to a model, and that model often suffered. Thomas à Kempis describes the use of Jesus as such a model for interior change:

31 32 33 34

James Pierrepont Greaves, “Letter to Bronson Alcott, 16 Sept. 1837,” The Dial: A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion 3.4 (1843): 422. Sanborn, Bronson Alcott at Alcott House, 16; Latham, Search for a New Eden, 61. Sears, Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands, 48. A Brief Account of the First Concordium, or Harmonious Industrial College (Ham Common, UK: The Concordium, 1843), 1–2, as cited in Latham, Search for a New Eden, 157.



“Constant inward looking” 85 the way to be truly Enlightened, and to deliver our selves from all Blindness of Heart, is to make his Holy Life the Object of our Imitation, and to form our Dispositions and Actions upon the perfect Model of the bright Example. […] employing our Thoughts, worth great Frequency and serious Attention, upon the Perfections of this Divine Original. (1)

The imitation of Christ, imitatio Christi, of course, was more than a contemplative ideal in the late Middle Ages, it was also a visceral ideal. Julian and Bridget both ask for suffering in order to allow them to form empathetic attachments to Jesus. In the second chapter of her long text, Julian “desired before three Gifts by the Grace of God. The first, was mind of the Passion. The second, was bodilie Sickness. The third, was to have of Gods gift three Woundes” (4). The first of Julian’s desires is for successful meditation on the Passion, but the other two are for the application of her body and mind to the pursuit of her spiritual ambitions. She “would have no manner of Comfort of fleshly, ne earthely Life.” Julian desires these physical difficulties in order to “be purged by the Mercy of God” (5). She seeks suffering to ally herself with Jesus, writing, “with him [. . .] I desired to suffer living in my deadlie bodie, as God would give me Grace” (9). Bridget also attaches to Jesus through imitatio Christi: It was her custom too, on Fridays, to pour on her bare flesh flaming drops from a burning candle so that they left wounds remaining; and if at any time before the next Friday these wounds healed somewhat by themselves, she then at once put her nails in and plowed them so that her body would not be without the suffering of wounds; and this she did for the sake of the memory of the passion of Christ.35 The morning cold-water baths at the Concordium and Fruitlands were certainly painful but differ from Julian and Bridget’s visceral practices in that they contain no affective component. The baths were thought to be bracing, physically and spiritually restorative, but they did not allow participants to form affective attachments to other cold-water bathers across temporal or spatial distances. The conjunction of bodily regulation and ideology is, of course, a prominent feature of many religious and cultural traditions. The anthropologist Lawrence Cohen describes eating, fasting, dressing, bathing, and enclosure as technologies of the embodied self, negotiations of the “regulatory frames” put in place by external agencies. If mainstream culture and the state that 35

Bridget of Sweden, Life and Selected Revelations, 96.

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supports it dictate particular relationships to eating, then eating otherwise, copulating otherwise, dressing otherwise, bathing otherwise, domesticating otherwise is an act of resistance through the body, a way that individuals and groups “constitute themselves in reference to particular bodily commitments.”36 Clearly the members of the Concordium and Fruitlands were forming a political and social alliance through their habits, but in a manner that engaged with a larger definition of the socio-political than Cohen imagines. Joseph Alter’s discussion of Hindu celibacy may pick up where Cohen leaves off. Alter argues that humans can use their bodies to perform more than locating themselves as individuals within a community and relating themselves to that community. Humans can also seek a transcendent self, enabled by a body that receives knowledge through its own physical means. Alter refers to such knowledge as “the embodiment of truth in somatic terms.”37 The body can work to pledge one’s allegiance to a social whole, or to organize a space for an alternative practice, a way of operating in the margins, and the body can also learn and know. The bodily practices described by Julian and Bridget differ in degree and technique from those described by Greaves and Alcott, but they share a motive in that they seek to change the interior terrain of the self by way of the body, and by extension to find the transcendent experience that Bennett describes as “enchantment.” Fruitlands was a failed experiment by all accounts, lasting only seven months and ending with more debts than enchantment. Greaves’ biographer Jackie Latham attributes the failure to the absence of a singular charismatic personality such as her subject, and the presence of two rather unharmonious ones in Alcott and Lane.38 Clara Sears, after reading Abigail Alcott’s and Charles Lane’s journals and letters, argues that the community failed because the consociate family is irreconcilable with the natural family.39 Catherine Albanese attributes the failure to the unharmonious relationship between limitations placed upon labor and the mandate of self-sufficiency.40 The editor of The Present, a short-lived publication for adherents of the “doctrine of association,” as it was called in its first issue, implied that Alcott and Lane had abandoned their senses, removed themselves from their society, and undervalued the body’s needs. The editor describes the antisocial aspect of Fruitlands, saying, “A life of action among men, even if imperfect, of our 36 37 38 39 40

Lawrence Cohen, “Semen, Irony and the Atom Bomb and Responses to Commentaries,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 11.3 (1997): 301–5 (303). Joseph S. Alter, “Seminal Truth: A Modern Science of Male Celibacy in North India,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 11.3 (1997): 275–98 (277). Latham, Search for A New Eden, 209. Sears, Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands, 132. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit, 171–72.



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own era and country […] is a far healthier atmosphere to breathe, than solitude in asceticism.”41 The implication that the practices of Fruitlands seem both foreign and out of date points to a mismatch between the goals of the contemplative life and this post-medieval context. Medieval devotional practices were supported by institutionalized monasticism and anchoritic enclosure through which the sons and daughters of the well-to-do were housed and fed with the ideological and financial support of royal patrons, their own families, local donors, and the rents and goods supplied by monastic properties. Much of the network that supported those practices had been dismantled at the time of the Reformation, making the adoption of medieval devotional procedures and their related “technologies of the self ” an ideologically and materially tenuous enterprise. Thoreau delivered part of the Fruitlands library to Wiley and Putnam in New York to be sold to pay Lane’s debts.42 Remaining volumes were divided between Alcott and Emerson, who agreed to sell the Fruitlands property and a portion of the books, which he called “a cabalistic collection” in a letter to his brother in 1845.43 In 1854 Emerson claims to still have some of the Fruitlands volumes on his shelves.44 Emerson’s perhaps derogatory use of the term “cabalistic” to describe these books captures the esoteric quality of the collection and marginalizes the eccentric and mysterious practices it supports. Jane Bennett describes the mystic as one of the “recalcitrant fugitives from rationalization,” one of the “errant forces” that ascribe meaning to the world and transform it from a fragile ecosystem that humans occupy through painful and partially effective compromise into a home.45 The presence on the Fruitlands shelves of the two occult authors Mary Shelley had depicted as Victor Frankenstein’s favorites, Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus, bespeaks a partnership in the effort towards enchantment between classical philosophy, medieval devotion, mysticism, and the occult. These are the discourses that may be debunked by serious men (fathers and professors in the case of Shelley’s novel) and embraced by the imaginative, naïve, and foolhardy. The members of the Concordium and Fruitlands may have been such “recalcitrant fugitives” in search of greater meaning than that offered them by modern religion, state, or technology. The criticism leveled at their project and at some of the authors they read highlights the vulnerability of 41 42 43

44 45

“Signs of the Times: Consociation, or the Family Life,” The Present (15 October 1843): 70. Sanborn, Bronson Alcott at Alcott House, 40. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ralph Leslie Rusk, and Eleanor M. Tilton, The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk, vol. 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 93. Latham, Search for A New Eden, 224. Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life, 57.

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heterodox literacies and experimental techniques of the self in a cultural context characterized by strong ontologies and deep suspicion of alternative metaphysics. The medieval devotional texts in the libraries of the communities at the Concordium and Fruitlands may have offered some procedural information as well as testimonies of transcendent experiences, but they also offer a set of metaphors through which medieval devotional subjects had come to understand the porosity and malleability of the self and the possibility of unmaking the boundary between self and Other. It is difficult to imagine a passage more pleasing to such untimely seekers than Julian’s famous vision of God in a point. She writes, “I saw God in a Point; that is to say, in my understanding: By which sight I saw that he is in all thing” (31). Meaning and value inhabits every point. While the members of these communities were displaced from mainstream societies in the thick of industrialization and scientific empiricism, and drawn into communities that ultimately fail, their alternative world-making dramatizes a desire for enchantment and a powerful attachment to life.

Speaking of the Middle Ages Today: European and Transatlantic Perspectives Vincent Ferré and Alicia C. Montoya This section of the book originated as a response to several recent developments within the field of medievalism studies. These included, as its most direct catalyst, a conference we organized in July 2010 on “Transatlantic Dialogues/Speaking of the Middle Ages,” at the joint initiative of the U.S.based group of scholars around the journal Studies in Medievalism and the French-based association Modernités médiévales1; the three articles included here are based on papers first presented at that conference – as is Jeff Rider’s essay, “The Middle Ages Are within Your Grasp: Motor Neurons, Mirror Neurons, Simulacra, and Imagining the Past.” The original conference, as well as this section and the simultaneously published volume of the RELIEF journal2 on French medievalism, aimed at engaging in a dialogue between continental European and Anglo-American traditions of medievalist scholarship. While the Middle Ages we refer to today are European, it appeared that it was Anglo-American scholarship in particular that was developing new ways of conceptualizing this era as the object of a distinct field of medievalism studies, dealing not with “the Middle Ages” but with the imaginative recreation of the medieval past in ensuing periods. Modern medievalism has tended to have a strong Anglo-American focus, overwhelmingly privileging the study of examples drawn from the AngloAmerican world and from English-language arts and literature in particular; 1 2

See the website , established in 2004. See the webste of the bilingual academic journal RELIEF (Revue électronique de littérature française), .

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medievalist phenomena from other geographic areas subsequently did not receive nearly the amount of attention they might seem to deserve. This existence of nationally distinct approaches to the medieval certainly seemed to invite further questioning. Papers presented at the 2010 conference illustrate how the dominant Anglo-American paradigm of medievalism studies could be enriched by drawing on insights from other geographical and cultural contexts, not only the French tradition – as the RELIEF issue shows – but also the often underappreciated richness of Hispanic and Lusophone engagements with the medieval, ranging from the ideologically motivated defenses of the medieval elaborated by Spanish historians exiled in South America during the Franco years, to postcolonial Brazilian “medievalizations” of the country’s own geographical peripheries. Moreover, both these elements – exile and peripheries – opened new vistas for medievalist theory, by their cultural and geographical displacement of the traditional “centers” of medievalist academic discourse. And while the academic tradition of medievalist studies developed in France, which was the primary focus of our original conference, may not at first blush appear to be terribly “peripheral,” in fact all these traditions, taken together, have the potential to subtly question the dominant Anglo-American paradigm. In this section, Juan Gomis first addresses the way in which nationbuilders in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Spain turned back to the medieval past in the quest for a new, unifying national ideology. He traces the process by which medieval traditions that had once been regarded with condescension became rallying-points for a new cultural memory, and how it was history’s “losers” – the medieval romances that had been relegated to chapbook popular culture – who were, in this first phase of medievalist fervor, perhaps most closely associated with the medieval. Then Jaume Aurell’s overview of Spanish medieval studies offers a metahistorical approach that focuses on the scholarly field of medieval studies, which in Spain was marked until the post-Franco decades by a characteristic failure to engage with the theoretical debates that dominated the field of medieval studies in the rest of Europe and in North America, and that had been given their original impetus by, among others, Paul Zumthor. Finally, Nadia R. Altschul explores a new subfield that is opening up within the broader field of medievalism studies, that is, that of trans­atlantic or even postcolonial medievalisms. This article focuses on cultural translations, dislocations, and the various discursive spaces located between traditionally defined nations and their accompanying medievalisms, that is, cultural translations not only between different geographical spaces but also across historical epochs. She particularly addresses a geographical periphery: the Brazilian northeast, labeled a backwater by the dominant culture, and defined by both defenders and detractors in relation to the



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medieval. In so doing, she joins Gomis, Aurell, and many other authors in this volume of Studies in Medievalism in illustrating to what extent the medieval is itself a concept anchored in notions of otherness, strangeness, and non-belonging.

Echoes from the Middle Ages: Tales of Chivalry, Romances, and Nation-building in Spain (1750–1850)1 Juan Gomis When the printer Antón de Centenera published Gómez Manrique’s Regimiento de príncipes in 1482, he could hardly have imagined that he was creating a new publishing line whose fortune in Spain would extend over four centuries. Since it was only a short work, Centenera used a single sheet for it, producing the first known pliego suelto in Spain: cordel literature was thus inaugurated.2 In the first few years, pliegos sueltos were used only to distribute short works of poetry among the court elite, but in the early sixteenth century astute printers realized the great profits that they could make by mass-producing small works at a price that almost anyone who wanted them could afford. As a publishing genre,3 cordel literature is one of the fundamental forms of popular literature in Spain between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it has characteristics in common with material 1 2

3

Research for this essay took place in the framework of the research Project HAR201126129, financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. Although, strictly speaking, the pliego suelto is only one folded sheet of paper, critics have used this term also to refer to brief printings (2–12 leaves) in quarto format with text in two columns and a picture in the title. It is the most common element in the cordel literature, even though this also includes images and longer texts, such as short chivalry tales. I have taken the term “publishing genre” from Víctor Infantes, “Los pliegos sueltos del Siglo de Oro: hacia la historia de una poética editorial,” in Colportage et lecture populaire. Imprimés de large circulation en Europe (XVIe–XIXe siècles). Actes du colloque des 21–24 avril 1991 (Wolfenbüttel), ed. Roger Chartier and Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink (Paris: IMEC-Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1996), 283–98; and, applied specifically to cordel literature, from Jean-François Botrel, “El género de cordel,” in Palabras para el pueblo. Vol. I. Aproximación general a la Literatura de Cordel, ed. Luis Díaz G. Viana (Madrid: CSIC, 2000), 41–69.

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published in other European countries, such as England (broadside ballads, chapbooks), France (bibliothèque bleue, canards), and Italy (libri da risma, stampe popolari). It was used to accommodate a heterogeneous mixture of contents (pictures and texts, in prose or verse, on an enormous range of subjects), the only requisite for which, for their publishers, was that they should be certain to arouse great demand. From the outset, these pliegos sueltos naturally included works of medieval origin, especially romances (ballads) from the oral tradition.4 Most of the medieval texts disappeared from cordel literature with the passing of the years, as a result of the emergence of new titles for which there was more demand. Some survived, however, and continued to be printed century after century. The present study concentrates on part of this very extensive printed material, historias caballerescas breves (short tales of chivalry), and on a specific period, between 1750 and 1850. The reasons for this are, first, the fact that these prose texts are less well known, especially in comparison with the extensively studied Spanish ballads, and second, these tales of chivalry suffered attacks from censors in the eighteenth century, which enables me to link their decline to the contrasting rise of medieval romances at the end of that century and especially in the nineteenth century, as the romances were popularized by erudite elites that saw in them the essence of the true Spanish nation. It was these ballads, rather than the stories in prose (also of medieval origin), that were taken and used to form the essential idea of the Middle Ages for the Spanish Romantic movement. The Romance Compared with History: The Romantic View of the Middle Ages In Spain, as in other European countries, the Romantic period produced a medieval renaissance in many areas: literature, history, philology, painting, architecture, and so on. From an ideological viewpoint, the medieval period was used repeatedly in nineteenth-century Spain to defend many attitudes: the conservatives saw in it an age of social harmony supported by the Church; the progressives saw a period of darkness and backwardness overcome by the advent of modernity; Marxism and anarchism identified 4

Giuseppe di Stefano, “La difusión impresa del romancero antiguo en el siglo XVI,” Revista de dialectología y tradiciones populares 33:1/4 (1977): 373–412; Alan Deyermond, “La liter­ atura oral en la transición de la Edad Media al Renacimiento,” Acta poética 26 (2005): 29–50 (37–38). The term romance refers to a poem consisting of a large number of octosyllabic verses, in which the even-numbered lines have a near-rhyme (assonance) and the odd lines are unrhymed. The critics distinguish between the traditional Romancero (from medieval origin), the new Romancero (consisting of poems written by educated poets in the sixteenth century), and the vulgar romancero, carelessly written and published since seventeenth century.



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feudalism as a system that exploited the worker; anticlericalism attributed the social and economic backwardness to the Church; federalism presented the municipal political organization as an argument in favor of decentralization; and so forth.5 However, among all these motivations, a decisive impulse for a new view of the Middle Ages was the process of construction of the nation that began during the years of the Peninsular War (1808–14) and continued during the whole century.6 Nineteenth-century historiography located the beginnings of the forging of a Spanish national identity in the medieval centuries, and especially in the fight of the Christian kingdoms against the Muslims.7 Religious unity, defense of the faith, patriotism, independence, and fighting spirit were characteristics attributed to the “Spaniards” of the Middle Ages by numerous nineteenth-century texts, which, amid the social and political turbulence of their century, cast a melancholy gaze toward a glorious past. This link between medievalism and nationalism, very common from the time of its introduction by the Romantic movement, was not exclusive to Spain and spread through the whole continent of Europe.8 It is not surprising, therefore, that in this cultural context there was widespread interest in the characteristic poetry of medieval times, transmitted orally and attributed to the people, that is, the nation. This process – begun in the late eighteenth century and by which “the people” became a major subject of interest, almost of veneration, for many European intellectuals – was revealingly described by Peter Burke as “the discovery of the people.”9 The first steps toward this “discovery” were taken by various authors of German origin and then quickly spread throughout Europe. One of the emblematic figures of German Romantic thinking was Johann G. Herder, who in 1778 wrote a celebrated essay about the influence of poetry on the lives of ancient and modern nations. In his opinion, since the Renaissance, 5

6

7 8

9

Rebeca Sanmartín, Imágenes de la Edad Media: la mirada del realismo (Madrid: CSIC, 2002); Visitando la Edad Media: representaciones del medievo en la España del siglo XIX, ed. Julián Ortega and Rebeca Sanmartín (Teruel: Fundación Amantes de Teruel, 2009). José Álvarez Junco, Mater Dolorosa: la idea de España en el siglo XIX (Madrid: Taurus, 2001); Pablo Fernández Albadalejo, Materia de España. Cultura política e identidad en la España Moderna (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2007). La gestión de la memoria. La historia de España al servicio del poder, ed. Juan S. Pérez Garzón (Barcelona: Crítica, 2000). David E. Barclay, “Medievalism and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” in Studies in Medievalism V: Medievalism in Europe, ed. Leslie J. Workman (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), 5–22; Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order. The Medieval Ideal in NineteenthCentury English Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971); Harry Redman, The Roland Legend in Nineteenth-century French Literature (Lexington: The Kentucky University Press, 1991). Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 23.

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only popular songs had preserved the moral effectiveness of the old poetry of medieval times, lost for cultured poets because of their refined, preceptory zeal. The contrast that Herder made between “popular culture” and “enlightened culture” was reinforced by the emphasis that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm placed on the association of poetry with the people, expressed explicitly in their well-known statement “the people creates.” Herder, the brothers Grimm, and their followers devoted themselves to collecting songs, tales, and proverbs from the mouths of the rural population, which they later published in various collections. Their example spread throughout Europe and many anthologies of popular songs – Russian, Swedish, Serbian, Finnish, etc. – soon appeared. The feverish collecting of this material was a result not only of the nationalist impulse but also of the intellectuals’ perception that this popular heritage was irremediably heading toward extinction, harried by urban growth, the construction of highways, the spread of literacy, and, above all, the process of industrialization, which was putting an end to the rustic Arcadia of which the Romantics dreamed.10 This work of searching and compiling was also executed in Spain during the nineteenth century. The Romantic influence arrived here mainly via the Schlegel brothers, whose ideas were made known at an early date by Juan Nicolás Böhl von Faber, a German Hispanist who had settled in Cádiz and was a prolific disseminator of Romanticism in Spain.11 August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel defended the right of every nation to develop the expression of its own feelings through its own genuine works of literature, free from all outside interference (in a clear reference to the widespread French taste). The true poetry of every nation was to be found in the pens of their great writers (such as Shakespeare in England, Calderón in Spain) and in their popular literature, which reflected the spirit and traditions of the people and was an expression of essential national characteristics. It is significant that they both turned their attention to Spain to apply their theories: according to Friedrich, “ninguna literatura ha conservado tan plenamente un carácter nacional como la española” (no literature has preserved a national character so completely as that of Spain).12 This popular/national literature was identified with the traditional romances of medieval origin. In contrast, the printed 10 11

12

Luis Díaz G. Viana, Los guardianes de la tradición. Ensayos sobre la “invención” de la cultura popular (Oiartzun: Sendoa, 1999). On the influence of German Romanticism in Spain, see Hans Juretschke, “La presencia del ideario romántico alemán en la estructura y evolución teórica del romanticismo español,” in El romanticismo, ed. David T. Gies (Madrid: Taurus, 1989), 304–19; Gies refers to the influence of the Schlegel brothers in Agustín Durán. A Biography and Literary Appreciation (London: Tamesis Books, 1975), 60–68. Gies, Agustín Durán, 64.



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works that for centuries had been spreading compositions of another kind, also of medieval origin, such as the tales of chivalry, were looked down on by the Romantic literary critics. The “common folk” that consumed these texts had nothing to do with the “people” created by Romanticism. It was in the ballads that the intellectuals searched for their image of the Middle Ages.13 In the following pages I shall try to specify the causes that gave rise to this identification. The old Spanish ballads had already been an object of attention for the early German Romantics: Herder himself made a verse translation of the ballads about El Cid (1803), via the French publication Bibliothèque Universelle des Romans; Jacob Grimm published a Silva de romances viejos (1815), taken mainly from the Cancionero de Amberes of 1555; the collection of ballads made by G. B. Depping (1817), dedicated “a todos los amantes de la literatura española y de la poesía de la Edad Media” (to all lovers of Spanish literature and poetry of the Middle Ages), achieved enormous success and was translated by Antonio Alcalá Galiano in 1844; Friedrich Diez published his Altspanische Romanzen between 1818 and 1821; and Beauregard Pandin followed suit in 1823. Ferdinand Wolf gathered several collections of ballads, notably his Rosa de Romances (1846), and Víctor Aimé Huber also wrote various works about ballads.14 It was not long before the work of collecting also spread through Spain, in parallel with the diffusion of Romanticism. This was acknowledged by Depping in the version that Alcalá Galiano made of his collection of ballads: “Cuando por la vez primera en 1817 publiqué yo mi obra, poca ayuda encontré en los trabajos de los recopiladores españoles, y tuve que vencer grandes dificultades. [. . .] Desde entonces acá se ha despertado la afición a la antigua poesía española en la tierra mismo donde ella nació” (When I first published my book in 1817, I found little help in the work of the Spanish collectors and I had to overcome great difficulties. [. . .] Since then there has been an awakening of interest in old Spanish poetry in the very land where it was born).15 This interest, cultivated by numerous scholars such as Manuel José Quintana, Bartolomé José Gallardo, Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch, and Böhl himself, is graphically described in the words that Antonio 13

14 15

As late as 1884, Francisco de P. Valladar declared in the journal La Alhambra: “El Romancero y los cantares del pueblo son [. . .] la verdadera historia de la Edad Media y la característica poesía española” (The Romancero and the songs of the people are [. . .] the true history of the Middle Ages and the characteristic poetry of Spain) (in Sanmartín, Imágenes de la Edad Media, 152). Edgar Allison Peers, Historia del movimiento romántico español, 2 vols (Madrid: Gredos, 1973), I: 130–31. Peers, Historia del movimiento, I: 32.

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Cánovas applied to the efforts of one of the compilers, Estébanez Calderón: “Es increíble el trabajo que se tomó en reunir y sacar romances viejos, ya de libros, ya de códices, ya de hojas sueltas antiguas o modernas, y hasta recogiéndolos de la tradición oral, especialmente en Andalucía” (It is incredible the trouble that he took to collect and obtain old ballads, from books, from codices, from old and modern single sheets, even collecting them from oral tradition, especially in Andalusia).16 Among all the collections of old ballads that saw the light in the nineteenth century, Agustín Durán’s Romancero General occupies the chief place. Durán had made his first contribution to the development of Romantic ideas in Spain with his Discurso sobre el influjo que ha tenido la crítica moderna en la decadencia del teatro antiguo español y sobre el modo con que debe ser considerado para juzgar convenientemente de su mérito peculiar, in 1828. In it, following the ideas of the Schlegels, he defended “las sublimes creaciones dramáticas” (the sublime dramatic creations) of the Golden Age, condemned by critics who had tried to apply to the works of Lope or Calderón “doctrinas y principios inaplicables al sistema dramático de que fuimos inventores, [con lo que] lograron apagar la esplendorosa llama del genio nacional, que iluminaba a toda la Europa civilizada” (doctrines and principles inapplicable to the system of drama of which we were the inventors, [so that] they succeeded in extinguishing the magnificent flame of our national genius, which illuminated the whole of civilized Europe).17 That same year, Durán published his Romancero morisco, with 218 ballads on Moorish themes taken from the Romancero General of 1614. He had been collecting old ballads for some time, and he was prompted to start publishing them by his realization of the contrast between the growing interest in popular Spanish poetry among foreign publishers and the ignorance of it that reigned in Spain. As he declared: It is not long since the English purchased for high prices and carried off countless Songbooks and Ballad Books of great rarity, which we are not likely to recover. The few that still remain will suffer the same fate, and before many years we shall have to make our way to foreign libraries if we wish to study the works that belong to us.18

16 17

18

Gies, Agustín Durán, 106. Agustín Durán, Discurso sobre el influjo de la crítica en la decadencia del teatro español, ed. Donald Leslie Shaw (Málaga: Ágora, 1994), 43. An analysis of the Discurso and how it was received is found in Gies, Agustín Durán, 69–82. “No hace mucho tiempo que los ingleses han comprado a peso de oro, y estraido una infinidad de rarísimos Cancioneros y Romanceros, que es verosímil no volvamos a recuperar.



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In giving his collections of ballads to the printer, Durán was attempting to preserve that poetry, scorned at the time, for scholars who might show renewed interest in it in the future. He explained this later, in the foreword to the Romancero General: “Si he sido largo y prolijo en la exposición de mis ideas, si pródigo en los materiales que he reunido, cúlpese al pensamiento de que nada sobra cuando se trata de conservar lo pasado para ilustrar lo venidero” (If I have been lengthy and long-winded in the exposition of my ideas, if I am lavish with the materials that I have collected, blame the thought that nothing is too much when it is a question of preserving the past in order to enlighten the future).19 Further anthologies appeared in the following years: in 1829 a second volume was published, with Romances doctrinales, amatorios, festivos, jocosos, satíricos y burlescos, and the 330 poems of his Cancionero; three years later, his Romancero de romances caballerescos e históricos appeared. Finally, in 1849 Manuel Rivadeneyra published the first of the two volumes of Durán’s Romancero General as volume X of the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles. In these books, Durán did not confine himself to including the previous ballads; the 1,230 existing entries became more than 1,900, to which he added critical comments, additional poems, and an alphabetical list of titles. Agustín Durán’s Romancero represented an enormous effort of collection, study, and compilation of ballads, a basis for future studies on this kind of popular literature. His vast undertaking was a reflection in the Spanish sphere of the wave of collection fever that flooded Europe in the nineteenth century. David T. Gies, Durán’s biographer, considers that the words of praise that J. F. Pacheco devoted to his work are still valid today: We do not consider, however, that we are at all mistaken in assigning to Señor Durán’s collections the highest place among such works in the present age, and in proclaiming them to be the only work of this kind that satisfies its needs and fulfills the idea of what a Spanish ballad book now should be.20

19 20

Los pocos que ya quedan sufrirán igual suerte; y antes de muchos años tendremos que acudir a las bibliotecas estranjeras, si queremos estudiar las obras que nos pertenecen.” Durán, Romancero de romances moriscos, compuesto de todos los de esta clase que contiene el Romancero General, impreso en 1614 (Madrid: Imprenta de D. León Amarita, 1828), 3. Durán, Romancero General, o colección de romances castellanos anteriores al siglo XVIII, 2 vols (Madrid: Rivadeneyra, 1851), I: XXVIII. “No creemos, sin embargo, incurrir en ningún desacierto señalando a las colecciones del señor Durán el puesto más elevado entre las de la presente época, y proclamándolas como la única obra de este género que satisface sus necesidades y llena la idea de lo que debe ser en el día un Romancero español.” Gies, Agustín Durán, 115.

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Since Durán’s work occupies the principal place among the numerous collections of ballads published in the nineteenth century, we can use it to discover the reasons that explain the connections between the romancero, the Middle Ages, and the nation that Romantic thinking devised. Durán did not confine himself simply to collecting and publishing ballad compositions; he also devoted various texts to the study of their origin and development. His theory about the romancero, of great influence in its time, may provide an answer to our questions. First of all, Durán referred on several occasions to the importance of the study of Spanish literature in order to oppose the excessive foreign influence that had predominated in the eighteenth century. In those times, he said in the foreword to the Romancero General, “fue moda en Europa, y más en España, despreciar la patria literatura, sin haber estudiado y conocido la buena de nuestros antepasados” (it was fashionable in Europe, and even more so in Spain, to look down on the literature of one’s own country, without having studied and become familiar with the good literature of our forebears). For the progress of the nation it was necessary to do away with those influences and concentrate on our own literary creations, since “La emancipación del pensamiento en literatura es la aurora de la independencia y el síntoma más expresivo de nacionalidad” (The emancipation of thinking in literature is the dawn of independence and the most expressive symptom of nationality).21 Durán said it was precisely the desire to be useful to his country, “el amor a las cosas de mi patria” (the love of the things of my own land),22 that led him to make his collections of ballads. However, in the whole of Spanish literature, why exactly were ballads the compositions that were sought out, studied, and published by Durán and other intellectuals? Why was “nationality” embodied in those texts and not in others? Durán gave an answer to these questions in the “Discurso preliminar” with which he began his Romancero de romances caballerescos e históricos. In this discourse he developed his theory about the origin and evolution of ballads. He referred to the fall of the Roman Empire, when Latin evolved toward other “rústicas” (rustic) languages as a result of merging with the dialects of the “naciones bárbaras del norte” (barbarous nations of the north). One of those rustic languages, that of the Asturians, survived in the north of the peninsula after the conquest of the Muslims (710), giving rise, in time, to Castilian Spanish. According to Durán, “la lengua castellana y la poesía del pueblo empezaron a progresar seria y constantemente desde mediados del siglo VIII, cuando los españoles independientes refugiados en 21 22

Durán, Romancero General, I: VI. Durán, Romancero de romances caballerescos e históricos anteriores al siglo XVIII, 2 vols (Madrid: Imprenta de Don Eusebio Aguado, 1832), I: VII.



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Asturias iban formando un poder compacto y una verdadera monarquía” (the Spanish language and the poetry of the people began to progress seriously and steadily from the middle of the eighth century, when the independent Spaniards who had taken refuge in Asturias began to form a compact power and a genuine monarchy).23 When the kingdoms in the north embarked on the conquest of territories at the cost of the Muslims (we must remember that this was one of the periods considered by Romantic thought as crucial for the forging of the Spanish nation), that common language was used by “los soldados y el pueblo para cantar sus sentimientos, celebrar sus caudillos, aplaudir sus triunfos y conservar la memoria de sus hazañas en un lenguaje métrico” (the soldiers and the people to sing of their feelings, to celebrate their leaders, to applaud their triumphs and to preserve the memory of their feats in metric language).24 Durán saw the origin of ballads in those primitive compositions; hence the extraordinary importance that he attributed to them from a linguistic, literary, historical, or political viewpoint.25 Furthermore, in his opinion, the romancero, with its rhythm, syntax, and metric system, was unique poetry, unequalled in the whole of European literature, which had accompanied the history of the Spanish nation since its origins: “el romance ha atravesado las edades y las generaciones con tanto aplauso, que quizá no hay un solo español [. . .] que no haya cantado amores, hazañas, guerras, valentías o fábulas en esta clase de combinación métrica” (the ballad has come down through the ages and generations with so much applause that perhaps there is not a single Spaniard [. . .] who has not sung of love, great deeds, wars, acts of courage, or fables in that kind of metric combination).26 This last point links up with the question that immediately arises: if there are other compositions within the cordel genre, such as short tales of chivalry, which also have their origins in medieval times, what was the reason for this exclusive fixation on ballads? The simple answer is that, in Durán’s opinion, short tales of chivalry and all literature of chivalry in general could not be considered a national tradition. He explained this by making a distinction between ballads of chivalry (romances caballerescos) and ballads of history (romances históricos): the former were very scarce and came from works composed in feudal countries. There, the order of chivalry had arisen as a defense of the people against abuses derived from feudalism, and the deeds of the knights became subjects for songs of heroic deeds: “Doquier que un 23 24 25

26

Durán, Romancero de romances caballerescos, I: XIV. Durán, Romancero de romances caballerescos, I: XV. “No será muy temerario conjeturar que [el romance] fue la primitiva forma métrica que después de la conquista árabe y el olvido de la lengua latina tomó nuestra poesía castellana” (Durán, Romancero de romances caballerescos, I: XVII). Durán, Romancero de romances caballerescos, I: XVII.

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caballero armado se presentaba en defensa del débil y oprimido, surgía un poeta cantando sus proezas o un narrador trazando una crónica novelesca” (Wherever an armed knight presented himself in defense of the weak and oppressed, a poet appeared to sing of his prowess or a narrator to recount a prose chronicle).27 According to Durán, however, feudalism was barely present in medieval Spain because of the particular conflict that developed between Christians and Muslims. As a result, stories of chivalry “no tenían el sello de nuestra verdadera y arraigada civilización, [. . .] no salían de nuestras entrañas” (did not bear the mark of our true, deeply rooted civilization, [. . .] they did not come from deep within us).28 The Reconquista, the war against the Muslims, gave the Spanish nation a special quality that was expressed in a unique popular literature: that is why our warlike spirit employed against the Moors produced a special chivalry, different from the chivalry created by the spirit of the North; that is why, deriving from a sacred war of the people, it spread to all classes and was not restricted to the aristocracy; that is why every Spaniard was a warrior, every warrior a noble, every noble a knight for his country.29 It was the history romances that recounted those fights, rather than the chivalrous romances, that Durán considered to be truly Spanish, “elementos de nuestra epopeya nacional” (parts of our national epic). As he said, those compositions: have a particular quality, a firm, vigorous tendency, characteristic of the rough times in which they originated, and the mark of blind faith, of a fixed idea that is pursued and maintained even with stubbornness; that is not questioned because it is believed; that is defended to the point of martyrdom because it is loved; and, in short, that is preserved more than a treasure, because it is generally the life-giving, animating hope of a whole nation.30

27 28 29

30

Durán, Romancero General, I: XVI. Durán, Romancero General, I: XX. “Por eso nuestro espíritu guerrero empleado contra los moros produjo un caballerismo especial y diverso del que creó el del Norte; por eso, éste, hijo de una guerra santamente popular fue extensivo a todas las clases y no circunscrito a las aristocráticas; por eso cada español era un guerrero, cada guerrero un noble, cada noble un caballero de la patria.” Durán, Romancero General, I: XIX. “Tienen un carácter particular, una tendencia firme y vigorosa, propia de los tiempos rudos en que nacieron, y el sello de una fe ciega, de una idea fija que se prosigue y continúa



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It is not surprising, thus, that since most short tales of chivalry originated in French medieval literature, neither Agustín Durán nor any other Romantic scholar paid them the slightest attention. Medieval romances were the exclusive object of their veneration. For the Romantics, the ballads produced after the sixteenth century and the whole cordel genre were not worthy of anything but contempt. The decline of the romance was associated with the decline of the Spanish nation, which, according to Romantic critics, began with the final conquest of Granada and the coming to the throne of the Habsburg dynasty. In the words of Durán: The total expulsion of the Moors extinguished in Spain the immediate need that kings have of their people; it stifled the stimulus that brought the love of their country to life and that aroused in their hearts the desire to take part in public issues, as unknown among the feudal serfs as it was practiced and maintained among ourselves.31 After that, genuine popular literature in Spain disappeared and was transformed into common literature without a trace of the greatness of the old romances. Their esthetic and moral degeneration finally converted them into “los vestigios de una civilización degradada” (the vestiges of a degraded civilization). The comparison between the ballads of the two periods provided “el contraste más notable entre el antiguo pueblo ignorante con el del nuevo vulgo humillado y envilecido; de la barbarie que camina a la cultura, con la civilización que desciende a la barbarie” (a most remarkable contrast between the old ignorant people and the new vulgus, humiliated and degraded; between barbarity advancing toward culture and civilization descending to barbarity).32 Consequently, tales of chivalry were not considered by Romanticism to be genuine popular literature. And it is significant that the weight of the Romantic tradition in its pejorative evaluation of the historias and the whole cordel genre has been maintained until the present day. This can be seen in works by the most highly considered scholars of ballads in Spain, such as

31

32

hasta con terquedad; que no se discute, porque se cree; que se defiende hasta el martirio, porque se ama; y en fin, que más que un tesoro se conserva, porque suele ser la esperanza animadora y vivificante de todo un pueblo.” Durán, Romancero General, I: XXV. “Con la total expulsión de los moros se extinguió en España la inmediata necesidad que los reyes tenían de los pueblos; se ahogó el estímulo que vivificaba al amor patrio y que levantaba en los corazones el deseo de participar en las cosas públicas, tan desconocido entre los siervos feudales como practicado y sostenido entre nosotros.” Durán, Romancero General, I: XII. Durán, Romancero General, I: XXXII.

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Ramón Menéndez Pidal or Diego Catalán.33 But in order to understand the decline of popular literature, it is necessary to go back to the eighteenth century and the rise of cordel. Short Tales of Chivalry in the Eighteenth Century The eighteenth century was a period of increasing popularity for cordel literature. Stimulated by the general recovery of the publishing industry, small printing firms proliferated in many towns, basing their production strategy on these publications characterized by low cost and high demand. Among the large amount of material then included in the cordel genre, there were still some texts of medieval origin. Romances such as the ballads of Gerineldo, Count Alarcos, and the Marquis of Mantua, and the traditional disputes between water and wine, or between wheat and money, were constantly being reprinted and sold in the streets, along with other new works about crimes, military victories, miracles, and natural catastrophes. Tales of chivalry also featured in these assortments. Critics use the term historias caballerescas breves (or, more briefly, historias) to refer to a small group of short novels that took their subject matter from chivalric literature and other medieval tales and that continued to be printed from the late fifteenth century to the beginnings of the twentieth. Physically, they consist of several folded sheets joined together to make up to thirty-two pages, generally in quarto format. Because they were longer than ordinary pliegos de cordel, they were also known as libros de cordel. The group of works defined as historias caballerescas breves (a term coined by Víctor Infantes and Nieves Baranda) appeared between 1480 and 1530.34 They consist of twenty novels that are all of medieval origin (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries) and mainly derived from French texts. Unlike books of chivalry, they are short stories with a simple linear structure, and they were translated into Spanish and/or adapted specifically for the printer. The titles and dates of the first known editions of these short tales of chivalry are as follows: Historia del noble Vespasiano (ca. 1492), Historia de Enrique fi de Oliva (1498), Crónica del Cid Ruy Díaz (1498), Historia de Oliveros de Castilla 33

34

Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Romancero hispánico (hispánico-portugués, americano y sefardí) (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1953); Diego Catalán, “El romance de ciego y el subgénero ‘romancero tradicional vulgar’,” in Arte poética del romancero oral. Parte 1ª. Los textos abiertos de creación colectiva (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1997), 325–62. Víctor Infantes, “La narración caballeresca breve,” in Evolución narrativa e ideológica de la literatura caballeresca, ed. María Eugenia Lacarra (Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco, 1991), 165–81; in the same volume, Nieves Baranda, “Compendio bibliográfico sobre la narrativa caballeresca breve,” 183–91; by the same author, “Las historias caballerescas breves,” Anthropos 166/167 (1995): 47–50.



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y Artús d’Algarbe (1499), Libro del caballero Partinuplés (ca. 1500), Historia de la doncella Teodor (ca. 1500), Historia de la reina Sebilla (ca. 1500), Vida de Roberto el Diablo (1509), Historia del rey Canamor y del infante Turián (1509), Crónica del conde Fernán González (1509), Libro de los siete sabios de Roma (1510), Historia de los dos enamorados Flores y Blancaflor (1512), Crónica de Tablante de Ricamonte y Jofre (1513), Libro del infante don Pedro de Portugal (ca. 1515), Historia de la linda Magalona y el cavallero Pierres de Provenza (1519), Historia de la Poncella de Francia (1520), Historia del emperador Carlomagno y los doce pares de Francia (1521), Historia de Clamades y Clarmonda (1521), Historia de Paris y Viana (1524), and Crónica del rey Guillermo (1526). The texts of these tales have very simple stories, with numerous summaries of the plot within the story as an aid to memory, or else placed by the publisher at the beginning of each chapter, which make them easier to understand for a large audience not skilled at reading. Nieves Baranda has classified these historias into five categories, depending on the plot: first, the ones that are presented as true stories, for which other known chronicle sources exist (El Cid, Fernán González, Carlomagno [Charlemagne], Poncella de Francia [Joan of Arc]); second, the stories that exalt faithfulness in love (Partinuplés, Flores and Blancaflor, Magalona and Pierres de Provenza, Clamades and Clarmonda, Paris and Viana); third, the stories that describe the hero’s chivalrous adventures (Canamor and Turián, Tablante de Ricamonte, Pedro de Portugal); fourth, the stories that focus on the virtue of the central characters in overcoming extreme adversity and regaining their status (Vespasiano, queen Sebilla, king Guillermo, Enrique Fi de Oliva); finally, the tales that come from medieval short stories and do not have any chivalrous element (doncella Teodor, the seven sages of Rome). Fantasy is an element that features in all these stories, whose characters (kings, nobles, powerful individuals) and contexts (exotic, magical, related to riches) were far removed from the reality of their readers. At the same time, they are stories with a clearly moralizing aim, in which the religious and moral values of the time are defended (honor, matrimony, the Catholic religion, the spirit of the crusade, etc.). The textual and physical characteristics (size, length, page layout, paratexts) of these short tales of chivalry made them a specific publishing category within cordel literature. Their origin profited from the impulse of the widespread fondness for books of chivalry that developed in Spain between the late fifteenth and late sixteenth centuries. When novels of chivalry lost favor with the public, the survival of these historias extended the life of tales of this kind for centuries. These works did not all follow the same pattern with regard to publication: after an initial period of adjustment, publication of Paris y Viana, Vespasiano and the Crónica del rey Guillermo ceased immediately, while some other

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titles, such as Canamor, Enrique fi de Oliva, and Reina Sebilla, did not make it into the seventeenth century. The rest of the repertoire, however, remained in print, with alterations and updates, until the nineteenth century. As time went by, other titles were added to this original core: for example, a catalog produced by the printer Antonio Sanz in 1751 included an “assortment of stories” in which the traditional historias were accompanied by tales of the Passión de Christo, Francisco Estevan, Bernardo del Carpio, the Marqués de Mantua, and the Batalla Naval.35 The diffusion of these texts in the eighteenth century reached unprecedented levels: searches made in printing firms and bookshops in the city of Valencia in 1766 found a total of 6,561 historias, and in Madrid, in 1757, 11,711 copies ready for sale were confiscated from the printer Antonio Sanz, who was mentioned earlier.36 However, perhaps precisely because of this publishing success, in the middle of the century these short tales of chivalry attracted the attention of the censor, who embarked on a cleansing process that culminated a few years later with the banning of these medieval texts. Historias, cordel Literature and Censorship François Lopez has analyzed the reasons for this ban. Its origin is bound up with the professional tensions that existed between various printers who published historias. On the one hand, there was Sanz, whose prosperous business combined the rich profits that he obtained from the office of Printer to the King and his Council, the privilege of printing the calendar, and the production of comedies, historias, romances, and coplas. This strategy made Sanz a wealthy man, and, according to Lopez, he became “the richest bookseller, printer and publisher in Spain.”37 On the other hand, there was Manuel Martín, a modest printer who tried to improve his business with a varied range of printed material (gazettes, small books, predictions, historias), and who envied the position that Sanz had attained. In an attempt to damage Sanz’s interests, Martín lodged a formal complaint against him 35

36

37

François Lopez, “Notes sur le fonds ancien des récits en prose dans la ‘literatura de cordel,’” in Les productions populaires en Espagne 1850–1950 (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1986), 17; María Ángeles García Collado, “Los libros de cordel en el siglo ilustrado. Un capítulo para la historia literaria de la España Moderna,” unpublished doctoral thesis (Vitoria: Universidad del País Vasco, 1997), 268. Genaro Lamarca, “Las librerías en Valencia en la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII,” Bulletin Hispanique 9:1 (1997): 183; Lopez, “Antonio Sanz, imprimeur du roi et l’édition populaire sous l’ancien régime,” Bulletin Hispanique 95:1 (1993): 349–78. Lopez, “Los editores,” in Historia de la edición y de la lectura en España, 1472–1914, ed. Víctor Infantes, François Lopez, and Jean-François Botrel (Madrid: Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez, 2003), 358–67 (360).



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in 1757, accusing him of printing short tales of chivalry without having obtained the statutory license. An interesting aspect of the lawsuit filed by Martín is that the action taken by the Printing Court was not limited to verifying the infraction committed by Sanz and applying the corresponding punishment. Printing without a license was common practice in the publishing world, and normally the matter would not have had much importance. However, apart from the infraction, the lawsuit aroused the interest of the authorities in these texts that had such a long history and aroused such high demand. What did these medieval texts offer to their numerous readers? It is not surprising that, in a century when the education of the people was a matter of public interest, the contents of the tales of chivalry became a focus of attention for the censor because they were so widely distributed. The censor’s verdict could not have been more negative: the historias, as a whole, were considered by the censor to be “un tejido de patrañas, amores, revelaciones, visiones y milagros” (a tissue of tall stories, love affairs, revelations, visions, and miracles) that were harmful for religious education and the acquisition of proper behavior by the people: it seems to us that in order to achieve this important aim a necessary and indispensable measure is to remove from the hands of children and other persons who lack instruction and principles these books and papers that attempts are being made to reprint and that have been extensively introduced in all places in the realm, causing irreparable harm to most of the inhabitants, who revel in reading these books with all the more eagerness the more foolish and far from the truth they are.38 In addition to these and other general observations, the censors’ report itemized complaints concerning each individual story: the Historia del emperador Carlomagno was full of visions, miracles, giants, sacrilege, and blasphemy; Roberto el Diablo was criticized for being “una cadena de bárbaras inhumanidades, de visiones y revelaciones” (a string of barbaric inhumanities, visions, and revelations); Oliveros de Castilla had an excessive abundance of visions, marvels, and miracles; the Historia del infante don Pedro was an absurd 38

“Nos parece un medio necesario e indispensable para lograr este importante fin el quitar de las manos de los niños y otras personas que carecen de instrucciones y principios estos libros y papeles que se intenta reimprimir, y que se hallan sumamente introducidos en todos los lugares del reino, causando irreparables daños a la mayor parte de sus habitadores, que se ceban en su lectura con tanta mayor ansia cuanto que los libros son más desatinados y apartados de la verdad.” Lopez, “Antonio Sanz, imprimeur,” 360 and 371.

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fiction; while in the cases of Flores y Blancaflor, Tablante y Jofre, and Clamades y Clarmonda it was the sensuality of the contents that aroused the censor’s indignation. However, according to the report, it was the chivalric element of these tales that made them all “inútiles, vanos, perjudiciales a las costumbres, indecorosos a la Religión Católica” (useless, vain, injurious to customs, unseemly for the Catholic Religion): “este género de escritos es el pasto de muchachos y gente ignorante, más expuestos al escándalo y al engaño. Qué idea formará de la Religión un niño que ve los milagros y las visiones sobrenaturales servir de tramas para tejer la basta tela de los libros de caballerías” (this kind of writing is fodder for youngsters and ignorant people, who are more exposed to scandal and deception. What idea of Religion will be formed by a child that sees miracles and supernatural visions serve as the weft for weaving the coarse cloth of books of chivalry?).39 Their medieval origin, associated with wonders and marvels, was precisely the reason for the scandalized reaction of the censor, who did not hesitate to ban the printing of historias in 1766. In his Tertulia de la Aldea, Martín, whose complaint prompted the action of the authorities, described the searches made in printing firms and bookshops to confiscate and burn banned titles: You have already heard how by Decree of the Royal Council they banned those ancient stories, full of fabrications and lies, about Roland at Roncesvalles, the Giant Fierabras and the Mantible bridge, Charlemagne, the Twelve Peers of France, and others of the same sort, which, instead of profiting us, fill our heads with absurdities and do much harm to young people with their deceptions. [. . .] Ours was not the only place that suffered this pillaging, for in Madrid, Seville, Valladolid, Saragossa, Barcelona, and many other towns and large places they were delivered to the fire in cartloads.40

39 40

The file of the report is in the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid, Sección de Consejos, legajo 5529, expediente nº 10. “Ya oísteis cómo se vedaron por Decreto del Real Consejo aquellas Historietas antiguas, llenas de patrañas, y mentiras, de Roldán en Roncesvalles, del Gigante Fierabras, y Puente Mantible, de Carlo Magno, los Doce Pares de Francia, y otros semejantes, que en vez de aprovecharnos nos embujan nuestras cabezas de disparates, y hacían mucho daño a la juventud con sus embustes. [. . .] No fue nuestro lugar solo el que padeció este saqueo; que en Madrid, Sevilla, Valladolid, Zaragoza, Barcelona, y otras muchas Ciudades y Lugares grandes, se entregaron al fuego por carretas.” Manuel Martín, Tertulia de la Aldea, y miscelánea curiosa de sucesos notables, aventuras divertidas, y chistes graciosos, para entretenerse las noches del invierno y del verano (Pasatiempo I, Madrid: Imprenta de Manuel Martín, 1775).



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This repressive action carried out by the civil authorities against short tales of chivalry was part of a climate of general hostility to cordel literature, with constant censoring, bans, and criticisms directed at their contents, considered to be pernicious and sometimes subversive. The legislation affecting printing paid attention to minor printed matter from the outset, but it was in the eighteenth century that efforts were redoubled to achieve effective control of the production and diffusion of pliegos sueltos: a series of orders was issued prohibiting the printing of any item, “por insignificante que fuera” (however insignificant it might be), without having the statutory license (1722, 1728, 1735, 1741, 1748, 1749, 1797); the zealous labor of the printing judge, Juan Curiel, in the middle of the century affected the production and circulation of pliegos sueltos; in 1767 Carlos III issued a royal proclamation that banned the printing of predictions, almanacs, romances de ciegos, and coplas de ajusticiados, considering them to be “de ninguna utilidad a la pública instrucción” (of no use for the instruction of the public). The Inquisition also took an interest in cordel literature: in 1755 it banned “romances de milagros no aprobados por el legítimo superior” (ballads about miracles not approved by the legitimate authority), in 1766 it banned the papers about the Esquilache riots and the expulsion of the Jesuits, and its Índice General de los Libros Prohibidos included titles such as Historia de la Doncella Teodor, Historia de los siete sabios de Roma, and the romances about Saint Barbara, the Virgin of Caravaca, the Virgin of the Destitute, the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Passion, Corpus Christi, etc.41 The dislike that the enlightened elite felt for pliegos sueltos is also well known. The Count of Campomanes complained that they produced “en los rudos semilla de delinquir, y de hacerse baladrones, pintando como actos gloriosos las muertes, robos, y otros delitos, que los guiaron al suplicio” (in the uncultured the seed of delinquency, and of becoming braggarts, depicting as glorious acts the murders, robberies, and other crimes that led them to execution), José Marchena criticized romances that “andaban de boca en boca de toda la plebe” (passed from mouth to mouth of all the common people) celebrating “las proezas de los salteadores de caminos, presentando 41

Fermín De los Reyes Gómez, Legislación y censura del libro en España y América (siglos XVXVIII) (Madrid: Arco Libros, 2000); by the same author: “Los impresos menores en la legislación de imprenta (siglos XVI–XVIII),” in La fiesta. Actas del II Seminario de Relaciones de Sucesos, ed. Sagrario López Poza and Nieves Pena Sueiro (Ferrol: Sociedad de Cultura Valle-Inclán, 1999), 325–38; Ángel González Palencia, El sevillano don Juan Curiel, Juez de Imprentas (Seville: Reales Academias Española de la Historia y Sevillana de Buenas Letras/Diputación Provincial, 1945); Manuel García Blanco, “Unos romances del siglo XVIII prohibidos por la Inquisición,” Revista de filología española 28 (1944): 466–70; Carlos III’s proclamation in Novísima recopilación de las leyes de España, libro VIII, título XVIII, ley IV.

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por dechado a una mocedad infatuada y pobre la vida de unos miserables que a poder de robos y asesinatos paraban en un patíbulo” (the exploits of highwaymen, presenting as an example to poor, infatuated youths the lives of wretches who ended up on the scaffold as a result of their robberies and murders), and Ignacio Luis de Aguirre saw in them signs of Spanish decadence, “cuando una nación pierde sus costumbres, trueca las ideas de la virtud y el vicio, y cree que es valor y heroicidad lo que es delito y bajeza” (when a nation loses its customs, exchanges the ideas of virtue and vice, and thinks that vile deeds and crimes are valiant and heroic).42 There are numerous cases of enlightened testimony against cordel literature, but one of the most outstanding examples is undoubtedly the Discurso sobre la necesidad de prohibir la impresión y venta de las jácaras y romances por dañinos a las costumbres públicas presented by Juan Meléndez Valdés.43 In this well-known text, Meléndez Valdés regretted the “indecente oprobio del gusto y la razón” (indecent opprobrium of taste and reason) and the “males gravísimos que causa entre las gentes tal género de escritos” (very grave harm that writings of this kind cause among the people). The terms employed to describe the publications were ferocious: Shameful relics of our old thieves’ cant and abortions rather than productions of famished need and the most crass ignorance [. . .]. Their common themes are acts of bravado and the ill-fashioned lives of outlaws and robbers, with outrageous resistance to justice and its ministers, acts of violence and abductions of maidens, cruel murders, disrespect of temples, and other such misdeeds, which, although related roughly and without enthusiasm or adornment, if believed, as they tend to be by ignorant people, fire weak imaginations with the urge to imitate them, and they have led many unfortunates to execution. Or they are crude tales of supposed miracles and vain devotions, condemned people and apparitions of spirits, which, doing injury to their reason even from the age of childhood, with false and harmful 42

43

Pedro Rodríguez, Conde de Campomanes, El fomento de la industria popular. La educación popular de los artesanos, ed. Gonzalo Anes (Oviedo: Gea, 1991), 176; Francisco Aguilar Piñal, Romancero popular del siglo XVIII (Madrid: CSIC, 1972), XV. On Meléndez’s ideas, see González Palencia: “Meléndez Valdés y la literatura de cordel,” in Entre dos siglos (Madrid: CSIC, 1943), 183–211; Marieta Cantos Casenave, “Doña Elvira y la dignificación del romance en el siglo XVIII,” in Juan Meléndez Valdés y su tiempo, ed. Jesús Cañas Murillo, Miguel Ángel Lama, and José Roso Díaz (Mérida: Editora Regional de Extremadura, 2005), 151–61; in the same volume, Joaquín Álvarez Barrientos: “Poesía popular e imagen nacional, según Meléndez Valdés,” 305–16; and José Roso Díaz, “Literatura y reforma de la educación: el Discurso contra las jácaras y romances vulgares de Meléndez Valdés,” 355–77.



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ideas about the most sacred nature of religion and its mysteries, its pious practices and true piety, make it superstitious and credulous for the rest of their life. Or they even present stories and tales that are indecent, that at the same time offend modesty and public decency, corrupt the mind and the heart, and without compunction leave indelible impressions in both, the disastrous results of which were not foreseen at the outset, nor is there any way for even the most careful attention to repair them in the future.44 What Meléndez said is of special interest for our present concern. He subjected historias and all cordel literature in general to very harsh criticism, which might be considered the culmination of the whole series of bans, acts of censorship, and insults applied to pliegos sueltos throughout the eighteenth century. However, Meléndez’s contribution was not confined to mere rejection of the whole cordel genre; he also introduced a distinction between what he judged to be harmful contemporary popular literature and the medieval ballads that had nourished the virtues of the people in earlier times. According to him, “el Romancero del Cid y otros antiguos cancioneros” (the Romancero del Cid and other ancient songbooks) were compositions that were “verdaderamente nacionales” (truly national), and that had celebrated and stimulated Spanish exploits: In those times there was not a single victory of the Moors that did not have its ballads and was not sung by the people, nor a single misfortune that was not deeply felt; in this way everyone took part in their good fortune and lamented their misfortune; festivities and entertainments were cheered by these songs, and in this way, from the cradle, spirits were emboldened, courage was ennobled, the heart was made 44

“Reliquias vergonzosas de nuestra antigua germanía y abortos, más bien que producciones de la necesidad famélica y la más crasa ignorancia [. . .]. Son sus temas comunes guapezas y vidas mal forjadas de forajidos y ladrones, con escandalosas resistencias a la justicia y sus ministros, violencias y raptos de doncellas, crueles asesinatos, desacatos de templos, y otras tales maldades, que, aunque contadas groseramente y sin entusiasmo ni aliño, creídas cual suelen serlo del ignorante vulgo, encienden las imaginaciones débiles para quererlas imitar, y han llevado al suplicio a muchos infelices. O son historietas groseras de milagros supuestos y vanas devociones, condenados y almas aparecidas, que dañando la razón desde la misma infancia con falsas e injuriosas ideas de lo más santo de la religión y sus misterios, de sus piadosas prácticas y la verdadera piedad, la hacen el resto de la vida supersticiosa y crédula. O presentan, en fin, narraciones y cuentos indecentes, que ofenden, a una, el recato y la decencia pública, corrompen el espíritu y el corazón, y dejan, sin sentirlo en uno y otro, impresiones indelebles, cuyos funestos resultados ni se previeron al principio, ni acaso en lo futuro es dado el reparar aun a la atención más cuidadosa.” Juan Meléndez Valdés, Obras completas, ed. Antonio Astorgano (Madrid: Cátedra, 2004), 1095.

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firmer against the common foe, and thus, in short, the heroic, patriotic character was formed to which we owe so many victories and glorious virtues.45 Meléndez turned his eyes nostalgically toward the past, admiring the popular poetry that contrasted so strongly with the “indecentes y perjudiciales” (indecent, injurious) printed matter that the people consumed in his own time. In this respect he anticipated the enthusiasm that the Romantic movement showed for the old romances in the nineteenth century. Thus, it is not surprising that Meléndez is considered by the critics to be a forerunner of Romanticism in Spain.46 Conclusion The tales of chivalry circulated for centuries and continued to be published after the end of the ban on them in the middle of the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century the repertoire of historias increased spectacularly: Jean-François Botrel has inventoried 225 new titles that had appeared since 1840, quadrupling what was available.47 The initial material consisting of stories of chivalry was now joined by texts taken essentially from European fiction (especially French: Chateaubriand, Dumas, Hugo, etc.), and from contemporary history. In this way a group of stories that in the early days of the cordel genre barely constituted a tiny part of the general range gradually became more numerous as the centuries went by and eventually became a considerable part of cordel literature, as we can see in the catalogue of publications by the Viuda de Hernando y Compañía at the end of the nineteenth

45

46 47

“No hubo en aquella edad una victoria de los moros que no tuviese sus romances y fuese cantada por el pueblo, ni una desgracia que no fuese sentida; todos por este medio tomaban parte en sus fortunas, lloraban sus azares; los festejos y diversiones se alegraban con estos cantos, y así desde la cuna se enardecían las almas, se ennoblecía el valor, el corazón se afirmaba contra el común enemigo, y se formaba, en fin, aquel carácter heroico y patriota a que debimos tantas victorias y gloriosas virtudes.” Meléndez Valdés, Obras completas, 1099. Peers, Historia del movimiento, I: 47–51; Ricardo Navas, El Romanticismo español (Madrid: Cátedra, 1982), 47. Jean-François Botrel, “Une bibliothèque bleue espagnole? Les historias de cordel (XVIIIe– XXe siècle),” in La Bibliothèque Bleue et les littératures de colportage, ed. Thierry Delcourt and Élisabeth Parinet (Paris and Troyes: École des Chartes and La Maison du Boulanger, 2000), 193–209. The same author offers a list of nineteenth-century historias in “Les historias de colportage: essai de catalogue d’une bibliothèque bleue espagnole (1840– 1936),” in Les productions populaires en Espagne 1850–1920 (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1986), 25–62.



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century.48 It may have been this profusion and mixture of stories from very different origins that dissolved the medieval texts even further in the heterogeneous genre of cordel literature. In any case, Romantic literary criticism had classified them long before as sub-literature or vulgar literature, of little interest for the scholar. The medieval ballads offered them the view of the Spanish Middle Ages that they wanted to see. The tales of chivalry were confined to the street stalls that continued to sell them, together with many other items, until the beginning of the twentieth century.

48

Study and edition in Cristina Sánchez Carretero, “De historias y romances: las clasificaciones de los géneros editoriales y textuales en los pliegos de cordel,” in Palabras para el pueblo, 429–86.

Antiquarianism over Presentism: Reflections on Spanish Medieval Studies Jaume Aurell It has been rightly argued that there is a difference between the historical and the historiographical Middle Ages, this second generally called “medievalism,” that is, the application of medieval models to contemporary needs, and the inspiration provided by the Middle Ages in all forms of post-­ medieval art and thought.1 It can also be said, using different words, that modern medieval historians cannot escape (probably they should not escape) their own context, and they have to describe, analyze, interpret not only what happened in the Middle Ages, but also the projection of what really happened in the past depending on the current circumstances in which the medievalists articulate their texts. Although we have obviously only one historical reality in the Middle Ages, we perceive multiple readings of it – what modern historiographers have called “medievalisms.” Much attention has been given in the last decades to what I would call “epochal medievalisms”: the different images of the Middle Ages projected by other, later ages. Thus, we understand very well the distinctions among, for instance, Renaissance medievalisms, Enlightenment medievalisms, Romantic medievalisms, modern medievalisms, and postmodern medievalisms. Yet, after the professionalization of the historical discipline and the emergence of scientific historicism in the mid-nineteenth century, these “epochal” categories have been complemented by others connected with the main historiographical and ideological tendencies that the discipline of history has experienced during the last century and a half, such as romanticism, positivism, historicism, Marxism, structuralism, and, more recently, 1

Leslie J. Workman, “Editorial,” in Studies in Medievalism 3.1: Medievalism in France 1500– 1750, ed. Heather Arden (Holland, MI: N.A., 1987), 1.

Studies in Medievalism XXIV, 2015

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poststructuralism, cultural studies, and gender studies. Thus, in modern and postmodern medievalisms, new categories are emerging in the complex area of medieval studies: Marxist modern medievalisms, structuralist modern medievalisms, gendered postmodern medievalisms, cultural studies/postmodern medievalisms, and so on. Nevertheless, and perhaps paradoxically, less attention has been given to what have been called the “national traditions.”2 The process of globalization may affect other social and cultural spheres, but the passage of time has shown that national (and even nationalistic) historical traditions are still valid as historiographical categories. Thus, the attempt of this volume to re-examine not only the concept of “national historiographical tradition” but also to question the established categories of “center–periphery” that have been constructed many times in terms of a-scientific criteria seems very ­stimulating. The study of all of these categories, and more particularly the areas of intersection among epochal medievalisms, disciplinary tendencies, and national traditions, is useful to deepen not only our understanding of what happened in the Middle Ages but also what is happening today – particularly in terms of intellectual and cultural history, and the ways we approach the Middle Ages. In this essay, I will focus on the history of medieval studies in twentiethcentury Spain. To be sure, the distinction between “Spanish medievalism” and “the history of medieval studies in Spain” is particularly relevant here, because Spain – and I would say, more generally, continental Europe – has not developed to the same extent as has North America, particularly in its pop-culture varieties of medievalism. With “medieval studies” I basically mean scholarship, while I understand that “medievalism/s” denotes the whole range of imaginative recreations of the medieval in scholarship but also – and especially, in current North American medievalism – in popular culture, ranging from fantasy literature to video games. The most extreme versions – that is, the so-called neomedievalists – study texts and cultural artifacts that have little relation to an identifiably historical Middle Ages, yet nonetheless are perceived by their readers or consumers  as being somehow medieval. These kind of neomedievalisms are perceived in Europe – and more particularly among Spanish scholars – as provocative attempts to project a presentist, reductive, biased, and artificial projection of the historical Middle Ages onto current cultural values. As I have argued elsewhere, I do not share this Spanish scholarly systematic suspicion towards whatever could be associated with postmodernism, because many times this suspicion is due to a simple 2

My interest for the subject culminated in Rewriting the Middle Ages in the Twentieth Century. 2/ National Traditions, ed. Jaume Aurell and Julia Pavon (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009).



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lack of knowledge or acritical prejudice rather than to a licit critical position before the so-called postmodernist approach. Nevertheless, I do share this mistrust when this kind of postmodernism becomes a pretext for historians to elude working with primary sources or with the solid methodological foundations provided by the founders of the medieval historical and philological disciplines. Yet, beyond this Spanish scholarly suspicion before some of the more recent approaches – that I cannot here describe with the detail they deserve – my focus in this essay is the development of Spanish medieval studies: an analysis that, interestingly enough, helps in turn to understand the abovementioned mistrust of postmodernism. Thus, in the first part, I try to summarize the evolution of Spanish medieval studies, particularly during the twentieth century. In the second part, I pay special attention to the development of Spanish philology, due to its crucial role in the general evolution of Spanish medieval studies. In the third part, I offer some general reflections on Spanish medieval studies, comparing them with North American medievalism, which is, from my point of view, its opposite in disciplinary and theoretical terms. Spanish Medieval Studies: Some Major Figures and Features It is my belief that any national medievalist tradition is built on three pillars: the historical evolution of its Middle Ages; the current intellectual and cultural context in which scholars are working; and, finally, the specific historiographical evolution of each discipline. Medieval studies have always been one of the most prestigious and popular fields within Spanish academics and culture. The enormous weight of the Middle Ages in the making of Spanish national identity may partly explain this phenomenon. As is the case for other national medievalist traditions in Europe – such as in France, England, or Germany – Spanish national identity has always turned to its Middle Ages as a mirror and justification of a common national project. Both the mystification of the cohesive Visigothic Iberian Kingdom (fifth–seventh centuries) and the process of reunification of the different Christian peninsular Kingdoms after their titanic fight against the Moors (the so-called Reconquista) provided nineteenth-century Spanish liberalism with adequate intellectual arguments for the re-foundation of Spain as nation. Thus, references to a medieval tradition have traditionally been seen in Spain as a patriotic sign – as, conversely, they have also provided arguments to peripheral autonomous traditions, especially in Catalonia. In addition, a number of modern political and ideological factors condemned the Spanish academic system to autocracy during the twentieth century, which hampered both the projection of Spanish medieval studies beyond the borders of the Iberian Peninsula – and,

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consequently, its adequate reception – and the assimilation in Spain of the new methodologies of Western historiography. The reality today is that Spanish medieval studies are still a dark corner for those who do not cultivate the study of medieval Iberia. The obstacle of language and the excessive national compartmentalization of European historiographic traditions are the cause of that lack of knowledge. Spanish medieval studies are obviously well known to experts and those who have mastered Castilian and the other peninsular languages, such as Portuguese, Catalan, Galician, and Basque, but it remains an excessively isolated fiefdom from the point of view of the general evolution of modern medievalism. When I look at contemporary Spanish medieval studies, three basic characteristics and five names come to my mind. The three characteristics are: (1) the links between history and philology that emerged from the beginning; (2) the strong German academic influence, which assumes the form of a preference for institutional and legal history; and (3) the impossibility of separating political and ideological Spanish evolutions from the specific evolution of Spanish medieval studies.3 The first characteristic would explain the natural dominance of antiquarianism – to which I will refer in the conclusion of this essay – that radically contrasts with the presentist dominance in other traditions, particularly the North American medievalist one. The second would explain not only the essential role of primary sources rather than secondary bibliography in research, but also the aversion of many Spanish medieval-studies scholars to “theory,” as well as the mistrust of many such scholars towards other national traditions – again, particularly, the Anglo-American. The third characteristic has resulted in a tendency to isolationism, singularity (honoring the slogan that “Spain is different”), and the long persistence of Marxism – a sort of intellectual and cultural weapon against the Franco-era dictatorship that would still remain influential some decades after Franco’s death in 1975. The five great twentieth-century scholars in history and literary criticism who perfectly embody and personify the best of this particular tradition and who immediately come to my mind when I think of the idea of “Spanish medieval studies” are Ramon Menéndez Pidal, Martí de Riquer, Ramon d’Abadal, Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, and Jaume Vicens Vives. 3

Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, “Aproximación al medievalismo español (1939–1984),” in La historiografía en Occidente desde 1945, ed. Valentín Vázquez de Prada, Ignacio Olábarri, and Alfredo Floristán (Pamplona: Eunsa, 1985); Presente y futuro de la Historia Medieval en España, ed. Cristina Segura (Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1990); Julio Valdeón, “La historia en España: Historia Medieval,” Revista Jerónimo Zurita 71 (1995): 19–30; La historia medieval en España. Un balance historiográfico (1968–1998) (Pamplona: Gobierno de Navarra, 1999).



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Pidal and Riquer are literary critics with a remarkable historical outlook, a mixed disciplinary quality that exemplifies the philological foundations of Spanish medieval studies. Sánchez-Albornoz and Abadal focused on the origins of Castilian and Catalan medieval society, respectively, while exhaustively, rigorously, and carefully interpreting the available primary sources. They are famous for an institutional approach that merges diplomatic, social, and legal history in a way that had many followers in later Spanish medieval studies. Jaume Vicens Vives was a multifaceted scholar who combined his perspicacity and erudition as a historian with a determined policy of changing the political situation “from the inside,” that is, through reform rather than revolution. His Notícia de Catalunya is a masterpiece on collective psychology but has not been translated into English, which proves that there is something wrong in the knowledge abroad of the Spanish historical tradition. The Evolution of Spanish Medieval Studies Spanish medievalism has its origins in the nineteenth-century liberal intellectual context. In Spain, the first political appropriations of the Middle Ages were liberal rather than conservative. Spanish national self-awareness and the patriotic project had their origins in the first half of the nineteenth century, when the liberal faction had to fight – both in the battlefield and in the cultural arena – against the conservative faction, that is, the traditionalists, who did not recognize the new regime established after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic invasion of Spain. Basically, what was being contested was the separation of politics and religion, a reality that was denied by the traditionalists – particularly by its principal political faction, the Carlists. From the war of Independence of 1808, the liberal factions tried (and succeeded) in constructing a national identity that had until then been confined to a strategic dynastic union of the different medieval peninsular kingdoms (particularly Castile, Aragon, and Navarre) rather than a cohesive, national common project. Thus, the “Spanish-national” medieval tradition was identified from the beginning of the nineteenth century with a liberal rather than a conservative tradition. It was only during the second half of the twentieth century that Spain witnessed a conservative political appropriation of the Middle Ages, during the Francoist regime, which used, abused, and appropriated its more conservative values. Conversely, after the process of democratic transition (1975–82), the Middle Ages recovered in Spain its liberal reading, and its conservative appropriations were contemptuously labeled as reactionary approaches to the past. At that time a third presentist appropriation of the Middle Ages re-emerged in Spain: the nationalistic. Based on the nineteenth-century Romantic nationalistic recuperation of the

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Middle Ages, some Catalan and Basque historiographers at the end of the twentieth century turned to the Middle Ages in search of the historical roots of their (real) national reality. I argue that, in the three kinds of appropriation, the problem is not that of turning to the Middle Ages in search of the historical roots of present national or nationalistic realities, but that of the manipulations inherent to some of these approaches. In any case, to my own distress, and no matter what the faction is – liberal, conservative, or nationalistic – the Middle Ages have always been trapped by politics and ideology, and this has condemned Spanish scholarship to a peculiar ideological atmosphere that I describe below – and to a divorce between scholars and their audience. The liberal appropriation of the Middle Ages was linked, from its beginning, to the introduction of the theory and practice of European Romanticism, which exerted a particular influence on the Spanish imagination through literary narratives and also generated an interesting revival of the medieval festivals, songs, regional costumes, and local dancing traditions (the so-called costumbrismo) that are still alive in the Spanish collective imagination and active in popular celebrations. This is also very important in understanding to what point the Middle Ages are still present in Spain: most Spaniards remember having experienced as a child some medieval traditions kept alive in their town or village. From a more scholarly perspective, the recovery of national essences, so much part of the Romantic and liberal atmosphere at the beginning of the 1800s, placed the medieval, rather than the early modern, period at the center of historiographical debate. That medievalist hegemony lasted until the 1950s, when the radical appropriation of the early modern Spanish Empire by the Francoist regime led Spanish scholarship to focus on the political and military expansion of the Habsburg House, the legendary conquest of America, and the amazing literature and art of the Golden Age, rather than on the suspicious religious hybridism of medieval Iberia. In addition, during the 1960s, the vivid influence of Anglo-Saxon Marxist historiography and French historical structuralism shifted the center of debate from the Middle Ages to early modern and contemporary studies.4 Thus, the essentialists’ theses of the shaping of the Spanish soul in the Middle Ages amid religious syncretism and military Reconquest began to lose their interest for historians, as analyses of workers’ movements, working classes, peasant revolutions, liberal thought, and the shaping of capitalism in Spain gained ground. 4

Ignacio Olábarri, “El peso de la historiografía española en el conjunto de la historiografía occidental (1945–1989),” Hispania 175 (1990): 417–37 (425).



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In a parallel process, Spanish historiography shifted from the heroic efforts of a series of eminent self-taught scholars in the nineteenth and the beginnings of the twentieth century to the professionalization of history during the 1920s and 1930s.5 During those turn-of-the-century years, figures with a true sense of historical scholarship began to stand out. Cultural modernization – basically understood in Spain as the intellectual, technical, economic, and political assimilation to other European traditions, particularly those of England, France, and Germany – was claimed by liberal intellectuals linked with the “Institución Libre de Enseñanza,” and historical studies benefited from the ideas of Rafael Altamira and the historicist philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. Their claims created suspicion among traditionalist, erudite historians, such as Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, especially because these methodological innovations were also associated with a desire for secularization that Catholic historians could not support. Yet, from my point of view (surely not shared by the greater part of Spanish historians), it was precisely the conjunction of both tendencies – the radical positivism of the traditionalists, and the innovative methodologies introduced by the liberals – that created a stimulating scholarly community during the 1920s and 1930s. Brilliant young medievalists, such as Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz and Ramón Menéndez Pidal in Madrid and Jaume Vicens Vives and Ferran Soldevila in Barcelona, created a new way of approaching the Middle Ages, and connected with some of the European – particularly German and French – new tendencies in medieval studies. However, this creative atmosphere was dramatically cut short with the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936, which marked a radical break in academic thought and practice in all fields of scholarship.6 The war heightened the traditional isolationism of Spanish scholarship. It was impossible to open up scholarship for many years, because the political situation generated by the Civil War (1936–39) and the long period of the Franco dictatorship (1939–75) consigned Spanish medieval studies to an impoverishing isolationism. But we should not overdramatize. The harsh working conditions of medievalists in the monolithic decades of the Franco era spurred their inventiveness and capacity for work. This was the time of the emergence of giants such as Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, Américo Castro, and Ramon Menéndez Pidal in the Castilian tradition, and JaumeVicensVives, FerranSoldevila, and Martín de Riquer in the Catalan tradition, who would not have stood out in

5 6

Ignacio Peiró and Gonzalo Pasamar, “La vía española hacia la profesionalización historiográfica,”Studium 3 (1991): 135–62. Gonzalo Pasamar, Historiografía e ideología en la postguerra española. La ruptura de la tradición liberal (Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza, 1991).

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such an extraordinary way without some extrinsic motivation. Their mastery, in some cases accomplished in exile, has been fertile. The 1940s, the first years of the Franco dictatorship, were years of apogee and inflation for Spanish nationalist historiography.7 It was like returning to former times, as if everything that had been achieved until then had lost all meaning. The maxim “Spain is different” was more present than ever, among other things because it justified the perpetuation of a regime that was also different. There would be a strict link between politics and historiography, between political action and academic research. That generated an anachronistic interest in a historiography with a positivist tradition, even though it could be of high scientific quality. That is the tone of the Spanish medieval studies of the postwar era. In the end, that tendency was the result of the late arrival in Spain of the methods, and not so much the theoretical presuppositions, of the nineteenth-century German school. Nevertheless, those anachronistic positivistic tendencies introduced a documentary rigor that has always been one of the more positive identifying features of Spanish medievalism – and that, to my view, has always to be balanced with its lack of interest in theory. For Spanish medieval studies, the 1950s were a singular combination of heroic, titanic, individual efforts on one side, and a rather depressing scene on the other, because there was hardly any methodological innovation, interest in other historiographies, or drafting of joint interdisciplinary projects. During this period, Spanish medievalism was too much conditioned by the ideological factors and ideological-scientific orientation imposed by the regime. No one can deny that the individual efforts were enormous, but often the best energies were diminished and isolated for two reasons: Spanish medievalists’ ignorance of scientific practices elsewhere, and, conversely, the same ignorance of Spanish medievalism abroad. Except for the exiles – Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz in Buenos Aires, Américo Castro in Princeton, and Ferran Soldevila in the South of France – and the odd isolated effort from Ramon Menéndez Pidal or Jaume Vicens Vives, Spanish medievalists were incapable of spreading their research abroad. To be sure, although I cannot give it here the attention that it deserves, the episode of Spanish medievalists who decided to go into exile is very relevant for the evolution of Spanish medieval studies and, obviously, for medieval scholarship as a whole. With the passage of time, they provided an unexpected “renovation from outside” that was one of the main circumstances that made possible the re-synchronization of Spanish historiography 7

José María Jover Zamora, “Corrientes historiográficas en le España contemporánea,” Boletín informativo de la Fundación Juan March 36 (1975): 3–21 (6).



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and philology with European trends after the 1980s. This process was obviously favored because of the reputation of these exiles, who were seen as “heroes” rather than deserters by most intellectuals who decided to remain in Spain. The exiles wanted to show, with their gesture, their rejection of the political situation of Spain during the Francoist dictatorship; those who stayed opted for trying to change the situation “from the inside” – one of the favorite expressions of Jaume Vicens Vives, a leader of this cultural, intellectual, and scholarly position. But, in general terms, they did not see each other as opposite sides, but simply as different strategic options against the same adversary. Thus, amazing scholars in exile such as Pere Bosch i Gimpere, a Catalan prehistorian, and the medievalists Claudio SánchezAlbornoz (who created a very active school in Buenos Aires) and Américo Castro (who settled in Princeton) established natural connections with other colleagues who stayed in Spain and continued helping the development of Spanish medieval studies. From this point of view, the scholarship of the exiles was not merely an extension of scholarly tendencies at home. Rather, favored by their geographical position, they developed along new paths that were welcome when they were able to transmit them to Spain – or, at least, promoted creative debates around international subjects and provided a more general scope to the generally much too autocratic Spanish scholarship. Nevertheless, for Spanish historiography, and in particular for medieval studies, the 1950s were years marked by the enrichment of perspectives through those individual efforts – and this tendency to essentialism explains the chronic difficulty of Spanish medievalists in creating larger research groups. The first connection with modern European tendencies came mainly through the penetration of the Annales school from neighboring France. The “epistemological conversion” of Jaume Vicens Vives had a good deal to do with that process. Vicens had been dazzled by the socioeconomic history of the Annales after attending the International Historical Sciences Congress in Paris (1950). From the 1960s, socioeconomic history came to totally dominate the methodology chosen by Spanish medievalists in the construction of their bulky monographs.8 That socioeconomic tendency coexisted with two others during the 1960s and 1970s: Spanish historical essentialism and Anglo-Saxon Marxism. On the one hand, the great masters of Spanish medieval studies were prone to 8

Gonzalo Pasamar, “La influencia de Annales en la historiografía española durante el franquismo: un esbozo de explicación,” Historia Social 48 (2004): 149–72; Adeline Rucquoi, “Spanish Medieval History and the Annales: between Franco and Marx,” in The Work of Jacques Le Goff and the Challenges of Medieval History, ed. Miri Rubin (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1997).

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essentialism, that is, to a peculiar erudite-speculative and historical-philosophical approach to the general history of Spain: Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz in history, Ramon Menéndez Pidal in philology, Américo Castro in anthropology, and, on the opposite side, Jaume Vicens Vives and Ramon Soldevila claimed a more decentralized history and non-Providential or metaphysical existence for Spain.9 The function of this Spanish peripheral historiography – the eternal debate between Castile and Catalonia, experienced globally today thanks to the football rivalry between Real Madrid and Barcelona – has always been very important as a means to balance Spanish historiography in multiple senses, particularly in terms of the introduction of new methodologies, which usually entered Spain via Catalonia, as in the case of Annales, Marxism, history of mentalités, and narrative history. Jaume Vicens (1910– 60), Josep Fontana (1931–), and Jose Enrique Ruiz-Domènec (1948–) are three examples of this, with each representing a different generation: in the 1950s the first of these generations introduced Braudel’s Annales postulates, particularly socioeconomical perspectives; the second generation expanded the Marxist historiographical orientation during the 1970s; and the third practiced a history of mentalités and narrative history during the 1980s and 1990s.10 In any case, the essentialist tendency – and the emergence of its opposite – were heightened by the patriotic exaltation generated by the triumph of Franco over the Republican forces in 1939 and had its deeper roots in the agonizing debate over the loss of the last Spanish colonies in 1898 to the United States. The essentialist Spanish medievalists gave some tremendously suggestive readings of the shaping of the Spanish soul in the Middle Ages (Sánchez-Albornoz’s España, un enigma histórico and Vicens Vives’ Notícia de Catalunya are still rhetorical and historiographic jewels that all young Spanish and Hispanist researchers should read), but they were anachronistic visions because of their focus on meta-historical disquisitions rather than on the socioeconomic history that was being written at that time by the Western historiographical tradition. Once more, the heterodox path of the Spanish 9

10

Ramon Menéndez Pidal, España y su historia (Madrid: Ediciones Minotauro, 1957); Américo Castro, Origen, ser y existir de los españoles (Madrid: Taurus, 1959); Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, España, un enigma histórico (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1962); Ferran Soldevila, Historia de España (Barcelona: Ariel, 1961). See Horst Hina for the Castile–Catalan debate: Castilla y Cataluña en el debate cultural 1714–1939: Historia de las relaciones ideológicas catalano-castellanas (Barcelona: Península, 1986). Some representative works of the historians mentioned are: Jaume Vicens Vives, Juan II de Aragón (1398–1479): Monarquía y revolución en la España del siglo XV (Barcelona: Teide, 1953); Josep Fontana, La crisis del Antiguo Régimen 1808–1833 (Barcelona: Crítica, 1979), and José Enrique Ruiz-Domènec, Ricard Guillem: un sogno per Barcellona (Napoli: Athena, 1999).



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medievalists seemed to challenge the spirit of the times, but contributed, no doubt, different visions that should at least be taken into account by historiographers. It can certainly be argued that the strong influence of this essentialism is perhaps one of the underlying reasons why medievalist traditions, that is, creative or playful reappropriations and self-conscious reinventions of the Middle Ages, have failed to gain ground in Spain as they have, most notably, in the Anglo-American world. At first sight, it is difficult to appreciate any connection between the two scholarly attitudes, the Spanish one and the Anglo-American. Yet, considering the deep erudite and positivistic training of Spanish historians and their great influence on Spanish medieval studies, it is possible that this connection exists, but only as a very secondary influence – the first would be the predominant positivistic tendency of Spanish medieval studies, at least until the 1980s. On the other hand, simultaneous with the emergence of essentialism during the 1960s, the postulates of French and Anglo-Saxon Marxism were being strongly introduced into Spanish medievalism – Pierre Vilar for the first tradition and Edward Thompson for the second were considered real heroes by Spanish scholarship. Once the influence of the Annales had weakened and the influence of essentialism was definitively rejected as anachronistic, Marxism became hegemonic from the late 1970s, which was shortly after the end of the Franco regime and the start of the political process of the Spanish Transición. The clearest example of this evolution was the publication of a book authored by Abilio Barbero and Marcelo Vigil, La formación del feudalismo en la Península Ibérica (1978).11 Barbero and Vigil intended to apply the models of materialist analysis to the study of peninsular society in the Middle Ages. That model had been imported into Spain through the work of a number of foreign Hispanicists, especially Pierre Vilar, but the combatively anti-marxist ideological orientation of the Franco regime had largely dampened its influence. At the same time, besides applying Marxism, Barbero and Vigil’s book confronted the essentialist tendency, so deeply rooted in Spanish medieval studies.12 The new medievalists were confronting a way of doing history based on a belief in the existence of the eternal Spain, shaped by the joint action of men and Providence through the complex process of the cultural and religious mixture of Christians, Jews, and Muslims, as well as the Reconquest of the Peninsula by the Christian kingdoms. Barbero and Vigil managed to break the twofold tendency (essentialism 11 12

Abilio Barbero and Marcelo Vigil, La formación del feudalismo en la Península Ibérica (Barcelona: Crítica, 1979). For this concept, see Miguel Angel Ladero Quesada, Lecturas sobre la España histórica (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1998).

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and intellectual autarchy) that had dominated Spanish medievalism until then and made a clear choice in favor of a materialist analysis of history. Yet, their theses on feudalization were harshly criticized because of their tendency to reductionism, but also because they shed doubt on the singularity of medieval Spain. In a process typical of the Hispanic academic world (in this case, always for the worse), the controversy filtered through to the political and ideological spheres. The spread of the Marxist model through Spanish medievalism was extensive because of both its persuasive capacity as a strictly scientific paradigm and its ability to present itself as a real political alternative to the Franco regime. The overwhelming election victories of the socialists between 1982 and 1996 and the tendency of Spanish historians towards historical materialism are substantial proof that, once again, Spanish scholarship was incapable of generating an intellectual discourse independent of the political conjunctions of the surrounding environment. It can be logically argued that this tendency to link scholarship with politics is not unique to Spain. But I argue that it is more pronounced in Spain because of the permanent and intensive irruption of a third factor: religion. Religion is always present in the intellectual and scholarly arena, not only for historical reasons – medieval Spain was forged on the political-religious process of the Reconquista; the early modern Spanish Empire was based on both political-military and religious motivations; the nineteenth-century liberal foundations of the Spanish nation were opposed to those who tried to mix politics with religion and the emergence of anticlericalism was inevitable; the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) was both a political and a religious conflict – but also for intellectual ones, since Spanish scholars involved in the humanities cannot avoid, at a certain stage of their career, the religious question. The 1980s were years of Marxist dictatorship in Spanish medieval studies. In Spanish universities historical materialism was presented as the only proper scientific method for reading historical reality. Then, scholars such as Marti de Riquer and José Enrique Ruiz-Domènec, or John Elliot among the Hispanists, had an outsized importance, as they allowed us to think that there was something beyond Marxism. Research systematically focused on social conflicts and economic crises (Reyna Pastor, Julio Valdeón). The formally impeccable models that came from France, notably those of Pierre Vilar and Pierre Bonnnassie, were idealized.13 Modern tendencies thus put in a belated appearance, because the Annales and Marxism were warmly 13

Pierre Vilar, La Catalogne dans l’Espagne moderne: recherches sur les fondements économiques des structures nationales (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1962); Pierre Bonnassie, La Catalogne du milieu du Xe a la fin du XIe siècle: croissance et mutations d’une société (Toulouse: Association des Publications de l’Université de Toulouse-le-Mirail, 1975–76).



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welcomed by Spanish historians just when those currents were falling into disrepute in Western medieval studies, which were increasingly being influenced by postmodernist tendencies and those that came afterwards, such as the movements of New Medievalism, New Historicism, and New Philology. To be sure, this hegemonic situation was mitigated in part by the work of a group of foreign historians and philologists, known as “Hispanists,” who undertook a serious, rigorous, academic study of the specific reality of Spain without falling into the typical cultural topics that people from abroad not always accurately tend to identify with an image of Spain. These Hispanists took advantage of the fact that they were naturally free from nationalist or partisan prejudices. The encounter between Hispanists and Spanish academics was fruitful, especially Thomas Bisson among medievalists, John Elliott among early modernists, and Raymond Carr among the modernists. The Hispanists learned from the Spanish academics to better understand the peculiarities of the history of Spain, without allowing themselves to be carried away by the “Spain is different” prejudice. The Spanish academics, for their part, learned to see the difference of the history of Spain as relative, delved deeper into the similarities in the international context, and acquired a deeper knowledge of the history and historiography of the other European and American nations. In a word, Spanish historiography began to catch up and to follow the same course as the rest of Western historiography without losing its particular idiosyncrasy. The end of Franco’s ideological protectionism encouraged dialogue with other international communities, especially in France, England, and the United States – so that the traditional German influence disappeared. Obviously, communication with the outside world had never been completely cut off, due to both the effective work of the Hispanists and the interest of the main figures of Spanish medieval studies in getting up to date.14 The tendency of Spanish medievalists to lock themselves in their secret realm began to decrease – again, for better or worse. Some of them began to practice comparative history or even to explore research into other countries. Others boldly launched themselves into the international forums. Some young researchers obtained grants to write their PhDs at the leading French, British, or American universities. Though their return to Spanish universities was not always easy, because endogamy still shamefully reigned in the academic system, their activity has helped to modernize the methodological and epistemological apparatus of Spanish medieval studies. 14

Adeline Rucquoi, “El medievalismo francés y la historia de España,”La Historia en el horizonte del año 2000 (Zaragoza: Instituto Fernando el Católico, 1997), 199–218; and Adeline Rucquoi, “La Péninsule Ibérique au Moyen Age,” L’histoire médiévale en France. Bilan et perspectives (Paris: Seuil, 1991): 141–439.

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The generation of medievalists born in the 1930s and 1940s continued to practice a more traditional history, serious and firmly attached to documents, with no excessive methodological pretensions or epistemological joys. Called “the generation of 68” because they won their chairs at Spanish universities starting in the late 1960s, they replaced Ángel Martín Duque, Eloy Benito Ruano, Federico Udina Martorell, Salvador de Moxó, Emilio Sáez, Luis Suárez, and Manuel Riu and include José Luis Martín Rodríguez, José Ángel García de Cortázar, Julio Valdeón, and Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, among many others. Their caution in the face of novelties has largely conditioned the tendency to stick to the “traditional” path of Spanish medievalism. However, during the late 1980s there was an alternative and complement to Marxism, which was imported from France and spread throughout Spanish medieval studies: the history of mentalities.15 This methodology particularly caught on among Spanish medievalists, providing them with an alternative to a hegemonic Marxism: the unquestioned authority of Georges Duby and Jacques Le Goff made that possible. It is interesting, from the point of view of the evolution I am trying to describe here, that Georges Duby stated in his 1991 intellectual autobiography, L’Histoire continue, that “the paths of Spanish historians were (at that time) the same as the French ones.”16 He was not mistaken, because in just a few years some truly unprecedented subjects had been incorporated into Spanish medievalism: private life, the history of death, medieval reading and books, and women’s history. The history of mentalities also encouraged a rich interdisciplinary dialogue. That was a fairly unusual practice in Spanish academic circles and was now beginning to bear fruit. At the beginning of the 1990s, both the Annales and Marxism entered a definitive crisis. The Annales were shaken by the gradual disappearance of the third generation of its practitioners and the emergence of the tournant critique, which tried to promote a re-foundation of the French school. Marxism began to decline due to the changes brought about on the European political scene from 1989. That affected Spanish medievalism too, which in the 1990s generated a greater methodological variety and a peculiar atmosphere of coexistence with the methodological traditions inherited from nineteenth-century positivism, the postwar currents such as the socioeconomics of the Annales and Marxism, and, lastly, though more of a minority, the practice of the new histories and the recent methodologies. 15

16

Carlos Barros, “La contribución de los terceros Annales y la historia de las mentalidades. 1969–1989,” in La otra historia: sociedad, cultura y mentalidades, ed. César González Mínguez (Vitoria: Universidad del País Vasco/EHU, 1993), 87–118. Georges Duby, L’Historire continue (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1991), 170.



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Thus, three broad directions in Spanish medievalism could be distinguished during the 1990s and 2000s. First, the publication continued of a large group of works based on the old subjects and methodologies, with no special interest in methodological innovation. This tendency was a response to a positivist and erudite tradition that (this time for the better) has never disappeared in Spanish medievalism. Second, the field was marked by the proliferation of the practice of social history, which is the generic field where the greatest renovation has occurred, within relatively traditional parameters. And third and last, a notable methodological innovation emerged, which in turn comes from three fronts: the recycling carried out by researchers with a long academic career, the action of the Hispanists, and the work done by some young researchers from the periphery of the Spanish academic world. The Role of Philology Spanish medieval studies have their foundations in philology. The influx of nineteenth-century German academic philology is the basis of its entire orientation. The application of philology, in all its spheres, automatically led Spanish medieval studies to a more acute sense of the past, in other words, an awareness of anachronism and of what we might call the “cultural distance” between the past and the present. It is obvious that this distance also has to do with the specially pronounced “otherness” of the Spanish medieval past, with its Muslim, Jewish, and Christian syncretic civilization. This historical experience was lost in Spain from the sixteenth century, after the expulsion of both the Jews and the Moors. (Actually, it is very striking how in a country that had this multiracial and multi-confessional experience during the Middle Ages, it is still today one of the most monoracial and mono-confessional countries of Europe.) Nevertheless, this distance could have been overcome by scholarship due to its supposedly scientific way of approaching the past. Thus, again both scholarly and non-scholarly circumstances must be taken into account when trying to understand Spanish medieval studies and, subsequently, the different forms of Spanish medieval studies that developed. In strictly scholarly terms, the fact is that Spanish medieval studies has preserved a German philological tradition for a long time. Between the two main nineteenth-century factions I mentioned before – liberal and traditionalist – it was obviously the second faction that had a more anti-progressivist and anti-Enlightenment view of the past and had a more natural attraction to German historicism. Nevertheless, the fascination that German culture and universities exerted among Spanish liberal scholars from the beginning explains also the general appeal of German historicism and philology among all Spanish medieval scholars, no matter their ideological orienta-

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tion. This German orientation was consolidated during the first third of the twentieth century (1900–36), because the ideal experience for Spanish scholars, and particularly those who studied the Middle Ages, was to spend some years of research and preparation in Germany. With the break out of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, this fascination turned more towards the French, whose intellectual influence in Spain dominated during the postwar years, particularly the 1970s and 1980s. Interestingly, scholars abandoned learning German and started learning French. A third phase started during the 1990s, when, following the global trend, English became the lingua franca among scholars and North America their Mecca. But this story of the successive fascination exerted by German, French, and Anglo-Saxon scholarship and science upon Spanish scholars is another story I cannot develop here. In any case, Spanish medieval scholarship has long preserved the German philological tradition, while other traditions of medieval studies, particularly North American, English, and French, abandoned it (and only in recent times have they tried to recover it, mainly through movements such as the New Philology and New Medievalism that, as indicated in the title of Howard Bloch and Stephen Nichols’ volume Medievalism and the Modernist Temper,17 are themselves related to criticism of the modernist, Enlightenment agenda). That is why, when these new tendencies argue in favor of avoiding interpreting moderna simulacra of medieval documents rather than the original ones, or plead for a deep analysis of the manuscript transmission rather than a static consideration of literary sources, I am always wondering (as others have) if they are not arguing for a return to the origins of the discipline rather than presenting a real “new” medievalism or philology. To be sure, this appellation to the origins seems to me very necessary and convenient, but the level of discredit and disdain with which they sometimes seem to regard other “older” or “peripheral” traditions seems to me, at least, artificial, not to say frivolous. Nevertheless, Spanish medievalism has not been able to renew the old German model, and, since philology was academically linked from its origins with linguistics and separated from history, there has barely been disciplinary dialogue among history, linguistics, and literary criticism. This situation has been worsened by rigid administrative and bureaucratic compartmentalizations: the disciplines’ separate structure has carried more weight than the aspiration to a medievalism that truly goes beyond the particular disciplines. That has meant that in Spanish medievalism there has not been much of a 17

R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols (eds), Medievalism and the Modernist Temper (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).



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tradition of interdisciplinary research projects, although there are exceptions. Among them are a number of volumes published jointly by experts in the two disciplines. One good example is a collective work, published in 2002, that focuses on the epic dimension of the narratives about El Cid Campeador.18 The volume is strikingly cohesive – something difficult to achieve for a collective volume – and tackles different themes from linguistic, literary, contextual, social, and cultural perspectives: the exaltation of the values of revenge, dishonor, or honor; the mythologizing and traces of the figure of El Cid in different historical periods; the influence of aristocratic lineages and clans and their relation with the monarchy; the concept of power and its linguistic materialization; the strong moral component of the successive editions of the history of El Cid; and lastly the expression of the story in iconography. As for the specific development of Spanish philology, a large volume of bibliographical output that might be included in the generic current of neopositivism is predominant. In the face of this output, which lacks methodological nerve and epistemological innovation, a movement for renewal has been generated in Spanish medievalism. True, the postulates of the New Philology, developed starting in the late 1980s in some North American academic circles, have not caught on. The real question here is if the epistemological distance between the neo-positivism practiced by some traditional Spanish philologists and the so-called New Philology is really that great. In any case, during the last decades Spanish medieval philology has also generated its “renewal from within,” resting on three pillars: the work of the great masters, the work of the Hispanists, and the fruits harvested by a series of young Spanish philologists who did their PhDs outside Spain, usually in North American universities with a long Hispanicist tradition. Among the great masters, the philologist Ramon Menéndez Pidal (1869– 1968),19 the linguist Emilio Arlarcos Llorach (1922–98),20 and the Romance language specialist Martí de Riquer (1914–2013) stand out; their work is of great quality and considerable extension. Riquer’s most noteworthy contributions over the last few years have been his anthology of medieval Catalan poets, an up-to-date study of knights’ armor, an edition of the poetry of the Catalan troubadour Guillem de Berguedà, an edition of the novel Tirant 18

19 20

El Cid: de la materia épica a las crónicas caballerescas, ed. Carlos Alvar, Fernando Gómez Redondo, and Georges Martín (Madrid: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alcalá, 2002). E. Michael Gerli, “Inventing the Spanish Middle Ages: Ramon Menéndez Pidal, Spanish Cultural History, and Ideology in Philology,” La Corónica 30 (2001): 111–26. An excellent work about his life and bibliography is Homenaje a Emilio Alarcos Llorach (Madrid: Gredos, 2001).

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lo Blanch, and, with Isabel de Riquer, a compendium of medieval Catalan troubadour poetry.21 Among his disciples Francisco Rico has continued with his pioneering work on Spanish literature, though recently he has turned to literary criticism and Italian studies, as well as to quite original subjects such as his recent contribution on discourse about taste.22 Lola Badia, for her part, has turned to comparative literature and, with Anthony Bonner, has looked deeply into the wide-ranging sphere of Llullism.23 Among the second broad group, the Hispanists, there are the daring projects of cataloging and publishing primary sources carried out for many years by Charles Faulhaber and the magnificent studies published since the 1970s by Alan Deyermond on the most important Castilian literary texts.24 Thomas Montgomery’s book on the Spanish medieval epic perhaps broaches an excessively ambitious subject, but is useful as a methodological reference in the study of the shaping of the “myth,” so typical of warrior societies, which is handed down from generation to generation through the ritual function of the epic. The historical vestiges and traces of the myth reach the historian and philologist through their linguistic and stylistic traces.25 The work of the Hispanists has an excellent organ of distribution, the journal La Corónica. Spanish Language and Medieval Literature, published in England since 1972, as, from the point of view of Romance literatures, the journal Romance Philology, published in Berkeley since 1947, is outstanding. In addition, the philological journals published in Spain (Revista de Literatura, Revista de Filología Española, and Rilce) and their promoters have kept an intense relation with the scholarship of North American journals, and have created both personal and institutional circuits of communication. Lastly, among those who received their academic training in North America, one good example is Jesús D. Rodríguez Velasco, who in 1996 published 21

22 23 24

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Antología de poetes catalans: un mil.lenni de literatura, ed. Martín de Riquer (Barcelona: Gutemberg, 1997); Martín de Riquer, Caballeros medievales y sus armas (Madrid: Instituto Universitario “General Gutiérrez Mellado,” 1999); Martín de Riquer, Les poesies del trobador Guillem de Berguedà (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1996); Martín de Riquer, Tirant lo Blanch, novela de historia y de ficción (Barcelona: Sirmio, 1992); La poesía de los trovadores, ed. Martín de Riquer and Isabel de Riquer (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 2002). Francisco Rico, Los discursos del gusto: notas sobre clásicos y contemporáneos (Barcelona: Destino, 2003). Lola Badia and Anthony Bonner, Ramón Llull: vida, pensamiento y obraliteraria (Barcelona: Empúries, 1988). Bibliography of Old Spanish Texts, comp. by Charles B. Faulhaber et al. (Madison, WI: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1984); Alan Deyermond, La literatura perdida de la Edad Media castellana: catálogo y estudio (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1995). Thomas Montgomery, Medieval Spanish Epic. Mythic Roots and Ritual Language (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998).



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a work of methodological gravitas on fifteenth-century Castilian chivalry. Velasco set out to analyze Castilian chivalry by setting it in relation to its European framework.26 The method adopted is to relate the fifteenth-century Castilian treatises to their antecedents in the period between 1250 and 1390, and to link them to the writings of Latin antiquity and the medieval West. The current of his work may be associated with literary history. Spanish Medieval Studies in the World It is my belief that any scholar in the humanities – historian, literary critic, linguist, philosopher, art historian, or anthropologist – must try to achieve an equidistance between the past that s/he is analyzing and the present that s/he is experiencing. As a consequence, in the crucial debate between antiquarianism and presentism, which is the basis of the whole debate on the epistemology of the humanities and social sciences, I argue for an equidistance that keeps a necessary rigor and referentiality with the object of study – in this case, the Middle Ages – but is also able to integrate in this approach the theoretical and methodological tendencies that surround the researcher in her present. I am convinced that Spanish and North American medieval studies are generally on the opposite side of the debate I have just described: while Spanish medieval studies have traditionally inclined to antiquarianism, North American medievalism has clearly opted, from the very beginning, for presentism.27 But I should not put it in terms of a binary and simplistic opposition, because the very richness of both traditions defies any attempt at simplification. The reflections on the general evolution of Spanish medievalism that I have just made may at least help to lessen certain misunderstandings or simply ignorance of this tradition that must be overcome by, particularly, North American, but also English and German medieval-studies traditions. It is obvious that the discredit of the Spanish language as a scientific and academic vehicle has contributed to some of this lack of knowledge. Yet it is time for global medieval studies to rediscover other traditions – or, at least, the best of other traditions – to create a real alternative to other hegemonic traditions, such as English and French medieval studies, on one side, and

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Jesús D. Rogríguez Velasco, El debate sobre la caballería en el siglo XV. La tratadística caballeresca castellana en su marco europeo (Salamanca: Junta de Castilla y León, 1996). The bibliography could be immense here, so I will give only one interesting diagnostic of presentist North American medievalism tendency: Paul Freedman and Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Medievalisms Old and New: The Rediscovery of Alterity in North American Medieval Studies,” The American Historical Review 103 (1998): 677–704.

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American medievalism, in terms of its emphasis on popular culture, on the other. To be sure, I would add that I have never conceived the natural “rivalry” of national historiographical traditions in terms of hierarchy, competition, or scoring. For this is one of the central tensions within academia: while humanistic scholarship naturally tends to view itself in collaborative terms, universities are framed by political contexts that instead insist on competition. Yet, as I have argued in other places, I have always thought that the best way to approach local European medieval topics requires us to combine the erudition of local scholars with the broader theoretical and methodological range offered by American and other foreign academics.28 Rather than framing the debate between medievalist national traditions in terms of “best” or “worst,” it is more useful to question the historical, academic, and intellectual circumstances that have distinguished them. As a pointer in this direction, it is obvious that a substantial difference between the different national traditions of medieval studies lies in the degree of experience that they have had of the historical Middle Ages. In this sense, European traditions have direct experience with the Middle Ages, since they are still geographically connected with their medieval predecessors. But this is also a very Western idea: that only geographical or physical connection ensures historical continuity. It is also possible to think of historical continuity in more spiritual or intellectual terms, in which case North American scholars would have as much claim to connection to the Middle Ages as European ones. Yet, European geographical continuity from the Middle Ages has provided European medieval scholars with a singular empathy with the Middle Ages, accentuated by the fact that they have available to them not only the primary sources kept in archives, but also the direct experience of the material reminiscences of that time. The very directness of this experience would explain some European traditions’ lesser degree of reflexivity or theory. What one experiences as a given in one’s day-to-day reality does not readily become (or makes it more difficult to become) the subject of detached examination. North American medievalists, for their part, do not have this direct experience of the Middle Ages – although most of them have spent some part of their career, usually while writing their dissertations, in Europe – but they have acquired a sort of “perspective” that provides them with a great ability to synthesize the main historical issues of the Middle Ages. In addition, their geographical distance from the Middle Ages has favored their tendency to presentism and an ability for theory and reflection. Other complex sociolog28

Jaume Aurell, Authoring the Past. History, Autobiography, and Politics in Medieval Catalonia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 8.



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ical and scholarship reasons are involved in this issue, starting with the fact that American medievalists have to defend themselves more than European ones from the accusation of being “unproductive” to society. The different funding practices in European, as opposed to North American, universities would explain part of this: while European universities can usually count on state funding (and private universities are the exception), North American ones rely much more on private funding and have to more aggressively justify the relevance of the scholarship they produce, hence their medievalstudies scholars have a much more presentist orientation. Their pronounced tendency to look for the medieval realities that have survived today or should be present in contemporary society, and their search for forms of conduct or organization of the Middle Ages that can be used as models today (i.e., confessional hybridism, religious syncretism, and affective over rational values), are significant symptoms of this. Considering the subject of this essay, one of American medievalism’s most interesting recent developments in this direction is the growing interest in medieval Spain, and, consequently but not proportionally, in Spanish medieval studies. Current events in North American society, particularly those connected with the difficult assimilation of Islamic culture and religion in and outside the country, have been projected onto medieval societies that had to face the same situation. A superficial fascination with medieval Spain would explain the mass-market success of books such as David Nirenberg’s awardwinning Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (1998) and the celebrated Rosa Menocal’s The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (2002). When Teófilo F. Ruiz was awarded the National Medal of Arts and National Humanities by President Obama, he was ­symptomatically praised for “his inspired teaching and writing. His erudite studies have deepened our understanding of medieval Spain and Europe, while his long examination of how society has coped with terror has taught important lessons about the dark side of Western progress.” This is obviously good news for Spain, Iberian medieval studies in North America, and Spanish medievalism. Firstly, because, for the first time at least since the defeat of the Armada at the hands of England and the defeat of Cuba by the United States (1898), Spain is being seen as a culture able to provide other Western societies with a culture of toleration and conviventia). Secondly, because the celebrity gained by these three prestigious medievalists among other American historians and scholars – and the great work of other “Hispanists” of the New Philology, such as John Dagenais – has contributed to shifting views towards university departments of Spanish and Portuguese Studies, previously viewed as marginal, to new models that instead view them as the places where the vanguard of historical and literary

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criticism disciplines is to be found. This also has much to do with other geopolitical shifts, such as the importance of Latin America and the presence of large numbers of Latin American students on North American university campuses. Thirdly, because prestigious American scholars who know and respect the Spanish medievalist tradition naturally contribute to a better understanding of this historiographical tradition. The same subject of medieval Spain emerges as an interesting historical arena in which relevant things happened during the Middle Ages. Traditionally, due to the historical, intellectual, and historiographical evolution of Europe and North America after the Enlightenment, medieval English, French, and German societies were considered as normative and model societies, able to create what was “normal” and “central” during the Middle Ages: classical feudalism, classical pre-modern capitalism, the classical premodern State, classical pre-modern monarchy, classical pre-modern parliamentary government, and so on. Other societies – such as despotic Russia, chaotic Spain, peculiar Poland, and, admittedly, brilliantly artistic Italy – were Western medieval societies for comparison purposes only, rather than genuinely. The complexity the United States experienced after the collapse of the binary Cold War has led American society to become interested in what was previously considered marginal, such as peripheral medieval European societies. Conclusion To conclude, I would like to draw some general insights from this overview of tendencies in Spanish medieval studies. Nowadays, there is no dominant current. A pragmatic neo-positivism is the norm, perhaps based anachronistically on the postulates of nineteenth-century German historicism and the French methodological school, but very solid in its documentary foundations and contributions. But there are also attempts at renovation “from within” through the recovery of old subjects endowed with a new methodology – the biographical story, social history, the new political history, the new cultural history, and the history of religiosity. All of that helps to endow Spanish medieval studies with a curious mixture of tradition and modernity, between conservatism and innovation. Unfortunately, no stable programmatic link between philologists and historians has been achieved. The two spheres continue to be too distant from each other, in terms of both a strictly academic point of view and that of research. Lack of communication has increased due to both the rigidity of the Spanish academic system and the uncritical reluctance aroused by currents related to postmodernism and the new medievalism that originated in the North American academic world. The idea of the conception



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of historical texts as literary artifacts and the practice of reading primary sources as texts (which has helped to bring together historians, linguists, and literary historians in other academic spheres) has been misinterpreted, which has widened the radical separation between ways of interpreting primary sources, historical texts, and literature. This is connected with a certain conceptual weakness that lingers among many Spanish medievalists – due to their established mistrust of theory, or, in other cases, to their lack of training in the new methodological tendencies associated with the postmodern and linguistic turn. The cultivation of methodological and epistemological approaches is regarded as an excessively theoretical task that distorts research into primary sources. Moreover, there is scarcely any dialogue among historians and researchers in the other social sciences such as sociology, anthropology, or linguistics. Although the lack of theoretical information is palliated in part by the new generations of medievalists, the situation still has to improve. Regarding influences from other national traditions, from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1950s, German historicism was predominant. From the 1960s to 1980s, French medievalism was the most prominent, not only because French was the first foreign language learned by the greater part of Spanish scholars, but also because of the growing influence of the Annales schools, both in their structuralist and mentalités variants. From the 1990s on, the model switched to North American medievalism. British historiography is today playing a minor role in Spanish medievalism, though paradoxically its influence among early modern and modern studies has been kept – this different evolution is basically explained by the fact that Marxism’s influx has been stronger and longer among early modernists and modernists than among medievalists. The diagnosis is severe in some points, but perhaps the hopes are greater. The gradual globalization of the scientific world, which has also affected the Spanish academic world, will in the end impose a more natural proclivity to theory, without losing its solid foundation on the work on primary sources. At the same time, the tradition of cordiality and sincere affection that has always existed among Hispanists and Spanish researchers will certainly contribute to a gradual normalization, modernization, and better reputation of Spanish medievalism.

Medievalism and the Contemporaneity of the Medieval in Postcolonial Brazil Nadia R. Altschul In recent years the general disregard of our field toward medievalisms outside Europe and the Anglophone world has changed noticeably. Volumes such as the 2009 Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World, which Kathleen Davis and I co-edited, as well as Michelle Warren’s 2011 Creole Medievalism, have been fully dedicated to the topic.1 Others have had at least a section on medievalism outside Europe, such as the papers devoted to “countries without a Middle Ages” in Revista de poética medieval’s special 2008 issue on medievalisms, which was edited by César Domínguez, and the project Le Moyen Âge vu d’ailleurs, which included four international conferences, several interim publications, and a recent volume by the same name, edited by Eliana Magnani in 2010.2 These last examples are of particular interest to my current concerns because they include position essays about the meaning and scope of Ibero-American medievalism and were written by local medievalists. The ideas of medievalists regarding the meaning of the Middle Ages in their local context, and especially the persistence of “the medieval” in post-independence nineteenth-century Brazil, will be the main topics of this essay. My discussion of the medieval in nineteenth-century Brazil will note similarities between, on the one hand, current academic medievalism as it appears in the recent critical literature and, on the other hand, the main text I will discuss, 1

2

Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul, Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of “the Middle Ages” Outside Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Michelle R. Warren, Creole Medievalism: Colonial France and Joseph Bédier’s Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). César Domínguez, ed., Revista de poética medieval 21 (2008); Eliana Magnani, ed., Le Moyen Âge vu d’ailleurs: Voix croisées d’Amérique latine et d’Europe (Dijon: Editions Universitaires de Dijon, 2010).

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Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands), Brazil’s nationalfoundational text.3 I will conclude by submitting that Brazilian medievalisms can point to a more spacious and ethically alert meaning for our field, urging the contemporary medievalism collective to a desirable expansion out of our current comfort zones. Postcolonial Medievalism and Marginality Not surprisingly, Ibero-American essays like those published in the Revista de poética medieval and Le Moyen Âge vu d’ailleurs take medieval studies as a field established in the metropolitan centers of the European world. One of their authors’ main purposes was to make themselves known to these metropolitan centers, and they thus endeavored to show the degree to which a marginal scholarly location was able to emulate metropolitan paradigms. A good case in point is the Argentinean contribution to the Spanish Revista de poética medieval, where María Mercedes Rodríguez Temperley’s long essay on the Middle Ages in the River Plate provides a preliminary bibliography and institutional information that runs for more than twenty printed pages.4 This documentation is an implied demand for inclusion in the so-called international scene, where peripheral locations expect to become equal members and not find themselves in need of reminding disciplinary centers of their medievalist output. The lack of knowledge about medieval endeavors in Latin America was in fact the seed out of which grew Le Moyen Âge vu d’ailleurs and the four international meetings that preceded the book – Auxerre (2002), São Paulo (2003), Madrid (2005), and Buenos Aires (2006). The overt rationale for the birth of the project – and we may add the organizing of two of the international meetings in Brazil and Argentina – was this lack of recognition: “la méconnaissance en Europe de la production médiévistique en Amérique latine.”5 In terms of marginality and desire for full membership in the club of medieval studies, it is also noteworthy that after the São Paulo meeting of 2003 Joseph Morsel observed how the idea of the Middle Ages with which Ibero-Americans work is the same as that used by Europeans, the same chronological construction, the same methods, the 3 4

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Euclides da Cunha, Rebellion in the Backlands (Os Sertões), trans. Samuel Putnam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). María Mercedes Rodríguez Temperley, “La Edad Media en las tierras del Plata (a propósito del medievalismo en la Argentina),” Revista de poética medieval 21 (2008): 221–93 (269– 92). Marta Madero and Eliana Magnani, “Le Moyen Âge vu d’ailleurs IV. La Edad Media desde otros horizontes IV. Sources et concepts/ Fuentes y conceptos,” Bulletin du centre d’études médiévales d’Auxerre/BUCEMA 10 (2006): 1–4 (2), [accessed 19 May 2011].



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same different possible approaches. Not empathetic to its derivativeness and attempt to be part of the larger community, Morsel determined that “Il s’agit donc bien d’un Moyen Âge vu d’ailleurs, mais pas autrement.”6 A related way in which peripheral medievalisms have tried to ascertain a meaningful space for local inquiry has been to posit a direct relationship with the Middle Ages, analogous to Europe’s. Rodríguez Temperley, for instance, starts her discussion by questioning the framework used by the editors of the special issue, rejecting the planning of a section devoted to medieval studies in countries classified as not having a Middle Ages.7 She asserts instead that this classification is an exclusionary move by the Euro-Spanish organizers, because in Spanish American countries the Middle Ages has never been an external element: their common Castilian language was formed in medieval times, and the most significant institutions for independence (the Cabildo), the bases of their law codes (the Siete Partidas), and the population charters that founded Spanish America’s first cities were all institutions and frameworks created in the Middle Ages (221–22). Europeans deny a Middle Ages to Spanish America, she explains, because they do not use the same measuring stick for the former colonies and the metropoles. This lack of interpretative reciprocity is shown when European dishes are considered “typical” even when they include potatoes and tomatoes, that is, ingredients that were unknown before the Conquest of America; while Spanish America is thought of as devoid of a Middle Ages despite the fact that the minds of the Conquistadors were populated by a medieval legacy, ranging from their linguistic and religious heritage to their literary cultural background in topography, legends, and bestiaries (222).8 At issue here is an alternative medieval/modern periodization for IberoAmerica, one that is easily linked to the desire to claim a European past that strengthens identitarian relationships with the former colonial powers, despite the lesser value of premodernity. The main topic of my essay, however, is a more disquieting take on this direct relationship of Ibero-America with the Middle Ages. Let me start by noting that, after the 2003 meeting in Brazil, 6

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Joseph Morsel, “Le Moyen Âge vu d’ailleurs,” Bulletin du centre d’études médiévales d’Auxerre / BUCEMA 7 (2003): 1–5 (3), [accessed 19 May 2011]. Rodríguez Temperley, “La Edad Media,” 221: “países-sin-Medioevo.” Another interesting meeting in this regard was the June 2008 international conference “El mundo de los conquistadores. La península ibérica en la Edad Media y su proyección en la conquista de América” (The World of the Conquistadors. The Iberian Peninsula in the Middle Ages and its Projection in the Conquest of America). It was held in Mexico City and sponsored by the institute for historical investigations of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and the history department of the Universidad Iberoamericana. I do not know if the presentations were published.

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Joseph Morsel had also chided medievalists from “l’equateur” for working at a distance from the field of anthropology and its interests on Amerindian and African national pasts, besides their embracing of a concept of the Middle Ages already contested in European circles.9 Perhaps as an answer to Morsel’s questioning, in the 2005 Madrid meeting the Brazilian medievalist Hilário Franco Júnior presented a more anthropologically oriented work on “The Medieval Roots of Brazil” (“Raízes medievais do Brasil”), which, despite the anticipation of an anthropological perspective, drew pointed criticism and was not included with the other historiographical essays published in Magnani’s 2010 volume.10 Besides technical questions regarding what specific competing aspects of the late Iberian Middle Ages reached across the Atlantic, the most significant critique for our purposes was that this essay on Brazil’s collective psychology concluded that the country not only had medieval roots but is a lot like a Middle Ages lived on American soil, a Middle Ages “vécu ailleurs.”11 This more troubling case of medieval continuity, explained as a Middle Ages lived elsewhere, is to stipulate that Ibero-American countries were not without a Middle Ages because certain populations and geographical parts of the continent continue to have a medieval mentality and lifestyle to this 9

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Morsel, “Le Moyen Âge,” 3: “En particulier, on ne peut qu’être étonné de constater que les médiévistes brésiliens travaillent à l’écart des anthropologues que se preoccupant, eux, des strates amérindienne et africaine du passé national: au-delá de la reprise d’une notion de Moyen Âge qui est contestée même en Europe, c’est tout simplement la distribution entre l’histoire (pour l’Occident) et l’anthropologie (pour les sociétés ‘primitives’) élaborée aux États-Unis et en Europe à partir du XIXe siècle qui a été importée sans crier gare.” Unfortunately the presentations from the São Paulo meeting were compiled in a 2004 volume that is not available to me, even through the interlibrary loan office of a premier research institution in the U.S.: Eliana Magnani, Hilário Franco Júnior, and Flávio de Campos, eds, Le Moyen Âge vu d’ailleurs II. Historiografía e pesquisas recentes (São Paulo: Instituto de Estudos Avançados da Universidade de São Paulo, 2004). As Hilário Franco Júnior points in his short essay in Magnani’s 2010 book, this essay was published elsewhere as “Racines médievales du Brésil.” In terms of anticipation, Magnani had announced that Madrid would provide “l’occasion d’envisager dans une perspective historique et anthropologique les heritages médiévaux en Amérique latine,” in Magnani, “Le Moyen Âge vu d’ailleurs III. Anthropologie historique et archeologie: mises en perspective et etudes en cours,” Bulletin du centre d’études médiévales d’Auxerre / BUCEMA 8 (2004): 1–3 (2), [accessed 19 May 2011]. Pascual Martínez Sopena, “Le Moyen Âge vu d’ailleurs III. La Edad Media desde otros horizontes III,” Bulletin du centre d’études médiévales d’Auxerre/BUCEMA 10 (2006): 1–6 (2–3, 5 n5), [accessed 19 May 2011]. It is nevertheless clear that Martínez Sopena agrees with the idea that societies have different internal evolutionary rhythms, and that traditionalism might become archaicizing with time (3).



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day. This position from “Raízes medievais do Brasil” was developed again in Franco Júnior’s co-written 2008 essay in the Revista de poética medieval, and particularly on his own suggestively titled section “Medieval Studies in Brazil, or of Brazil?” (“Estudos medievais no Brasil ou do Brasil?”).12 As the section title proposes, a scholar can do medieval studies of Brazil because certain areas and aspects of the country are still medieval. As Franco Júnior asserts, although bona fide medieval institutions have decayed in contemporary Brazil, the social, cultural, religious, and psychological medieval elements of the country have not (183). In contemporary Brazil, as he proposes, there is still a medieval value system and a climate of archaism, while elements such as extreme religiosity and little distinction between public and private spheres can legitimately be called medieval because they stem from the country’s medieval roots (182–84).13 The basic reason given for this literal medievality is that Portugal did not have a clear transition into modernity before the conquest of Brazil – the Portuguese who colonized the country were from the least progressive groups of a still-medieval society, and their goal was to recreate their own Middle Ages in the new environment.14 In professional terms, this living Brazilian medievality is considered a fantastic opportunity for medievalists internationally: practitioners can use this part of America as an observatory, a type of medieval field trip. In Europe the Middle Ages is a lost historical reality because the continent has already left behind its medieval elements, but since the Middle Ages are active in places 12

13

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Hilário Franco Júnior, Yara Frateschi Vieira, and Lênia Márcia de Medeiros Mongelli, “Estudos medievais no Brasil,” Revista de poética medieval 21 (2008): 177–219 (“Estudos medievais no Brasil ou do Brasil?,” 177–91). Franco Júnior, “Estudos medievais no Brasil,” 182–84: “clima de arcaísmo,” “sistema de valores medievais,” “a religiosidade ardente e abrangente,” and “pequena distinção entre as esferas pública e privada.” As Franco Júnior notes, he gave more examples of specific continuations in “Racines médiévales du Brésil.” Franco Júnior, “Estudos medievais no Brasil,” 181: “the reach of that historical phenomenon [the Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries] was limited in Portugal. It is important to consider that the modern colonial experience of those of Iberian extraction in a certain way prolonged their medieval colonial experience. […] In both cases, the process was not the work of the most progressive sectors of society” (“o alcance daquele fenômeno histórico [o Renascimento dos séculos XV–XVI] foi limitado em Portugal. Importante é perceber que a experiência colonial moderna dos ibéricos de certa forma prolongou sua experiência colonial medieval. [. . .] Nos dois casos, o processo não foi obra dos setores mais progressistas da sociedade […]”). In a well-rehearsed rationale regarding South and North America, Franco Júnior stipulates that the differences between the modern and successful north and the backwards south can be associated to the fact that “the English colonization of America was accomplished by modern segments of society” (“a colonização inglesa da América foi realizada por segmentos sociais modernos”) while “Portuguese colonization was the work of sectors that were still medieval” (“a colonização portuguesa foi obra de setores ainda medievais”) (182).

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like Brazil, these lost medieval characteristics can be “analyzed live in a new stage” (189–91, my emphasis).15 The reader might be surprised to read that Franco Júnior’s overall position is not a novelty in the interpretation of Brazil but part of a common understanding of the country as having a double character, and which has generally posited the North/Northeast as temporally backwards vis-à-vis a modern South/Southeast (which includes São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro). Franco Júnior therefore upholds his opinions by quoting previous authorities: One historian speaks of a juxtaposition of epochs, the contemporary in the large cities close to the coast, the imperial in the small cities of the interior, the colonial in the towns, the Neolithic in the indigenous areas; another historian perceives after the Abolition of slavery (1888) an “American” Brazil in the South/Southeast confronted to an “Iberian” Brazil in the North/Northeast; a sociologist verified the existence of “two Brazils” separated by “differences of age,” one modern, one archaic, which he calls colonial; an ethnologist refers to a “land of contrasts” in which “historical epochs mix within one another.”16 Franco Júnior does not consider the interpretations of his predecessors distorted but merely insufficient because they do not take into account what he calls the medieval hypothesis. Creating a more spotted temporal landscape that maintains the problems of its predecessors, Franco Júnior’s conclusion is that: More appropriately, then, we could define the Brazil of today as the interaction of areas of medievality with pockets of modernity and of 15 16

Franco Júnior, “Estudos medievais no Brasil,” 191: “podem ser analizadas ao vivo nesse palco inesperado.” Franco Júnior, “Estudos medievais no Brasil,” 185: “Um historiador fala na justaposição de épocas, a contemporânea das grandes cidades próximas ao litoral, a imperial das pequenas cidades do interior, a colonial das aldeias, a neolítica das zonas indígenas; outro historiador percebe após a Abolição da escravatura (1888) um Brasil ‘americano’ no Sul/Sudeste contraposto ao Brasil ‘ibérico’ do Norte/Nordeste; um sociólogo constata a existência de ‘dois Brasis’ separados ‘por diferenças de idade’, um moderno, outro arcaico, que ele chama de colonial; um etnólogo refere-se a ‘terra de contrastes’ na qual ‘as épocas históricas misturam-se umas nas outras.’” The first historian quoted is Pedro Calmon, Espírito da sociedade colonial (São Paulo: Nacional, 1934), 197; the second historian is Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Raízes do Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997), 171–76; the sociologist is Jacques Lambert, Os dois Brasis (Rio de Janeiro: MEC, 1959); and the ethonologist is Roger Bastide, Brésil, terre des contrastes (1957, repr. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999), 16.



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areas of modernity with pockets of medievality. This is the contrast that draws attention and explains the historical dynamics pertaining to the country. (188)17 Although these positions are a form of resistance to disciplinary marginality, the notion of a medieval North/Northeast or of medieval enclaves living within modern ones is quite unsettling. The temporal dislocation between medievalists who observe the local primitives from a “modern” location and their medievalized objects of study signal a core ethical problem that any Ibero-American proposal for medieval continuity must address. Let us point out that in postcolonial studies this temporal dislocation between contemporary scholar and primitive object of study has been well identified and critiqued. Associated with Dipesh Chakrabarty, the “contemporaneity of the medieval” is a rejection of the alterity and radical separation of the medieval from the modern, and thus a critique of the construct of modernity as it sets itself against negatively constructed others. As is well known, in Time and the Other Johannes Fabian critiqued the “denial of coevalness” by which anthropologists placed studied populations at a primitive stage of the Western civilizational timeline.18 Following Fabian’s pathbreaking book, Chakrabarty developed the position arguing that there is no real past time or place, that any practices, populations, or institutions existing at a particular present are fully contemporaneous with each other. A main example was the contemporaneity of the medieval: “the very fact that these worlds are never completely lost[, that we] inhabit their fragments even when we classify ourselves as modern and secular.”19 It is significant that postcolonial studies proposed the contemporaneity of the medieval as a form of resistance to modernity without any apparent knowledge of the Ibero-American parallel.20 As mentioned, Franco Júnior 17

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Franco Júnior, “Estudos medievais no Brasil,” 188: “Mais apropiadamente, então, poderíamos definir o Brasil de hoje como interação de zonas de medievalidade com bolsões de modernidade e zonas de modernidade com bolsões de medievalidade. É esse o contraste que chama a atenção e explica a dinâmica histórica própria do país.” Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 112. Hilário Franco Júnior expresses something quite similar to Chakrabarty when defending his position against anachronism, and points out that in History “não existe período temporalmente homogêneo” (“There is no temporally homogeneous period”) (186). However, this heterogeneity is explained by teleological historical progression and the lack of dynamism of certain groups with slower temporalities than the pacesetters (“temporalidades mais lentas”) (186). As Geraldine Heng has recently stated, a major problem for scholars proposing heterogeneous temporalities is that this view may “engage

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should not be identified with the beginnings of these ideas but with its latest appropriation by medievalists. To problematize the “contemporaneity of the medieval” in postcolonial studies we should note that in Ibero-America the idea of medieval continuities has a long history and applies to different fields of knowledge. To give a combination of examples, in History the feudal character of Hispanic America was identified by José Carlos Chiaramonte in the thinking of central nineteenth-century figures like Simón Bolívar, Bartolomé Mitre, Juan Martín de Pueyrredón, and Victorino Lastarria, among others.21 In the early twentieth century, the Argentinian José Ingenieros likewise interpreted much of his country’s early history as feudal, asserting for instance that the first decades after emancipation from Spain was an age of barbarian feudalism, with caudillos as bona fide feudal lords.22 And one of its most influential proponents was the Marxist historian José Carlos Mariátegui, who, based on economic elements, also interpreted Peru as essentially feudal in his 1965 Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality.23 In 1983, in fact, Chiaramonte considered the question of a feudal Spanish America one of the most arduous standing problems in the local social sciences and he proposed examining the genesis because the idea in itself was already a tangled commonplace. In the fields of art and architecture the concept of a medieval artistic character on the continent was also prevalent: in its first year, 1931, the influential Buenos Aires journal Sur posited the medieval character of early Spanish American art, while Manuel Toussaint’s 1948 Colonial Art in Mexico has a chapter titled “The Middle Ages in Mexico: 1519–1550.”24 The idea was also developed among medievalists: starting in the 1930s conservative Spanish exile Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz wrote that the conquest and colonization of the continent was “a projection of the Hispanic middle ages in space and in time,” and Mexican Luis Weckmann followed suit in 1951 stating in Speculum that on the American side of

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beautifully with the politics of temporality owned by constituencies we disavow,” such as jihadists and the Western political right (“Holy War Redux: The Crusades, Futures of the Past, and Strategic Logic in the ‘Clash’ of Religions,” PMLA 126.2 [March 2011]: 422–31 [423–24]). José Carlos Chiaramonte, “Génesis del ‘diagnóstico’ feudal en la historia hispanoamericana,” Formas de sociedad y economía en hispanoamérica (México: Grijalbo, 1983), 17–95, 40–41, 46, 49, 55. José Ingenieros, Sociología argentina (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1946), 50–51. José Carlos Mariátegui, Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (Lima: Amauta, 1965. Repr. México: Ediciones Era, 1979). Mariano Picón Salas, “El medievalismo en la pintura colonial,” Sur 1.3 (1931): 162–66; Manuel Toussaint, Colonial Art in Mexico (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1967; originally Arte colonial en México [México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 1948]).



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the Atlantic “the Middle Ages found their last expression” and that “Spain was able to transmit to America, as a living product and not as a dead tradition, many of her mediaeval accomplishments.”25 Luis Weckmann has in fact written the most extensive studies on the Middle Ages in Ibero-America: his portentous 1984 book on the medieval heritage of Mexico was followed in 1993 with a similar book on the medieval heritage of Brazil.26 This last book, La herencia medieval del Brasil, is what Hilário Franco Júnior attempted to continue, extending Weckmann’s focus on the colonial sixteenth century to Brazil’s contemporary period. As resistances to disciplinary marginality the positions regarding medieval continuity in Ibero-America that we have examined here are self-serving and, in the case of Brazil, carried out at the expense of subaltern others. In the Brazilian disciplinary context, however, the idea of a medieval continuity is also a handy solution in a system that is dependent on state monies. A local Brazilian Middle Ages shows that this field is not a mere intellectual luxury but has relevance for the country, while the documents needed for its study are more easily available than European archives. Below, I will develop the medievalist logic of Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands) as the other reason suggested throughout this essay for why this selective medievality works so powerfully within Brazil.27 25

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Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, Spain, a Historical Enigma (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1975), II: 1059; Luis Weckmann, “The Middle Ages in the Conquest of America,” Speculum 26 (1951): 130–41 (130). Rodríguez Temperley also played with the idea of continuity, but without falling prey to a literalizing position. Following the master figure of Sánchez-Albornoz, to her the Middle Ages is not the era that America did not have but the “vital time” that Spain “transplanted” across the Atlantic through its men (“el Medioevo no es la época ‘que le faltó a América’ sino el tiempo vital que, a través de sus hombres, España ‘transplantó’ tras el Atlántico” [“La Edad Media,” 229]). As she explains, her position is in line with a long list of scholarly endeavors that further this direction, including the inescapable Sánchez-Albornoz, Luis Weckmann, and Leonard Irving’s well-known The Books of the Brave: Being an Account of Books and of Men in the Spanish Conquest and Settlement of the Sixteenth-Century New World (1949. Repr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). To both Sánchez-Albornoz and Rodríguez Temperley it is fortunate that Argentinians “have understood this truth” and started to impart Spanish medieval history in “all of the Republic’s universities and teacher training institutes” (“Afortunadamente los argentinos han comprendido al cabo esa verdad y a la hora de ahora se estudia historia española en todas las universidades e institutos del profesorado de la República,” Rodríguez Temperley, “La Edad Media,” 229 n12; original in Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, Del ayer y del hoy de España [Barcelona: Planeta, 1980], 162). Luis Weckmann, La herencia medieval de México (1984. 2nd ed., México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994); La herencia medieval del Brasil (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993). This logic continues to work in later texts as well. I thank one of the blind reviewers of this essay for pointing to three examples: José Lins do Rego’s Pedra Bonita (Rio de Janeiro: José

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Os Sertões and the Medieval Northeast Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões is a generically unclassifiable text, a text of national psychology, a geological and geographical treatise, and an interpretive history, among other genres. It tells the last episode of the Canudos War, which ended in 1897 with the killing of the fifteen- to thirty-thousand inhabitants of the Canudos settlement in Northeastern Brazil. In this “rebellion” the sertanejos – inhabitants of the sertão or backlands – associated the Republic established in 1889 with the Antichrist, rejecting the state’s encroachment on issues such as taxation and the secularization of daily life. The new Brazilian state, positing in this settlement a monarchist attack on the Republic, replied with military campaigns that killed practically all of the inhabitants and finally leveled the town. Da Cunha arrived with the last battalion sent to assault Canudos and witnessed the eradication of this shantytown settlement and the last of the emaciated rebels that had survived the confrontations, mostly women and children, who had also fought to the death. Like Franco Júnior and other critics proposing two temporally disassociated Brazils, da Cunha’s 1902 book on Canudos – written from his previous field notes – associates the backlands population with remains from centuries past. Literary critics have noted and critiqued the spatio-temporal lag of Os Sertões for decades. For instance, Gerald Michael Greenfield noted that da Cunha’s “spatial journey to Bahia became as well a journey back through time, from the ‘civilized’ society of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro to the ‘primitive’ world and people of the interior.”28 Da Cunha also characterizes the sertanejo of this drought-stricken region as “a holdout from an earlier stage in the evolution”29: while the leader of Canudos was a “living example of atavism” and a regression to ancestral types of the species.30 Far from rare, da Cunha’s interpretation became canonical: as a foundational text Os Sertões was accepted as “a kind of ‘Bible’ of Brazilian nationality” and with the status of a sacred text its interpretation became virtually untouchable.31 Likewise

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Olympio, 1938), Guimarães Rosa’s Grande Sertão: Veredas (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1956), and Ariano Suassuna’s O Romance d’A Pedra do Reino (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1971). Gerald Michael Greenfield, “Sertão and Sertanejo: An Interpretive Context for Canudos,” Luso-Brazilian Review 30.2 (1993): 35–46 (35). Mark D. Anderson, “From National to Natural Disasters: Drought and the Brazilian Subject in Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões,” Hispania 91.3 (2008): 547–57 (548). Mónica Ayala-Martínez, “Euclides da Cunha and the Trap of the Republican Dream,” Chasqui 34.1 (2005): 57–64 (61 n7): “um documento raro de atavismo […] uma regressão ao estádio mental dos tipos ancestrães da especie.” Anderson, “From National to Natural,” 548; Greenfield, “Sertão and Sertanejo,” 35.



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Adriana Michéle Campos Johnson in the most recent book-length study of Canudos rightly associates da Cunha’s positions with Johannes Fabian’s denial of coevalness. As interpreted by da Cunha, and as a shared tendency in anthropological and colonial discourse, at the core of the conflict in Os Sertões was the “lack of a common terrain or a common temporality within the ‘geographical fiction’ of Brazil.”32 Os Sertões, in fact, starts exactly by stressing the lack of a joint temporality in da Cunha’s 1901 Preliminary Note. As he states, sertanejos are backward races that are utterly separated from modern Brazilians living on the coast of the Atlantic, and what separates them from us is exactly “a co-ordinate of history – time” (xxix–xxx).33 Three centuries of physical isolation have led to their atavistic existence, visible in their dress, their customs and adherence to remote traditions, their fanatic religious sentiment and exaggerated point of honor, as well as their beautiful folklore and folk poetry (78). In broad strokes the culprits for their atavism were three: racial miscegenation, the character of the land, and – most important for us here – feudalism. As explained by da Cunha, the rural landlord was “Addicted to a crude variety of feudalism, which led him to transform his tributaries into vassals and the meek Tapuias [Amerindians] into serfs” (81). The great land grants given in the sixteenth century created latifundia, made their owners “the lords of the countryside, barely if at all tolerating the intervention of the metropolis itself,” and represented “the most perduring aspect of our shamefaced feudalism” (82). Within these areas the inhabitants of the Northeast remained isolated and evolved “in a closed circle for three centuries,” reaching the author’s contemporary era as a group “wholly alien to our destinies, and preserving intact the traditions of the past” (84). The sertanejos continued to live like their (medieval) sixteenth-century ancestors, and da Cunha particularly associated their entertainment with the Middle Ages, here describing a variety of what is known as a dance of Moors and Christians: They will go to the towns, if there happen to be festivals there, cavalcades and Moorish mummeries, anachronistic divertissements which the backland settlements have preserved intact, in all their details, for three whole centuries. Among these is the exotic camisado, as curious an example as any to be found of their adherence to the most remote traditions. A very old copy of ancient nocturnal sallies in the Peninsula, against the Moorish castles, and wholly forgotten now in the land of its birth, where the very name is an archaism, no longer in use, this 32 33

Adriana Michéle Campos Johnson, Sentencing Canudos: Subalternity in the Backlands of Brazil (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 116. All quotes are from Samuel Putnam’s English translation.

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diversion, a costly but an interesting one, is staged by the light of lanterns and grass torches, with long processions of men on foot, clad in white or in Mussulman garb, while others go on horseback, in weird animal disguises they all file past rapidly, with skirmishes and mock encounters; and this in his frolicsome moments, is the greatest delight the backwoodsman knows. (102)34 Another aspect particularly associated with the Middle Ages was the sertanejos’ intense religiosity. As da Cunha tells us, the intensive settlement of Brazil took place when “all the terrors of the Middle Ages were crystallized in peninsular Catholicism,” so that the Portuguese who went to Brazil: came filled with a fierce mysticism, a religious fervor that vibrated to the brilliant glow of the inquisitorial fires which flared so intensely in the peninsula. They were part and parcel of the same people who in Lisbon, under the grievous obsession of miracles and assaulted by sudden hallucinations, had beheld above the royal palace prophetic caskets, mysterious tongues of flame, throngs of white-hooded Moors passing in procession, and paladin combats in the skies. (111) Due to this historical conjuncture the backlands still produce similarly out-of-time “hair-shirt ascetics who are followed always by an imperious throng of fanatic, sorrowing, mad disciples” (111). As da Cunha concluded regarding the temporality of the inhabitant of the sertão: “In the rustic society of the backlands time has stood still; this society has not been affected by the general evolutionary movement of the human race” (111–12).35 As da Cunha’s text is considered the “Bible” of Brazilian nationality, one may hardly be surprised that current Brazilian medievalism did not escape his foundational gravitational pull. Yet, as Greenfield expressed, in the period that led to the Canudos War the ascription of atavism to certain populations was a useful tool for the elites, who denigrated the Brazilian masses in order to try and “elevate themselves above the national reality to the level 34 35

Oral poetical contests are also described as anachronistic divertissements, and the singers as bards (Rebellion, 103). Another aspect of Canudos medievality is Sebastianism, since the rebellion was interpreted as a millenarian movement with roots in Portuguese medieval Sebastianismo (Mónica Ayala-Martínez, “Euclides da Cunha,” 58). Following the last quotation, da Cunha indeed continues by describing one instance of Sebastianism in Pedra Bonita, Pernambuco, where a visionary convinced the population that pouring their sacrificed infants’ blood on a rock would cause the advent of the “kingdom of Dom Sebastião,” who would reward those who had helped in ending his enchantment while punishing an ungrateful humanity (Os Sertões, 113).



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of civilized Europeans.”36 Whether or not today’s attribution of medievality to subaltern populations in Brazil should be interpreted as a contemporary elite attempt to measure up to European academics, it is quite troubling to find that current disciplinary positions can be compared to colonialist and discriminatory nineteenth-century medievalisms. As practitioners of medievalism ourselves, it simply behooves us to be attuned to the ethics and the politics of the presence and invocation of the Middle Ages in any place and time, and for those who do medieval studies – like Franco Júnior sees himself doing – to be aware of the medievalism that exists within all approaches to the medieval past. The co-occurrence of an ascription of medievality and a resistance to marginality in the discourse currently circulated by Brazilian medievalists seems to be a suitable example of the internal colonialism of Euro-American settlers, who recognize the vague dismissiveness with which they (we) are treated by “true” Europeans, while deploying similarly colonialist maneuvers on the local subaltern populations.37 Changing Medievalism The notion that parts of the American continent continue to either live or have operational ties with the Middle Ages does not fall into the traditional divisions with which the collective gathered around Studies in Medievalism works – that is, into the division of the field as the study of the historical Middle Ages or, on the other hand, as the recreation of medieval themes and elements in post-medieval times.38 Medievalism as it is currently defined 36 37 38

Greenfield, “Sertão and Sertanejo,” 41. See Nadia Altschul, “Creole Medievalism and Settler Postcolonial Studies,” in Geographies of Philological Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). At least since the beginning of Studies in Medievalism (SiM) in 1976, Medievalism has had an established definition: the reception of the historical period known as the Middle Ages in post-medieval times, be it as artistic pieces of any kind (music, architecture, literature, games, etc.) or as scholarly pursuits (medieval studies as an academic field, editorial reconstructions, linguistic and historical studies, etc.). Likewise, Lord Acton’s epigraph to all issues of SiM still establishes for the field that Antiquity and the Middle Ages are “the two civilizations that have preceded us, the two elements of which ours is composed.” Despite the elasticity of the field, since Islam has not been judged as an intrinsic part of “us” in so-called Western civilization, medievalism has been underlined by a notion of the medieval that refers mainly to Latin Christendom and the medieval past and post-medieval reception of English, French, and Germanic realms. Even closer to our concerns, Leslie Workman made a division between survivals of medieval worldviews and lifestyles and medievalism, because as it is still currently theorized through the works of this foundational figure, medievalism depends on the end of the Middle Ages to exist: “medieval pattern of thought and behavior ended at different times in different places and on different levels of society. […] French feudal law […] survives today in the formerly

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depends on a Middle Ages that is finished and enclosed, and that can be studied, interpreted, refashioned, or manipulated with much or with little adequacy to a real medieval culture and lifestyle. This manipulation and interpretation will be done according to contemporary interests and needs, but they will always be achieved from outside the chronological boundaries of the medieval.39 The Brazilian articulations of medieval contemporaneity that we have observed here show an additional facet of medievalism that does not depend on the distancing device of reception but instead have the immediacy of contemporary and current sociopolitical implications – an immediacy that regrettably evidences more ties with colonialist outlooks than with postcolonial considerations. Our field has a trajectory of critiquing the functions played by post-medieval approaches to the medieval, and it has long and successfully examined the nationalist underpinnings of medieval studies, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet despite this critical trajectory the medievalist collective has not yet fully engaged with especially problematic presences of “the medieval” in the contemporary world. One of the most somber reminders of the uses of the medieval in today’s political world is Bruce Holsinger’s examination of how neomedievalism was co-opted for rationalizations that cynically abrogate human rights.40 The discussions at the core of our field have, in contrast, mostly associated neomedievalism with a new ludic ahistorical practice, loosely defined by further removal from the characteristics of the real Middle Ages: “In particular, neomedievalism is further independent, further detached, and thus consciously, purposefully, and perhaps even laughingly reshaping itself into an alternate universe of medievalisms, a fantasy of medievalisms, a metamedievalism.”41

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French provinces of Canada, and […] feudalism was not banished from the English statute book until […] 1926. The society which Spain planted in the New World was medieval by almost any definition, while, coming from a quite different level of society, the social ideas as well as the agricultural technology which the Puritans took to New England were similarly medieval” (Workman, “Editorial,” in Studies in Medievalism V: Medievalism in Europe, ed. Leslie J. Workman [Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993], 1–4 [2]). Consider Leslie Workman’s Editorial to issue 1.1 of SiM: “medievalism could only begin, not simply when the Middle Ages had ended, whenever that may have been, but when the Middle Ages were perceived to have been something in the past, something it was necessary to revive or desirable to imitate. This consciousness of an historical watershed grew in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and our concern extends from that time to the present, if not into the future.” Workman, “Editorial,” in Studies in Medievalism I:1: Medievalism in England, ed. Leslie J. Workman (Oxford, OH: N.A., 1979), 1–3 (1). Bruce Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007), esp. 66–79. Carol L. Robinson and Pamela Clements, “Living with Neomedievalism,” in Studies in Medievalism XVIII: Defining Medievalism(s) II, ed. Karl Fugelso (Cambridge: D. S.



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The locally prevalent but internationally unfamiliar medievalism that I discussed in this essay thus touches upon several underlying points. Firstly, the example of Euclides da Cunha shows how Ibero-American medievalism may go against the grain of even our best established notions about this area of study. In our most common disciplinary terms, European nineteenthcentury medievalism searched for national exclusivity in an originary past. And yet the use of the medieval in Ibero-American foundational texts such as Os Sertões was implemented for a different political project: instead of the past that founds the nation, “the medieval” was a living past that needed eradication before the true modern nation could emerge. Secondly, with this essay I have endeavored to exemplify the need for medieval postcolonial thinking and the Ibero-American intellectual tradition to enter into closer dialogue. Unawareness of the Spanish and Portuguese empires still seems ubiquitous among postcolonial medievalists, where the long tradition of thinking about a medieval continuity in South America was untapped in discussions of the contemporaneity of the medieval. On the other hand, the unfamiliarity of Brazilian medievalism with core concepts of postcolonial thought is quite evident. This fact was also noted by Eliana Magnani, who concluded that medievalism in South America reinforces European referents while its practitioners are not concerned with who they are and where they speak from, thus showing no meta-disciplinary questioning that could counterbalance the discipline’s Eurocentrism.42 Postcolonial studies has yet to make a serious impact on Ibero-medievalism, and this field would greatly benefit from the interests and the theoretical attentiveness that are prevalent in postcolonial studies.43 Thirdly and most importantly, this essay has proposed that medievalism as it has been practiced within the Studies in Medievalism collective should expand beyond reception – whether reception is at one or many removes from the Middle Ages. The temporalities of medievalism are more complex than those allowed by reception, and to join in today’s most current discus-

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Brewer, 2009), 55–75 (56). For an intelligent and ethical critique of many of the problems of this neomedievalism, see Amy S. Kaufman, “Medievalism Unmoored,” in Studies in Medievalism XIX: Defining Neomedievalism(s) (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), 1–11; for a discussion of the similarities between medievalism and neomedievalism, see Cory Lowell Grewell, “Neomedievalism: An Eleventh Little Middle Ages?,” in Studies in Medievalism XIX: Defining Neomedievalism(s) (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), 12–43. Eliana Magnani, “Entre politique et disciplinaire: Les etudes médiévales en Europe et en Amérique Latine. Perspective,” in Le Moyen Âge vu d’ailleurs, ed. Eliana Magnani, 7–14, 11. Magnani also pointed to the complete absence of postcolonial studies in her edited book, “Entre politique et disciplinaire,” 10. See Nadia Altschul, “The future of postcolonial approaches to medieval Iberian studies,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 1.1 (January 2009): 5–17.

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sions our field must include these apparently extraneous and politically charged presences and invocations of the medieval in the contemporary world. As scholars of medievalisms this enlargement and fine-tuning is an ethical choice for a renewal that participates in a genuinely transnational and transdisciplinary dialogue.

The Middle Ages Are within Your Grasp: Motor Neurons, Mirror Neurons, Simulacra, and Imagining the Past Jeff Rider Today, the Middle Ages might be conveniently defined as the study of the events and artifacts in Europe (more or less) between 500 and 1500 (more or less) that still survive, and our interactions with them. Countless medieval acts of various kinds have been incorporated, and survive as what Bruno Latour has called “actants,” in our present institutions, artifacts, and gestures, but they are so combined with so many other actants that it is impossible to disentangle the medieval actants from the others, and meaningless to do so, since in these cases their value lies not in their historical difference, their “medievality,” but precisely in their having been assimilated into modern institutions, artifacts, and gestures.1 Certain artifacts have, however, been set off as being “medieval,” which is to say past and other. Some of these artifacts are relatively intact, but the larger and more complex ones – like “medieval” churches – almost never are, having been repaired or transformed 1

Latour writes: “An action in the distant past, in a faraway place, by actors now absent, can still be present, on condition that it be shifted, translated, delegated, or displaced to other types of actants, those I have been calling nonhumans”; “a fresh hybrid […] carries past acts into the present and permits its many makers to disappear while also remaining present. […] in a minute I may mobilize forces locked in motion hundreds or millions of years ago. The relative shapes of actants and their ontological status may be completely reshuffled – techniques act as shape-changers, making a cop out of a [speed-]bump in the road, lending a policeman the permanence and obstinacy of stone. The relative ordering of presence and absence is redistributed – we hourly encounter hundreds, even thousands, of absent makers who are remote in time and space yet simultaneously active and present” (“On Technical Mediation – Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy,” Common Knowledge 3.2 [Fall 1994]: 50, 40).

Studies in Medievalism XXIV, 2015

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over the years. Some of these “medieval” artifacts, like churches, are still in use today for contemporary purposes, which may in some cases be analogous to the purposes for which they were used during the period in which they were created. Relatively few of these “medieval” artifacts are immediately or directly useful today, however, at least for their original purposes, and those that are have almost always been modified or supplemented to serve modern purposes. These “medieval” artifacts have by and large been constituted and preserved as a distinct set of objects on account not of their immediate and practical usefulness but on account of their ability to enrich the present, everyday world and to enable us to see and experience potentialities in our present, everyday world that we would not otherwise see or experience. It would in fact probably be most accurate to say that the Middle Ages, today, are primarily a set of potential actions, thoughts, and feelings that are available to us thanks to the survival of these artifacts. I have published elsewhere a preliminary discussion of the ways in which our imagining the other worlds, which once existed but no longer exist, to which these artifacts point is useful and productive for us because it opens up for us what Paul Ricœur called “new possibilities of being-in-the-world.”2 In this essay, I would like to concentrate on the ways in which the artifacts themselves open up new possibilities of being-in-the-world for us … directly, immediately, pre-reflectively. In order to do so, however, we must first take a short detour through some recent developments in neuroscience. Mirroring Movement Our brain possesses certain “visual dominant and visual and motor AIP [anterior intraparietal area] neurons [. . .] that [. . .] respond selectively to specific three-dimensional stimuli. Some respond to spherical objects, others to cubes, others again to flat objects, etc.” When we perceive an object, thanks to these neurons, there is an immediate and automatic selection of those of its intrinsic properties that facilitate our interaction with it [or “affordances”].3 These [affordances] […] incarnate the practical opportunities that the object offers to the organism which perceives it. […] As soon as we see [an object] […], these affordances selectively activate groups of AIP 2

3

See Paul Ricœur, “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” Philosophy Today, 17:2 (Summer 1973): 129–41; and Jeff Rider, “L’Utilité du Moyen Âge,” in Médievalisme. Modernité du Moyen Age, ed. Vincent Ferré (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010), 35–46. The notion of affordances was introduced by J. J. Gibson in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1979).



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neurons. The visual information is then transmitted to the F5 [one area of the premotor ventral cortex or cortical motor system of the brain] visuomotor neurons, which, however, no longer code the individual affordances, but the motor acts which are congruent to them. In this way the visual information is translated into motor information […]. Many objects […] have more than one affordance. It follows that when we see these objects, more than one set of neural AIP populations will be triggered, each of which will code a specific affordance. It is likely that these action proposals will be sent to F5, sparking off what can be defined as potential motor acts.4 The translation of visual information into motor information, of action proposals into potential motor acts, takes place in F5 because of “a vocabulary of motor acts,” which it contains and “in which the words are represented by populations of neurons.” This vocabulary or “repertoire” of motor acts “facilitate[s] the association of these acts and the visual affordances extracted by the AIP neurons.” When, in other words, a set of neurons has been activated by an object’s visual affordances, it sends a set of action proposals to the F5 visuomotor neurons. These action proposals evoke “potential motor acts [from the repertoire or vocabulary of motor acts contained in F5 that] categorize the ‘seen’ object as [in the example given by Rizzolatti and ­Sinig­aglia] graspable in this or that manner, with this or that grip, etc., endowing it with a ‘meaning’ that it otherwise would not have had.” The F5 neurons then select “the most appropriate motor act” from the potential motor acts that have been evoked, a choice that depends not “only on the intrinsic properties of the object in question (its shape, size, and orientation), but also on what we intend to do with it, on its functions, etc.”5 The chosen action may at this point remain potential, or be sent to other parts of the brain for enactment. An object’s affordances are thus part of our perception of it, are inseparable from our perception of it, and are “seen” immediately, pre-reflectively by our brain. We do not see an object and then decide what we can do with it. What we see is in fact less an object than a set of potential actions involving the object. Our brain “tells” us, as part of its perception of the object, what we can do with it. Our brain automatically perceives all objects in our environment as “virtual pole[s] of action” or “hypotheses of action” and presents them to us in this way.6 We are surrounded, in sum, by an environ4

5 6

Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain – How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions, trans. Frances Anderson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 34–35. Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain, 46–47, 50, 38, 35. Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain, 48, 77.

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ment filled not with static, independent objects, but with potential actions we can perform. We imagine new motor acts, enlarge our vocabulary of motor acts, through another set of neurons (other than the AIP/F5 visuomotor neurons) called mirror neurons, some of which are to be found in F5, others in other parts of the brain. Unlike AIP neurons, mirror neurons “do not discharge at the sight of […] three-dimensional objects […;] their activation depends on the observation of specific motor acts involving a body part […] – object interaction”; “the visual stimulus is not constituted by an object or its movements, but by object-related movements made by another individual with the goal of grasping, holding, or manipulating them.” These neurons, in sum, respond specifically to human object-related movement and “are primarily involved in the understanding of the meaning of ‘motor events’, i.e. of the actions performed by others.”7 If the observed action (or something reasonably like it) already exists in the brain’s repertoire of actions, the activation of these mirror neurons “generate[s] an ‘internal motor representation’ of the observed motor act, […] a potential motor act is evoked in […] [the] brain which is to all effects similar to that which was spontaneously activated during the organization and effective execution of that action” in the brain of the individual who performed it, and “these movements take on meaning for the observer, thanks to the vocabulary of motor acts which regulates his own capacity to execute an action.”8 If the observed action or something like it is not already present in its repertoire of actions, however, the brain learns it, adds this new action to its repertoire, by: the integration of two distinct processes: in the first, the observer segments the action to be imitated into its individual elements or, in other words, he converts the continuous flow of movements observed into a string of acts belonging to his motor repertoire; in the second he arranges these coded motor acts into a sequence that will compose an action replicating that of the demonstrator.9 It is important to remember that this mental activity is pre-reflective and automatic. When we see someone throw a stone, our brain automatically, immediately, and pre-reflectively generates a motor representation of throwing a stone similar to the motor representation that was activated during the organization and execution of that action in the brain of the 7 8 9

Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain, 80, 98, 97. Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain, 96–97, 98. Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain, 145–46.



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thrower, whether or not we have ever thrown one. If we have thrown one, our brain remembers what it is like to do so; if we have never thrown one, it segments the action into a string of smaller motor acts that are in its motor repertoire and then combines them into a sequence that replicates as completely as possible throwing a stone. This is how we learn by watching. The brain can, of course, then attempt to perform the new action it has seen – it can try to throw a stone – according to the motor representation it has generated, and the experience, in turn, provides motor and visual feedback that allows the brain to develop and refine the motor representation. When we perceive an artifact, its visual affordances immediately and prereflectively activate groups of AIP neurons. This visual information is transmitted to a set of visuomotor neurons, which translate it into a series of small motor acts congruent to the affordances. If we have already observed movements related to this artifact or a similar one, we have pre-existing sequences of motor acts (internal motor representations) associated with the artifact’s affordances in our brain’s repertoire of movements, and can use these pre-existing representations simply to imagine or to imagine and carry out these movements. If I have seen a knife used to cut something, my brain has created a motor representation of using one to cut something, and I can use anything with affordances like those of a knife to cut. If we observe a new movement related to this artifact or a similar one, the brain creates a new sequence of motor acts that becomes part of its repertoire of movements. I need to see only one knife thrown to know, at least approximately, how to throw a knife. When humans make or modify objects, when they create artifacts, they provide them with artificial affordances that facilitate certain movements, certain sequences of motor acts, in relation to those artifacts. They intend the artifacts to be used in certain ways, and their intentions are reflected and materialized – memorialized – in the artifacts’ affordances. A soccer ball, for example, has clearly been made to roll smoothly along a flat surface; a brick has not. A medieval artifact has thus been provided with certain artificial affordances to facilitate certain movements, and, given how little human beings have evolved over the last couple of thousand years, I suspect that my brain still perceives all of a medieval artifact’s affordances, including those with which it was endowed by its medieval creator, and that they all evoke the small motor acts congruent to them in my brain.10 If, however, I have 10

It is in this sense that we have to understand, I think, Frank Ankersmit’s remark that “the past itself can be said to have survived the centuries and to be still present in objects that are given to us here and now, such as paintings, burial chambers, pieces of furniture, and so on”; that “the past can properly be said to be present in the artifacts that it has left us” (Sublime Historical Experience [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005], 115).

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never observed the larger movements these artificial affordances were created to facilitate, I do not know how to sequence the small motor acts in order to perform the larger movement. A medieval artifact bears the impression, so to speak, of certain movements, but it is difficult for me to replicate those movements without seeing them at least once. The problem in replicating medieval object-related movements thus lies in learning how to combine the small motor acts congruent to the object’s affordances into complex, continuous movements that replicate unobservable medieval ones. Our brain has at least five means I can think of for overcoming this lack of observable medieval movements. First, in some cases at least, the sequence of small motor acts the artifact has been intended to facilitate seems to have been clearly inscribed on it. Few people, I think, would try to manipulate a knife with their teeth: “handle” is clearly inscribed on one part of the object. Modern children may well have never seen a butter churn, but if one placed one in the middle of a group of ten-year-olds, I suspect they would quickly discover the movements its maker intended it to facilitate, as well as a great many movements he or she did not have in mind, even if they have no idea what it is supposed to be used for. A book begs to be opened even if one cannot read. Second, I can see medieval visual representations, and read medieval verbal representations, of people using artifacts, and I can, on the basis of those representations, imagine them doing so. These representations are incomplete – the visual ones are static and show one moment in a continuous movement while the verbal ones cannot provide the same degree of information as seeing someone perform a movement and must be “translated” by the brain into an imagined continuous movement – and we cannot be sure that the movements they represent were truly medieval ones, but they provide a guide for imagining how to combine the small motor acts congruent to the object’s affordances into complex, continuous movements that replicate unobservable medieval ones. Third, many past artifacts have analogies in the contemporary world, and the movements related to those contemporary objects can suggest analogous movements related to past artifacts. If I have used a pen to write on paper, I can imagine using a stylus of wood or bone to write on wax. Observing someone aiming a rifle helps me imagine aiming an arrow. Watching a modern soldier put on a helmet or a modern woman put on a dress helps me imagine the movements related to analogous objects in the Middle Ages. In some cases, moreover, certain disciplines or practices with respect to analogous modern artifacts, whose antecedents go back to the Middle Ages (at least), still exist. Modern competitive fencing is undoubtedly quite different from medieval your-life-may-depend-on-it fencing, but someone



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who wished to replicate an unobservable medieval movement related to a sword would do well to consult modern fencers. In many cases, fourth, the potential motor acts related to an artifact may also be indicated by its preservation and presentation. I once spent several weeks transporting prehistoric stone tools from an old to a new storage space in a museum of natural history, and I was surprised at how often it seemed to me that I immediately and automatically “knew” how to hold this or that tool and what I could use it to do. Part of this “knowledge” may have been due to the kind of clear inscription on the object itself of the sequence of small motor acts it had been intended to facilitate that I mentioned above – these were not, after all, very sophisticated tools – but this “knowledge” was undoubtedly also due to the fact that these stones had already been identified for me as tools, which immediately evoked a set of movements associated with certain purposes. Had I simply found them lying amid a pile of rocks, I might not have recognized them as tools. When we perceive a medieval artifact, our brain uses such means, and undoubtedly many others, to imagine movements with respect to the artifact that it cannot observe directly. These mental images stand in the place of observations and, like them, generate motor representations of the imagined motor act, although my imagining of an unobserved movement will necessarily be more approximate than would my mental image of an observed one, and so presumably will the motor representations generated by it. It is like trying to follow the directions for assembling a particular piece of furniture without ever having seen that precise piece of furniture assembled. Fifth, this approximate imagining of a movement I have not observed can be enhanced, refined, filled in, so to speak, by means of experimentation and practice, by trying to perform what I have imagined. This is how we get better at any motor activity: the fifth time I reassembled my daughter’s coffee table, I did not even bother to look at the directions. Enacting movements in relation to an artifact refines the motor representation corresponding to the movement through motor and visual feedback. The “knights” who joust and perform throughout the Unites States each year provide a striking example of such enactments with respect to medieval artifacts and of the degree to which such enactments are learning experiences. As Dashka Slater wrote in a New York Times article in 2010: horsemanship and targeting are what make jousting so difficult. Staying on a horse while wearing 50 to 100 pounds of armor is challenging enough, particularly when your vision is restricted by the helmet’s narrow eye slit. Persuading a horse to run toward another horse at full speed is more challenging still. Jousting requires you to do both while simultaneously lowering a heavy and unwieldy weapon from vertical to

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horizontal, aiming it at a small target and receiving a massive wallop in the chest.11 Contemporary jousters are trying to master an old, and therefore unfamiliar and difficult techne, a set of motor skills that requires the development of a substantial new vocabulary of internal motor representations related to medieval artifacts through training and practice. One of these jousters, Jeffrey Hedgecock, even runs a “Knight School” one day a month to teach “the art of knightly combat.” In order to participate, one must already be “an experienced and confident rider,” and anyone who is interested in attending is forewarned that “jousting is a very demanding sport that is difficult to ‘dabble’ in. Most people involved in jousting take it very seriously and make it their sole hobby. Like any gear or skill intensive hobby, jousting is a sport that requires a significant time and financial investment even to participate at a very basic level.”12 The curriculum at the Knight School includes: Exercises to prepare your horse for jousting Introducing your horse to jousting Riding in armour Balance with and without a lance Focus Coordination for both horse and rider Lance handling techniques […] Historical technique, based on works of Duarte, Monte, Quixada and Wallhausen Proper set up of horse and rider for a pass Running the pass Recovering from the strike Completing the pass in a controlled and measured manner Special techniques to improve lance targeting and presentation goals Exhibiting style and grace as detailed in historical sources.13

11

12 13

Dashka Slater, “Is Jousting the Next Extreme Sport?” New York Times, 8 July 2010 [accessed 6 August 2014].

[accessed 6 August 2014]. [accessed 6 August 2014].



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The technical nature of jousting and the skill and body-learning that are required to do it well (or at all) are also evident in journalists’ frequent references to it as a sport, an extreme sport, a competitive sport, an equestrian sport, a form of theater, or as being “(un)choreographed.”14 Charlie Andrews, six-time World Champion of Full Contact Heavy Armored Jousting, is quoted as saying, “‘I don’t know jack about history, nor do I care,’” but he clearly knows the advantages and disadvantages of the affordances offered by different forms of medieval helmets, and might in many ways understand better a medieval description of knightly combat than would someone who does know ‘jack’ about history.15 As the example of these modern jousters shows, it is possible to develop a sophisticated vocabulary of internal motor representations, of movements related to medieval artifacts, and to refine that vocabulary through experience. The existence of medieval artifacts, in other words, offers us the opportunity to enrich and enlarge our motor vocabularies. Some of these new motor representations may seem relatively useless to most people – how many of us are ever going to want or need to know how to use a lance while riding on a horse? – but once the representations of these new movements have become part of the brain’s repertoire of motor acts, they, or at least some of their components, may be evoked by contemporary objects as well. I believe, for example, that I read, physically read, modern books differently, in a richer, more comprehensive way, because I have read medieval manuscript books. When I perceive a medieval artifact, I perceive more practical opportunities in the world than I did before, can imagine doing more and other things than I could before. By imagining and refining movements related to medieval artifacts, I learn old ways to move (but that are new to me), new things I can do, and how to relate newly learned old movements to contemporary objects. Mirroring Feeling The mirror neurons discussed above are activated by object-related movements, motor acts involving an object’s interaction with a body part, and 14

15

“‘If we had sponsorship, jousting could make for some really fantastic viewing programs – and they wouldn’t be on the History Channel, either, they would air alongside other sports and people would watch. [. . .] Imagine if Red Bull or Under Armour came out and sponsored this sport?’” (Mary Buckheit, “Chivalry isn’t dead at World Joust event,” ESPN Page 2, 2 November 2010, ) [accessed 6 August 2014]. Dashka Slater, “Is Jousting the Next Extreme Sport?”; [accessed 6 August 2014].

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enable us to understand the meaning of actions performed by others by replicating those movements in our brain as if we were performing them, without necessarily carrying them out. There is, however, another mirror neuron mechanism, located in a different part of the brain, “that codes […] sensory information directly in emotional terms.” In this mechanism, “the information from the visual areas [of the brain], providing descriptions of faces or bodies expressing emotion, is conveyed directly to the insula [of Reil, a part of the brain], where it autonomously and specifically activates a mirror mechanism that immediately codes these descriptions in the corresponding emotive mode.” This mirror neuron mechanism, in other words, evokes in us the emotions that the perceived motor acts, even intransitive motor acts like smiling or skipping, would evoke in us if we performed these motor acts. I see someone laughing or kicking a vending machine and I know, approximately, what he or she is feeling because I imagine what I would be feeling if I were performing those movements. “Experiencing […] [an emotion] and perceiving it in others appear therefore to have a common neural basis.” Like the motor neuron mechanism that allows us to understand the objectrelated movements of others by imagining ourselves performing them, this visceromotor neuron system allows us to understand what other people are feeling by imagining what we would be feeling if we were performing the movements we see them performing. “We do not need,” moreover: to reproduce the behavior of others in full detail in order to understand its emotive meaning, just as action understanding does not require the actions to be replicated. Even if they involve different cortical circuits, our perceptions of the motor acts and emotive reactions of others appear to be united by a mirror mechanism that permits our brain to immediately understand what we are seeing, feeling or imagining others to be doing, as it triggers the same neural structures (motor or visceromotor respectively) that are responsible for our own actions and emotions.16 My brain has to imagine looking quizzical to understand what someone I see looking quizzical is feeling, but I do not have to actually look quizzical to do so. Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia observe that “the instantaneous understanding of the emotions of others, rendered possible by the emotional mirror neuron system, is a necessary condition for the empathy which lies at the root of most of our more complex inter-individual relationships” and that “which16

Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain, 186, 189, 185, 191–92, 190.



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ever cortical areas are involved, whether motor or visceromotor centres, and whatever the type of mirroring induced, at neural level [sic] the mirror neuron mechanism embodies that modality of understanding which, prior to any form of conceptual and linguistic mediation, gives substance to our experience of others.”17 I would go a step further and suggest that no movement can occur without some emotional coloring – we can say that someone opened a door reluctantly or closed it eagerly, and the reluctance or eagerness is visible as much in the gesture, I would suggest, as on the face; even involuntary visceral functions like the beating of my heart have emotional associations – and that understanding the movements of others thus requires understanding the feelings associated with those movements. Mirroring the movements of others – imagining myself doing what they are doing – always also involves mirroring their feelings – imagining myself feeling what they are feeling.18 Anger and compassion, that is, are associated at the neural level with certain movements and certain movements are associated at the neural level with them. I cannot feel anger without its evoking certain movements, whether or not I carry them out; I cannot, as acting teachers have known for a long time, perform certain movements without their evoking certain feelings. I would thus suggest that, to the degree that the perception or imagination of movements in relation to a medieval artifact generates internal motor representations, it will also generate internal visceromotor representations of the feelings associated with them.19 If I then refine and enhance those movements through experimentation and practice, I will also refine and enhance the feelings associated with them. Like the perception of any unfamiliar object, in sum, the perception of a medieval artifact leads automatically and pre-reflectively, “prior to any form of conceptual and linguistic mediation,” to the evocation of some potential motor acts and some feelings that would 17 18 19

Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain, 190–92. Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia suggest much the same, albeit a bit more guardedly (see Mirrors in the Brain, 173–74). When the first knight was knocked off his horse at the Gulf Coast International Jousting Championships in January 2010, writes Slater, “it was as if someone had sent an electric current through the arena’s aluminum bleachers. Men leapt to their feet with their fists in the air. Teenage girls clutched one another’s arms. Tolle [the unfortunate knight] lay on his back on the ground flanked by two squires and didn’t move for a full minute. When the squires pulled him to his feet, he stumbled and nearly fell again before limping off. ‘I want to see another guy get paralyzed,’ a boy in front of me squealed, waving a toy sword” (“Is Jousting the Next Extreme Sport?”). Jeremy Smith, a competitor in the fall 2010 Tournament of the Phoenix, is quoted as saying “‘Do you know how many meatheads come through here and love it? […] Sure this is a King René style tournament, but you don’t have to know or care who that is to want to watch us beat on each other’” (Buckheit, “Chivalry isn’t dead”).

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not be evoked by a familiar object, and, once these motor acts and feelings have become part of my neural vocabulary, they, or at least some of their components, may be evoked by other objects as well. My motor and visceromotor vocabularies are enhanced and enlarged. I am able to see more practical opportunities in the world than before and have a wider range of feelings than before. The world becomes a denser, richer place. This is what happens, I suggest, when one enters a medieval church. Churches were constructed to encourage certain movements – forward and back rather than from side to side – to draw our attention to certain focal points – forward toward the altar, up to the ceiling, up to the windows at the ends of the transept, the choir, and the nave – and to elicit certain feelings like curiosity, amusement, and a sense of a pattern underlying the physical world. A particular church’s affordances, the practical opportunities that it offers me when I enter it, the movements I can make in relation to it, and the feelings associated with those movements, are inscribed in it. The basic movements the affordances evoke, moreover, are so simple and common even now – walking and looking – that no one, I think, would have any trouble imagining them even in the absence of an observable model. I thus think that a medieval church’s affordances will evoke, at the neural level, internal representations of roughly the same movements and the same feelings in the brain of any human being entering it. The brain of a fanatical skateboarder may hierarchize these movements and feelings differently from mine – his or her vision may be drawn towards the floor rather than the ceiling . . . and so might have been that of someone in the Middle Ages whose job was to push a wheelbarrow – but I suspect that at the neural level there is substantial overlap in our brains between both the movements and the feelings evoked by the perception of the interior of the church and their hierarchization. And ultimately all human beings, to the degree their brains resemble one another, will perceive and imagine, will imagine and mirror largely the same set of movements and feelings. When I perceive the interior of a medieval church, in sum, I experience something similar to what people experienced when they perceived it in the Middle Ages and to what people who perceive it in five hundred years will also experience. Once it has reached the reflective level of the mind, of course, that experience will be articulated differently by different people based on all sorts of cultural and social differences, but at the neural level it must be reasonably similar. I would further suggest that the movements and feelings generated by the perception of the interior of a medieval church are different from those generated by entering a modern church or a different kind of medieval building. Perceiving the interior of a medieval church enriches and enlarges my motor and emotional vocabularies in ways that no other perception



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would do in exactly the same way. It is simultaneously a unique experience and one that I can potentially share with every other human being. This is why two people who have been to Notre Dame of Chartres understand one another’s descriptions of the experience in a way that someone who has not been there never can. And if I enact the set of movements and feelings generated by the perception of the church’s interior by moving through it and looking at it and allowing myself to feel the feelings it was built to evoke, I can further enrich and refine the motor and visceromotor representations the perception has generated. I can become expert at visiting a particular medieval church, or medieval churches in general: with no art historical or historical knowledge, I can, with practice, learn the most affective way to visit a particular church or, to some degree, medieval churches in general, and learn to distinguish the different itineraries and effects generated by different churches. This “revelation of new modes of being,” as Ricœur put it,20 this broadening of our capacity to project ourselves in our own world of everyday experience, this discovery of new possibilities of being-in-the-world through the perception of the artifacts of a past world, also seems to be what Johan Huizinga experienced at an exhibition of works by Flemish Primitives in Bruges in 1902 (an experience that, according to Frank Ankersmit, inspired The Waning of the Middle Ages). At this exhibition, Huizinga later wrote, the details of an engraving by Jan van der Velde (the Younger, I presume) suddenly [gave] […] me the conviction of an immediate contact with the past, a sensation as profound as the profoundest enjoyment of art, an (don’t laugh) almost ekstatic experience of no longer being myself, of a flowing over into a world outside myself, of a getting in touch with the essence of things, of the experience of Truth by history. […] This is the nature of what I call historical sensation.21 Elsewhere, Huizinga wrote: there is in all historical awareness a most momentous component, that is most suitably characterized by the term historical sensation. One could also speak of historical contact. […] This contact with the 20

21

Paul Ricœur, “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” 141; and “Appropriation,” in Paul Ricœur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1981), 192–93. Johan Huizinga, “De taak de cultuurgeschiedenis,” in Johan Huizinga, Verzamelde Werken 7: Geschiedwetenschap, Hedendaagsche Cultuur (Haarlem: H.D. Tjeenk Willink, 1950), 72. Cited and translated by Ankersmit in Sublime Historical Experience, 126.

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past […] is the entrance into a world of its own, it is one of the many variants of ekstasis, of an experience of truth that is given to the human being. […] This contact with the past, that is accompanied by the absolute conviction of complete authenticity and truth, can be provoked by a line from a chronicle, by an engraving, a few sounds from an old song. It is not an element that an author writing in the past deliberately put down in his work. It is “behind” and not “in” the book that the past has left us. The contemporary reader takes it along with himself in his encounter with the author from the past; it is his response to his call.22 Ankersmit seems to suggest that this experience, which he calls “historical experience,” involves some sort of direct contact with the past, but I would suggest that what is discovered or revealed in such experiences is not the past, but new potentialities in the present. Whatever it felt like – that is, however he explained it to himself – Huizinga’s “ekstatic” historical experience at the exhibition of Flemish Primitives was not a moment of unmediated (or even mediated) contact with a past world, not a direct experience of the past, but rather Huizinga’s apprehension, as a result of viewing the engraving, of something new in his world. Viewing the engraving, that is, helped Huizinga broaden his capacity to project himself in his own world of everyday experience in, evidently, a sudden and dramatic way. It is important to realize that Huizinga was in fact enacting a movement – viewing an engraving – that is automatically and immediately generated in the human brain by an engraving’s visual affordances. The engraving’s visual affordances generated a motor representation of viewing it in his brain and he enacted that representation. He was thus enacting the movements and feelings that the engraving had been created to evoke. He was looking at it, consuming it the way its creator had intended it, apparently, to be consumed. But something even more complex was, I think, going on. Viewing an engraving was presumably not a new experience for Huizinga and remains a reasonably common experience today. Simply seeing an engraving, that is, would not necessarily have evoked any new motor- or visceromotorrepresentations in Huizinga’s brain; viewing a work of art was already in his motor- and visceromotor-repertoire. This experience occurred, however, at a formal exhibition of selected works of art, which marked the works in a specific way: they were examples of art from a particular region at a 22

Johan Huizinga, “Het historisch museum,” in Johan Huizinga, Verzamelde Werken 2: Nederland (Haarlem: H.D. Tjeenk Willink, 1950), 566. Translated and discussed by Ankersmit in Sublime Historical Experience, 119–28.



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particular time. Huizinga’s training and background undoubtedly made him especially sensitive to this marking,23 and I do not see how he could not have thought also of a seventeenth-century viewer viewing the engraving. He thus imagined an unobservable past act in relation to that artifact, and this imagined act evoked the same motor- and visceromotor-representations as the artifact’s affordances. He was simultaneously enacting these representations and imagining a seventeenth-century viewer doing so, simultaneously viewing the engraving and imagining a seventeenth-century viewer doing so. The resemblance, the identity in fact, at the neural level between the internal motor representation that he was imagining a seventeenth-century viewer enacting and simultaneously himself enacting produced a profound sense of shared feeling with that imagined early modern viewer. At that moment, that is, Huizinga sensed the deep and broad commonality of human experience: the fact that any human being viewing the engraving would experience at least something of what he was experiencing. The empathetic quality of his experience is clear from his description of it as “sudden,” “immediate,” “profound,” “ekstatic,” and so on.24 I would suggest that this kind of experience does not, however, take place “behind” the artifact, as Huizinga wrote, but rather, as Ricœur puts it, “in front of ” the artifact,25 between the artifact and the viewer – something that Huizinga also suggests when he writes that this experience is the modern observer’s “response” to the past artisan’s “call.” This call emanates from the 23 24

25

See Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 256. Even more was, I think, going on. The “historical sensation” or “historical contact” Huizinga experienced when looking at van der Velde’s engraving, his “almost ekstatic experience of no longer being [him]self, of a flowing over into a world outside [him] self ” was particularly strong, I would suggest, because at a higher mental level, although perhaps still not consciously, Huizinga was probably also imagining what it would be like to live in the past world of the early seventeenth-century viewer of the engraving whose viewing he was imagining – enhancing his sense of empathy with that viewer – and imagining what it would be like to live in the fictional world projected by the engraving, an act of imagination he also shared with the imagined seventeenth-century viewer. He was imagining what it would be like for him to live in the seventeenth-century viewer’s world, and was imagining sharing both his (I imagine Huizinga imagined a man) viewing of the engraving, and his imagining of what it would be like to live in the world projected by the engraving. As Ankersmit points out, “the visual arts, more than anything else,” are likely to produce this sense of a shared experience (Sublime Historical Experience, 134). We can consume relatively intact artistic products in roughly the same way that their original consumers did and be moved or shaped by them in analogous ways. This is why we can, for example, learn something about past “emotionologies” from past stories (see Jeff Rider, “The Inner Life of Women in Medieval Romance Literature,” in The Inner Life of Women in Medieval Romance Literature: Grief, Guilt and Hypocrisy, ed. Jeff Rider and Jamie Friedman [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011], 1–25). Ricœur, “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” 140.

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artificial affordances with which the past artisan has endowed an artifact, and the response is generated by the observer’s motor- and visceromotorrepertoire. The interaction takes place “in front of ” the artifact, between the artifact and the modern observer, or, more accurately, within the brain of the observer. It is one part of the brain’s response to the call, to the action proposals, of another part of the brain. The simplest way in which our interactions with medieval artifacts enrich the present is thus to generate a set of motor acts and feelings associated with them that may be at least partially unlike those suggested by any modern object: by enlarging our motor- and visceromotor-vocabularies. Without such artifacts, we would have smaller, simpler, ruder motor- and visceromotor-repertoires. We preserve medieval artifacts, and other past artifacts, precisely because they enable us to have larger motor- and visceromotorrepertoires than could be created by only contemporary objects, and because of the ideas they generate. Replicas Certain medieval artifacts, like churches or castles, may be relatively accessible, but relatively few people are able to handle, or even to see, smaller medieval artifacts. Replicas of these artifacts are, however, reasonably accessible, and, since the affordances of any object are visual, these replicas evoke, to at least some degree, the same internal motor- and visceromotor-representations that the authentic artifact would evoke. It is probably the case that two-dimensional replicas – images, whether electronic, photographic, or artistic – evoke these representations less well than three-dimensional replicas simply because we can see all of a three-dimensional replica’s affordances, while some of those of a two-dimensional replica’s remain hidden, but the material composition of replicas is important only insofar as it affects our visual perception of the object. The visual affordances of a good plastic replica of a medieval sword, that is, will evoke the same internal motor- and visceromotor-representations as the original. The material composition of a replica is important if one seeks to enhance and refine these representations by manipulating it. The manipulation of a virtual sword in a video game, for example, may enhance and refine to some degree (depending on the sophistication and realism of the program running it) the internal motor- and visceromotor-representations evoked by the visual affordances it shares with the real sword it replicates, but it will not do so anywhere near as well as would the manipulation of a replica that reproduces, insofar as possible, the original’s material composition. As the material variation between the replica and the original shrinks, moreover, the difference between them grows less important from the point of view of



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the evocation, refinement, and enhancement of motor- and visceromotorrepresentations. When the material variation between the replica of a latetwelfth-century northern French sword and the original is no greater than the material variation between one late-twelfth-century northern French sword and another, the replica is in fact every bit as good as the original for the evocation, refinement, and enhancement of the motor- and visceromotorrepresentations evoked by the original. The very best sort of replica not only reproduces the original’s affordances and material composition but is produced, insofar as possible, with the same tools and methods as the original. The “thirteenth-century” castle currently under construction in Burgundy is an example of this kind of replica.26 This project – Guédelon – began in 1997 and is expected to be completed in 2020. According to the Guédelon website:   Guédelon is a field of experimental archaeology – a kind of open-air laboratory.   The aim is to recreate the site organization and the construction processes that might have existed on an early 13th century building site. Unlike traditional archaeology, which is concerned with cataloguing, excavating and analysing an existing structure, experimental archaeology puts this process into reverse. A structure is built from start to finish in order to obtain, following experiments and observations, a set of conclusive results.   Guédelon is a back-to-front archaeological dig.27

26 27

The website of the castle project may be found at: [accessed 6 August 2014]. [accessed 6 August 2014]. On “experimental archeology,” see also [accessed 6 August 2014], and [accessed 6 August 2014]. I should perhaps point out that I am not unaware of the popular and lucrative aspects of this project. It was started by Michel Guyot, who restored and owns Saint-Fargeau castle in Yonne, where he stages a massive, six-hundred-actor spectacle for a month every summer presenting ten centuries of history in an hour and a half. The project is open to the paying public and has a strong popular dimension: Guédelon, for example, is visited each year by “around 60,000 schoolchildren,” has a “tavern” where one may sample medieval-inspired fare, and an online store ( [accessed 6 August 2014], [accessed 6 August 2014], [accessed 6 August 2014]). But castles were of course already a means of extracting money from people in the Middle Ages.

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Distanciation One of the pillars of the broad intellectual, indeed cultural, trend that became dominant in the social sciences in the 1870s and is generally labeled positivism was the systematic devaluation of the cognitive, scientific utility of emotions, especially of empathy.28 Objectivity had to triumph over subjectivity (in reaction, one supposes, to Romanticism). One aspect of this systematic devaluation was the denial of empathy as a form of historical understanding.29 This trend and its resistance to empathy as a form of historical investigation may have lost its dominance around the 1970s, but it is still well established today. 30 As Alexander Cook has noted, a “tendency to privilege a visceral, emotional engagement with the past at the expense of a more analytical treatment” is still one of the major concerns with “sympathetic identification” with past people, and there is still quite a bit of “suspicion,” “perplexity, hostility,” “cynicism,” and “anxiety” among “academic historians” about enactment and the sympathetic identification with past people it suggests as a historical method or tool. Although Cook is himself generally sympathetic towards what I have termed enactment as a means of historical study, even he cautions that “there is a legitimate question whether such an objective stands in tension with the critical distance that can be one of the greatest tools of historical investigation.”31 Given that the distance between us and the medieval worlds and people is infinite (since those worlds no longer exist), and given that medieval artifacts are as physically present to us as any other objects in our world and have always already evoked motor- and visceromotor-representations in our brains before we start thinking about them, it would seem that the object from which academic historians want to maintain a critical distance (that is, neither too far nor too near) cannot be either those vanished worlds and people or their surviving artifacts. I would suggest, rather, that the object from which historians want to maintain a critical distance is their own imaginings of past movements, people, and worlds. They want to discipline 28 29

30

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On the more recent recognition of the cognitive role of emotions, see Rider, “The Inner Life of Women,” 1–2. For an interesting and complex reaction to this trend, which both embraced and resisted it, see Jeff Rider, “Roger Sherman Loomis: Medievalism as Anti-Modernism,” in Studies in Medievalism VI: Medievalism in North America, ed. Kathleen Verduin (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), 143–62. See Jeff Rider and Alan V. Murray, “Introduction,” in Galbert of Bruges and the Historiography of Medieval Flanders, ed. Jeff Rider and Alan V. Murray (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 7–9. See also Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 160–91. Alexander Cook, “The Use and Abuse of Historical Reenactment: Thoughts on Recent Trends in Public History,” Criticism 46 (2004): 488, 495 n2, 490.



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their imaginations. Historians try to mix as little of their own subjectivity as possible into the unobservable past movements they imagine in relation to an artifact so that those movements will be as new and unfamiliar to them as possible, and thus enrich and enlarge as much as possible their neural vocabularies of movement and feelings.32 It is thus clear why enactment, which appropriates those imagined movements and reduces their strangeness by bringing them closer and making them ours, is anathema to objectivist historians. The vehemence, energy, and institutional armature with which this disciplining of the imagination, this maintenance of a critical distance between our imaginings of our world of everyday experience and of past worlds, is still often promoted and defended is a good indication of the usefulness of the otherness of past worlds as a means of enriching the present. It also indicates, however, that such objectivity – such a refusal to engage emotionally and subjectively with the past world one imagines – is unnatural, for only a struggle against nature would require such means. As was noted earlier, “empathy,” as Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia write, “lies at the root of most of our more complex inter-individual relationships” and mirroring the movements and feelings of others, the basis of this empathy, is what “prior to any form of conceptual and linguistic mediation, gives substance to our experience of others.”33 Empathetic identification with others, that is, is the natural neural way to approach other people: to assimilate them to us; to replicate their actions and emotions. It is thus unnatural for us to imagine past people without feeling empathy, or at least sympathy, for them, and one has to wonder about the value of any method that begins by denying this and struggling against it. Because our neural system automatically and immediately sees the affordances offered to us by every object, we cannot imagine a past world without imagining it as a world full of practical opportunities for us, without projecting ourselves into it, just as we project ourselves into our everyday world. If we imagine a past world with people in it, we draw on our internal, neural motor- and emotional-vocabularies to imagine them doing and feeling things, and our brain spontaneously, immediately, and pre-reflectively creates representations of their imagined movements and feelings that are necessarily familiar to us since they are composed of elements in our motor- and emotional-vocabularies. This could all be very solipsistic were it not for artifacts, whose affordances suggest new, unfamiliar movements, movements we could not otherwise imagine, and the feelings associated with them. This is 32 33

On the way our imaginings of past worlds do this, see Rider, “L’Utilité du Moyen Âge.” Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain, 190–92.

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what Ricœur describes by means of the notions of distanciation and appropriation.34 Artifacts, like texts, point to movements, feelings, and ultimately worlds that do not, or at least no longer, exist. Our brain automatically and inevitably imagines these movements, feelings, and worlds at the neural, pre-reflective level but possibly at higher psychological levels as well. These artifacts thus permit us to distance ourselves from ourselves in imagination, to imagine doing, feeling, and being otherwise, and then to appropriate this otherness, creating a new, larger self. The appropriation of the imagined past movements, feelings, and world proposed by the artifacts is thus not necessarily either solipsistic or self-congratulatory. “What is ‘made our own,’” in this appropriation, Ricœur wrote: is the projection of a world, the proposal of a mode of being-in-theworld … appropriation is the process by which the revelation of new modes of being – or, if you prefer Wittgenstein to Heidegger, new “forms of life” – give the subject new capacities for knowing himself. If the reference of a text [or artifact] is the projection of a world, then it is not in the first instance the reader [observer] who projects himself. The reader [observer] is rather broadened in his capacity to project himself by receiving a new mode of being from the text [artifact] itself. Thus appropriation ceases to appear as a kind of possession, as a way of taking hold of […]. It implies instead a moment of dispossession of the narcissistic ego […]. Only the interpretation which satisfies the injunction of the text [artifact], which follows the “arrow” of meaning and endeavours to “think in accordance with” it, engenders a new “selfunderstanding.” “To understand,” Ricœur concludes, “is not to project oneself into the text; it is to receive an enlarged self from the apprehension of proposed worlds which are the genuine object of interpretation.”35 Or, as Bruno Latour observes: Each artifact has its script, its “affordance,” its potential to take hold of passersby and force them to play roles in its story. […] You are 34

35

See Ricœur, “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation” and its later versions – “La Fonction herméneutique de la distanciation,” in Exegesis: Problèmes de méthode et exercices de lecture (Genèse 22 et Luc 15), ed. François Bovon and Grégoire Rouiller (Neuchâtel; Paris: Delachaux & Niestlé, 1975), 201–15; and “The Hermeneutical function of Distanciation,” in Ricœur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 131–44 – as well as Ricœur, “Appropriation.” Ricœur, “Appropriation,” 192–93, 182–83.



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different with a gun in hand; the gun is different with you holding it. You are another subject because you hold the gun; the gun is another object because it has entered into a relationship with you. The gun is no longer the gun-in-the-armory or the gun-in-the-drawer or the gunin-the-pocket, but the gun-in-your-hand, aimed at someone who is screaming. […] Neither subject nor object (nor their goals) is fixed.36 From this point of view, the “accuracy” of our imaginings of past movements in relation to past artifacts and the feelings associated with them is unimportant and cannot, in any case, be tested. All that matters is that the observer learn something new through this act of imagination and enlarge and enhance his or her motor- and visceromotor-repertoire. Children – or bankers – playing at being knights with plastic swords may not be enacting very accurately the movements and feelings associated with early twelfthcentury northern French swords, but they may be learning a great deal and may live richer lives because of it.37 Discouraging the appropriation and enactment of the motor- and visceromotor-representations we imagine with respect to past artifacts is impossible, at the neural level, unnatural, and unproductive. It narrows our capacity to project ourselves in the world of everyday experience and limits our possibilities of being in it.

36 37

Latour, “On Technical Mediation,” 31, 33. For some reflections on artifacts, enactment, and learning, see Janet Coles and Paul Armstrong, “Living history: learning through re-enactment,” a paper presented at the 38th Annual SCUTREA Conference, 2–4 July 2008, University of Edinburgh, [accessed 6 August 2014], and Kokila Vani Nagalingam “The Art of Re-constructing the Past: Historical Empathy through Artefact Creation,” The International Journal of the Humanities, 9.3 (2011): 223–34 ( [accessed 6 August 2014]).

Alfred the Little: Medievalism, Politics, and the Poet Laureate Megan Arnott On 11 January 1896 the literary magazine Punch published a cartoon of poet laureate Alfred Austin wearing the classic poet’s garb, complete with sandals and laurels, stretching, grasping for a lyre, which is just out of reach (Fig. 1). The caption reads: Alfred the Little . . . “The Queen has been pleased to appoint Alfred Austin, Esq. to be Poet Laureate to Her Majesty” – Daily Papers, January 1, 1896.1 Appointed poet laureate in 1896, Austin was a Tory, a supporter of Lord Salisbury, a friend of Queen Victoria, and a very prolific poet. His contemporaries, however, did not consider him to be a very good poet. Robert Browning famously called him the “Banjo-Byron that twangs the strumstrum there.”2 “Banjo-Byron” did not stick to him as much as “Alfred the Little.” This was a particularly cruel, though particularly apt nickname. It referred first to his diminutive stature; Austin was very short, barely five feet tall.3 More importantly, it referred to the difference between Austin’s literary talent and that of Alfred Tennyson, who preceded Austin as poet laureate. The Critic, the British literary magazine, for instance, wrote in its “Notes” section that:

1 2 3

“Alfred the Little,” Punch, 11 January 1896, 14. Norton B. Cromwell, Alfred Austin Victorian (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1955), 29. Cromwell, Victorian, 203.

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Figure 1.  Alfred the Little, Punch

Mr. Austin has been a prolific writer, but at sixty he has made but little reputation as a poet. One thing, however, he has in common with his predecessor: his Christian name. Tennyson has occasionally been called Alfred the Great. He will be called so oftener hereafter.4 Austin was an object of criticism, not just because his poetry was subpar, but because he made himself a target. The biggest source of amusement for contemporaries like the editors of Punch was that the grandeur of Austin’s ego constantly undermined his talents. Norton Cromwell, who wrote the only book-length biography of Austin, observed that Austin was a target because his “inimitable egotism, unrelieved by any trace of humor, sent the nation into guffaws of laughter.”5 It was Austin’s most public flop that earned him a nickname tinged with the medieval. Critics derived the name “Alfred the Little” from Austin’s medieval drama England’s Darling, which he wrote in verse the same year he became poet laureate. In his preface Austin claims it is the first drama about 4 5

Cromwell, Victorian, 156. Cromwell, Victorian, 198.



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Alfred the Great, the King of Wessex who ruled from 871 to 899.6 It was not (as both Clare Simmons and Joanne Parker point out in their studies of Victorian medievalisms), but it was one of Austin’s most widely criticized works.7 Not only did Austin publish it in 1896, the same year that he would subject himself to the most scrutiny as new poet laureate, but it made poor use of archaic language, lacked any semblance of realism, and said little new about King Alfred.8 In total Austin wrote six works of a medievalist nature, including five poems and one play: “The Passing of Merlin” (the only one written before he was poet laureate), “The Spotless King,” “The Death of Harald Hardrada,” “Harold and Tostig,” “Victoria” (which was written for the Queen on the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee), and finally England’s Darling. This is not much, considering his overall output, but these poems demonstrate both Austin’s interest in making literature political and the political use of the medieval as a literary trope. Austin’s conservative politics, including his prescriptive views on gender roles and social hierarchies, shape every word of these works. Austin employs the medieval world to help assert his ideal of what it is to be English – an ideal that was patriarchal, aristocratic, but above all patriotic. By the time he was elected poet laureate, Austin had well established his interests in politics and in the politics of poetry. Born in 1835, Austin grew up at Headingley, which was a rural parish near Leeds. His father, Joseph Austin, was in the wool-stapling trade and a decided Whig. He instilled many lessons in his son that Austin would reflect on in his later autobiography.9 Alfred Austin ran twice for the Tory party and was defeated both times – once for Taunton in 1865 and then for Dewsbury in Yorkshire in 1878.10 In 1883 he found one way to bring together his passions for writing (he had been writing poetry for publication since 1855) and politics when he and W. J. Courthope founded the Conservative paper The National Review.11 However, as poet laureate, Austin found his true political calling. Throughout his career as laureate, from 1896 until his death in 1913, Austin tried, in his own words, to “guide the thinking of the nation into the paths that make it 6 7

8 9 10 11

BBC, “Alfred the Great” (2012), BBC British History, 15 November 2012, ; Cromwell, Victorian, 232. Clare Simmons, Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 40; Joanne Parker, “England’s Darling”: The Victorian Cult of Alfred the Great (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 63. Cromwell, Victorian, 234. Cromwell, Victorian, 3. Cromwell, Victorian, 11, 15; Alfred Austin, The Autobiography of Alfred Austin Poet Laureate: 1835–1910 (London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd, 1911), 188. Cromwell, Victorian, 18.

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great: [the poet laureate] must, then, instill the spirit of patriotism into each heart.”12 In later years, when asked why he appointed Austin to the position of poet laureate, Lord Salisbury is reported to have replied “for the best possible reason, because he wanted it.”13 Austin saw the laureate position as his way to make a mark on the governing of England. Throughout this long career Austin made himself a target by politicizing literature. He wrote several tracts of criticism in addition to his literary work. In these he not only derided the English literary circles in general, but devoted whole chapters to the critique of contemporary poets. For instance, in The Poetry of the Period (1870) Austin’s chapter about Swinburne states that Swinburne “travesties” the Hellenic period he writes about: and in what way does he travesty them? By eliminating all that was masculine – and what a masculine epoch it was! – and intensifying and exaggerating what was not masculine by aid of his modern feminine lens.14 Austin says of Browning that, “Mr. Browning not having a poetical organization, but rather a philosophical one, cannot, in his assumed rôle of poet, assimilate into verse these fresh scientific theories.”15 This no doubt provoked the “Banjo-Byron” remark. The Poetry of the Period outlines the reasons there are no great poets of the age. Austin argues circularly that it is because the age is not a great one for poetry: “great poets are the unambiguous representative voice of decisive eras that have arrived at some definite conclusion.”16 For Austin the poverty of the poetry “proves the feminine, timorous, narrow, domesticated temper of the times.”17 Austin ponders “what is one of the chief marks of great poetry?” and answers “surely, action.”18 Austin is arguing early on for a conflation between literary men and men of the world, between literature and politics. This is a theme that appears more developed near the end of his career as poet laureate in The Bridling of Pegasus, published in 1910. Here Austin argues that “the highest literary eminence is not attainable by persons who stand aloof, and have always stood aloof, from the field of action.”19 As Cromwell observes 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Cromwell, Victorian, 188. Cromwell, Victorian, 157. Alfred Austin, The Poetry of the Period (London: Richard Bentley, 1870), 88. Austin, Poetry of the Period, 45. Austin, Poetry of the Period, 281. Austin, Poetry of the Period, 273. Austin, Poetry of the Period, 274. Alfred Austin, The Bridling of Pegasus: Prose Papers on Poetry (London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd, 1910), 223.



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in his biography, Austin conceived of the poet-laureate job as a political one, but did not believe this compromised his literature.20 However, Austin acknowledges that this makes him a target: [i]t may, perhaps, be taken as an absolute rule that a man of letters who takes a conspicuous interest in contemporary politics thereby debars himself to a considerable extent from literary popularity in his lifetime; a matter of little moment, however, since to every reflective mind contemporary popularity is no pledge of enduring fame, while contemporary neglect is not necessarily an omen of eternal oblivion.21 In this statement Austin makes himself a target of his contemporaries, not only because he seems to think that his poetry will stand the test of time, which seems like pure arrogance, especially when time has proved otherwise, but specifically because he conceives of literature as a political act. This point of view certainly brings Austin into conflict with contemporaries like Oscar Wilde. Wilde, in the preface to The Portrait of Dorian Gray, takes the opposite view of Austin, demonstrating a belief that literature is not written to influence men’s actions: “[t]here is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all. […] No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.”22A distinction can certainly be made between Wilde’s “ethics” and Austin’s “politics,” but for Austin ethics and politics overlap: “politics mean, or ought to mean, the practical concerns of the many, of the state, of the Empire, or of mankind at large, as contradistinguished from the mere personal or class interests.”23 Wilde and Austin stand as polar opposites on this issue, though, as Jil Larson points out, Wilde’s novel is not without a moral, and as Cromwell shows, Austin’s garden poetry may be Austin’s best received work, with little obvious action implied. Larson demonstrates how late-Victorian writers like Wilde, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James are working through ethical dilemmas, demonstrating the ways that one’s will may be constrained, and how one may not act how one wishes given external pressures. These “New Ethics” resist the idea of normative truth.24 Conversely, Austin, although he is also working through ethical 20 21 22 23 24

Cromwell, Victorian, 188. Austin, The Bridling of Pegasus, 229. Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Dorian Gray (London: Ward, Lock and Company, 1891; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3. Austin, The Bridling of Pegasus, 222. Jil Larson, Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel 1880–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 111; Cromwell, Victorian, 261.

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dilemmas via narrative, is espousing a moral normative truth. Austin is not trying to play out a dilemma of personal choices; he is instead trying to give voice to those truths that should impact personal as well as political decisions. In his medieval poetry those truths that influence decisions include “masculine” values, the rights of monarchy and nobility, and, most importantly, a love of country. Wilde no doubt disliked this “mannerism of style.”25 Interestingly, Austin had shunned the use of historical settings in his poetry, even deriding writers such as William Morris for his reliance on a medieval past, stating “he finds no life in anything living, in anything round and about him; and he feels no impulse to strive vainly to vitalize them.”26 But Austin’s perspectives on poetry altered as he matured. Cromwell contends that Austin changed because his conservatism grew, because he was satisfied with his temporal lot, and chiefly because he was driven by imperialist and patriotic zeal.27 Yet his belief that poetry should be masculine, and that it should reflect and inspire the great objectives of the period in which it is written, seems to have stayed the same from his early career until his later days as poet laureate. Austin’s medievalisms drip with implications for his contemporaries, especially when compared with Morris’s engagement with the Middle Ages. Andrew Wawn says that “for Morris translation [of Icelandic texts] was more a private communion with the past.”28 And, Austin would agree: Morris engages in the past for its own sake, whereas Austin openly aspires that his use of the Middle Ages will be relevant and instructive for his readers. Austin uses the medieval to re-enforce his idea of English character. He generalizes the medieval past in order to particularize the present.29 Austin especially engages in the past in order to communicate imperialism and patriotism/jingoism. That this poetry also reflects his views on social and gender hierarchies demonstrates how much Austin incorporated these concepts into his notions of Englishness. By employing the Middle Ages as subject matter, Austin wished to imbue his audience with pride in an ancestral country and shining examples of when and why one should fight for it. Austin is worth studying, mostly for the same reasons he was largely criticized (although the poor use of poetic forms may remain) – his poetry represents an extreme of English conservatism in Victorian Britain, and although his medievalist verse 25 26 27 28 29

Larson, Ethics, 11. Austin, Poetry of the Period, 145. Cromwell, Victorian, 96. Andrew Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in 19th-Century Britain (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 253. Clare Simmons, Popular Medievalisms in Romantic-Era Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 12.



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represents a very small portion of his overall writing, it very demonstrably shows his politics and places him in a political and literary community using the Middle Ages to express national(ist) pride. Austin wrote his first medieval poem, “The Passing of Merlin,” in 1892, four years before he was appointed poet laureate. In many respects it stands out from the other five works that Austin wrote after he became laureate. For one thing, its focus is England’s legendary past, and not the historical events or characters of the others. However, the penultimate stanza places this legendary history in a relevant trajectory to England’s glorious future: From Arthur unto Alfred, Alfred crowned Monarch and Minstrel both, to Edward’s day, From Edward to Elizabeth, the lay Of valour and love hath never ceased to sound, But Song and Sword are twin, indissolubly bound.30 (XVIII, 1–5) The poem is a love song to England and to what it is to be English. The final stanza adds: Nor shall in Britain Taliessin tire Transmitting through his stock the sacred strain. When fresh renown prolongs Victoria’s Reign, Some patriot hand will sweep the living lyre, And prove, with native notes, that Merlin was his sire. (XIX, 1–5) Austin actively uses the medieval both to show examples of how being English will make the reader great, but also to exhort the reader to be proud of being English. In this example, English stock, English songs, English legends, and English history are being praised, but there is also an exhortation to sing the praises of England: “For never hath England lacked a voice to sing / Her fairness and her fame, nor will she now” (XVII, 1–2). The reason Austin evokes the medieval is to give an example of proper patriotic behavior, and to give people a reason to do likewise. In the Quarterly Review in January, 1880 Austin stated: there never must come a time when the rulers of this country think it within the province of their duty, even to contemplate as a possibility 30

Alfred Austin, “ The Passing of Merlin,” England’s Darling (London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd, 1896).

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the smallest diminution of the territories of the British Empire, or to shrink from their forcible extension, if the only choice lies between advance and retreat. They should perpetually bear in mind that to the English race, as to the Roman, an imperial commission has been given.31 This statement throws light on Austin’s choices of medieval settings for his literature. The Middle Ages spans nearly a thousand years, but Austin confines his choices to subjects that will inspire an English audience with their Englishness. Overwhelmingly, Austin’s medieval subject matter is AngloSaxon. Clare Simmons demonstrates how in the Victorian Age there was a binary between Norman and Saxon, between invader and “English,” though it was not always so neat. In her book Reversing the Conquest, Simmons says the Victorian period was a time “when moral judgments and heroes and villains were seen to be a valid part of history.”32 Austin is interested in specimens of “Englishness,” who become the heroes of his history. From Austin’s perspective the ancestors of the English were the Anglo-Saxons. Of the six aforementioned texts, two of those (England’s Darling and “The Spotless King”) are about King Alfred, king of Wessex and the AngloSaxons. In “Victoria” the comparison between Alfred and Victoria is the only thing that allows this poem to be studied for medievalism. As has been shown, Alfred is referenced in “The Passing of Merlin” as an important part of English greatness. In the preface to England’s Darling Austin calls Alfred “the greatest of Englishmen.”33 He goes on to list the qualities that make him deserve this title. For Austin, this is exactly why dramas should be written about Alfred: “well may Englishmen revere these qualities in Alfred; for, while they constitute him their ideal and their darling, they are the qualities which founded, and which can alone maintain, the English Empire.”34 This preface suggests that Austin believes he must write this play to keep Alfred in people’s minds, in order to achieve a political goal of maintaining empire. It also explains the title of the play, England’s Darling. An “ethical sympathy,” as Wilde would derisively call it, is helping Austin to achieve his political ends. In “Victoria” there is one reference to England’s medieval past in the thirty-stanza poem, but it consists of a comparison between the Queen and Alfred the Great:

31 32 33 34

Cromwell, Victorian, 189. Simmons, Reversing the Conquest, 12. Alfred Austin, England’s Darling, x. Austin, England’s Darling, xiii.



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Thus with grave utterance and majestic mien She with her eighteen summers filled the Throne Where Alfred sate: a girl, withal a Queen, Aloft, alone!35 In this context the reference to Alfred is meant to give the throne itself majesty. The mere mention of Alfred is calculated to mean something already to an English audience. It is also meant to draw parallels between Victoria and the Anglo-Saxon past. Simmons discusses the connection made in political and literary spheres between Victoria and the Anglo-Saxon past: “if Alfred had symbolized the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon Golden Age, in a strange reversal Victoria drew the spirit of the nation into her own: her personality was reflected in the entire nation.”36 Austin tapped into this political current, elevating the status of the Anglo-Saxons as the true ancestors of the English, and into what Joanne Parker has called the “cult” of King Alfred.37 In Austin’s list of the qualities of King Alfred, it is clear that loyalty to one’s country, militancy, and masculinity are important parts of his character. Austin, from his political sympathies (akin to ethical sympathies), would be moved to choose Alfred as a model because Alfred was responsible for bringing together many kingdoms, a sort of early English empire. This is what, for Austin, makes Alfred a good Englishman. And, Cromwell suggests, “the word [ancestral] grows in importance in [Austin’s] vocabulary as the years come upon him.”38 In Austin’s take on medieval history the AngloSaxons are privileged due to their inherently indigenous, ancestral nature and so are good stand-ins for all of England. Austin wrote “The Spotless King” in 1901 for the Millenary Celebrations at Winchester in 1901. As the embodiment of England Alfred is luminous:   Some lights there be within the Heavenly Spheres Yet unrevealed, the interspace so vast: So through the distance of a thousand years Alfred’s full radiance shines on us at last.39

35 36 37 38 39

Alfred Austin, “Victoria – June 20, 1837. June 20, 1897,” Songs of England (London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd, 1900), XIV, 1–4. Simmons, Reversing the Conquest, 177. Parker, “England’s Darling,” 33. Cromwell, Victorian, 71. Alfred Austin, “The Spotless King,” Lyra Historica: Poems of British History A.D. 61–1910, ed. M. E. Windson and J. Turral (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), 1–4.

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At the end of the poem Austin names four places around England that are associated with Alfred: Athelney, Ethandune, Wantage, and Winchester. The implication is that by mentioning them in conjunction with Alfred, Alfred can help elevate the very land where he was king. Austin implies that by marking England with references to Alfred we are doing England a service. Parker argues that the 1901 Winchester celebration, celebrating the supposed thousandth anniversary of Alfred’s death, was significant because: it was not just an isolated tribute but rather the pièce de résistance of a pervasive nineteenth-century cult of King Alfred which included the erection of at least three other statues, the completion of more than twenty-five paintings and, most strikingly, the publication of over a hundred works of literature.40 Although Austin’s viewpoints were passé in many literary circles, Austin was, in some ways, a mouthpiece for a large part of the Victorian population who felt “ancestral” to be a large portion of Englishness. Though his is not a voice that has caught much attention in the twentieth century, through his medievalist poetry he was following the guidelines he set out in The Poetry of the Period and trying to make great poetry by being a voice of a great number of people. Austin also wrote two poems, “Death of Harold Hardrada” and “Harold and Tostig,” that jump forward in time two hundred years, from the ninth century and Alfred, to 1066 and the Conquest. Unlike the other poems, “Death of Harold Hardrada” focuses on a Norwegian, not an English king:   And with holy rites, in far-off Norway, Tomb him, peaceful after all his battles. Forth to seawards sweep the Northmen’s galleys, Bearing home the restful son of Sigurd. So fell Harold, last of all the Vikings, Scald, by scalds sung, Harold of the fair hair.41 Since he is Norwegian and not English, Harald Hardrada has to die. Harold Godwinson’s death, also in 1066, is not the subject of the poem. The event

40

41

Joanne Parker, “The Day of a Thousand Years,” Studies in Medievalism XII: Film and Fiction: Reviewing the Middle Ages, ed. Tom Shippey and Martin Arnold (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), 115. Alfred Austin, “Death of Harold Hardrada,” in Lyra Historica, 17–22.



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described in the poem, the Battle of Stamford Bridge, takes place on English soil and was actually a great success for the Anglo-Saxon king, Harold Godwinson. The Battle of Hastings, a disastrous Anglo-Saxon/English loss, directly followed the Battle of Stamford Bridge and resulted in the Conquest, making that last victory at Stamford Bridge an even more important one. The Battle of Stamford Bridge is often a footnote to the Battle of Hastings, but in his poetry Austin makes this last Anglo-Saxon victory the main event. The Anglo-Saxon loss to the Normans is the footnote, and the victory over the Norwegians is the example of English martial prowess from 1066 that should inspire pride and patriotism in the hearts of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century public. This theme is continued in “Harold and Tostig.” Tostig Godwinson was Harold’s brother. When Tostig lost his position as earl in Northumbria his brother Harold did not support him. In some versions of the story of the Conquest Tostig is the one who convinces Harald Hardrada to invade. Tostig is a complicated figure in the poem. He is not on the side of the English, but he gives his reasons; when Harold says that Tostig will once again be earl of Northumbria, Tostig says “Friendship had ye proffered then, full surely, / Better had it been this day for England.”42 He is a betrayer of the English, but feels he has been wronged. At the end Tostig proves his worth by standing, to the bitter end, with his new ally: “Never Northman this shall say of Tostig, / That, with Sigurd’s son, I, warring westward, / Basely left him.”43 Loyalty to one’s cause and to one’s lord are lauded here as part of a warrior’s life. This is the closest Austin comes in this portion of his body of work of playing out an ethical, or at least political, dilemma via narrative. However, the decisions Tostig makes represent his commitment to fight for his king, showing how his political sympathies override all other considerations, including personal safety. Tostig is an object of criticism because he is on the wrong side of the battle, he is with the Northmen instead of the English, but as a warrior and a man he is praiseworthy for remaining loyal to the side that he seems to realize can no longer win. These Conquest poems focus on the tragedy of the losers but are once again exalting the victories of the Anglo-Saxons. The overt reason the medieval is employed is to express and inspire patriotism, but other aspects of Austin’s conservative politics are mirrored in his medievalist poetry. For instance, much of Austin’s criticism of other poets is about how what they write is too feminine.44 In his Autobiography Austin writes that his friends agreed that “Tennyson’s muse was rather a feminine

42 43 44

Alfred Austin, “Harold and Tostig,” in Lyra Historica, 9–10. Austin, “Harold and Tostig,” 22–24. Cromwell, Victorian, 133.

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than a masculine one in tone and power.”45 He clung to the belief that good poetry was crafted in a masculine way.46 Austin insisted that women’s influence on art “has been unmitigatedly mischievous.”47 In part this is related to his belief that the great poet must not only be a witness of the day’s events, but must act in them too: “by action thought is rendered more masculine, attains to greater breadth, and acquires a certain nobleness and dignity.”48 It is hard to separate his poetic misogyny from his anti-suffragette politics. In his essay titled “Female Suffrage, Society and State,” published in The Times on 7 January 1909, Austin asked “will anyone deny that, in great emergencies, men are, as a rule and collectively, calmer and more submissive to sound judgment than women, whose virtues reside rather in another direction?”49 According to Austin, the realm of literature and the realm of politics should be left to men. The privileging of masculinity in Austin’s poems can be seen in his medievalist works. The medieval poems are a sub-genre of Austin’s martial poems, implying courage and honor and traditional masculine values. Even before his appointment as laureate, Austin reused his militaristic metaphors throughout his career. Images that represent England and “Britannia,” many of which have roots in the Middle Ages, are often repeated. The overuse of the same imagery is one of the many criticisms of Austin’s poetry; he repeats “the British lion ‘crisping his mane’: the rolling ramparts; the bastion of the brine; the fawning foam; England smiling in victory, hand on undrawn sword; the girding of loins, etc.”50 If we take the sword as an example, this is an image that is repeated in the volume Songs of England at least fourteen times in twenty-four poems. Austin personally presented Songs of England to soldiers headed to the Boer War.51 The poems within the volume, which include such works as “Who Would Not Die for England” and “Why England is Conservative,” all celebrate England and martial prowess. In his later poems Austin embraces the blatantly medieval and his medieval imagery is military imagery. The “Death of Harold Hardrada” celebrates a warrior culture and the idea that it is honorable to die in battle. “Harold and Tostig” sets the scene on the field of battle:

45 46 47 48 49 50 51

Austin, Autobiography, 1–2. Cromwell, Victorian, 9. Austin, Poetry of the Period, 79–94. Austin, The Bridling of Pegasus, 223. Cromwell, Victorian, 14. Cromwell, Victorian, 195. Cromwell, Victorian, 196.



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FORTH from England’s ranks a score of horsemen Ride, their chargers mailed, and mailed their riders. Near the Northmen’s steel array up-reining “Where is Tostig” shouts their kingly leader.52 The martial/medieval poems are guaranteed to be masculine poetry, by what we can perceive as Austin’s standards. They are full of the “action” that Austin insists upon as masculine. In the medieval poems women have no role, except in “Death of Harold Hardrada” where one passive woman appears, anonymous in the context of the poem: “Long his Queen shall watching look to westward,/ Look across the long waves for his coming” (5–6). In this poetry Austin portrays historical figures who would die to defend their martial code, patriotic to the last. Here women’s role is to support and mourn their men. By giving women this role in his medievalist poetry, which gives Englishmen “ancestral” examples, Austin aligns his idea of masculinity with his ideas of Englishness. Austin asks men, when presented with a choice, to choose the more “masculine” option, according to his definition of masculine, whether in poetry or in life. For him “masculine” is a normative truth. If women’s role is diminished, so is the role of anyone with status less than that of an earl. The medieval world of Austin’s poetry is an aristocratic one, if not a royal one. Alfred, Harold Hardrada, and Harold Godwinson are all kings, and Tostig is an earl. Throughout Austin’s poetry he maintains a social hierarchy; Cromwell states that “the disaffected, the iconoclasts, the radicals in his books may be hero or villain; but those who submit to their destiny and remain content in their station, high or low, are happy, harmonious, and socially constructive.”53 According to Simmons, medieval imagery in Victorian England was widely used to evoke people’s ancient rites and to confirm “present-day privilege.”54 The poems praise the actions and honorable sentiments of these aristocrats. Even Earl Tostig, in “Harold and Tostig,” is praiseworthy for not giving up his allegiance with the enemy, even though he is a traitor. Tostig shows deference for his monarch, and the poem honors his choice, even though he is wrong to follow the Norwegian king instead of the English one. Likewise, those at the top of the hierarchy have a code of honor that is worthy of admiration and emulation. Queen Victoria sits on King Alfred’s throne; it is assumed that the English audience will know that this is a flattering comparison. Austin embraced an aristocratic/royal version of the medieval that existed in the nineteenth-century public consciousness.

52 53 54

Austin, “Harold and Tostig,” 1–4. Cromwell, Victorian, 160. Simmons, Popular Medievalisms, 194.

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In “Death of Harold Hardrada,” Hardrada is a sympathetic political and military other, a center point that England and the English can focus on. Likewise, Alfred Austin conceived of the poet laureate as a center point, one that can galvanize the public into action or influence their opinion. Or maybe he could have, if he had had a better reputation as a poet. Alfred was speaking for a part of the population, but it was not the part that was prevalent in literary circles or on the editorial boards of literary magazines like Punch. Nor was Austin able to spark the imaginations of ensuing generations as he had hoped. His work appeals more to the niche market of researchers looking for characterizations of Harald Hardrada in literature. By comparison, Wilde’s ethics, or stated lack of ethics in art, has had a demonstrably greater impact on the way future generations have acted and thought than Austin’s have. However, Austin is interesting for these very reasons, because of his blatant mixing of literature and politics, and because he does show the great variety of opinions of authors who believed one could put forth ethics through narrative. Austin’s conception of the medieval was easily adaptable to his poetry, because in the choice of a medieval setting he found a way to express his politics to his audience, which was his goal. The relative places of gender and class are worked seamlessly into these medieval poems that explain, with pride, what it means to be English. Cromwell suggests that the association of imperialism and patriotism with the past was a natural one: for one cannot understand the romantic, sentimental Victorian imperialism unless one keeps in mind that it did not become hysterically popular until people had made the association of the grand old aristocratic England – the England of tradition and legend – with imperialism. The whole movement is closely tied up with nostalgic patriotism, love of everything which time had demonstrated to be thoroughly British.55 His politics affected his poetry, but Austin conceived of the writing of poetry, especially as poet laureate, as a political act – as an act that could guide the thinking of the nation. Therefore, his medieval poems are jingoistic, masculine, aristocratic constructions that should help inspire the nation to Austin’s way of thinking. When speaking at the opening of a new school of science and art Austin told the students: “if any student believed himself to be an artist in the true sense of the word, the incredulity of others should not shake his faith or 55

Cromwell, Victorian, 178.



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in the faintest degree discourage him; for they too would believe when the student had proved himself to be one.”56 It is good that Austin did not let the medieval-tinged epithet “Alfred the Little” get to him. As poet laureate, he wanted to reflect in his poetry the greatness of his nation as evidenced by its history, and to inspire his nation to greatness. This greatness, according to Austin, included a mighty empire, martial prowess, and a society where every person had a (predetermined) place. But his critics decided this was over-reaching. Austin’s biographer said of him that “had he written fewer and less hysterical poems his reputation would today be far higher than it is.”57 However, write them he did, for better or worse, and he poured into them everything he thought poetry should be, as he tried, probably unsuccessfully, to become the twentieth century’s first quintessentially “English” poet.

56 57

Cromwell, Victorian, 208. Cromwell, Victorian, 194.

Swords, Sorcery, and Steam: The Industrial Dark Ages in Contemporary Medievalism Kevin Moberly and Brent Moberly Peter Jackson’s The Desolation of Smaug affords audiences a rare glimpse of the means of production through which the spectacular wealth of Middle Earth is realized.1 The second installment of Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy, the film culminates in the bowels of the Lonely Mountain as Bilbo and company lead Smaug to an abandoned cavern where the remnants of long-dormant Dwarven industry wait. After tricking Smaug into reigniting the furnaces, Thorin directs Bombur to the bellows and Bilbo to a lever high above the room. At Thorin’s signal, Bilbo sends water surging from a series of sluice gates set into the mouths of enormous, carved Dwarven heads. Smaug reels backwards, engulfed in water and steam as waterwheels begin to turn and ore buckets come clanking to life. One of the most startling embellishments in Jackson’s film, this scene underscores the degree to which the industrial has become synonymous with the magical and the heroic in many works of contemporary medievalism. With its lingering shots of careful rivet work and cast iron gears, it suggests that swords and sorcery are no longer sufficient to the larger cultural and sociopolitical project of medievalism. If one is to exorcise the malingering, monstrous serpent of greed and accumulation, one must also have steam. Smaug’s expulsion from the Lonely Mountain vividly illustrates a primary difference between Tolkien’s medievalism and the medievalism of the contemporary moment. Tolkien was profoundly inspired by John Ruskin,

1

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, directed by Peter Jackson (New Line Cinema and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures, 2013).

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William Morris, and the Arts and Crafts movement.2 While this influence is immediately apparent in Tolkien’s watercolors, it is equally present in his well-documented antipathy for industrialization and mass production.3 In his essay “On Fairy Stories,” for example, Tolkien inveighs against identifying motor cars and the factory with “real life,” writing that the “notion that motor-cars are more ‘alive’ than, say, centaurs or dragons is curious; that they are more ‘real’ than, say, horses is pathetically absurd.”4 He repeats this point a paragraph or so later, declaring that the “maddest castle that ever came out of a giant’s bag in a wild Gaelic story is not only much less ugly than a robot factory, it is also (to use a very modern phrase) ‘in a very real sense’ a great deal more real.”5 Tolkien’s objections are grounded in his belief about the potential of fantasy and fairy stories to help readers recognize presumably more transcendent, “more real” ideals and therefore escape the increasingly mechanized and brutish conditions of their everyday lives. As such, they underscore the degree to which Tolkien subscribed to one of the core principles of Ruskin and Morris’s work – namely the belief that the mass-produced, uniform products of industrial society (and the accompanying labor practices) alienated subjects from the natural order. On one level, it is tempting (and perhaps not entirely inappropriate) to read Tolkien’s condemnation of the “Robot Age” as an indictment of Jackson’s Desolation of Smaug, as well as many of the works that have come to define the popular medievalism of our time. Too often these works seem interested in hobbits, dwarves, and dragons only as a means of demonstrating the wonders of high-frame-rate cinematography, computer-generated imagery, or any of the other technologies that late capitalism is desperate to promote as magical at the moment. These works, as such, often seem to exemplify Ruskin’s complaint that in “old times, men used their powers of painting to show the objects of faith; in later times, they used the objects of faith that 2

3

4 5

Tom Shippey, for example, notes “very close analogues to Tolkien’s fictional practice” in Morris’s The House of the Wolfings and The Roots of the Mountains. See, “Goths and Huns: The Rediscovery of the Northern Cultures in the Nineteenth Century,” in Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien (Zurich: Walking Tree Publishers, 2007), 117–36 (119). See also, among others, Mark Atherton, There and Back Again: J. R. R. Tolkien and the Origins of the Hobbit (London: I. B. Taurus & Company Ltd, 2012), 107–16; and Humphrey Carter, J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 77–78. For an overview of Tolkien’s artistic influences, see Mary Podles, “Tolkien and the New Art,” Touchstone Magazine, [accessed 15 July 2014]. J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories,” in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983), 109–61 (149). Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories,” 150.



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they might show their powers of painting,” a complaint that Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer echo in their critique of the mid-twentieth-century culture industry and its emphasis on the “predominance of the effect, the obvious touch, and the technical detail over the work itself.”6 This is especially the case with medieval-themed computer games. Not content to wait for the industrial revolution, games like Dungeon Siege, World of Warcraft, Skyrim, and Dishonored (to name a few) present players with medievalesque worlds that are rife with gyrocopters, self-propelled catapults, and goblins wielding Gatling guns rather than swords. Many also construct the industrial as a form of life in its own right, endowing legions of cleverly articulated, clockwork robots with the sort of fantastic sentience usually reserved for orcs, hobgoblins, and the occasional dark elf. By the same token, however, the degree to which the industrial and the medieval have become conflated suggests a different and perhaps more complicated reading. As we write in the companion piece to this essay, many works of contemporary medievalism, particularly those produced after the recession of 2008, are marked not only by anxieties about the environment and the collapse of empire, but by a nostalgia for the types of production that are presumed to have vanished with the arrival of the so-called service economy.7 Yet while these works contain more than enough dragons and racial enmities to address the first two concerns, the same cannot be said for labor. Beholden to the culture industry, these works present consumerism and accumulation as heroic endeavors in their own right. As such, they no longer possess the symbolic vocabulary to articulate, much less formulate, a meaningful response to larger anxieties about the loss of production. These works thus foreground what, we argue, is a larger tension that is apparent not only in less explicitly industrialized strains of contemporary medievalism, but also in Tolkien’s medievalism and in the medievalism of Ruskin and Morris – in other words, in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century medievalisms that are widely regarded as significant antecedents for much of the medievalist production of our own time. As Kathleen Biddick writes, John Ruskin, William Morris, and their immediate followers entombed the very “Gothic peasant” that they claimed to revive, enacting, according to 6

7

John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 3 vols (New York: Peter Fenelon Collier & Son, 1900), 3: 110. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Verso, 1997), 125. Adorno and Horkheimer explicitly articulate their concerns about the industrialization of culture in language that recalls Ruskin’s, as a lament for the loss of the “rebellious” impulse that “in the period from Romanticism to Expressivism, asserted itself as free expression, as a vehicle of protest against the organization” (125). Kevin Moberly and Brent Moberly, “There is No Word for Work in the Dragon Tongue,” forthcoming.

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Biddick, “the repetition of loss rather than recognizing the contemporaneous disembodiments at stake in the industrial fabrication of labor.”8 Much of the same can be said about contemporary medievalism. As an extension of the aesthetics and politics of Tolkien, Ruskin, and Morris, it struggles to speak about concerns that it has long represented as hopelessly outdated and irrecoverable, often through digital technologies that, according to Nick Dyer-Witheford, have paradoxically been celebrated as exemplars of a larger societal shift away from both traditional forms of labor and the associated class conflicts.9 Understood in this sense, it is perhaps not surprising that the industrial has become a fixture of so many works of contemporary medievalism. As with the castles that Tolkien’s giants carry around in their bags, the presence of robots and factories in these works suggests a larger desire to return to a time that is simultaneously imagined to be “not only much less ugly […] but ‘in a very real sense’ a great deal more real.”10 Yet, we argue that the ambivalence that surrounds these things is also indicative of a deeper anxiety, one that these works recognize, but cannot quite articulate. In this essay, we turn to two medieval-themed computer games, Skyrim and Dishonored, to understand the otherwise contradictory ways that the specter of the lost industrial haunts contemporary medievalist production. We argue that although Skyrim and Dishonored implicitly confront a crisis in labor, they are unable to formulate a meaningful response. Working through steampunk’s recuperation of the Arts and Crafts movement, they instead default to what Biddick understands as a melancholy for labor that characterizes Ruskin and Morris’s work – a melancholy that, she argues, ultimately functions to reinforce the distinctions between the Victorian elite and the working class, rather than unite them in a “solidarity of mourning.”11 Interested in the adventure of production, but not its actualities, these works thus present the loss of the working class as a spectacular opportunity, one that, in keeping with Biddick’s formulation of melancholy, invariably manifests itself through the theft and reappropriation of both the medieval and the industrial past. These works thus foreground both a lack and an opportunity for contemporary medievalist scholarship. To the extent to which each is implicated in the 8 9

10 11

Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 13. Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Struggles in High-Technology Capitalism (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 27. As Dyer-Witheford writes, “everything once (and so deceptively) signified by the red flag – the classless society, non-alienated work, the dissolution of property – will be achieved simply by the operation of the technology which capital is itself so frenetically developing.” Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories,” 150. Biddick, Shock, 12–13.



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complex networks of material and immaterial production that characterize late capitalism, they foreground the fact that if we are to fully understand what contemporary medievalism reveals about the present and its relationship to the medieval past, we must labor to recover not only the privileged work of authors, artists, and audiences, but also the more mundane labor upon which their creativity is predicated. * The difficulties inherent in attempting to address the economic desolation of the so-called “new” economy through an aesthetic vocabulary that no longer possesses the requisite imagery to conceptualize, much less represent, labor are immediately apparent in the way that Jackson portrays Lake Town in The Desolation of Smaug. Departing from Tolkien’s novel, he presents the settlement not as a diminished, though otherwise thriving trading post, but as the Middle Earth equivalent of Detroit. Surrounded by the icy waters of the Long Lake, the meager income it receives from fishing and transporting wine to the wood elves is barely sufficient for the needs of its inhabitants, who languish in squalor amidst the remains of the town’s once magnificent, towering architecture. Despair over the lack of “jobs, shelter, and food” has reached the point that open revolt is a very real possibility. Here, it is not surprising that, unlike in Tolkien’s novel, the town’s master is among the most eager to assist Thorin and his band. Given the precarious state of Lake Town, subsidizing Thorin’s expedition seems a small price for the return of Dwarven industry and therefore prosperity to the region. Doing so, however, ultimately proves ruinous. Although restarting the factory allows Thorin to restore the flow of gold and drive the dragon out in one fell swoop, this victory signals the beginning of the end for Lake Town and its mercantile aspirations. As the film’s conclusion suggests, the most immediate consequence of the return of industry to Erebor is the return of wholesale environmental destruction – not the literal smog of the industrial revolution, but as Bard explicitly warns, the Smaug that once devastated Dale and other prosperous human settlements.12 12

Admittedly, the link between Smaug and smog is more etymological than it is phonetic. Jackson’s Desolation of Smaug has rekindled the debate as to how exactly Smaug’s name should be pronounced. The general consensus is that the correct pronunciation is “smowg,” not “smog,” but J. S. Ryan and Jason Fisher link “Smaug” to the Old English verb “smeócan,” meaning, according to Fisher, “to emit smoke, reek” (108). See J. S. Ryan, “German Mythology Applied – The Extension of the Literary Folk Memory,” Folklore 77:1 (1966): 50; and Jason Fisher, “Tolkien’s Wraiths, Rings, and Dragons: An Exercise in Literary Linguistics,” in Tolkien in the New Century: Essays in Honor of Tom Shippey, ed. John William Houghton, Janet Brennan Croft, Nancy Martsch, John D. Rateliff, and Robin Anne Reid (Jefferson, NC: McFarland 2014), 108. Ryan and Fisher’s etymologies are

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To Jackson, then, the industrial represents something of a double-edged sword. Although it promises Lake Town an easy deliverance from its crippling poverty and the attendant political problems, it does not bring prosperity and certainly not security. One can argue, in fact, that the industrial does not even bring jobs. If the events beneath the Lonely Mountain are any indication, the Dwarven forges are almost fully automated. All that is needed to start them is a hobbit at the lever, a source of spectacular heat, and an overweight dwarf to bounce on the bellows. And once the waterwheels begin turning, all of this becomes extraneous: the apparatus runs of its own accord, sending rivers of molten gold sluicing down a network of ancient, pre-laid channels. Thus, while restarting the factory promises incredible wealth and a return to prestige for the dwarves and Lake Town’s corrupt politicians, its benefit for the townspeople is much less clear. Even without the threat of Smaug, the best they can hope for is a return to the glory days of greed and free trade that, as Bard suggests, brought the dragon to the mountain in the first place. One way to understand the contradictions inherent in the way that the industrial appears in Jackson’s film is through the example of Bethesda Softworks’s role-playing game Skyrim, which, working through the steampunk, explicitly conflates the industrial with more traditional medievalist elements.13 As we write elsewhere, Skyrim was released in 2011 just as the economy began to transition into the so-called jobless recovery. Accordingly, it immerses players in a medieval-themed Scandinavian world on the verge of political and economic collapse. The northernmost province of the fictional realm of Tamriel, Skyrim has not only been ravaged by decades of fighting, but finds itself deeply divided between two rival factions. Worse yet, the province faces the threat of wholesale environmental destruction in the form of dragons that, like Smaug, have awoken after centuries of slumber and are terrorizing the landscape. Players are inducted into these spectacular antagonisms as refugees. Having barely escaped execution, they arrive at the hardscrabble village of Riverwood with little equipment and even less coin. Yet as players

13

at odds with Tolkien’s own account of “Smaug” as deriving from the primitive Germanic “*smugan,” meaning “to squeeze through a hole,” but Fisher finds supports for his claim in Shippey’s analysis of the potential associations between “*smugan” and the Old English cognate “sméogan” (108). According to Fisher, “smeócan […] is very close to sméogan” (108). Coined in 1905, “smog” is a blend of the nouns “smoke” and “fog.” See, “smog, n.,” OED Online, [accessed 22 August 2014]. For a concise account of the debate over the pronunciation of Smaug’s name, see “How to Pronounce ‘Smaug,’” Ask About Middle Earth, [accessed 22 August 2014]. Skyrim: The Elder Scrolls V (IBM PC Version), Bethesda Softworks (2011).



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struggle to repair their fortunes, they find that there is very little actual work to be found. Although Skyrim teems with sawmills, mines, and any number of other, presumably medieval sites of production, the majority of these are largely symbolic. As with the forges and carpentry exhibits one encounters in living-history museums, they accurately reproduce the means of production, but do not actually produce anything. Players, as a result, are forced to seek more heroic employment. Armed with a staggering assortment of weapons and armor, they trade their health and mana for gold and glory in a bloody orgy of consumption that invariably leads them into the deepest, darkest regions of the game. There, half-buried in the detritus of one of Tamriel’s oldest civilizations, players discover the remains of another form of presumably lost production – the robot factories of the Dwemer. As with the sawmills and forges above ground, these factories are remarkably well preserved and, for the most part, fully functional. Despite collapsed masonry, occasional flooding, and the presence of the ghoul-like Falmer, steam still courses through the massive pipes that run along their chambers and passageways. As players carefully pick their way through a treacherous maze of cylinders, gears, and other exposed mechanisms, they discover that these ruins are also guarded by scores of intricately crafted robots.14 The Dwemer who built the factories are, however, conspicuously absent. According to the game’s lore, they disappeared en masse centuries before, leaving their factories and robots behind as an enduring testament to their magical technological prowess. As with the forges that Bilbo and company discover beneath the Lonely Mountain, the machinery of these lost Dwemer factories has survived the spectacular calamities visited upon their progenitors. These mechanical remnants, then, testify to the enduring potential of an industrial tradition that has not only been lost but abandoned – one that, in the conspicuous absence of its masters, is as much subject to the heroic work of reappropriation as are any of the game’s more traditional medieval elements. While these factories yield some of the best treasure in the game, they ultimately do not produce anything. Their robots are never seen working, even though many of them are explicitly identified as “workers.” Likewise, their gargantuan machinery runs in perpetuum without manufacturing anything and without requiring refueling or maintenance. Abstracted from their larger material circumstances, these factories are thus represented in much the same way as many of the sites of production above ground. Just as players do not 14

Dwemer automatons range in size from diminutive eight-legged spider robots, to rapidly moving spheres that transform into humanoid-like warriors, to towering, heavily armed centurions and colossuses, and, in the Solstheim ruins, large, walking ballisti. All are invariably hostile to players.

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need to bring logs to the game’s sawmills or stoke its furnaces, its subterranean factories operate independently of the sophisticated infrastructure of supply, transportation, and labor that would otherwise be required to sustain them. If they function at all, it is only as museum exhibits. Like the carefully restored engines in London’s Museum of Water and Steam, their massive pistons, cylinders, and gears are spectacular reminders of not just the sheer scale and the power of the industrial but also its potential horrors.15 The industrial, however, is not imagined as a consequence of the feudal in Skyrim, but as existing in parallel with it, as a competing Gothic tradition. The game’s lore makes this explicit. Although often called “dwarves,” the Dwemer are, in fact, one of the original Elven races: deep-elves whose intelligence, logic, and craftsmanship manifest themselves through technological achievements. Yet while the Dwemer are represented as having come into existence concurrently with many of the game’s more explicitly medievalesque races, Skyrim distinguishes them by their visual design. Unlike the Nords, whose predominantly wooden architecture recalls that of medieval Scandinavia, Dwemer architecture is decidedly Byzantine. Characterized by thick walls, vaulted chambers, and gilded domes supported by pendentives, their buildings are adorned with geometric friezes that, at times, seem vaguely Mesopotamian, and at others, vaguely Mesoamerican. While this sort of bricolage typifies the way that the Elder Scrolls franchise differentiates races and cultures, the suggestion here is that the Dwemer represent something else altogether: a high-tech, steam-driven strand of medievalism, one that in its conspicuous aesthetic primitivism constitutes as much of an origin myth as the more traditional, heroic, and anti-technological strands of medievalism that players encounter in-game. Understood in this sense, it is perhaps best to describe the Dwemer aesthetic as steampunk. As Rebecca Onion points out, steampunk is a fundamentally postmodern endeavor, one that not only “picks and chooses from previously existing styles of physical technology and ideological modes of technological engagement,” but often seeks to communicate a sense of the awe and sublimity of industrial technology by contrasting its size and intricacy.16 This proclivity is immediately apparent in the way that Skyrim represents the 15

16

Dwemer robots also embody anxieties about alienation. When defeated, they yield soul gems. Required by the enchanting skill, these gems allow players to capture the souls of vanquished foes, which in turn allows them to craft and recharge magical weapons. The implication, then, is that the Dwemer’s robots and perhaps even some of their machines are powered by draining the souls of the dispossessed. Rebecca Onion, “Reclaiming the Machine: An Introductory Look at Steampunk in Everyday Practice,” Neo-Victorian Studies 1:1 (2008): 142, [accessed 15 July 2014].



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Dwemer and their technologies. While not ostensibly Victorian, the automatons and machinery that players encounter nevertheless recall the gilded, geometric motifs that characterized Victorian Orientalism, not to mention the more recent work of steampunk artists such as Vladimir Gvozdev, Ian Miller, and Sam Van Olffen.17 What is more, the game’s Dwemer elements also reflect what, according to Onion, is steampunk’s larger concern with challenging many of the underlying assumptions of the so-called ubiquitous design of consumer products such as Apple’s various iDevices – namely, the belief that technology should be impersonal, impenetrable, and, above all else, safe. Pointing out that many steampunk artists and writers have adopted the dirigible as an emblem, she writes that steampunk often foregrounds the “possible harm that technology could do to the human body.”18 She claims, in fact, that “Steampunk seems to fetishise this possibility, re-casting danger as evidence of the aliveness or volatility of technology. Steampunk also sees danger as a reproach to a modern world, which is overly insured against catastrophe.”19 As we note above, Dwemer technology is nothing if not dangerous. Characterized by ax-wielding robots and clockwork traps that threaten to impale players at the slightest misstep, these machines do not present technology as helpful and certainly not innocuous, but as a monstrous form of life in its own right, one that, as Onion writes about steampunk, constantly requires players to ritually demonstrate their mastery of the computerized technology of the game itself. * Skyrim’s robots and factories thus attest to the fact that steampunk’s engagement with the medieval is much more fraught than its fascination with romantic narrative and Gothic adornment would initially suggest.20 While its adherents view “heritage” movements with suspicion and treat calls to recover the lost virtues of past eras with evident skepticism, they nevertheless acknowledge the precedent of Victorian medievalism as a model for

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See, for example, Vladimir Gvozdev’s “Snail Train,” [accessed 23 August 2014]; Ian Miller’s “Robot 8,” [accessed 23 August 2014]; and Sam Van Olffen’s “Futur Ranger,” [accessed 23 August 2014]. Onion, “Reclaiming the Machine,” 149. Onion, “Reclaiming the Machine,” 149. On steampunk and the Gothic, see Gail Ashurst and Anna Powell, “Under Their Own Steam: Magic, Science and Steampunk,” in Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture: PopGoth, ed. Justin D. Edwards and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet (New York: Routledge, 2012), 148–64.

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their movement’s uneasy engagement with the past.21 Amal El-Mohtar, for example, claims that “steampunk is our Victorian Medievalism” and that “our present obsession with bustles and steam engines mirrors Victorian obsessions with Gothic cathedrals and courtly love.”22 Likewise, C. Allegra Hawksmoor opens the sixth edition of Steampunk Magazine by conceding that “the Victorian Age is slowly becoming to steampunk what the Dark Ages is to sword-and-sorcery.”23 Other steampunk commentators insist upon a distinct hierarchy of medievalism, privileging socially conscious and critical strains above those that they consider naïve or simply nostalgic. Cory Gross contrasts the “sanitized” medievalism of Howard Pyle’s Arthurian works with Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court as a means of illustrating the difference between “nostalgic” and (the superior) “melancholic” steampunk.24 Melancholic steampunk, writes Gross, treats “the corruption, the decadence, the imperialism, the poverty and the intrigue” of the Victo-

21

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Bruce Sterling, for example, writes in his “User’s Guide to Steampunk” that “the heritage industry does not sell heritage, because heritage is inherently unsellable. Instead, it sells the tourist-friendly, simplified, Photoshopped, price-tagged, Disneyized version of heritage. Steampunk is great at mocking these activities.” See “The User’s Guide to Steampunk,” Steampunk Magazine 5 (2009): 32. As Sally-Anne Huxtable writes, many of the movement’s key proponents, including Sterling, articulate a desire to represent “something more profound than a form of neo-Victorian escapist role-play” as a part of what they consider a larger social critique. See “‘Love the Machine, Hate the Factory’: Steampunk Design and the Vision of a Victorian Future,” in Steaming into the Future: A Steampunk Anthology, ed. Julie Anne Taddeo and Cynthia J. Miller (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 214–17 (214). On the movement’s continuing and uneasy relationship with museums seeking to exhibit its works, see Jeanette Atkinson’s “Steampunk’s Legacy: Collecting and Exhibiting the Future of Yesterday,” in Steaming into the Future, 273–97. Though they do not specifically address medievalism, Rachel A. Bowser and Brian Croxall argue that Victorian attempts to navigate the shifting temporal paradigms (Railway Time, Catastrophism, etc.) of the period continue to inform steampunk’s retro-futurist aesthetic. See “Introduction,” Neo-Victorian Studies 3:1 (2010): 2–10, [accessed 15 July 2014]. Amal El-Mohtar, “Winding Down the House: Toward a Steampunk without Steam,” in Steampunk III: The Steampunk Revolution, ed. Ann Vandermeer (San Francisco, CA: Tachyon Publications, 2012), 392. El-Mohtar is ultimately uncomfortable with what she views as her movement’s privileging of the Victorian over other equally compelling historical pasts, arguing that steampunk’s insistence on “Victoriana […] is akin to insisting on castles and European dragons in fantasy: limiting, and rather missing the point” (393). “It confuses,” she continues, “cause and consequence, because it is fantasy that shapes the dragon, not the dragon that shapes the fantasy” (393). C. Allegra Hawksmoor, “Dear Reader,” Steampunk Magazine 6 (2009): 2. Cory Gross, “Varieties of Steampunk Experience: Nostalgic Versus Melancholic Steampunk,” Steampunk Magazine 1 (2007): 63.



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rian era “not as much as an indictment of [that] era but as an indictment of our own.25 Similarly, Twain’s “Connecticut Yankee focuses exactly on the gross inequalities and corruptions of the Mediaeval system in only a barely veiled commentary about his own time.”26 Steampunk commentators are especially fond of the reactionary steam-era medievalism of Ruskin and his followers, appropriating much of the Arts and Crafts’s critique of late-nineteenth-century industrialization and mass production, as well as its affinity for “handcrafted objects and […] the pleasures of labor” as precedent for their own aesthetic program.27 Bruce Sterling, co-author of The Difference Engine, widely considered to be one of the movement’s seminal works, declares in his “User’s Guide to Steampunk” that “Steampunk is a counterculture arts and crafts movement in a 21st century guise” and recommends that all would-be steampunks read Ruskin’s “On the nature of the Gothic” with “great care.”28 Ruskin, according to Sterling, was “the greatest design critic of the original steam era,” and his “manifesto was the seed of […] about a thousand other things most steampunks would consider very cool.”29 Sterling, however, qualifies this recommendation with one significant caveat – “everything Ruskin says in that essay is wrong.”30 Writing that the “ideas in there don’t work, have never worked and are never going to work,” he advises readers that “[i]f you try to do the things Ruskin described in the spirit that Ruskin suggested, you are doomed.”31 He then, however, suggests a steampunk alternative: If you try to do those things in a steampunk spirit, you might get somewhere useful. Steampunks are equipped with a number of creative tools and approaches that John Ruskin never imagined, such as design software, fabricators, Instructables videos, websites, wikis, cellphones, search engines and etsy.com. Successful steampunks are not anti-industrial as Ruskin was. They are digital natives and therefore post-industrial. This means that they can make their own, brand-new, fresh mistakes – if they understand the old mistakes well enough not to repeat them.32

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Gross, “Varieties of Steampunk Experience,” 63. Gross, “Varieties of Steampunk Experience,” 63. Huxtable, “Love the Machine,” 217–21 (218). Sterling, “User’s Guide to Steampunk,” 33. Sterling, “User’s Guide to Steampunk,” 33. Sterling, “User’s Guide to Steampunk,” 33. Sterling, “User’s Guide to Steampunk,” 33. Sterling, “User’s Guide to Steampunk,” 33.

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Sterling’s critique of Ruskin is not as damning as it initially seems. Devotees of steampunk see themselves as connoisseurs of the obsolete and outmoded, scouring what Alan Moore describes as “the junkyard of ideas” for “abandoned elements that […] were perfectly functional but had simply been left by the wayside” to “create ideas that will help us extend ourselves into the future.”33 Such “upcycling,” as Suzanne Barber and Matt Hale call it, is central to the movement’s complex, retro-futurist appropriation of the past.34 As Barber and Hale write, the steampunk past is “a narratively constituted field of discarded objects and temporal pieces, some of which are worth reclaiming and reusing; others are left behind as they are no longer useful, and still others are created into new forms that exceed the prior potentialities that they once had.”35 Following this logic, Ruskin’s importance arises from the conspicuous failure of his ideas, and from their subsequent (and contingent) recuperation by Sterling and other steampunk commentators. This doubled concern with alternatively recuperating and eviscerating the past is embodied by one of the more fascinating steampunk “upcycling” projects of late: Mike Libby’s Insect Lab, a menagerie of dead insects and the occasional crustacean “enhanced” with watch parts and other electronic and mechanical contrivances.36 Arguably, Sterling and other steampunk “tinkerers” have performed similar “renovations” on Ruskin and other exemplars of the Arts and Crafts movement, retaining the carapace while replacing the ichor with more palatable formulations. For example, Sterling readily embraces the aesthetics of, among other things, “William Morris wallpaper, Aubrey Beardsley Yellow Book decadence, [and] romantic-nationalist architecture.”37 However, he and others renounce the pervasive anti-industrialism of the Arts and Crafts movement, as well as what Jeff Vandermeer and S. J. Chambers describe as “the classism, racism, and exploitation that partially informed the Victorian era.”38 According to Vandermeer and Chambers: 33 34 35 36

37 38

Alan Moore, “An Interview with Alan Moore,” Steampunk Magazine 3 (2007): 23. Moore is the author of the popular steampunk graphic novel League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Suzanne Barber and Matt Hale, “Enacting the Never-Was: Upcycling the Past, Present, and Future in Steampunk,” in Steaming into the Future, 166. Barber and Hale, “Enacting the Never-Was,” 179. Mike Libby, Insect Lab, [accessed 15 July 2014]. Among Libby’s recent projects is “Ludlow,” an interactive, augmented crab. “What makes Ludlow unique,” writes Libby, “is that he has four interactive and interchangeable claws (a spinning blade, a pinching claw, a telescope with barbs, and a syringe with connecting hose to the back side).” See, “Ludlow,” Insect Lab, [accessed 15 July 2014]. Sterling, “User’s Guide to Steampunk,” 33. Sterling, “User’s Guide to Steampunk,” 33. Jeff Vandermeer and S. J. Chambers, The Steampunk Bible: An Illustrated Guide to the World of Imaginary Airships, Corsets and Goggles, Mad Scientists, and Strange Literature (New York: Abrams, 2011), 99.



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Steampunks seek to reject the conformity of the modern, soulless, featureless design of technology – and all that implies – while embracing the inventiveness and tech origins of Victorian machines. They also seek to repair the damage caused by industrialization. This isn’t simply an impulse to whitewash the classism, racism, and exploitation that partially informed the Victorian era – it is instead a progressive impulse to reclaim the dead past in a positive and affirmative way. Similarly, Ruskin’s movement sought to return the creative freedom exemplified for him by the medieval workshop, while rejecting the context of a political/social system more oppressive and unfair than the one in place during Victorian times. In both cases, creative renovations are meant to lead to innovation.39 There are at least two “creative renovations” of Ruskin here. Vandermeer and Chambers readily admit to the first: the removal of the more noxious aspects of Victorian culture. The second, however, is more covert, namely the assertion that Ruskin rejected the “context of a political/social system more oppressive and unfair than the one in place during Victorian times.”40 This last claim enlists Ruskin in a positivist narrative of economic progress, readily acknowledging the evident shortcomings of steam-era capitalism while at the same time holding them to be an improvement over a “more oppressive and unfair” medieval past.41 Whether Ruskin actually held such a position is open to debate. According to Timothy Evans, Ruskin wavered “between a Carlylean feudalism and a decentralized socialism” before eventually adopting the latter, and, as Rob Breton writes, Ruskin followed Carlyle in advancing a paternalistic feudalism as a model for industrial management over more contemporary and dehumanizing schemes.42 Ruskin certainly celebrated, as Vandermeer and Chambers write, the “creative freedom exemplified for him by the medieval workshop,” but Ruskin did not, as Gill Cockram reminds us, equate this freedom with “political freedom,” democratic or otherwise: “the kind of freedom [Ruskin] advocated,” writes Cockram, “was to operate within a hierarchy, with each 39 40 41 42

Vandermeer and Chambers, Steampunk Bible, 99. Vandermeer and Chambers, Steampunk Bible, 99. Vandermeer and Chambers, Steampunk Bible, 99. Timothy H. Evans, “Folklore as Utopia: English Medievalists and the Ideology of Revivalism,” Western Folklore 47: 4 (1988): 253. Rob Breton, “WorkPerfect: William Morris and the Gospel of Work,” Utopian Studies 13: 1 (2002): 47–48. Breton writes that both Ruskin and Carlyle turned to the feudal as an antidote to the “uber-rationalist/industrialist propaganda of the day. The procrustean Andrew Ure, for example, […] recommends ‘training human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work, and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automaton’” (45).

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individual making his own particular, self-fulfilling contribution to society as, he claimed, the Gothic craftsmen did when building their cathedrals.”43 While Sterling is content to own (and then disown) Ruskin as precedent, Vandermeer and Chambers’s renovations of Ruskin are shaped by the need for both precedent and continuity. Imagining themselves as steampunk historians, Vandermeer and Chambers must, as they put it, “reclaim the dead past,” and this involves excising Ruskin’s notorious, not-quite-­ politically-correct nostalgia for the feudal and replacing it, vis-à-vis Gross’s appropriation of Twain, with a “melancholy” for the period.44 In doing so, they attempt to formulate a progressive, clockwork version of Ruskin’s politics, one whose capacity for “brand-new, fresh mistakes,” as Sterling puts it, is contingent upon its ability to “understand the old mistakes well enough not to repeat them.”45 What results, however, is more of the same. Punctuated by extended profiles and interviews with steampunk artists Tom Every and Sean Orlando, their account of Ruskin conflates concerns about the “zipless totalitarianism” of contemporary design with Ruskin’s prescient account of the “dead perfection” of the “‘English Room’ […] as evidence of the slavery of workingmen.”46 According to Orlando: there are a lot of people out there who are simply dissatisfied with throwaway bottle-fed art and consumption artifacts that have been forced upon us by sheer repetition and rote consumption. So, as an antidote, we look to a time when care, design, and artistry were applied 43 44 45 46

Vandermeer and Chambers, Steampunk Bible, 99. Gill Cockram, Ruskin and Social Reform: Ethics and Economics in the Victorian Age (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007), 30. Vandermeer and Chambers, Steampunk Bible, 99. Gross, “Varieties of Steampunk Experience,” 63. Sterling, “User’s Guide to Steampunk,” 33. Vandermeer and Chambers, Steampunk Bible, 91–99 (91). Here, Vandermeer and Chambers are referencing Ruskin’s condemnation of the evident perfection of “this English room of yours” as the result of “a slavery in our England a thousand times more bitter and degrading than that of the scourged African, or helot Greek.” See Stones of Venice, 2: 163. Tom Every is the creator of the “Forevertron,” an outdoor sculpture garden in Baraboo, Wisconsin. Every has repurposed industrial salvage into a fantastical “anti-gravity machine and spacecraft” with the potential, in the imaginative universe of Dr. Evermor, Every’s fictional alter-ego, to propel its creator “through the heavens on a magnetic lightning force beam.” Qtd., Vandermeer and Chambers, Steampunk Bible, 93. See also, “Off The Map. Travelogue. Dr. Evermor,” Independent Lens, [accessed 15 July 2104]. Sean Orlando has contributed to or led several iconic large-scale steampunk art projects, including the Raygun Gothic Rocketship. See, “Raygun Gothic Rocketship,” Engineered Artworks, [accessed 15 July 2014].



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to everyday life in a more lasting way. We are appealing to a different nondominant ideology. Modern design can be very cold and rectangular, so hidden as to be aesthetically unreachable, smooth, a zipless totalitarianism.47 Orlando’s “zipless totalitarianism” is an inspired phrase, one that speaks to the origins of “throwaway bottle-fed art and consumption artifacts” as much as it does to their “cold and rectangular […] aesthetically unreachable” design.48 Arguably, such “artifacts” are increasingly produced in factories located in barely reformed totalitarian states by laborers working in conditions that recall those that so appalled Ruskin and his contemporaries. If Vandermeer, Chambers, and Orlando intend such a reading, they ultimately do not sustain it. Ruskin imagines factory workers thoroughly dispirited by the “steely precision” required by the inherent repetition of their work.49 “All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves,” he writes.50 For Orlando, however, it is consumers who find themselves enslaved “by sheer repetition and rote consumption.”51 Ruskin invokes a crisis of manufacture and management, of workers reduced to machines under increasingly precise and unrelenting production schemes, but Orlando’s crisis is one of ideology rooted in “modern design,” one that requires steampunk interventionists who can embrace “a different nondominant ideology” and “look to a time when care, design, and artistry were applied to the everyday life in a more lasting way.”52 For Orlando, it is not workers or even consumers who are ultimately oppressed by the “sheer repetition and rote consumption” demanded by consumer culture, but the antithesis of the steampunk “we” – the less inspired engineers and designers who are forced to churn out such schlock on a regular basis. Vandermeer and Chambers concur, writing that Orlando’s critique of modern design: echoes Ruskin’s call to arms, which led to the opening of crafts schools in England like Felix Summerly’s Art Manufactures, where students were instructed to beautify household objects like shaving bows – per Every’s own reminder that “in the past, engineers were artists. They

47 48 49 50 51 52

Vandermeer and Chambers, Steampunk Vandermeer and Chambers, Steampunk Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 2: 162. Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 2: 162. Vandermeer and Chambers, Steampunk Vandermeer and Chambers, Steampunk

Bible, 99. Bible, 99. Bible, 99. Bible, 99.

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made beautiful, elaborate objects that had many purely decorative components.”53 This passage is a bit of a tangle. In retroactively applying contemporary steampunk artist Tom Every’s “own reminder” to Sir Henry Cole’s Victorian implementation of Ruskin’s “call to arms,” Vandermeer and Chambers implicate the steampunk present in its imagined Victorian precedent.54 Beyond this, though, Vandermeer and Chambers also collapse distinctions between design, engineering, and manufacture. Ruskin celebrates an imaginary past where medieval laborers were artists in their own right, producing one-off grotesques to adorn the architecture of their day, but Vandermeer and Chambers imagine, vis-à-vis Every and Cole, a past where Gothic engineer/ artists, not workers, “made beautiful, elaborate objects that had many purely decorative components.”55 In doing so, they present Ruskin as something of a medieval figure in his own right, a proto-renaissance man whose inspired tinkering during the industrial dark ages of the late-Victorian period anticipates the more fully articulated philosophy of the contemporary steampunk movement. * This perhaps startling vision of the Victorian as an industrialized dark ages is vividly articulated in Bethesda Softworks’s 2012 stealth-action game Dishonored. Set in Dunwall, the capital city of the fictional Empire of Isles, the game immerses players in a medievalesque Victorian world, one that, as with many steampunk works, is explicitly constructed in the image of the Great Exhibition of 1851. While the game does not attempt to reproduce the Crystal Palace, it nevertheless adapts Joseph Paxton’s conservatory-inspired design to reimagine some of the most iconic works of Victorian Gothic-revival architecture. The game’s box art, for example, prominently features a four-faced clock tower that, despite its exposed iron framing, recalls London’s Big Ben. Likewise, the game contains an ornate suspension bridge that somewhat faithfully reproduces the iron skeleton and mechanics of London’s Tower 53 54

55

Vandermeer and Chambers, Steampunk Bible, 99. Vandermeer and Chambers do not specify a source for Every’s “own reminder” here. Vandermeer and Chambers, Steampunk Bible, 99. As Charles Harvey notes, Sir Henry Cole established “Felix Summerly’s Arts Manufactures” in 1847 to commission artists to “provide designs for commercial production” by “[…] ‘the most eminent British manufacturers’ […] ‘to obtain as much beauty and ornament as is consistent with cheapness.’” See William Morris: Design and Enterprise in Victorian Britain (New York: Manchester University Press, 1991), 40–41. Here, Harvey is quoting from Cole’s Fifty Years of Public Work, vol. 2 (London: George Bell and Sons, 1884), 179–80. Vandermeer and Chambers, Steampunk Bible, 99.



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Bridge yet dispenses with the Gothic masonry shell that characterized Sir Horace Jones’s 1884 design. The influence of the exhibition is also apparent in the game’s interior spaces. As if to invoke the lavish and, at times, overwhelming opulence that Ruskin, Morris, and many other Victorians encountered as they toured the Crystal Palace, many of the game’s mansions and palaces display a wealth of carved, velvet furniture, oriental rugs, yards of intricately embroidered drapery, banners, and tapestries, as well as indoor gardens complete with fountains and tropical plants.56 The game’s more utilitarian spaces are dedicated to its mechanical wonders – enormous, hissing engines, recording devices that function via punch cards, and hand-cranked music boxes specifically designed to drown out any echoes of witchcraft in the industrial cacophony of interlocking cylinders, gears, and pins. In the final level of the game, players ascend to the top of a militarized lighthouse that is crowned by a glass-and-iron structure that Joseph Paxton and other visitors to the exhibition would have instantly recognized. If there is a crucial difference, though, it is that the Great Exhibition attempted to contain and therefore subordinate the Gothic within the positivist, hothouse exuberance of Britain’s industrial might – an attempt that was exemplified and, to some degree, frustrated by the medieval court that Augustus Pugin designed for the exhibition. Dishonored, however, exhibits both the Victorian and the industrial as fundamentally medievalesque endeavors, a circumstance that becomes clear from the opening moments of the game. Cast in the role of Corvo Attano, chief bodyguard of Empress Jessamine Kaldwin, players enter Dunwall via a motorized launch lowered from an enormous iron trimaran. Although the launch is crewed by officers wearing Victorianesque naval uniforms, the first thing that players see as they enter the open river is a medieval castle. Constructed of grayish-white stone and decorated with sky-blue pennants, its crenellated towers stand in stark contrast to the brackish water and smokestacks belching smoke in the distance. When the launch enters the castle, players discover that, like Libby’s insect sculptures, the structure’s Gothic carapace disguises a distinctly industrial ichor: an enormous hydraulic lock that lifts them to the level of Dunwall Tower and the royal palace above via enormous, fly-wheel driven pumps. Players encounter much of the same when they meet the empress. While she stands at the edge of a stone gazebo complete with fluted, Gothic columns and a vaulted roof, the view of the river below and the surrounding 56

Dishonored also recreates the spectacle of the fireworks displays that accompanied the Great Exhibition. In the aptly named mission, “Lady Boyle’s Last Party,” players pose as invited guests to a costume party held in the Boyle mansion. If players look up through the vaulted stained glass and iron ceiling over the mansion’s grand foyer, they can just see the fireworks exploding in the night sky.

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city is anything but pastoral. The entire far bank is choked with factories and smokestacks, while warehouses and other industrial structures are interspersed among the steep roofs of the rowhouses beyond the castle’s gates. Yet, as with Skyrim, it quickly becomes clear that the game’s medieval elements do not predate the industrial. Instead, the two traditions are presented as parallel, interchangeable, and equally as ancient (or modern). Players learn, for example, that Dunwall was built on the ruins of an ancient fishing village whose inhabitants harnessed the magical powers of a shadowy figure known as the Outsider through runes and charms carved from whale bones. According to the game’s lore, however, Dunwall was transformed into an industrial state when natural philosopher Esmond Roseburrow discovered that the mystical power of the whales could be harnessed by refining their oil into a magical, volatile fuel, one that could be readily adapted for industry and transportation, not to mention many of the fantastic military technologies that are explicitly deployed to control Dunwall’s population.57 While Roseburrow’s discovery is credited with ushering in Dunwall’s industrial revolution, it does not bring about enlightenment or really even progress. Characterized by a corrupt, feudal regime and a centralized church that regularly engages in witch-hunts and inquisitions, this revolution instead manifests itself as a sort of industrialized dark ages, complete with its own version of the Black Death – a rat plague that has transformed the once prosperous Dunwall into an immense Victorian dungeon, one whose mechanical wonders and horrors rival anything that Tolkien’s adventurers encounter in Moria or the depths of the Lonely Mountain. Again, though, this is a version of the Dark Ages that seems eerily familiar – an industrialized Dark Ages that, as with Skyrim and Jackson’s Lake Town, is constructed as much through anxieties about production and labor as it is chivalry, honor, and other more traditional medievalist topoi. The first bit of flavor text included in the game’s manual makes this clear: “The family silver mines haven’t been producing as much, it’s true. My brother Morgan and I have given it all, as they say, but apparently the quality of labor has greatly fallen since our father’s time.”58 Attributed to Lord Custis Pendleton, a prominent member of parliament, this quotation speaks volumes about the socioeconomic situation that players encounter as they explore Dunwall. In the Estate District, for example, they discover that the city’s aristocratic 57

58

According to Ashurst and Powell, the various fuels described in steampunk fiction (steam, electricity, oil, etc.) often conflate magic and physical science, functioning as “‘avatars’ for further, less tangible, forces.” See “Under Their Own Steam,” 150. In Dishonored, whale oil is rendered using the same neon blue color that has long been used for mana-potions in medieval-themed games, further suggesting its inherent magical potential. “Game Manual,” Dishonored (Xbox 360 Version), Bethesda Softworks (2012).



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families have remained largely unaffected by the plague. Protected from the poor by the city watch and so-called Walls of Light – whale-oil-powered force fields that disintegrate undesirables on contact – they host lavish parties in their brightly illuminated late-Victorian mansions. Dunwall’s distillery district, by contrast, is in ruins. Home to a whiskey distillery, a brothel, and the Abbey of the Everyman, its working-class row houses are almost entirely abandoned. While the brothel continues to thrive, largely due its aristocratic clientele, the distillery has been overrun by thugs. Despite its suggestive name, the abbey is not open to “every man.” Instead, it serves as the headquarters for the overseers, the priestly class of masked inquisitors who scour the city in search of witchcraft. The situation is even worse in the flooded district of Rudshore. Abandoned to the river when years of poor maintenance caused its levy to fail, the district serves primarily as a quarantine zone and dumping ground for corpses. Populated only by soldiers, assassins, and plague survivors, its crumbling factories and half-submerged warehouses are symptomatic of the root cause of the city’s economic despair: the fact that Dunwall no longer hosts any functioning industries. Dunwall’s skyline might be punctuated by smokestacks spewing black smoke, but these are all located offshore, on the opposite bank of the Wrenhaven river, where they are effectively unreachable. As in Skyrim, the sites of production that remain are either represented as museum pieces – spectacular reminders of the imperial might of Dunwall’s vanished industry – or as ruined, abandoned, and overrun with interests that, criminal or otherwise, threaten players with grievous physical harm. Likewise, there is no sign of anything resembling a working class. Like the Dwemer, the scores of workers who once presumably manned the factories and inhabited Rudshore’s now derelict apartments are nowhere to be found. They have fled the city or, more likely, succumbed to the rat plague – a plague that, as players discover, did not precede Dunwall’s economic troubles, but was deliberately introduced by the city’s elites in an attempt to eliminate poverty and quell discontent among the lower classes. In fact, Dishonored only acknowledges two forms of labor as viable or valuable. The first, of course, is the quasi-military, quasi-criminal work performed by the city-watch, the overseers, and by players themselves. The second is the service work of the game’s seemingly endless supply of maids, butlers, and prostitutes. Constructed through these binaries, Dishonored immerses players in an economic landscape that, according to Dyer-Witheford, has become all too familiar with the advent of globalization. As he notes, outsourcing and similar practices have not only brought unprecedented prosperity to impoverished parts of the world, but have also condemned once prosperous areas to unprecedented poverty. Writing that capital has “imploded the Three Worlds into one another,” he explains:

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Corporate flight from the demands of the mass worker in Europe and North America has led to the partial Third-Worlding of the First World – deindustrialising manufacturing centres, cancelling the Keynesian deal, inaugurating mass unemployment, lowering wages, intensifying work. This has introduced into the metropolis levels of insecurity and destitution previously thought of as relegated to the peripheries of capitalist world economy.59 This is very much the situation that players encounter in Dishonored. Framed for the assassination of the empress, their quest to rescue her daughter and thereby redeem themselves requires them to make their way through the remnants of Dunwall’s past industrial glory. Accordingly, they discover that there is often little or no buffer zone between the wealth of the game’s ruling classes and the poverty upon which this wealth is predicated. In the Estate District, for instance, players leap through the broken window of a ratinfested, crumbling rowhouse onto the lavish balcony of the Boyle’s mansion. In the Abbey of the Everyman, a doorway off the marbled, Art Deco foyer leads players down into the stone and iron-bound bowels of the hound pens where overseers feed the corpses of the recently deceased to wolf hounds. Explicitly constructed as the result of technological and biological warfare waged against the working class, the decidedly Gothic proximity of Dunwall’s class-based extremes of despair and privilege suggests the problematic politics of Vandermeer and Chambers’s calls to “reclaim the dead past in a positive and affirmative way.”60 Indeed, although the exposed iron architecture of many of Dishonored’s Gothic-revival landmarks explicitly suggests a recognition that Dunwall’s medievalesque trappings are predicated on the industrial production of an unseen and largely absent class of workers, it is unwilling to make the larger connection – that is, to recognize that its own digital medievalism is also predicated on the unseen labor of an industrial proletariat. The game instead dramatizes the plight of the city’s knowledge class of artists, engineers, adventurers, and entrepreneurs. Prisoners of the promising, though ultimately unworkable ideals of the “dead past,” they are represented as the primary victims of Dunwall’s impossibly fractured economic order – the next, logical casualties of a regime that unrepentantly cannibalizes itself to maintain the neo-feudal iniquities that so favor the elites.61 Accordingly, Dishonored does not mourn the loss of its working 59 60 61

Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx, 134. Vandermeer and Chambers, Steampunk Bible, 99. Players discover, in fact, that one of the primary ways that Dishonored’s aristocracy is able to maintain their standard of living is by falsely accusing prominent middle-class families of being infected with the plague and subsequently seizing their possessions.



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class any more than Skyrim mourns the loss of the Dwemer. Although the game explicitly conflates Dunwall’s imperial and industrial decline with the disappearance of its once heroic labor power, it capitalizes on the resulting sense of loss. It constructs the absence of the workers as the impetus for a sort of heroic, consumerist praxis, one that requires players to assume the role of a militarized thief – an assassin. Forced to fend for themselves amidst a city that threatens at every turn to devour them, the only way that they can recuperate their stolen aristocratic privilege is by reappropriating the disembodied goods, treasures, and technologies that appear in game as the last tangible remnants of the vanished working class. Understood in this sense, much of what passes for play in Dishonored is constructed through what Biddick describes as a sense of melancholy, one that, she writes, “has been called a type of theft that reappropriates the lost object.”62 Drawing on Freud’s Melancholy and Mourning, Biddick argues that Ruskin, Morris, and other Victorian intellectuals deployed a “melancholy of work” to defer solidarity and limit their own identification with the potentially revolutionary “emerging politics of British workers.”63 According to Biddick: I call the ways in which Victorian intellectuals and artists (such as John Ruskin and William Morris) responded to the shock of industrialization as a melancholy for work. Rather than join in a particular work of mourning – join the outcry of workers in their strikes – Victorian intellectuals practiced another “economics of the mind” (as Freud designated it), a melancholy for work; that is, they concentrated not on the disturbing lost objects, all those disembodied industrial workers whose disembodiment threatened their own imagined integrity, but on a sense of loss that they articulated as the “hand” of an imagined Gothic handicraft. Put in other terms, the melancholy for work protected from an awareness of the loss that would bound disembodied workers most intimately and most painfully to such elites, in a solidarity of mourning.64 For Dishonored and steampunk in general, it is not the “hand” of the Gothic peasant that stands in, metonymically, for the imagined potential of lost labor, but the gears, valves, and pistons of the animistic Gothic machine.65 In 62 63 64 65

Biddick, Shock, 10. Biddick, Shock, 12, 42–43. Biddick, Shock, 12–13. Steampunk commentators often treat machines as living entities. The Catastrophone Orchestra and Arts Collective (NYC) claims, for example, that “Steampunk machines are

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enjoining their audiences to “love the machine, hate the factory,” steampunk intellectuals perform a sleight of hand that is similar if not identical to that of their imagined steam-era predecessors. To borrow Biddick’s formulation, they articulate their own “sense of loss” through the elaborate, overly embellished mechanizations of an equally imaginative steam-era instead of concentrating on the plight of workers displaced by or newly disembodied by the rise of the globalization and post-industrial service economies.66 As with the spider robots in Skyrim, the machine arguably becomes a sanitized stand-in for the potentialities and the anxieties inherent in the new economy, for the promise of Sterling’s “design software, fabricators, Instructables videos, websites, wikis, cellphones, search engines and etsy.com.”67 The steampunk machine also, however, embodies the shortcomings of the so-called knowledge class: their inability to restore either the industries that produced and consumed the machinery or the impossible clockwork pastoral that inspires such steampunk melancholy. As prototype rather than product, it conflates capital and labor, foreclosing the work, industrial or otherwise, required for its production. The machine becomes a sensual assemblage, an alluring mirror with the power to reveal its admirers as engineers, craftsmen, mad scientists, inventors, urchins, or innovators – anything but the workers that they fear they are and yet so desperately long to become. Here, Biddick helps us to understand steampunk’s investment in the medieval as arising from a desire for the adventure and privilege of labor but not its actual contingencies. To the extent that Dishonored constructs its play of reappropriation as natural, inevitable, and even fun, it participates in a larger cultural narrative, one that celebrates the power of production, yet effaces the workers whose time and talents are indelibly intertwined with this production. Manifested through spectacular ruined factories that are not only devoid of laborers, but disconnected from larger networks of produc-

66

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real, breathing, coughing, struggling and rumbling parts of the world. They are not the airy intellectual fairies of algorithmic mathematics but the hulking manifestations of muscle and mind, the progeny of sweat, blood, tears and delusions. The technology of steampunk is natural; it moves, lives, ages and even dies.” See “What then, is Steampunk?: Colonizing the Past so we can Dream the Future,” Steampunk Magazine 1 (2007): 4. Ashurst and Powell locate this anthropomorphism in Gothic fantasy and “Frankensteinesque forms,” as well as an Arts-and-Crafts inspired emphasis on hand-crafted products. See “Under Their Own Steam,” 154–60 (157). Biddick, Shock, 12. The phrase, “Love the machine, hate the factory,” is, according to science-fiction author Cory Doctorow, the motto of Steampunk magazine. See, “Love the Machine, Hate the Factory,” Make 17 (2009): 14. Huxtable treats this imperative as a revision of calls by Morris and C. R. Ashbee for the restoration of human agency over the machine. See Huxtable, “Love the Machine,” 216–21. Sterling, “User’s Guide to Steampunk,” 33.



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tion, this narrative is undoubtedly motivated by contemporary anxieties about the loss of industry, outsourcing, and our current jobless recovery. As we discuss above, all of this is latent in the image of the ruined machinery of empire, abandoned to history at the epitome of its potential. Yet, while this narrative recognizes these anxieties, it ultimately functions to efface them. By representing the factory and all of its associations as relics of an always earlier, more barbaric time, works like Dishonored, Skyrim, and Jackson’s Desolation of Smaug explicitly construct the present as the past. In doing so, they suggest that whether or not we have the wherewithal to realize it, our concerns about globalization, deregulation, and many of the other social and political policies of the so-called new economy are also relics of the past. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that while the symbolic grammar of many works of contemporary medievalism is more than adequate to express these anxieties, it ultimately proves insufficient to formulate a workable response. Grounded in ideology rather than imagination, this failure is symptomatic of what, according to Dyer-Witheford, is one of the most pernicious tenets of post-industrialism – namely, that when combined with the inexorable logic of the marketplace, advances in technology are rapidly producing a future in which economic inequality, exploitation, alienation, and any number of other ills traditionally associated with industrialization will soon become distant memories – fodder, perhaps, for some futurist strand of cyberpunk medievalism.68 As Dyer-Witheford argues, however, this is an ultimately disempowering vision of the future, one that explicitly constructs the human subject as an outdated technology incapable of affecting anything that remotely resembles social change.69 This ideology, in other words, interpellates us as medieval subjects – the backward remnants of a passing order whose inability to look beyond the traumas and inequities of the present are symptomatic of a larger failure to embrace the promise of a digital renaissance that is always only a microprocessor away. Medievalism, as such, is ideally suited to interrogate the way that this and any number of other fantastic futures are sold to the public through the expedient of reimagining the present as a version of the medieval past. If Umberto Eco is correct in stating that “[m]odern ages have revisited the Middle Ages from the moment when, according to historical handbooks, they came to an end,” then medievalism, as the critical study of this “continuous return,” can help scholars understand not only what these revisitations say about the hopes

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Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx, 30. Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx, 26.

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and fears of the present, but the larger question of how they build on and diverge from the medievalisms of the past.70 In order to realize this potential, however, medievalist scholarship must be willing to not only take on subjects that Tolkien, Ruskin, and Morris recognize as “real”: the faeries, giants, and various heroic masons and stonecutters of our lost Gothic past. Medievalism must also be willing to broach the sort of mundane subjects that they might arguably have considered false. For we often approach medievalism only as a product of two, privileged forms of labor: the creative work of authors, directors, and designers, and the interpretive work of scholars, readers, players, and various other forms of tinkerers. Yet if medievalism has a tangible existence, it is also because of the unprivileged and largely unrecognized labor that takes place in factories (robotic or otherwise), power plants, agriculture, and any number of other sites that are implicated in the complex networks of material and immaterial production that constitute the contemporary culture industry. In one way or another, all of this labor is congealed into and leaves its traces on medievalist production. As Marx reminds us, the “totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society – the real foundation” upon which everything that we describe as history is predicated.71 To understand the present, it is therefore imperative for us to attempt to disentangle this past from its more heroic trappings. While doing so may not help us to, as Sterling advises, “understand the old mistakes well enough not to repeat them,” it might, in the very least, prevent us from representing those mistakes as new or somehow revolutionary.72

70 71 72

Umberto Eco, “The Return of the Middle Ages,” Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 65. Karl Marx, A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, trans. N. I. Stone (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1904), 11. Sterling, “User’s Guide to Steampunk,” 33.

Modern-day Ring-givers: MMORPG Guild Cultures and the Influence of the Anglo-Saxon World Lindsey Simon-Jones In modern, massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs), players are creating and challenging normative cultural structures as they establish, sustain, and cultivate new virtual societies. Moreover, many of these games rely heavily on medieval aspects for both their game content and their community frameworks. As Oliver Traxel notes, nearly all MMORPGs include some aspect of the medieval: “Some of the latter [computer games] are grounded in thorough research on the historical circumstances of the Middle Ages, but many more depend on overt fiction from or about the period, and almost all incorporate at least some pseudo-medieval elements.”1 Thus, it is no surprise to find many types of modern medievalism influencing MMORPG game lore; even decidedly un-medieval games – like Star Wars: The Old Republic, DC Universe Online, and EVE Online – frequently rely on various forms of medievalism.2 There has been recent critical interest in the many and varied reimaginings of the medieval world in modern video games, and we know now that many social structures of the medieval world

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Oliver M. Traxel, “Medieval and Pseudo-Medieval Elements in Computer Role-Playing Games: Use and Interactivity,” in Studies in Medievalism XVI: Medievalism in Technology Old and New, ed. Karl Fugelso with Carol Robinson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 125. BioWare, Star Wars: The Old Republic (United States: Electronic Arts and Lucas Arts, 2011); CCP Games, EVE Online (United States: CCP Games, 2003); and Sony Online Entertainment, DC Universe Online (United States: Sony Computer Entertainment, WB Games and AsiaSoft, 2011).

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are replicated in modern MMORPGs gaming communities.3 For example, Edward Castronova has recently explored the cultural effects of online games and concludes: “the same institutions that make norms effective in the real world make them effective in the synthetic world. In general, the forces that create and evolve institutions are human social forces, and they will operate the same way whether the humans find themselves on Earth or on some cybernetic version of Pluto.”4 In addition, Lauryn S. Mayer has explored the ways in which neo-medieval MMORPGs reproduce restrictive gender norms while they simultaneously “provide the foundation for radical challenges to traditional concepts of gender and its embodiments.”5 Of particular interest to this study is Mayer’s exploration of the ways that in MMORPGs “the implicit rules of governing culture […] make some of the less-articulated but still powerful normative forces behind that culture more visible.”6 Although Mayer’s work focuses on representations of gender, her speculation that modern video games can both fortify and undermine cultural norms by making them “more visible” opens up significant avenues of inquiry for exploring the representation of other cultural phenomenon in modern video games. It is my contention that MMORPG guilds and guild leaders are remaking centuries-old methods of leadership, building their guilds on cultural and economic systems that are strikingly reminiscent of those seen in Anglo-Saxon warrior culture. More than merely adapting storylines from early Germanic 3

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For recent studies on medievalism in modern video games, see: Brent Moberly and Kevin Moberly, “Revising the Future: The Medieval Self and the Sovereign Ethics of Empire in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic,” in Studies in Medievalism XVI: Medievalism in Technology Old and New, ed. Karl Fugelso with Carol Robinson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 159–83; Neomedievalism in the Media: Essays on Film, Television, and Electronic Games, ed. Carol L. Robinson and Pamela Clements (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2012); Carol L. Robinson, “An Introduction to Medievalist Video Games,” in Studies in Medievalism XVI: Medievalism in Technology Old and New, ed. Karl Fugelso with Carol Robinson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 123–24; and Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl, Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present (New York: Routledge, 2013). See also online work on sites like the International Society for the Study of Medievalism’s Medievally Speaking: An Open Access Review Journal Encouraging Critical Engagement with the Continuing Process of Inventing the Middle Ages, The Virtual Society for the Study of Popular Culture and the Middle’s Studies of Popular Culture and the Middle Ages, and the Medieval Electronic Multimedia Organization’s The Medieval in Motion: The Blog for Medieval Electronic Multimedia Organization. Edward Castronova, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Worlds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 102. Lauryn S. Mayer, “Promises of Monsters: The Rethinking of Gender in MMORPGs,” in Studies in Medievalism XVI: Medievalism in Technology Old and New, ed. Karl Fugelso with Carol Robinson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 184–205 (195). Mayer, “Promises of Monsters,” 192–93.



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and Anglo-Saxon texts, real-world gaming guilds are enacting, recreating, and reimagining Saxon societies. Like the Germanic and Scandinavian tribes that came to prominence in England after the fall of the Roman Empire, in order to survive and thrive, global MMORPG guilds – particularly raidingguilds working towards end-game content – must ensure sustainable and reliable participation from their members. To secure such fealty, MMORPG guilds have appropriated the social structures that bound Anglo-Saxon tribes together by developing looting systems, wherein guild members are rewarded for their skill, time, and effort. Moreover, in the MMORPG world, the guild master/leader acts as a Beowulfian béaggifa (ring or treasure-giver), and, like those early raiding warriors, raiding guild members are reliant on the béaggifa for gear upgrades that will ensure more likely survival in high-level combat. In doing so, MMO guilds create micro-economies based not on modern modes of market systems, but on more traditional and communal structures of trade and goods distribution. MMORPG Guild Cultures Although anecdotal evidence may suggest that video game culture is individualistic rather than community-based, as if MMO games and gamers frequently suffer from isolation and detachment from society, research has shown (and any gamer will tell you) that these stereotypes are erroneous. Given the social nature of human development, we should not be surprised that online games have also developed strongly social features. Moreover, this social interaction provides online gamers with a sense of community and shared experience. To wit, Sarah Bowman’s recent work on the functions of role-playing demonstrates the community-building that RPGs and MMORPGs simulate: in Werewolf […] the role-playing practice itself recapitulates traditional, tribal ideals into modern rituals and storytelling forms. In this way, the game designers call the player’s attention to the potential for role-playing to act as a unifying communal practice.7 More than merely side effects of the game, social and community structures – tied to but external of the game itself – often shape an entire gaming experience.

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Sarah Lynne Bowman, The Function of Role-Playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems and Explore Identity (London: McFarland & Company Inc., 2010), 77.

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In fact, social interaction between gamers has been found to be central to many types of gameplay by social scientists working to quantify and qualify the effects of online gaming; recent studies on EverQuest outline the importance of just such interaction.8 For example, Florence Chee, Marcelo Vieta, and Richard Smith have found that: [EverQuest experiences] are deep social involvements between future directed and co-responsible working selves committed to meaningful mutual projects […]. For these players, EverQuest holds deeply meaningful and shared experiences that are rooted in community values and reciprocal projects […] with deep investments of emotion and time.9 In fact, as T. L. Taylor notes, those who play most intently (here identified as power gamers) are, perhaps, the most intensely social: the participation of power gamers in guilds points to a sociability we do not normally associate with this kind of focused play style. […] This commitment to a larger group moves the idea of socializing beyond simply chatting, or informal friendship networks, to a recognition that there is a fundamental necessity to rely on others in a game like EverQuest. The power gamers are not exempt from this. Their intense focus, commitment to instrumental action, and love of efficiency does not in the context of EQ produce an isolated and individualistic player, but a highly networked one.10 Power (or hardcore) gamers may participate in one or more, four- to fivehour raids per week. In addition, power gamers will need to play individual hours restocking consumables, rebuilding bank/credit accounts, and earning reputation; they will also often gear up alternate characters, aid in the development of lower-level characters, and play “for fun.” In all, power gamers devote a considerable number of hours to gameplay, and nearly all of their activities involve in-game social interaction.

8 9

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Sony Online Entertainment, EverQuest (United States: Sony Online Entertainment, 2009). Florence Chee, Marcelo Vieta, and Richard Smith, “Online Gaming and the Interactional Self: Identity Interplay in Situated Practice,” in Gaming as Culture: Essays on Reality, Identity and Experience in Fantasy Games, ed. J. Patrick Williams, Sean Q. Hendricks, and W. Keith Winkler (London: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2006), 168. T. L. Taylor, Play between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), 88.



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These social interactions, however, are not solely about advancing to game completion. They are also a key element in establishing and maintaining online gamer satisfaction. As studies like “Collaborate and Share: An Experimental Study of the Effects of Task and Reward Interdependencies in Online Games” have shown, The experience of collaborative play has been found to increase gamers’ enjoyment and the popularity of the game. For this reason, most online games, especially MMORPGs, are designed to generate interdependencies among players that lead them to depend on, relate to, or interact with other players.11 Since game loyalty increases in games with significant inter-player dependence, game developers have increasingly built social interactivity – often in the form of requisite grouping tasks – into game progression in an attempt to maintain or increase gameplay and paid game subscriptions. Because it is often impossible to complete important elements of the game as a solo player, many players join ready-made social units to ensure easy access to players with similar interests, playing strategies, and/or skill levels. These units often, but not always, take on the medieval nomenclature of Guilds or Clans, signifying the importance of collective effort for successful task completion. MMO guilds/clans can take many forms, as Taylor has outlined. Many guilds are “family guilds (sometimes called ‘social guilds’) that emphasize personal connections and playful engagement with the game.”12 Some guilds are “simply moving a real-world social or professional network” into an online environment for work and play13 – like the World of Warcraft guild The Truants, “an active group of academics, a full contingent of PhDs and advanced graduate students who dedicate a significant portion of their lives to the study of MMORPGs.”14 Other guilds form organically as players meet and establish friendships or playing/questing partnerships in-game. Guilds vary in their expectations of members’ time, dedication, and skill. The most demanding guilds function as “raiding guilds (sometimes called 11

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Boreum Choi, Inseong Lee, Dongseong Choi, and Jinwoo Kim, “Collaborate and Share: An Experimental Study of the Effects of Task and Reward Interdependencies in Online Games,” Cyberpsychology and Behavior 10:4 (2007): 591. Taylor, Play between Worlds, 43. Scott Rettberg, “Corporate Ideology in World of Warcraft,” in Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader, ed. Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), 33. Rettberg, “Corporate Ideology,” 19.

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‘uber guilds’); these raiding guilds can be quite large, boasting memberships in the thousands, and are marked by a very well-articulated commitment to pursuing the high-end game.”15 At their heart, online guilds are “sophisticated networks in which reputation, trust, and responsibility form the predominant modes of organization.”16 When a guild is strong, the bonds between dedicated guild members can be quite powerful; large, successful guilds have even been known to shift en masse from game to game. Some community ties are so strong that they withstand multiple moves and regenerate in some surprising ways. A small band of online friends, with members on multiple continents, may grow uninterested in one game only to find each other again in new games, sometimes years later. Smaller guilds can be absorbed into larger ones, only to break away again as a unit. This type of guild migration has been tracked on a much larger scale by Celia Pearce in an “eighteen-month ethnographic study” of what she terms the Uru diaspora across multiple games and platforms.17 She traces a guild (neighborhood, in this context), The Gathering of Uru, displaced by the unannounced shuttering of their home-game/home-world in Uru Ages: Beyond Myst, as they search through There.com, Second Life, and Beyond Uru for a new homeland. She argues that this particular guild/neighborhood “identifies collectively as a single group […] and carry persistent identities concurrently across no less than five different networked environments.”18 Although such strong social ties might suggest that guild/clan membership is integral to MMO gameplay, players are not required to participate in guild cultures; in fact, many players never desire to align themselves formally with a guild. There are valid reasons to avoid guilding; casual gamers, for example, may dislike the time demands or obligations that often accompany guild membership. However, by not joining, players suffer: like a medieval craftsman without a guild, or the Wanderer in search of a new clan, unguilded players are forced to fend for themselves. Without a guild or clan, players have to group with strangers of varying skill and gear levels (pick-up groups, or PUGS), and playing in such groups offers little assurance to a player of a fair distribution of goods/winnings. For these reasons, most players, at one time or another, join a guild or clan. 15 16

17 18

Taylor, Play between Worlds, 43. Mikael Jakobsson and T. L. Taylor, “The Sopranos meets EverQuest: Social Networking in Massively Multiplayer Online Games,” Proceedings of Melbourne DAC, the 5th International Digital Arts and Culture Conference, 2003, [accessed 15 March 2013], 85. Celia Pearce and Artemesia, Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 69. Pearce and Artemesia, Communities of Play, 178.



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Establishing trust and maintaining player alliances is necessary to sustain healthy guilds. In most online games, creating or disbanding a guild is a simple process. Because of this, the possibilities for MMORPG guilds are nearly limitless, and because leaving a guild can be as easy as typing a simple command (/gquit), it can be a challenge to hold a large guild together. Indeed, as Taylor suggests, just like with the historical bonds uniting tribes or warriors, trust and strong leadership are often the only things that can hold a large raiding guild together: “Guild members are constantly risking their characters’ lives for each other and, in turn, trusting each other that hunting and raids will be well planned, loot distributed fairly, and that if problems arise the group will band together to solve them.”19 While good conflict-management and proper planning are essential to a well-functioning guild, we would be remiss to overlook the importance of the fair distribution of in-game treasure, the sharing of the loot – namely, the giving of weapons, gear, and rare items to dedicated guild members – to guild management. Players of various MMOs in multiple online forum discussions indicated the importance of gear and loot to their continued play; this is particularly true of hard-core players who raid.20 In a survey of responses on three different forums to the general question “Why do you raid?”, the attainment of special raid “Loot” consistently ranked as one of the most significant motivators. Specifically, “Loot” came in first on the WoWForum discussion, with seventeen players mentioning it as a motivating factor; players on this forum mentioned “Game Progression” fifteen times, “The Challenge” twelve 19 20

Taylor, Play between Worlds, 46. Recently, some in the MMO gaming world were forecasting the end of hardcore raiding, given decreasing popularity and significant changes to raiding structures in the most popular games, for example, the institution of the “Looking for Raid” (LFR) feature in World of Warcraft (see, for example, the various opinions expressed on the MikeB staffblog “Community Spotlight: Is Raiding Dead,” MMORPG.com, 1 July 2012). However, Wildstar, a new MMORPG launched in June 2014, is bringing back hardcore raiding with no apologies (William Murphy, “WildStar Interviews: Making Raids Matter Again,” MMORPG.com, 13 May 2014, [accessed 24 June 2014]). Wildstar is still in its primacy, so it is difficult to know how its focus on hardcore raiding features will fair, but, thus far, the response seems positive. Furthermore, perhaps in response to both Wildstar’s launch and the generally negative feedback it had been receiving on the changes to raid structures, the World of Warcraft expansion Warlords of Draenor, set for release in fall 2014, will reintroduce large-scale raids (raids had been scaled back to primarily 10-man raids in the 2010 Cataclysm expansion). Raids in Normal and Heroic modes will be available to 10–25 player groups, while raids set at the Mythic difficulty level will require a mandatory 20 players (Bashiok, “Warlords of Draenor: Dungeons and Raids,” World of Warcraft Battle.net, 9 November 2013, [accessed 24 June 2014]).

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times, and both “Social Aspects” and “Fun” eleven times. Additionally, “Loot” ranked only one behind “Game Progression” on the MMOChampion forum, ranking at eighteen mentions compared to nineteen for “Game Progression.” On the Joystiq.com forum, “Loot” ranked below “The Challenge,” “Social Aspects,” and “Game Progression”; however, that thread was set up as a choice between “seeing the story’s conclusion” and the challenge of killing difficult bosses. Loot was not mentioned in the initial question; thus, it is not surprising to see numbers significantly lower than those in the categories specifically identified by the original poster. The statistics are compiled in Fig. 1, and clearly show the role that “Loot” plays in the sustained interest of these hard-core raiding players. Figure 1.  Why do you raid? 50 45 40

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Moreover, players desire good gear and loot for more than merely its aesthetic appeal. In the WoWForum, Razór, a level-90 Orc Rogue from the Prophesy of Hellscream guild, sparked a lengthy debate about the role and importance of gear/loot in raiding when he suggested that “Everyone raids because it gives a sense of accomplishment/character progression/bragging rights […]. There is no way I’m buying any other explainaition [sic] having seen what Ive [sic] seen for years. Take away the gear, see how many still keep raiding.”21 Such a declarative statement ignited some outrage from 21

Razór, “Why do you raid? Why did you start raiding?” World of Warcraft forum Battle.net,



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other players, who cited multiple reasons for raiding; nevertheless, most admitted that loot was an important (albeit not the sole) reason for raiding. In one response, for example, Bodom, a level-90 Orc Death Knight from the Exertus guild, argued, “I’m pretty sure most people get a bigger sense of satisfaction from defeating new bosses than they get from gear upgrades. Gear is just one way to progress your character, but a new boss kill is a way to progress your whole guild and raid group.”22 What Bodom’s response suggests is that even those players who defend “Game Progression” or “The Challenge” – in this case “defeating new bosses” – as their primary reason for raiding acknowledge the necessity of “Loot” or gear in their quest to conquer increasingly difficulty opponents. Indeed, we might compare this to the need that Anglo-Saxon warriors had for functional armament. While some degree of wealth and respect might be garnered by the attainment of impressive weaponry, Anglo-Saxon thanes required such weaponry as a means of protecting their own lives, the lives of their families, and of community members. They, too, needed to defeat their foes, and the loot provided by their ring-givers allowed them to believe they could do just that. In Beowulf, for example, we find named swords and exceptional armor exchanging hands often, although not solely through the auspices of a ringgiver. Most of the weaponry that gains fame in Anglo-Saxon poetry does so because of its strength and usefulness in battle, and, as in modern video games, when one weapon is not up to the battle at hand, it is cast aside for better arms. Readers will recall, for example, when the sword Hrunting fails Beowulf in his fight with Grendel’s mother (lines 1521–28). In this instance, Beowulf abandons Hrunting and turns instead to a stronger, giant-made sword (lines 1528–57), essentially upgrading his weaponry, as do modern players as they encounter more dangerous and resilient foes. How then, can guild leaders ensure the continued satisfaction of their guild mates, each of whom has his or her own desires and motivations for devoting significant time and energy to the guild and to the game? In order to meet these challenges, MMORPG guilds and guild leaders are revisioning time-tested methods of group management based on loot distribution employed by early Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon tribes in order to sustain and grow their virtual societies. This is not meant to suggest that guild leaders have studied and are deliberately mimicking the social structures of the Anglo-Saxon world; rather, as Nicholas Perkins and David Clark remind

22

18 March 2012 [accessed 24 June 2014]. Bodom, “Why do you raid? Why did you start raiding?,” World of Warcraft forum Battle. net, 18 March 2012 [accessed 24 June 2014].

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us, “Anglo-Saxon culture works its way into the dreams and landscapes of the modern arts in ways neither to be ignored as obscurantist nor dismissed as cliché-ridden.”23 In short, we are now seeing bygone social systems and their tensions “work their way into” modern MMORPG cultures that replicate the hoard distribution, social behavior, and communal economies of the Anglo-Saxon world. Anglo-Saxon Ring-Giving We know that weaponry, armor, and treasure played a central role in the social structure of the Anglo-Saxon world. Hugh Magennis views gift-giving as an integral part of the Old English feasting trope, which he identifies as the encapsulation of community in Old English poetry; this trope is particularly well developed in Beowulf. Anglo-Saxon leaders, þeodnas, are repeatedly praised for their generosity and even-handed distribution of beagas, the bounty of war; good leadership is frequently aligned in the texts with effective and responsible gift-giving.24 Further, Joseph E. Marshall argues that, even in his final moments, Beowulf believes that distributed treasure is for the good of the people while hoarded treasure (like that of the Dragon and Grendel) is wicked.25 In many ways, gift-giving and the exchange of treasure drive the action and adventure of these early tales. Ring-giving and treasure distribution extend far beyond the Beowulf text, though; their significance is also seen in a number of other Old English poems. The speakers in these poems frequently lament their loss of or distance from their béaggifa [treasure-giver], goldgifa (gold-giver), or goldwine [generous lord]. In two of the most famous elegies from the tenth-century Exeter Book, The Seafarer and The Wanderer, we find intense longings for not only the economic luxuries bestowed by a ring-giving lord, but also for the social amenities such community afforded. In The Seafarer, a Christian poem contrasting the hardships of seagoing and mortal life with the joys of heavenly salvation, the speaker mourns the loss of his ring-giving lord: “Dagas sind gewitene, / ealle onmēdlan eorþan rīces; / nearon nū cyningas ne cāseras / ne goldgiefan swylce iū wǣron” [The days [of glory] and all magnificent earthly kingdoms are departed. There are no new kings, nor emperors,

23 24 25

Nicholas Perkins and David Clark, introduction to Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination, ed. David Clark and Nicholas Perkins (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), 9. Hugh Magennis, Images of Community in Old English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Joseph E. Marshall, “Goldgyfan or Goldwlance: A Christian Apology for Beowulf and Treasure,” Studies in Philology 107:1 (2010): 1–24.



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nor gold-givers such as there were].26 The poem goes on to suggest that age and time have altered nobility and have left only sadness on Earth. The Wanderer amplifies this theme. The narrative poem depicts an exiled speaker’s search for community and acceptance; that community is codified by the presence of a ring-giving lord. The narrator in The Wanderer is “wretched” and “abject” as he searches for a new “treasure lord” after his previous ring-giver has passed away (was hidden in the earth). He yearns for a single friend or companion who would accept him, protect him, and honor his contributions to the group with treasure. Here, the relationship between social acceptance and the receiving of goods is crystallized. The poem juxtaposes loss and isolation with the joys of hall life: “an exiled path accompanies him, not braided gold; a frozen spirit, not earthly riches.” To be alone is to be bereft of the economic benefits of community; being forced to survive without the aid and comfort of companions is the narrator’s greatest sadness. Although the narrator speaks of the death of his previous lord, the joy that has perished is the treasure-giving social system that sustained his community. We need not rely solely on literary evidence to understand the importance of such gift-giving in the Anglo-Saxon world; their representations are supported by historical evidence. Take, for instance, the burial mounds at Sutton Hoo and the discovery of the Staffordshire hoard, along with archeological finds in many North Sea-facing countries, suggesting that such treasures were critical to foundational cultural events like funeral rites, military victories, and to the maintenance of community. The Staffordshire hoard contains “more than 3,500 items that are nearly all martial or warlike in nature,”27 and the Sutton Hoo burial is particularly relevant to the Beowulf text, given the text’s ties to the East Anglian region of England. In addition to these burial mounds (and buried treasures), archeologists have identified a number of structures that, like Heorot, were seen as centers for the distribution of gold, war booty, and treasures. For example, digs in Gudme, Denmark have uncovered “detached gold rings” that Catherine M. Hills argues “suggest this was a place where such rings were given out, as Hrothgar did at Heorot.”28 As Hills has pointed out, the Anglo-Saxon author(s) of the poem reflect the material cultures in England, Sweden, and Denmark 26

27 28

“The Seafarer,” in A Guide to Old English, 6th ed., ed. Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2001), 277–82, lines 80–83. All subsequent line numbers are given parenthetically. “About” Staffordshire Hoard, [accessed 13 November 2013]. Catherine M. Hills, “Beowulf and Archaeology,” in A Beowulf Handbook, ed. Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 307.

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from the sixth to the eleventh centuries; thus, “the author of Beowulf need not have been fantasizing. It all really existed, in Suffolk in the seventh century.”29 Yet, gift-giving exchanges in Anglo-Saxon culture were not merely economic in nature. Ring-givers in the Anglo-Saxon world created a circular system of exchange wherein gifts awarded were repaid by the continued fealty of the recipient. Indeed, as represented in literature, Beowulf begins by implying a direct relationship between a lord’s ability and willingness to provide treasures to his people with the loyalty and support of those people: Swa sceal geong guma  gode gewyrcean Fromum feohgiftum  on fæder bearme Þæt hine on ylde  eft gewunigen Wilgesiþas  þonne wig cume, Leode gelæsten30 [Thus should a young man bring good gifts, splendid treasures from his father’s possessions, so that later in life loyal comrades will stand beside him. When war comes, the people will support him.] Here, Beowulf clearly links the distribution of goods with the ensured loyalty of the lord’s retainers. Moreover, it suggests that a leader’s ability to provide such treasures will result in the affections and support of the larger community (not only of those who have personally received the gifts). As Marshall notes, “The three ideal lords (Hrothgar, Hygelac, and Beowulf ) magnanimously distribute treasure to their thanes in exchange for loyalty and service, whereas the four anti-lords (Grendel, the dragon, the last survivor, and the Geats) avariciously hoard treasure.”31 Such ring-giving also seems to have implied long-term support. For example, after the defeat of Grendel, Wealðeow leverages the gifts Hrothgar has bestowed upon the Geats for continued loyalty to her sons, Hreðric and Hroðmund (lines 1226–31). Her speech reminds the men that these gifts are not merely payment for the service of ridding the hall of Grendel, but rather that she expects they will establish a relationship between the two kingdoms that ought to remain

29 30

31

Hills, “Beowulf and Archaeology,” 294. Beowulf: An Edition with Relevant Shorter Texts, ed. Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1998), lines 20–24. All subsequent line numbers are given parenthetically. Marshall, “Goldgyfan or Goldwlance,” 24.



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intact for generations to come (and that should protect her sons from any ideas Beowulf might have had about his right to the Danish throne). In essence, the ring-giving culture of the Anglo-Saxon world is a system designed to negotiate complex social interactions between various hierarchies of people, tribes, and cultures: “through its proper use and exchange, treasure comes to represent the inner and outer mettle of a kingdom. How a kingdom uses treasure is a good indication of how well that kingdom conducts itself.”32 So, too, is the management of loot distribution a marker of a well-functioning and sustainable guild. Even a quick survey of online loot system descriptions demonstrates that one of the main priorities of most guilds is to establish a system that will, in short, eliminate bickering, discontent, and drama among its members. Indeed, one player noted that “loot drama is a monstrous guild killer,”33 and Scott F. Andrews has suggested “in the entire history of MMO gaming, no single issue has caused more drama than loot. Loot drama is the main cause of players dropping out of raid, players turning on each other, players leaving guilds and guilds ripping themselves apart.” 34 The adoption of a cultural system of goods distribution similar to those used by Anglo-Saxon communities offers members a clear, sometimes mathematical method by which they can see how their participation affects their likelihood of receiving loot and ensuring that all players are bound by the same looting rules. In this way, modern loot systems provide MMORPG guild members with security and safety. With the right system in place, even members who may feel that they have been wronged or slighted in the past can be placated by the knowledge that system is transparent and just. Looting Structures MMO guilds employ numerous strategies for the distribution of items rewarded to the group for defeating various in-game opponents. Most games also offer in-game systems for the random or semi-random dispersal of lesser content that may, or may not, also be used by MMO guilds. However, many large guilds, working on game-progression tasks in large raids have found the random distribution of loot unacceptable. As one player noted: “There is essentially only one requirement for loot systems for a raid: you 32 33

34

Marshall, “Goldgyfan or Goldwlance,” 20. Valkeo, “A Guild Leader’s Guide,” Rift community forum, 18 March 2014, [accessed 13 June 2014]. Scott F. Andrews, The Guild Leader’s Handbook: Strategies and Guidance from a BattleScarred MMO Veteran, Kindle edition (Ann Arbor, 2010), chapter 6.

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dole out the gear in such a way that best benefits the raid team, rather than any individual. Generally speaking you want to equitably distribute the loot rather than over-gearing one person.”35 In response to these desires, guilds have turned to regimented systems to ensure a just system of distribution for individual players that result in the betterment of the guild as a whole. Many of the top world guilds choose to rely on a Loot Council, wherein guild leaders keep track of members’ progress, participation, and gear. The council, usually composed of a representative sampling of long-term guild members, determines loot distribution based on democratic decisions about what is best for the guild. This system requires significant trust and respect among guild members and a significant investment of time for the Loot Council. Each member must know the best statistics for his/her own class along the strengths and weakness of each player in the raid. Some of the top raiding guilds use this system because their primary goal is game progression. As one player put it, “Loot council is designed to keep a guild progressing. This means who ever will benefit the guild the most with the piece is the person who should receive it. This person is someone who we know is reliable and a quality player.” 36 Players in guilds using this system understand that a group is only as strong as its weakest player; thus, it is of utmost importance that guilds adequately “gear-up” active members. Any soldier stands a better chance of survival and victory if s/he carries the best possible weapon into battle. This is the same logic seen in Beowulf; it is why, for example, despite his earlier vitriol, Unferth offers Beowulf the sword Hrunting, which is described as a maegenfultuma [a mighty aid ] (line 1455), a foran ealdgestreona [a foremost heirloom] (line 1458). Knowing the danger he would face, and the repercussions that might result if he is defeated, the Danes hope to shift fortune in their favor by offering Beowulf their greatest weapon. This council-based system, while more problematic than some of the mathematical systems (because it is far less transparent), is probably closest to the method employed by Anglo-Saxon béaggifas [ring-givers]. Certainly, a lord would make subjective decisions about which of his aeðlingas [noble warriors] deserved or needed particular treasures based on his own assessment or on the recommendation of his advisors; a loot council makes the same types of decisions based on the same criteria. Some guilds prefer point-based systems. Created in 1999 by Thott, guild 35

36

Elgunaz, 90 Orc, Warrior Dominion guild “Loot system?,” World of Warcraft, Raid and Guild Leadership forum, 2 March 2013, [accessed 24 June 2014]. Blazekronic, 85 Undead Rogue, “Why do guilds use dkp/loot council systems?,” World of Warcraft forums, 7 October 2011, [accessed 18 June 2014].



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leader of Afterlife, the DKP (Dragon Kill Points) system, upon which many modern raid-loot systems are based, emerged from the Tolkienesque and pseudo-medieval world of EverQuest.37 Variations of basic DKP (Dragon Kill Points) or EP/GP (Effort Points/Gear Points) systems are most common among guilds using a point-based system. These systems reward points to players for their dedication to the guild, not just to their individual skill, and those dedication points determine which player will receive a desirable loot item. Such point-based systems ensure that guild members who regularly participate, who illustrate the social values appreciated by the culture (such as promptness), and who aid guild progression are rewarded for their loyalty, time, and effort, often regardless of success and failure. We might compare this type of reward system to the distribution of goods demonstrated after the defeat of Grendel. In the text, we see Hrothgar doling out treasures and gold to the loyal Geats who have traveled with Beowulf to Heorot. Even though none of the men participate in the battle (on Beowulf ’s orders), they are nonetheless rewarded for their time and loyalty to the group with maðþum [treasure] and yrfelafe [heirlooms] (lines 1050–55). Like the heroes of Anglo-Saxon epic poetry, modern MMO guild leaders understand that the health of the larger social system requires various types of participation and they distribute wealth and goods based on measures of loyalty. Although a point-based system’s primary function is to reward culturally acceptable behaviors, guild leaders may also reduce a player’s point total punitively. As in the real world, underperforming or causing strife in the guild will damage a player’s reputation. Because guild leaders are free to reduce DKP at their discretion, point totals are an essential means for monitoring a player’s participation and behavior. Since gear and in-game loot are highly prized in MMORPGs, a guild is able to modify the poor performance of its members for the greater good of the group.38 The (in) famous “50 DKP minus” meme and viral video encapsulates the pressure 37 38

Thott, “DKP Explanation,” Afterlife Guild, < http://afterlifeguild.org/dkpinfo/> [accessed 20 October 2012]. The pressure to perform can be exacerbated by the use of damage meters (in-game data collectors that quantify individual contributions to battles/raids). Data can then be used to moderate point totals; however, such meters are also “seen as promoting unhealthy competition that is detrimental to the group” and “individual (over-)achieving (seeking to be top of the damage meter) can be seen as jeopardizing the group’s success” (T. L. Taylor, “Does World of Warcraft Change Everything? How PVP Server, Multinational Playerbase, and Surveillance Mod Scene Caused Me Pause,” in Digital Culture, 190). Guild leaders/Ring-Givers, then, are faced with the difficult task of evaluating a player’s service to the guild, encouraging better and more active gameplay, while simultaneously keeping in mind that the good of the group as a whole must take precedence over individual achievements.

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on power players to execute strategies flawlessly and the harsh penalties for inadequacy and error.39 The meme is certainly an extreme example of guild point reduction, but is not dissimilar to the rant Wiglaf unleashes on the men who fled the dragon fight. Wiglaf promises that those men will not only lose personal reputation for their cowardice, but they and their kin will also suffer economic hardships: Nu sceal sincþego  one swyrdgifu, Eall eðelwyn  eowrum cynne Lufen alicgean;  londrihtes mot Þære mægburge  monna æghwylc Idel hweorgan,  syððan æðelingas Feorran gefricgean  fleam eowerne, Domleasdan dæd. (2884–90) [Now shall the receiving of treasure and sword-gifts, all the comforts of your homeland, fail your kin. Every man of the clan will be deprived of land-rights when lords from afar hear of your flight, your inglorious deed.] Wiglaf ’s tirade equates the loss of reputation with the loss of sword-gifts, treasure, and land. Beowulf ’s men will, essentially, lose gear points because of their failures in battle. Just as in the Anglo-Saxon world, modern gamers are motivated by their desire to earn treasure; guild leaders rely on this desire to ensure continued and satisfactory participation in the guild. A survey of guilds listed as primarily interested in “Raids” on MMORPG. com in the top five MMORPGs (as consistently ranked by “The Nosy Gamer”)40 as well as Wild Star, the newest MMO to focus on raiding at the time of writing, demonstrates some substantial consistencies in loot distribution over significantly disparate gaming experiences. Table 1 indicates a strong preference for some type of structured looting system, be it the Loot Council, DKP, or some other method: Overall, 63.5% of guilds choose a non-randomized method of loot distribution. This survey indicates that 36% of guilds chose the randomized Need before Greed system, with undefined 39 40

Scott Williams, “Many Memes, Handle It,” WoW Archivist, 18 January 2013 [accessed 30 June 2013]. “The Nosey Gamer” has weekly statistical data for game play dating back to 2012 based on xfire.com use in its “The Digital Dozen” blog posts. Please see for further information. The Google Docs spreadsheet for all historical data collected by the site is available at , accessed 21 June 2014.



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“Other” systems in use 26% of the time and Loot Council in use 22.5% of the time. The DKP system is used most infrequently, appearing as the guild choice only 15% of the time. The high percentage of guilds using a Need before Greed system is partially explained by casual guilds that run raids a part of their game play, but who are not intensely focused on game progression. This system does not require much if any outside research or record keeping. Differences in looting structures are also likely tied to differences in gameplay; nevertheless, these numbers demonstrate a strong preference for some type of structure in a guild’s looting system. Table 1.  MMORPG.com “raid” guilds’ loot-systems of choice

Need Before Greed Loot Council DKP Other

World of Warcraft 118 (32%) 94 (26%) 76 (21%) 79 (21%)

Star Wars: The Final Fantasy Guild Old Republic XIV Wars 2 115 26 77 (38%) (39%) (42%) 54 (18%) 52 (17%) 78 (26%)

9 (13%) 12 (18%) 20 (30%)

EVE Online 13 (25%)

WildStar 10 (29.5%)

Totals 359 (36%)

46 15 (25%) (29%) 6 1 (3%) (2%) 54 22 (29.5%) (43%)

8 (23.5%) 8 (23.5%) 8 (23.5%)

226 (22.5%) 155 (15%) 261 (26%)

The focus of guilds and players on the equal distribution of goods replicates historical structures, such as are seen in the song of Finnsburh section of Beowulf where we find that Finn, “[…] Folcwaldan sunu / dōgra gehwylce Dene weorþode, / Hengst hēap hringum wenede / efne swā swiðe sincgestrēonum / fǣttan goldes, swā hē Fresena cyn / on bēorsele byldan wolde” [With feasting gifts, should honor the Danes each and every day, gladden the troops of Hengst with gold rings and ancient treasures, ornamented gold, just as often as he would encourage the hosts of the Frisians in the beerhall].41 Although this intertextual allusion is a little obscure, it is also retold in the Finnsburh fragment, and is worth noting here because it demonstrates the power loot distribution has in community-building. The fragment tells us that the Frisians ambushed the Danes, who were visiting Hildeburh, sister of Danish prince Hnæf. Hengst, a surviving Danish retainer, then led an uprising against Finn, the Frisian king. The sides were so evenly matched that they were forced to come to an agreement wherein the Frisians 41

“The Battle of Finnsburh,” ll. 1089–94, Old English Minor Poems, The Labyrinth: Resources for Medieval Studies, Georgetown University [accessed 20 March 2013].

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allowed the Danes to settle on their land. Despite the vitriol between the two groups, peace was maintained through the equal exchange of treasures: the Danes were honored with goods just as the Frisians were honored. Thus, a fair and equal loot distribution system pacified conflicted communities. This ethic of fairness is reproduced in virtual gaming communities that rely on the dissemination of weapons, gear, and goods to stabilize and maintain what can be a vast and disparate community of players. What these raiding guilds create, then, is an interconnected system of individual micro-economies.42 While most MMO games utilize some traditional features of a market economy – players often can, for example, earn monetary rewards for completing tasks; they can also participate in market exchanges by gathering raw production materials, crafting products from those raw materials, or selling rare items discovered during the course of gameplay – this essay hopes to have shown that the primary economic systems chosen by the main social structures (guilds) in MMO games deviate significantly from modern market-based and capitalist systems. What we see in the guild distribution of loot, particularly in high-end raiding guilds, is a preference for a far more communal disbursement of goods, particularly systems that harken back to the more traditional economies of the Anglo-Saxon world. Guilds favoring the Loot Council system have chosen a command economy designed to allocate loot in a manner that best serves the group, rather than the individual. Guilds favoring a points-based system, by instilling points decay, EP/GP ratios, or a zero-sum system,43 have chosen a mixed system in which effort is rewarded, but no one player is able to amass an extraordinary amount of capital, thus combining some attributes of capitalism with more socialist tendencies. Even guilds that employ the “Need before Greed” system, effectively leaving the loot distribution up to chance, demonstrate a turn from strictly market modes of economic structure. Few, if any, guilds enact a monetary or market-based system for the sole purpose of bestowing honor or glory on a select few. Rather, the collective goals of the guild are the driving force in the establishment of the distribution system; 42

43

Admittedly, we need not localize reward systems that originate solely in the Anglo-Saxon world. Modern psychology now employs what they call “token reward” systems and/ or “token economies” in behavior modification. Just as in modern guild loot systems, behavior psychologists use tokens (which we might equate with loot) to reward desirable behaviors (like active raid participation and prompt arrival). In behavior modification, these tokens are converted to meaningful objects or rewards over time, and MMO games have begun to include just such systems – again to ensure customer/gamer loyalty – wherein players must collect a certain number of tokens from daily tasks in order to earn a special piece of equipment, set of armor, or enhancement. For more on the complexities of the EP/GP system, see WoW Wiki, “EPGP,” [accessed 20 October 2012].



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in high-functioning guilds, the needs, desires, and goals of the individual are secondary to the group cause. As Traxel has suggested, “as medievalism and pseudo-medievalism represent popular notions of the Middle Ages, they particularly foster interactivity, for they often revolve around the belief that success, and perhaps even survival, during that period required both rugged individualism and careful diplomacy.”44 What we can see in this comparison, then, is that by instituting looting systems that require just such “rugged individualism” in the form of raid participation and “careful diplomacy” in the form of loot distribution, modern guilds are replicating age-old social and economic systems in an effort to stabilize and ensure the continuation of their virtual communities.

44

Traxel, “Medieval and Pseudo-Medieval Elements,” 137.

Contributors NADIA R. ALTSCHUL is Assistant Professor of Spanish at The Johns Hopkins University. Her teaching and research interests include nineteenthcentury transnational studies; Orientalism; medievalism; disciplinary and intellectual history; temporality; geopolitics; and postcolonial studies, especially on Spanish America and the Iberian Peninsula. She is the author of Geographies of Philological Knowledge: Postcoloniality and the Transatlantic National Epic (2012); Literature, Authorship and Textual Criticism (2005, in Spanish); and co-editor of Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of “The Middle Ages” Outside Europe (2009). She is currently working on a book project on the medieval character of Spanish and Portuguese colonization in the Americas. MEGAN ARNOTT is a PhD student at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She completed an MA in Norse and Viking Studies at the University of Nottingham and another in Public History at the University of Western Ontario, completing her internship at L’Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site in Newfoundland. Her article, “Putting the Vikings on the Canadian Map,” was published in Mapping Medievalism at the Canadian Frontier, a special project undertaken by the University of Western Ontario. She is currently working on her dissertation about characterizations of the eleventh-century Norwegian king Haraldr harðráði. JAUME AURELL is Associate Professor at the Department of History at the University of Navarra (Spain). His main subjects of research are Mediterranean merchant culture, medieval and contemporary historiography, and medieval political theology. His works include Els mercaders Catalans al Quatre-Cents (1996), La cultura del mercader en la Barcelona del siglo XV (1998), La escritura de la memoria. De los positivismos a los postmodernismos (2005), and Authoring the Past. History, Autobiography, and Politics in Medieval Catalonia (2012). He is the editor of the Series “Rewriting the Middle Ages in the Twentieth Century” (Brepols) and is currently working on a book on twentieth-century historians’ autobiographies. ELIZABETH EMERY is Professor of French at Montclair State University, where she teaches courses on medieval, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century French literature and culture, and serves as Graduate Coordinator. She has published articles, books, and essay anthologies pertaining to nineteenthStudies in Medievalism XXIV, 2015

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century French and American medievalism, most recently (2014) Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, coedited with Richard Utz. A collection of essays coedited with Kathryn Duys and Laurie Postlewate, entitled Telling the Story in the Middle Ages, is forthcoming (2015). She serves as joint editor of the journal Romance Studies and Book Review Coeditor for Nineteenth-Century French Studies. VINCENT FERRÉ is Professor in Comparative Literature and Theory at Université Paris Est-Créteil (UPEC), member of Fabula, and vice-president of “Modernites medievales.” His scholarship centers on the European and American novel. He is the author of Sur les Rivages de la Terre du Milieu (2001), Lire Tolkien (2014), and L’essai fictionnel. Essai et roman chez Proust, Broch et Dos Passos (2013); editor of Tolkien, Trente ans après (2004), Médiévalisme. Modernité du Moyen Âge (2010), and Dictionnaire Tolkien (2012); and co-editor with K. Haddad of Proust, l’étranger (2010), with Ch. Pradeau and A. Besson of Cycle et collection (2008), and with D. Mortier of Littérature, politique et Histoire au XXe siècle (2010). JUAN GOMIS is Assistant Professor at the Catholic University of Valencia. His research focuses on popular literature in eighteenth-century Spain, which is understood as a valuable historical source. He works on not only the cultural representations contained in these printings (about political, gender, or religious aspects), the ways by which they were produced, sold, and read (in order to know how their meanings were built), but also the usages of this kind of literature in the service of nineteenth-century nationalisms. He has written several articles about these topics. He is the author of Menudencias de imprenta. Producción y circulación de la literatura popular en Valencia (siglo XVIII) (2014). VALERIE B. JOHNSON is a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she teaches medievalism-themed courses in composition and communication design. She has published on Robin Hood’s engagement with contemporary political theory and has forthcoming essays on how space and gender intersect in the medieval and modern Robin Hood tradition. Her current projects examine political expression through the language of landscape and environment in medieval literary contexts. ALEXANDER L. KAUFMAN is Professor of English at Auburn University at Montgomery, where he teaches classes on medieval outlaws, Arthuriana, and Chaucer. He is the author of The Historical Literature of the Jack Cade Rebellion (2009) and is the editor of the essay collection British Outlaws of Literature and History: Essays on Medieval and Early Modern Figures from



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Robin Hood to Twm Shon Catty (2011). Along with Lesley A. Coote, he co-edits the series Outlaws in Literature, History, and Culture. ERIN FELICIA LABBIE is Associate Professor of English at Bowling Green State University, where she teaches courses in medieval literature and critical theory. She is the author of Lacan’s Medievalism (2006) and co-editor of Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (2012). She is currently completing an edited issue of Literature and Medicine on pain in Middle English literature, a collection on commentary, authority, and dream interpretation, and a book on Faust, debt, and social contracts. VICKIE LARSEN is Assistant Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan – Flint, where she teaches medieval and biblical literatures. Her research investigates the reception of late-medieval women’s devotional literatures, with an emphasis on reading communities and manuscript and printed book trades. She has published on Julian of Norwich’s fifteenth-century manuscript record in The Journal of the Early Book Society (2011) and on Margery Kempe as a reader of hagiographic literatures in Exemplaria (2013). Her current book project examines the function of medieval devotional texts in the seventeenth century. BRENT MOBERLY holds a doctorate in medieval English literature from Indiana University. His current academic work focuses on play, spectacle, and labor in popular medievalist production, and he is collaborating with his brother, Kevin Moberly, on a comparative, book-length study of contemporary medievalism and its often-fraught relationship with its late-nineteenthand early-twentieth-century antecedents. He is currently employed as a software developer for Indiana University. KEVIN MOBERLY is Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Digital Media, and Game Studies at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. His research focuses on understanding how computer-enabled manifestations of popular culture reflect, contribute to, and transform contemporary cultural and political discourses. In particular, he is interested in the way that contemporary computer games encode labor, often blurring already uneasy distinctions between work and play. He is currently working on a number of academic projects, including a book-length study about medieval-themed computer games, which he is co-authoring with his brother, Brent Moberly. ALICIA C. MONTOYA is Professor of French at Radboud University (The Netherlands), where she teaches courses in early modern and modern French literature. She is the author of Marie-Anne Barbier et la tragédie post-classique (2007), and Medievalist Enlightenment: From Charles Perrault to Jean-Jacques

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Rousseau (2013), and has published articles and edited several volumes on female authorship, medievalism, and book history. SERINA PATTERSON is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia and recipient of the Joseph-Armand Bombardier SSHRC scholarship. Her various publications on John Gower, early modern monster culture, casual medieval games, and digital humanities have appeared in Studies in Philology, LIBER Quarterly, Scholarly and Research Communication, and Digital Gaming Re-Imagines the Middle Ages (2014). She is the editor of the forthcoming collection Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature. Her current research focuses on medievalism in games and the convergence of manuscripts with medieval game culture. JEFF RIDER is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Medieval Studies at Wesleyan University. His work focuses on the literature and history of northern Europe from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries. His recent publications include an edition of Walter of Thérouanne’s “Vita Karoli comitis Flandrię” et “Vita domni Ioannis Morinensis episcopi” (2006); a volume of essays, co-edited, on Galbert of Bruges and the Historiography of Medieval Flanders (2009); a volume of essays, co-edited, on Le Diocèse de Thérouanne au Moyen Age (2010); and a volume of essays, co-edited, on The Inner Life of Women in Medieval Romance Literature: Grief, Guilt and Hypocrisy (2011). His edition and translation of the thirteenth-century Lai du conseil was published in 2013, as was his translation of Galbert of Bruges’s The Murder, Betrayal, and Assassination of the Glorious Count Charles of Flanders. LINDSEY SIMON-JONES is Assistant Professor of English at Penn State Fayette: The Eberly Campus, where she teaches courses in pre-nineteenthcentury British literature and composition. She is primarily interested in language use in late-medieval and sixteenth-century drama. Her work focuses on a fusion of cultural historicism and historical sociolinguistics, and she has published on Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale (2007), linguistic hybridity and English identity in early English drama (2011), English dialect speakers in sixteenthcentury drama (2013), lexical dichotomy and ethics in Macbeth (2013), and masculinity in John Lydgate’s Troy Book (2013). RICHARD UTZ is Professor and Chair in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research centers on the reception of medieval culture in postmedieval times, with an emphasis on identity, memory, nationalism, technology, and temporality, and on providing humanistic perspectives on a technological world. HELEN YOUNG is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Sydney, funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career



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Researcher Award. She is the author of Constructing England in the Fourteenth Century: Postcolonial Interpretations of Middle English Romance (2010) and is currently working on two edited collections exploring medievalism in popular culture genres and on a monograph: Race in Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness. Her research interests include Critical Whiteness and Postcolonial Studies, speculative fiction, and medievalism.

Previously published volumes Volume I 1. Medievalism in England Edited by Leslie J. Workman. Spring 1979 2. Medievalism in America Edited by Leslie J. Workman. Spring 1982 Volume II 1. Twentieth-Century Medievalism Edited by Jane Chance. Fall 1982 2. Medievalism in France Edited by Heather Arden. Spring 1983 3. Dante in the Modern World Edited by Kathleen Verduin. Summer 1983 4. Modern Arthurian Literature Edited by Veronica M. S. Kennedy and Kathleen Verduin. Fall 1983 Volume III 1. Medievalism in France 1500-1750 Edited by Heather Arden. Fall 1987 2. Architecture and Design Edited by John R. Zukowsky. Fall 1990 3. Inklings and Others Edited by Jane Chance. Winter 1991 4. German Medievalism Edited by Francis G. Gentry. Spring 1991 Note: Volume III, Numbers 3 and 4, are bound together. IV. Medievalism in England Edited by Leslie Workman. 1992 V. Medievalism in Europe Edited by Leslie Workman. 1993 VI. Medievalism in North America Edited by Kathleen Verduin. 1994 VII. Medievalism in England II Edited by Leslie J. Workman and Kathleen Verduin. 1995

VIII. Medievalism in Europe II Edited by Leslie J. Workman and Kathleen Verduin. 1996 IX. Medievalism and the Academy I Edited by Leslie J. Workman, Kathleen Verduin, and David D. Metzger. 1997 X. Medievalism and the Academy II Edited by David Metzger. 1998 XI. Appropriating the Middle Ages: Scholarship, Politics, Fraud Edited by Tom Shippey and Martin Arnold. 2001 XII. Film and Fiction: Reviewing the Middle Ages Edited by Tom Shippey and Martin Arnold. 2002 XIII. Postmodern Medievalisms Edited by Richard Utz and Jesse G. Swan. 2004 XIV. Correspondences: Medievalism in Scholarship and the Arts Edited by Tom Shippey and Martin Arnold. 2005 XV. Memory and Medievalism Edited by Karl Fugelso. 2006 XVI. Medievalism in Technology Old and New Edited by Karl Fugelso with Carol L. Robinson. 2007 XVII. Defining Medievalism(s) Edited by Karl Fugelso. 2009 XVIII. Defining Medievalism(s) II Edited by Karl Fugelso. 2010 XIX. Defining Neomedievalism(s) Edited by Karl Fugelso. 2010 XX. Defining Neomedievalism(s) II Edited by Karl Fugelso. 2011 XXI.  Corporate Medievalism Edited by Karl Fugelso. 2012 XXII.  Corporate Medievalism II Edited by Karl Fugelso. 2013 XXIII.  Ethics and Medievalism Edited by Karl Fugelso. 2014

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FUGELSO (ed.)

Studies in Medievalism XXIV

The eight opening essays address: the physical marginalizing of medievalism in annotated texts on medieval studies; the marginalism of oneself via medievalism; medievalism’s dearth of ecotheory and religious studies; academia’s paucity of pop medievalism; and the marginalization of races, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, and literary characters in contemporary medievalism. The seven subsequent articles build on this foundation while discussing: the distancing of oneself (and others) during imaginary visits to the Middle Ages; lessons from the margins of Brazilian medievalism; mutual marginalization among factions of Spanish medieval studies; and medievalism in the marginalization of lower socio-economic classes in late-eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Spain, of modern gamers, of contemporary laborers, and of Alfred Austin, a late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century poet also known as Alfred the Little. In thus investigating the margins of and marginalization via medievalism, the volume affirms their centrality to the field.

Medievalism on the Margins

This volume not only defines medievalism’s margins, as well as its role in marginalizing other fields, ideas, people, places, and events, but also provides tools and models for exploring those issues and indicates new subjects to which they might apply.

Editor: KARL FUGELSO with Vincent Ferré and Alicia C. Montoya

KARL FUGELSO is Professor of Art History at Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland. Contributors: NADIA R. ALTSCHUL, MEGAN ARNOTT, JAUME AURELL, JUAN GOMIS COLOMA, ELIZABETH EMERY, VINCENT FERRÉ, VALERIE B. JOHNSON, ALEXANDER L. KAUFMAN, ERIN FELICIA LABBIE, VICKIE LARSEN, KEVIN MOBERLY, BRENT MOBERLY, ALICIA C. MONTOYA, SERINA PATTERSON, JEFF RIDER, LINDSEY SIMON-JONES, RICHARD UTZ, HELEN YOUNG.

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

Medievalism on the Margins