cross-posted to In The Middle

[titled cadged from "Funplex" by the B-52's]

Consider this a timely post on the International Medieval Congress at Leeds from just this past week [7-10 July] and a belated post on the BABEL Working Group’s Kalamazoo Congress panel, “What Is the Place of the Present in Medieval Studies?” [8-10 May]. I attended many great sessions at Leeds, including three of the four panels organized by Asa Simon Mittman and Debra Higgs Strickland on “The Unnatural World” [which featured really memorable papers on medieval monstrosity by Asa, Susan Kim, Eomann O Carrigain, Craig Davis, Patricia Aakhus, and Heather Blurton, among others]; a roundtable organized by the Society for Feminist Medieval Scholarship on whether or not it would be possible to locate a “feminist poetics” or aesthetic of the female body in the texts of the Middle Ages [a question posed by Beth Robertson the year before, and from what I could tell from the roundtable's discussants, apparently either unanswerable or conducive to a lot of discomfort as to what constitutes either "feminist" or "female," textual, aesthetic, or bodily--although Ruth Evans raised here the provocative possibility of approaching the question through some current narratives on aesthetics and singularity as well as through the philosophy of alterity: for example, through Derek Attridge's The Singularity of Literature and through the work of Badiou, respectively]; and an excellent session on the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book Riddles, which included a really good paper by a graduate student at Trinity College, Alice Jorgensen, that analyzed tropes of pain and violence in the Riddles concerned with tools and other utilitarian objects [such as pens and keys] through the lens of Elaine Scarry’s work in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.

I also attended one of two sessions devoted to “Englishness and the Sea,” where Jonathan Hsy gave a wonderful paper on the fluidity and un/homeliness of linguistic “travels” [on land and sea] in Margery Kempe, and in this same session Kathy Lavezzo delineated a new inter-between space of post-coloniality for us: the “sludge” of the English channel into which Arthur and Gawain wade in the alliterative Morte Arthure. And in a session sponsored by the [new] Institute for Mediaeval Studies at St. Andrew’s, I heard a fantastic paper by one of Clare Lees’s students at Kings College London, Josh Davies, “Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” One session that really stood out for the fact of all three papers being so excellent was the session sponsored by the Society for the Study of Homosexuality in the Middle Ages, “Queer Landscapes,” with papers by Dominic Janes, Albrecht Diem, and Lara Farina. Lara’s paper, “Touching Landscapes,” was especially memorable for raising the provocative question of how it is, after so many years of visual and picture theory, we do not yet have a theory of the visual that also incorporates a theory of touch: what does it mean to see with touch, while touching, or as touch [and really, can we even have a visual theory that is not embodied?], and further, how does touch, in certain contexts, undo certain objects [bodies, but also buildings, landscapes, etc.] that threaten within the visual field? In what ways did medieval persons inhabit a practice of reading that was visual-tactile and how can we read the sites of seeing-touching within medieval texts?

But it has to be said, the one session that really kind of grabbed and got me [and which I can't shake off] was the one organized by Tom Prendergast, “Does Medievalism Have a Past?” in which Stephanie Trigg delivered the amazing talk, “When Is the Medieval? Medievalism as a Critique of Periodization.” It has to be stated here that since Stephanie and Tom are currently at work together on a book on medievalism, both her talk and his ["Medievalism and the Naked Truth"] were, as they themselves noted, co-productions. Stephanie’s talk was one of those great bomb-throwing [and also highly entertaining] affairs, and sitting in the very back I noted the body language and furious scribbling in notebooks all around me that connoted some discomfort in the audience with Stephanie’s and Tom’s arguments. In short, Stephanie opened with the attention-grabbing argument that, while some will always be at pains to distinguish “real” medieval studies [of a decidedly historicist bent and which apparently is "serious" and "difficult"] from “medievalism” [of a decidedly more presentist bent and which is supposedly "pleasurable" and therefore "too easy"], all of medieval studies is “medievalism,” and cadging from Bruno Latour, “we have never been medieval.” In one form or another, all of us working within medieval studies are practicing some form of “medievalism” [in which--let's face it--there is always "serious" labor and also pleasure: is anyone really a medievalist who wasn't drawn, libidinally, to the subject, and is there any work within our field that hasn't come at some amount of physical and psychic cost?], although we might like to believe otherwise, when, for instance, we consider ourselves scholars of only the “hard-edged alterity” of the past, and which some of us labor mightily to move out from under the aegis of the present or any past that supposedly comes “after” the Middle Ages.

In order to offer one avenue for escaping the trap of thinking about history only through teleologically linear narratives that don’t allow room for what Stephanie described as post-historical reflection, Stephanie began with a discussion of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s thinking in his book Medieval Identity Machines [in his chapter "Time's Machines"] on the need for medieval studies to incorporate critical temporality studies [such as the work of Bruno Latour, Manuel Delanda, Rita Felski, Elizabeth Grosz, etc.] and a better understanding of nonlinear dynamics into its work, in order to, as Jeffrey writes in his book,

discover how time might be thought beyond some of its conventional parameters, outside of reduction into monologic history, . . . outside of enchainment into progress narratives, with their “ever upwards” movement of evolutionary betterment and abandonment of the past for a predestined, superior future, and outside of linearization, the weary process through which a past is not encountered for its own possibilities, but either distanced as mere antecedent or explored only to understand better the present and render predictable the future. [pp. 2-3]

Stephanie also noted Jeffrey’s insistence on “thinking time” in relation to corporality and “movements of becoming over the immobilities of being” [Jeffrey's words in Medieval Identity Machines, p. 3], and she described an amazing [under-noticed] moment in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur [in the Book of Sir Tristram], where, during a banquet after a tournament [in which tournament Lancelot had placed women's clothing over his armor], the knight whom Lancelot defeated, Dinadin, appears [after having been knocked off his horse and dragged into the forest by Lancelot's men to be forcibly stripped of his armor and then dressed in women's clothing], occasioning Guenevere to laugh so hard that she falls down [as if she were "ded"]. Stephanie did not explicate or interpret this scene so much as she noted the ways in which it marked a moment of atemporality within Malory’s text that might beg certain questions: what to do with such an anomalous moment that is, quite explicitly, about the movement and affect of bodies and which, by its unexpected and strange nature within the context of this particular text/world, disrupts the “regular” time of the narrative? [I might note here that Stephanie herself, in order to dramatize the temporal dis-jointedness of such a moment, orchestrated her own fall behind the podium: medieval studies has now officially gone "slapstick"--it was great! How can anyone not love this woman?]

Stephanie then drew our attention to the polytemporality of Bruno Latour’s spiral time, which is analogous, I might add, to Bergson’s conception of time as duration: this is not time that can be neatly divided nor segmented, and events are continually moving/flowing along certain lines in which matter, space, and consciousness are inherent in time and vice versa, and to “fix” a moment of the past at a particular point, in the same manner that a lepidopterist might pin a dead butterfly to a piece of cardboard, is essentially a futile exercise in “capturing” the past–more important, how do we capture history in flight–all the ways, as Stephanie put it, that the medieval and the modern are moving in all directions, up and down, north and south, east and west, forward and backward, along time’s spirals?

When one of the audience members confessed that it made her really uncomfortable when she read the Kalamazoo Congress 2009 call for papers and saw that there was a session on the Harry Potter books [with the codicil that she loved the books but she wasn't sure they were a proper subject for medieval studies], Tom Prendergast raised the question of responsibility: although the Harry Potter books may have only a very tangential relationship to the Middle Ages, isn’t it partly our responsibility to determine what that relationship might be and why it matters? This immediately connected with a point I was already somewhat anxious to make: that medievalism–although it often seems to be about movies and fantasy novels and children’s literature and Victorian poetry and other cultural productions that take the Middle Ages as their subject–can also be deadly serious in its choice of subject matter that is often the very opposite of “entertaining”; for example, in the work of BABEL members Steve Guthrie and Michael Moore on the Bush White House torture memos and medieval law, or of Daniel Kline on the Bush White House’s Lancastrian and Derridean pretensions [go here for more on that]. It seemed to me then [at the Leeds session] and now in our present moment when human [and other] rights are under terrible assault in a country–the United States–that calls itself an historical democracy and that supposedly believes in historical due processes of law, and which has no problem calling its enemies “medieval,” that medieval studies has a great responsibility, indeed, and one that must never forget its location in the [troubling and troubled] present.

When John Ganim told me later in the evening that he had sidelined the comments he had prepared for the roundtable [following Tom's and Stephanie's session], “Futures for Medievalism: A Roundtable Discussion” [featuring John, Larry Scanlon, Anke Bernau, David Matthews, Andrew Lynch, Tom Prendergast, and Jenna Mead], in order to re-raise my point about a medieval studies [which is also always medievalism] having a responsibility to take on certain “deadly serious” political subjects [thank you, John], apparently the general discussion drifted toward that worn-out chestnut I’ve heard time and time again: we can try, but no one is ever really listening to us [the medievalists], anyway, so wouldn’t that be a colossal [and frustrating] waste of time? Isn’t it always? I was immediately reminded of Steve Guthrie’s comments, in his remarks for BABEL’s Kalamazoo roundtable, “What Is the Place of the Present in Medieval Studies?” that it is not a question of whether or not medievalists can do a better [or worse] job at this than anyone else [investigative reporters, perhaps?], but rather a matter of us acting “as if.” Here is how Steve put it more precisely:

. . . . good scholarship has predictive power, and predictive power may just save us from the present catastrophe, if we’re willing to exercise it and anyone is willing to listen. Our record is not good, but we must behave as if. So the question, for the survival of the Constitution (see Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception) and maybe the species, to the extent that that outcome is in the hands of medievalists — and we might as well take it on; no one else is doing a very good job — is not whether medievalists ought to write about Abu Ghraib but whether the presentist approach or the pastist is more likely to save us from our present circumstances.

A good pastist depends on the agenda of the period, and on the question of torture there are no flags waving in the published record. There is plenty to make sense of, but only in the presence of a motivating question — a hunch — drawn from now. The published record is there if you have an idea of the pattern to look for. So the useful medievalist is like I. F. Stone, the independent Washington reporter who for decades published his influential weekly newsletter by starting with a question or a scent, combing the papers and wire services, and putting two and two together. The person who does it best now is Noam Chomsky. It’s investigative journalism at the level of scholarship. Its purpose is to salvage the present in the name of the future.

Think of this in reverse: scholarship at the level of investigative journalism. So let me substitute “investigative medievalism” for “critical interrogation.” The difference is important to me. It’s the difference between feeling like I.F. Stone and feeling like Donald Rumsfeld. That substitution in place, I’m all for presentism. It boils down to this: We start with the present because that’s where the bodies are buried.

The phrase “as if” has such forceful power for me–it would not be an exaggeration to say [confess] here that there has never been another reason or cause for which I myself have expended so many personal and scholarly labors as I have for “as if.” I have never understood those who make the argument–no matter the disagreement or subject at hand–that one should not do a particular thing if the outcome can generally be assured [or safely predicted] to be, again, generally non-consequential. Whether we are talking about love or intellectual work [or even a general predisposition that we might adopt toward the world], I cannot see that we have any other choice but to proceed “as if” things could be better if only we were to believe they might be emended, recuperated, attended to, saved, ameliorated, healed, touched, moved, affected, changed, etc. by our labors–labors, moreover, rooted in a fierce attention to and regard for others, wherever they might be, past, present, or future. This has something to do as well with something Michael Moore wrote in his essay, “Wolves, Outlaws, and Enemy Combatants” [published in Eileen Joy et alia, eds., Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages], where he argued that,

Displays of hatred have been common in recent years, thriving in a moral atmosphere of decline. Nationalism has formed the crucial backdrop to the legal atavism and return to more primitive forms of law . . . . The attempt to preserve a humane culture and to assert our rights or our love of the right, should not be left in the hands of a distant state, since these are qualities of the virtuous life. One should highlight the possibility of friendship and the connections between friendship, liberty, and joy. It is by no means easy to orient oneself during a period such as this one. While pondering the theme of this essay, I went on retreat in the monastery of Maria Laach (Monasterium Sanctae Mariae ad Lacum). Walking the paths lined with ancient beech trees or sitting in the quiet of the old liturgical library, I found that the topic troubled my thoughts. It seemed like a violation of the peace of the monastery to study torture and terrorism inside the walls, and yet those walls gave my reflections a hopeful and dignified frame.

We have been given the world as a setting in which to practice virtue and to attain self-knowledge; we are also bidden to study the world and the human tradition. Only this can open the prospect of contemplative happiness, “to which the whole of political life seems directed.” In periods of disturbance and change, personal constancy and discussions with like-minded friends become more important. If we can remain true to our friends, then new paths will appear . . . .

I would draw attention here to Michael’s invocation of friendship as a political project of intellectual life, and I would only add that, when told that our work, as medievalists, may have no impact on the so-called “real world,” that we must remember that we do this work [by which I mean a medievalism concerned with the present] together with others who are bound to us in the present–whom we may [must] call our friends–and that, again together, we are leaving records, testimonies, and witnesses to this present. This is ethical work, it is political, it is affective [both libidinal and pleasurable], and it matters. It is what we leave behind in the space of the “as if” it were otherwise.

I think the remarks provided by the panelists on BABEL’s Kalamazoo panel in May, although they [temporally] preceded Tom’s and Stephanie’s in Leeds just this past week, provide a beautiful response [or critical preamble] to Stephanie’s call for a more polytemporal approach to our studies, and for a field that would better recognize the interrelated labors and pleasures of its [mutual] work. I will leave everyone with some snippets from those remarks, and for those who would like to read the more full texts of that session, you can access those here:

To think temporality otherwise; to discern in our Now the living traces of multiple pasts (even the United States carries within it the burden and the possibility of medieval pasts); to recognize that time is so complex that futures can curve to sink their teeth deep into histories long passed; to touch these times and to love them: that’s the place of the present in medieval studies. Such emplacedness challenges us to reconceptualize the Middle Ages and history more generally, to think them outside of the points of view that have hardened around them and seem true – but only because we’ve repeated them for so long. Such congealing into doctrine says more about our reverence for imagined pasts and our fear of unstable futures than about the Middle Ages. Doctrinaire modes of analysis strive to encapsulate this geotemporal expanse, to still into a museum display. A more restless approach will grant the medieval its life in the present. [Jeffrey J. Cohen]

. . . it seems to me, those working on the premodern past and those working on the postmodern present (or post-postmodern, if you wish) share much more than we might commonly recognize or acknowledge. What might it be like for both groups to practice a historicism that brings the past and the present, premodern and postmodern, alongside each other in a rich heterogeneity, that stresses a temporality and spatiality that is coincidental, affective, and performative rather than stabilizingly teleological, segmented, or hierarchized? In terms of sexuality and gender, for example, such an encounter between past and present would seek to uncover in the premodern that which is in excess to the discourses of modern heteronormativity. If, as Christopher Nealon has recently noted of current queer critique, “we need to read sexuality as historical, that is, as made out of found materials, secondhand,” then I think the premodern, with its diversity of gender and sexualities, competing and interwoven models of virgin, virago, good wife, chaste marriage, chivalric masculinity, clerical celibate, etc., can provide a powerfully heterogeneous set of “found materials” to bring alongside the present. Such a historicization, focused on what cannot be assimilated to the logic of a repetition that is conducive to periodization and stabilized identities, enacts its own logic of the beside, necessarily and profoundly engaging with the present as it attempts to move, in Lee Edelman’s words, into “the space where ‘we’ are not.” Such a richly and self-consciously performative historicization of past and present could help instantiate how both past and present (not just the present, as Edelman would have it), are “project[s] whose time never comes and therefore [are] always now.” [Glenn Burger]

. . . what I would like to suggest is that the present should function in medieval studies not only to bring new theories and histories to bear on the past, but more importantly, as the site of potential transformation. Here, I want to refer to Elizabeth Grosz’s marvelous book, The Nick of Time. Drawing on Nietzsche, Grosz argues that “what history gives us is the possibility of being untimely, of placing ourselves outside the constraints, the limitations, and blinkers of the present. This is precisely what it means to write for a future that the present cannot recognize; to develop, to cultivate the untimely, the out-of-place and the out-of-step. This access to the out-of-step can come only from the past and a certain uncomfortableness, a dis-ease, in the present” (117). This notion of untimeliness as the goal of historical work, by which she means the dislocation of the present, seems to me to argue for a present in medieval studies that cannot hold. In other words, I think that many of us on this panel today would consider our work in medieval studies to serve as a kind of intervention in the present. In my own recent work, I am explicitly interested in the ways in which the medieval past can dislodge our heteronormative present and help us to imagine a “world not normatively organized around heterosexuality,” in the words of Michael Warner. In fact, Warner thinks this effort of imagination is nearly impossible, but I would argue, alà Grosz, that we can cultivate an untimely sense of our own present through the study of the past, even as we study that same past through modern theories and especially in conjunction with contemporary political events. The role of the present in my fantasy of medieval studies is to serve as the discomfiting position from which we write and speak with the knowledge that our present cannot be detached from the medieval past. [Karma Lochrie]

One peculiar trait of literature is its proclivity for endless temporal regeneration: the “I” of the lyric, for example, is re-activated, bound to the reader, no matter the distance of that reader from the historical moment of composition; it is an essential component of lyric form that it lives again, with each new voicing, in more than a superficial way. As a phenomenon, what do we do with this subject, part textual artifact of the medieval century, part contemporary reader? I do know that our current dominant modes of literary criticism are not well equipped to handle that disjunction, burying it beneath History. I think bringing to bear our critical faculties on the immediacy of that phenomenological moment should occupy us as vigorously and seriously as the application of endless social and historical contexts. [Andrew Scheil]

I hope I will be forgiven for such a long post, but the subject is one that has long obsessed, and will continue to obsess the members of the BABEL Working Group who, as we might say, will be appearing soon [again] in a venue near you.

Guest Post: Daniel Cook (Queens’ College, University of Cambridge)

British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS)
University of Winchester and Chawton House Library

Considering that the biennial British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Post-Graduate Students and Early Career Scholars conference (27^th and 28^th June) was a conference about “identities”, let’s begin with some outward appearances. Around 65% of the delegates were from overseas, as far afield as Australia, the States, and Japan, and including many from across Europe. The age-mix was also surprisingly diverse, as beginning graduates joyfully exchanged ideas and stories with the more senior members of the eighteenth-century studies community, including members of the BSECS executive board (http://www.bsecs.org.uk/comm.stm). Such a community, as headed by BSECS, is composed of a number of different disciplines – even ones without official names – such as History, English, French, and Austenian Cryptography. I’m pleased to report that such a heady mix was well-represented at the Winchester conference, in no small part due to the eclectic variety of rooms for the panels. Within the University of Winchester itself delegates were able to listen to papers in the cosy chapel room of the West Downs Centre or take in talks in the more traditional seminar rooms. And, no less importantly, lunch was served in the large Shakespeare Room. On Friday afternoon we took a trip to the second of the venues, the iconic Chawton House Library. So, perhaps inevitably, the range of papers was wonderfully diverse. Old favourites were well represented – especially Defoe and Austen – along with a host of unknown names. Needless to say it’s gratifying to find such passionate and illuminating approaches to a period that all eighteenth-century scholars would recognise as both familiar and unfamiliar in equal measure.

FRIDAY

Debbie Welham (Winchester), the conference organiser and BSECS postgraduates and early career scholars representative, opened the conference with a very warm welcome address at the very reasonable time of 10am. Proceeding immediately to the first panels of the day, I chose Panel 1: Forging Literary Identity. The speakers were Claudine van Hensbergen and John McTague (both Oxford), and McTague again, reading the prize-winning paper of the regrettably absent Stephen Bernard (Oxford). All three papers were extremely witty and vibrant, and exhibited some fascinating insights into their respective material. Where do debates go when they die? Once we realise an attribution is wrong, do we lose interest in it? Such questions were explored in great theoretical and practical details. Truly it was a great start to the conference, and I took away a lot of new information about the relationship between ‘Fiction and Law, Wife and Whore’ (van Hensbergen), Swift’s Bickerstaff hoax (McTague), and Authorship and Attribution in Defoe studies (McTague as ‘Bernard’). Were it physically possible I could have learned even more about Bickerstaff – as well as William Hodges and the York Theatre Royal – were I able to attend the parallel panel, Panel 2: The ‘national’ and the ‘civic, in Room 9. Evidently the papers by Gunda Windmueller (Bonn), Susan Valladares (Oxford), and Simon Macdonald (Cambridge) in this panel were received very positively.

Lunch followed in the Shakespeare Room, and it was indeed a bountiful buffet. Then, at 1, most of us boarded the coach for a short trip to the Chawton House Library, where we were warmly greeted by Gillian Dow, Susan Carlile, and the staff. On behalf of Debbie, the rest of the BSECS committee, and the delegates I want to offer a heart-felt thank-you to Dr Dow and Chawton for such a hospitable welcome.

In the Dining Room I attended arguably the most controversial panel at the conference, Panel 4: Reading women writers of the later 18^th century. Anielka Briggs (Murdoch) opened the proceedings with a fully interactive paper on the “Jane Austen Code”. (Check out http://thejaneaustencode.com for more information.) With the promise of prizes, Briggs asked the attending delegates to fill in the linguistic codes and to trace homophonic connections, amongst other things, in Austen’s novels. Not everyone was convinced by the central argument that this indicated a hidden satire on the court, but the originality of thought, and the innovative prize giving – I won a book on Maria Fitzherbert [Miss Hetty Bates?]! – was a great joy. This was followed by Sarah Moseley’s treatment of Evelina and Sense and Sensibility and the creation of a ‘diagonal social hierarchy’, which necessitated a focus on wealth as much as status. The final speaker, Ema Jelinkova (Palacky), looked at Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote and Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Neatly evoking the stylistic mores of Horace Walpole and others, Jelinkova offered a well-developed take on the gendering of the Gothic novel in the eighteenth century. The questions and answers round perhaps inevitably focused on Brigg’s findings but, overall, broad and local points alike were profitably unpicked by all.

After all this excitement, we were left to explore Chawton House Library and the surrounding area. For more information about Chawton’s academic pursuits, including conferences and events, please do visit their website (www.chawton.org). The website now has an online catalogue, which gives you a taste of their unique holdings. In this spirit the library was kindly opened up to interested delegates, while others explored the beautiful grounds in homage to Austen. And yet, in seemingly no time at all, the coach took us back to Winchester at 5.30pm. The coach was brimful with excitement and I shared some delightful conversation with Penny Pritchard (Hertfordshire), who was equally as effusive about the merits of Chawton as I was. Although I was not privy to the parallel sessions, which included such topics as fashion clothing, exotic birds, eighteenth-century Greek fiction, and slavery, the word on the bus suggested that these were very interesting and original papers. The relationship between satire and feather, I understand, was one such standout avenue of discussion.

Back at Winchester, the Plenary Address by Professor Penelope J. Corfield, the President of BSECS, proved highly appropriate to a conference of this kind. In ‘After Language, Culture, Gender, Space, it’s Time – Hot Themes for the Eighteenth Century’ – a much more provocative title than the one advertised – Corfield gave a lucid account of the role of disciplinary thinking in academia. A self-confessed advocate of interdisciplinarity, Corfield did not shirk the more trenchant issues associated with modern scholarly practices. She began by outlining the collapse of a succession of Grand Narratives – including ones that masquerade as anti-grand narratives – such as the Linguistic Turn, the Cultural Turn, Gender Studies, and even Space Studies. From this basis Corfield neatly advocated a return to ‘diachronic framing’, a rigorous as well as expansive treatment of one’s subject. One particularly thought-provoking consideration was the speaker’s insistence that we should be discussing continuity as much as a change, what stays the same as much as what radically changes, the micro-changes as much as the macro ones. Moreover, and perhaps most intriguingly of all for the majority of those in attendance, Corfield addressed the nature of what she termed ‘receiver disciplines’. Disciplines such as English and History, takes on ideas from theoretically-minded ones. How will the endless creation and collapse of new disciplines, or sub-disciplines, shape the future of academic study in the future? I’ll leave you to ponder that one.

After Corfield’s talk we all enjoyed some pre-dinner drinks and then a lovely conference dinner. Some people had two desserts, thanks to the kind and attentive waiting staff. Those people enjoyed it very much. Then, dinner over, we reconvened in the makeshift bar in the Link Gallery, though many eagerly sought their beds after an exhausting and travel-weary first day.

SATURDAY

First thing Saturday morning, after breakfast in the Shakespeare Room, I chaired a workshop panel on ‘Completing your PhD & Life after a PhD’. The speakers were Elizabeth Stuart, Professor of Christian Theology and Director of Research and Knowledge Transfer at Winchester, and Ruth Herman, based in the Business School at Hertfordshire. Both speakers gave some great and truly honest insight into the topic. I liked to think I provided some useful words, too, having recently finished my own PhD. But really it was Stuart’s advice on finishing in a timely and methodical fashion, and Herman’s encouraging insight into alternatives to academia, that evidently proved most useful to the large group in attendance.

After a short interlude of refreshments, I then chaired another workshop panel, this time on Publishing. The delightful speakers were Linda Bree, a Literature Editor at Cambridge University Press, and Chris Mounsey, Editor of BSECS’ Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Both speakers offered great insight into the terrifying world of publishing, not only in terms of the processes involved but also what the appropriate styles were, amongst other things. The Q&A was jammed with eager questions and spot-on answers from the speakers. Little was left out as Bree and Mounsey delivered a master class in communication as much as publishing.

After a well-earned lunch I attended Panel 13: Britain and Ireland, which comprised three great papers on subjects I had very little knowledge about. On the surface the three papers seemed very different, but the connections soon proved as palpable as they were productive. Chris Ludington (Duke) delighted the seminar room with a confident examination of the role of wine drinking in the formation of British identity in Scotland in the late-eighteenth century. Initially I was concerned that the idea seemed too causal. But, with his well-deployed use of economic and political theory, and no less his nods to Linda Colley and Colin Kidd, Ludington offered some genuine insight into the drinking choices of the officer classes. Following this, Helena Kelly (Oxford) offered an affectionate examination of Elizabeth Hervey – ‘she writes novels’ (Lord Byron) – and the construction of Irishness in her prose. The third paper, by Tsai-Yeh Wang (Birmingham), provided a tour de force of British Women’s travel writings in the 1790s. In sum, the three papers – grouped under the nebulous title ‘Britain and Ireland’ – neatly addressed localised versions of national identity, that of the upper classes at the end of the eighteenth century.

The final sessions of the day, after the mid-afternoon refreshments, offered an ever more overwhelming variety of papers, and addressed such topics as the fiction of Eliza Haywood, Defoe’s non-conformism, and the life and works of Louis Aime-Martin. And, at the same time, Ildiko Csengei (Cambridge) chaired a hands-on workshop run by Mary South (Winchester) on smallpox inoculations in Southampton and the local area.

As is always the way, many attendees had to leave before the end in order to catch trains or planes; but, perhaps as a testament to the quality of this conference, the majority stayed right up until the final words. Debbie duly received warm and well-deserved thanks from all. And then we each went our own way, secure in the knowledge that we knew a little – nay, a lot – more about a great variety of familiar and unfamiliar topics. And, more than that, we were reminded why the eighteenth century was so fascinating a period to study. Yes, if you weren’t there, you really missed out. But, not to worry, in January 2009 we have the annual BSECS conference in Oxford (http://www.bsecs.org.uk/conference09/conferenceDetail.stm).

Guest Post: Kate Mattacks (University of Worcester)

Brief Outline

Assisted by an AHRC grant, the Victorian Plays Project began in 2003, under the direction of Professor Richard Pearson at the University of Worcester. Its primary aim was to preserve and supply playtexts of popular London productions, the vast majority of which were previously unavailable to scholars and practitioners alike. Over 1400 plays were published as acting editions by T.H. Lacy from 1848 – 1875, constituting a huge and varied resource of material from melodramas, historical plays, comedies, burlesques to the more unusual squibs, sketches and monologues. The project fell into several distinct phases: producing a detailed catalogue of all the plays (2003 – 5), creating a searchable database of selected plays using xml encoding (2006) and generating e-texts of over 380 plays (2006-8).

Making a Crisis out of a Drama

The project faced several challenges in terms of material, editorial practice and methodology. Basic information such as the year of publication was impossible to discern, and discrepancies between the play’s first performance and Lacy’s print version abound. Did Lacy’s Acting Edition of Black E’yd Susan in 1855 indicate a revival of the play or merely his ability to procure the copyright for a new two-act version based on the original of 1829? As a result, the project records both the dates for collective volumes and gives the original performance date on the website.

The huge number of plays printed by Lacy meant that only a quarter could be digitised. How could one play be prioritised over another, particularly given that Lacy’s own selection policy was unclear? His choices reflect a circle of friends that included Mark Lemon, Tom Taylor and John Maddison Morton. Was their popularity in part derived from the availability of a Lacy edition that practitioners could use? These thorny issues aside, Professor Pearson and I endeavoured to choose plays based upon the following criteria: plays that were unavailable elsewhere, plays that responded to a key event/cultural concern, had been mentioned in novels, diaries or letters and therefore were a frame of reference for the Victorians, plays that demonstrated an analysis of visual or theatrical culture. Unusual texts such as monologues, and the few plays written by women were also included. Lacy’s pirate versions of The Jewess and The Corsican Brothers figured high on the list of inclusions.

The most experimental part of the website appears in the form of a searchable database of thirty plays. These were encoded in xml to secure their longevity using TEI.lite and Oxygen software. However, it quickly became apparent that whilst the format was suitable for texts, it did not lend itself to plays. The use of songs, tableaux, extra scenes, shows within scenes, stage directions and allusions required new ways of definition in order for the search engine to find them. Here we worked with the staff at Oxford AHDS, particularly Dr James Cummings, to address the particular needs of Victorian Drama. Multiple definitions of stage directions were needed, as we quickly discovered that exits, gestures and entrances were never simple, and nearly always involved props, directions or emotions. It also became clear that only direct references to famous characters, places, buildings, people, etc. could be highlighted. The complexities of allusion and suggestion designed to avoid the censor’s gaze were unquantifiable in coding terms.

The final phase of the project involved collaboration between Birmingham Library who held the collection, BCU who digitised the plays and an editorial team based at Worcester. The time constraints of encoding plays meant that the pdf format was used for the majority of the plays. BCU produced beautiful photographic images of the plays which ensure the preservation of the collection. However, when these were run through OCR packages to become pdfs, rogue llamas, otters and other animals emerged in the texts. The presence of a small watermark transformed a ‘warm, yet modest flame of passion’ into a ‘warm yet modest llama of passion’. Foxing on the originals gave rise to a number of ‘otters stage left’ (‘Enters stage left’). Whilst exotic and bizarre animals appeared in numerous burlesques, the unusually high incidence of them across the catalogue meant that an editorial team had to scrupulously check every play. All spelling inconsistencies and incorrect punctuation were noted, but if the odd ‘small glass of urine’ has sneaked through, we’d welcome the feedback in order to correct it.

Once these problems were overcome, the site was designed to maximise the potential for each play. The catalogue and list of digitised plays are searchable. There is a facility to search the pdf of a play before downloading it to assess the frequency of a keyword. Thirty of the plays have been fully encoded to enable detailed searches for names, places, people, etc. or these keywords can be accessed. Once downloaded, the plays themselves are searchable through Acrobat.

The Future

Victorian Drama remains a hugely undervalued cultural medium, particularly from the 1830s through to Ibsen and Wilde. The Victorian Plays Project aims to make available texts which were an integral frame of reference for the Victorians. Whilst the playtexts are fixed records which belie the shifting nature of the performance mode, they offer a rare glimpse into the tastes and debates of their day. The speed at which a playwright could capitalise upon public demand meant that a play could be written, licensed and performed within a week. An inspection of Lacy’s catalogue for the year 1851 reveals, as one might expect, a prolonged interest in The Great Exhibition. However, other trends from fashion to facial hair are equally identifiable throughout the List. When read alongside the Lord Chamberlain’s Collection, which is currently being catalogued through the ‘Buried Treasures’ Project at the British Library/Royal Holloway, significant cultural moments can be revealed through the lists of plays on common topics.

The potential for such a resource is almost unlimited. The interdisciplinary nature of many of the plays makes them an ideal locus for wider debates on how theatre helped shape Victorian visual culture. Their use of paintings, adaptations of literary texts, contemporary allusions and records of historical moments allow the texts to be used as another source of primary evidence alongside those more traditionally studied at undergraduate and graduate level. For example, H.T Craven’s Meg’s Diversion (1866) from Volume 73 contains a tableau scene recreating Philip H. Calderon’s painting Broken Vows (1856). Lacy even provides a line drawing of the painting as a frontispiece to emphasis the relationship between art and theatre. These playtexts are not meant to displace the theatrical moment which changed nightly to suit the exigencies of time, technical restrictions, budgets, stage managers, writers, actors and audiences. Rather they are offered as a basis for a long and rewarding journey into the minds of the Victorians.

Recently, the value of the project has extended beyond the scholarly community, with family historians and theatre practitioners all taking the resource in new directions.

Over at The Valve, they’re holding a group summer reading project on George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859). The novel will be discussed in a series of instalments as follows:

 June 17 - Book 1 Chapters 1-5

June 24 - Book I Chapters 6-11

July 1 - Book I Chapters 12-16

July 8 - Book II (Chapters 17-21)

July 15 - Book III (Chapters 22-26)

July 22 - Book IV (Chapters 27-35)

July 29 - Book V (Chapters 36-48 )

August 5 - Book VI and Epilogue

August 12 - General Discussion

Rohan Maitzen introduces the event here and the first post is here. I look forward to listening in to the ensuing conversations!

Guest Post: Nicole Leapley (Saint Anselm College)

The 43rd International Congress on Medieval Studies offered, as usual, thought-provoking papers in a variety of fields - it is this diversity that makes Kalamazoo such a stimulating conference. My principle reason for attending is to hear about recent work in my own area of expertise, but I often find that the most memorable talk of the conference is from a completely different discipline. This year, I found the plenary and panels particularly good. One of the most exciting and frustrating aspects of the congress continues to be its size and multi-track layout. While there is always something going on with 600 or so sessions to choose from, it nevertheless seems to regularly happen that the talks I most want to hear are scheduled at the same time, but in different buildings. While WMU¹s dorm rooms continue to be dubious, coffee is more plentiful and the wireless network easier to access - even the cafeteria food seems to be improving!

Saturday morning’s plenary, entitled “Are Bestiaries Really Psalters, and Vice Versa?” was given by Christopher de Hamel (Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge) who laid out his argument simply: Bestiaries were made and illustrated as companion volumes to Psalters and were structured and used similarly. The book was not a guide for identification, but a religious book used in monasteries.

De Hamel reminded the audience of the characteristics of the medieval Psalter—a volume of the Old Testament psalms. Millions knew it by heart. Every week monks would get through all 150 psalms. Individual Psalters were not numbered or rubricated. The psalms were read for three layers of meaning: the literal, the moral or tropological (how to behave today), and the prophetical or typological (how the psalm points to the future New Testament).

Bestiaries flourished from 1120-1300. The majority of the 80 or so manuscripts are in England. Christopher de Hamel emphasized that a bestiary is structured like the Psalter, opening with identical images of creation. The length of chapters and their order is also similar. While the Psalter contains 150 psalms, a bestiary covers from 100 to 150 animals. The animals correspond to a psalm (as the lion corresponds to Psalm 1). The bestiary, or “The Book of the Nature of Animals and their Significance” sometimes opens with the story of the creation of the world. The bestiary analyses animal habits to show how humans can learn a lesson that will bring them closer to salvation. For example, the lion bears dead cubs and on the third day the father breathes on them, bringing them to life. This is an allegory of the resurrection. The Panther, like Christ, is beautiful, and his enemy is the dragon. He eats then sleeps for three days. Upon awakening he roars and his sweet breath pleases all (except, of course, the dragon). The phoenix’s behavior similarly points to Christ while the bee is a model for the good monk. De Hamel shows that like biblical commentary, the bestiary shows that animal behavior has many layers and can be interpreted in the same three-fold manner. Observing animals and decoding their behavior is thus a pious act. The seeking of meaning is itself devotion. The same reflection and attention to detail is involved. Why had God chosen to use this word here? was of equal value as Why did God make lions live on mountaintops?

In other words, animals, like the psalms, were to be analyzed and decoded. De Hamel’s talk addressed some of our most basic questions about Psalters. For example, why did the bestiary contain mythical animals? If all animals were made in order to present a message, then you can’t exclude any—even the rare or mythical ones. Unicorns are mentioned nine times in the bible. If there was the slightest chance that an animal was part of God’s creation, it was unthinkable to leave it out. There was, of course, no concept of evolution. Hugh of St. Victor said the animals were like a book written by God. They were non-verbal, pre-literate, pre-Moses scriptures. The “Book of Creation” was not written in words, but with animals, while the “Book of Redemption” was the Bible. Both were equally valid.

The only comparably illustrated book is the Psalter. Why are both always illuminated? Neither has its narrative sequence or numbering marked out, thus the image would orient the reader and help them memorize the point at hand. De Hamel’s talk dealt with another basic question, why were the bestiaries illustrated so strangely? The strangeness of the image helps the reader remember. Pious recollection in itself is an act of devotion. If one memorized the psalms or animal behavior, one could ponder their meaning, even in the absence of the book. In addition to aiding memory, the image also served to analyze non-verbally and in a pre-literate way. It shows how to look at animals and think about what they are doing.

From the mid-third of the 12th century bestiaries began to shrink in size in tandem with Psalters. De Hamel discussed the fact that these books were not only used in monasteries, but also privately. Many of these books were owned by Augustinians who specialized to bringing spirituality to the life of the laity. The two luxury books that successfully crossed the divide were the Psalter and the bestiary.

Eventually, the bestiary became obsolete, but its imagery continued into the 14th century, uniquely in the Psalter. These images represented the last expression of pre-literate glossing and provided a wordless marginal text. De Hamel gives the example of the use of the Crane (which the informed reader would recognize as figuring a sentry) to illustrate psalm 40. Psalm 43, which deals with foolishness, is glossed by an image that looks like a dog gazing into a dish. The modern reader might assume this has nothing to do with the psalm and is just margin doodling. A truly literate medieval reader would be familiar with bestiaries and know something of the tiger’s behavior, specifically that in order to catch a tiger cub, the hunter chases the tiger and her cub, exhausting them, then drops a mirror near the mother tiger, who looks into the mirror and licks it, as she thinks it is her cub. Only then can the hunter can steal the real tiger cub. Foolish tiger.

Session 19
Reading Aloud the French of England (A Workshop)
Organizer: Laurie Postlewate, Barnard College
Presider: Laurie Postlewate
Love and Death in Thomas’s Tristan: The Monologue of Ysolt
Alice M. Colby-Hall, Cornell Univ.
When Truth Hides in the Lie: Marc Confronts Iseult in Béroul’s Tristan
Joan Tasker Grimbert, Catholic Univ. of America
Voices in the Life of Saint Margaret
Tara Foster, Univ. of Missouri-Columbia
Male and Female Voices in the French of England
Thelma Fenster, Fordham Univ., and Robert L. A. Clark, Kansas State Univ.

As it is difficult to summarize a workshop, I will simply say that I would attend such a workshop in the future, especially had I specific questions in hand. All participants agreed that Anglo-Norman must be pronounced and encouraged the audience to go forth boldly to read it aloud. The participants offered two resources as guides:

Short, Ian. Manual of Anglo-Norman. London : Anglo-Norman Text Society, 2007.
Link to A-N Text Society: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/llc/forstudents/fs_fr/fr_interests_as
“Or dient et content et fabloient: Four Centuries of Old French Verse”
Link to Chaucer Society: http://creativeworks.byu.edu/chaucer/ViewItem.aspx?id=ICMS003

Session 277
Late Medieval French Language and Literature I
Sponsor: Fifteenth-Century Studies
Organizer: Steven Millen Taylor, Marquette Univ.
Presider: Steven Millen Taylor
Women Singing and Women’s Song: Feminine Performance and the Pastourelle
Geri L. Smith, United States Military Academy, West Point
Multilingual Late Medieval Manuscript Anthologies containing Works by
Christine de Pizan
Karen L. Fresco, Univ. of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign
Avian Intertextuality: Jean de Condé, Jean Lemaire de Belges, and David Lindsay
William Calin, Univ. of Florida

Geri Smith’s talk, “Women Singing and Women’s Song: Feminine Performance and the Pastourelle”, discussed four early references to Pastourelle in northern France, underlining how these early works approach the role of the often forgotten female character in the traditional Pastourelle couple. Froissart’s text gives voice to the usually silent shepherdess, allowing her to speak. Christine de Pizan’s Dit de la Pastoure sets up the woman’s agency by singing about love and abandonment, and emphasizing the woman’s need to tell the story. In the chanson de toile Smith discusses, a woman sings a man’s song about a singing shepherdess who is alone guarding her sheep. Here, the dual gender of the narrator constructs a jarring play on pastourelle gender conventions.

In “Multilingual Late Medieval Manuscript Anthologies containing works by Christine de Pizan”, Karen Fresco discussed BNF fr 1182, Dresden OC 62, Rodez 57, and BNF fr 25434, noting that normally Christine’s work appear in French manuscripts. The multilingual manuscript thus presents an anomaly. She asked what the languages of these manuscripts can tell us about the culture that created them and the readers that read them. She also examined what holds these anthologies together—is there a thematic coherency? Multilingualism has various meanings and functions depending on the region, period, and purpose of the manuscript. In BNF fr 1182 translation appears to be the organizing principle (Christine’s texts are presented along with a Latin text that she is said to have translated). In others, the codicological structure suggests moral teaching is the unifying principle. In the final two examples, monastic or translatio themes connect seemingly disparate texts.

“Avian Intertextuality: Jean de Condé, Jean Lemaire de Belges, and David Lindsay” is part of a larger project on the French tradition in early literature in Scotland. In his paper, William Calin compared David Lindsay’s Testament and Complaynt of Our Soverane Lordis Papyngo, written in Scots, and the Epitres de l’amant vert by Jean Lemaire de Belges. In both texts the birds die by falling down and are devoured by predators. In both texts we have the theme of the court poet in a precarious position, allegorized as a household pet. In both texts dead parrots speak and write (two!) letters to active rulers. The first falls from a high perch (which shows her overweening ambition) onto a spike. Before dying, she dictates two letters to James V, encouraging him to become a good king and to beware the fickleness of Fortune, in the second, she criticizes the morals of the court. A magpie, kite, and raven (figuring corrupt clergy) offer absolution in exchange for the bird’s goods. The bird instead leaves her possessions to the poor and her heart to the king before her would-be confessors devour her. In the second text Calin analysed, a male bird commits suicide by throwing himself in the maw of a dog. This is a mock courtly text where we have a parrot that acts like a man. He writes two epistles to Margaret of Austria from beyond the grave. In the third text (by Jean de Condé), which chronologically preceded the two already discussed, is also a bird allegory, but here the parrot plays a minor role, as orator rather than letter writer. Like in Lindsay, the narrator denounces ignorant and wicked clergy. Calin pointed out that while Lindsay mentions no French sources, he certainly spent time in France from his childhood and would likely have been familiar with these two storylines.

Session 330
Late Medieval French Language and Literature II
Sponsor: Fifteenth-Century Studies
Organizer: Steven Millen Taylor, Marquette Univ.
Presider: Steven Millen Taylor
Happiness and Christine de Pizan
Josette A. Wisman, American Univ.
Songs Telling Stories: Christine de Pizan’s Cent ballades d’amant et de dame
Daisy Delogu, Univ. of Chicago
Mélusine and the Nagas of Cambodia
Julia A. Nephew, Dominican Univ.

In her talk on “Happiness and Christine de Pizan”, Josette Wisman questioned Christine’s enjoyment of solitude and focused instead on her depression caused by her husband’s death and her subsequent legal and social disempowerment. A discussion on Christine’s vocabulary of happiness and unhappiness followed, during which joie and plaisir were evoked along with mesheur and malheureuse.

Daisy Delogu focused on the interplay of lyric and narrative, noting the lyrico-narrative moments within individual poems as well as the narrative logic of the “livret” as a whole. While the author/compiler inscribes herself within the canzoniere tradition, these ballades do not constitute a first-person outpouring of feeling in song, they are rather recounted and written within a narrative, carefully organized by a controlling author. This allows a sort of moral commentary. Ballade 38 contributes to the narrativity of the work by introducing information about the world before and outside of the canzoniere. Five of the ballades are conversations between the two lovers, which constitute a mise en abyme of the receuil as a whole, pointing to the controlling force of the author. However, both the Lady and author figure operate within the constraint of the discourse of courtly love. Christine’s also tells the story of an author and her patron in the poem’s frame. The work opens with the word “Quoique” (even though), thus setting up the author’s will against that of the patron. Here the influence of Machaut is visible: singing and loving are not interchangeable. However, Machaut wrote in the service of love while Christine inscribes herself in an economy of monetary exchange that allows literary patronage but shows that language can be divorced from feeling. This sets up questions about the reliability of language that recur throughout the work (the médisants whose gossip threatens love, the lovers who doubt one another).

Julia Nephew compared Mélusine and the Nagas of Cambodia and India in her talk. While Mélusine is a fairy who is half-snake, half-woman, the Naga is usually a multi-headed deity and usually male. The female Naga have one head or an even number of heads if multi-headed, while the males have an odd-number of heads. Around these Naga, stories like the Mélusine myth evolved. In one an Indian wife cures her snake husband—it is often the husband that is superhuman while the wife is human. Nephew posits that the Mélusine legend takes its source from these Indian and Cambodian Naga stories.

Photo (L>R): Amy Earhart, Andrew Jewell, Steven Olsen-Smith, and Elizabeth Lorang

Guest Post: Amy Earhart (Texas A&M University):

ALA (the American Literature Association) was held May 22-25 in San Francisco, CA. I attended a number of interesting panels, but want to focus on the two Digital Americanist sponsored panels. For more information on the Digital Americanist group see http://www.digitalamericanists.org. I always enjoy the ALA as it is smaller and more manageable than the MLA. You can catch up with friends and really find out what is going on in your particular area. Plus, who can beat San Francisco for host city? I made my regular trips to Japantown, Chinatown, and the Embarcadero (cheese, noodles, tea and dim sum). And the rare book seller was back at the book exhibit, bringing delightful items to drool over.

The first panel was titled “Discoveries through Digitzation”. It featured the following papers:

Chair: Andrew Jewell, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
1. “Discovering the Text through Experimental Digital Humanities Infrastructure,” Amy Earhart, Texas A&M University
2. “Digitizing the Sealts ‘Check-List of Books Owned and Borrowed’: New Insights on Melville’s Reading and Collecting,” Steven Olsen-Smith, Boise State University
3. “Digital Scholarship and Graduate Studies in American Literature,” Elizabeth Lorang, University of Nebraska, Lincoln

My disclaimer—the first paper is my own. I wanted to try out some of my ideas regarding infrastructure—of technology and the academic profession—in the paper. I argued that we are at a transitory moment where we might restructure some of the more static infrastructures that are residual in our digital work. These include versioning, canonicity, challenging traditional forms of scholarship production, particularly graduate education, and technology standards and representation of data. The point that I really wanted to push on was that we have, in many ways, recreated some of the most traditional aspects of our profession and, while these parameters, such as the reproduction of the online edition, are crucial to our future profession, we need also to continue to think of experimental approaches, whether in data representation, graduate education, approaches to canonicity and the way in which we represent the products we are producing.

Steven Olsen-Smith gave a fascinating paper on his Melville’s Marginalia project. While still in development, the Melville project is utilizing Merton M. Sealts’ “Check-List of Books Owned and Borrowed” (1948-50, 1966, and 1988 ) to catalog Melville’s book collection. The project hopes to trace the dispersed collection and to digitize the volumes so that scholars might use Melville’s marginalia. Olsen-Smith spoke extensively on the use of Google books, which has allowed scholars to locate digitized versions of Melville’s former books. He discussed the copy of Sir Thomas Browne’s Works housed at the New York Public Library, a set consulted by Melville that includes marginalia resembling his hand. Apparently Melville scholars are now combing the digitized collection in hopes of locating additional text. I’m pleased to see that Google books’ agnostic approach is beginning to produce important scholarly discoveries.

Elizabeth Lorang, a graduate student at Nebraska who has worked on various digital projects including the Walt Whitman archive, gave a paper that laid out the importance of digital humanities project work to graduate student training. I thought that the crucial point she made was to emphasize the connection of the practical project work to the methodological approaches of the scholar. In particular she mentioned that the work has made her retheorize her understanding of text and textuality, author and publication. It seems clear, as well, that the groups in which she has worked give her a network and sense of community that is not often available to students working within our traditional educational model.

Later that afternoon, the Digital Americanists sponsored a roundtable entitled “The Politics of Digital Scholarship.”

Moderator: Edward Whitley, Lehigh University
Participants:
• Kenneth M. Price, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
• Amanda Gailey, University of Georgia
• Matt Cohen, Duke University
• Laura Mandell, Miami University
• Andrew Jewell, University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Ed Whitley started the discussion by mentioning that while preparing the questions for the panel it became apparent that all of the topics evident in digital humanities are the same topics raised each week by the Chronicle of Higher Education. I thought that was a great way to get the conversation started; at the heart of digital humanities are the same disciplinary concerns.

The roundtable conversations were wide-ranging and dealt with the need to theorize the archive, textuality, publication and promotion, representation of data, and usability testing. Of these issues, the need for theorizing our work is one that seemed to return throughout the discussion. All panelists stressed the importance of examining crucial questions such as how we filter, organize and hierarchize our materials, the purpose of close reading within this new medium, and the unseen aspects of the technologies behind our materials. In addition, there was much discussion from the audience regarding print versus digital publication and the way in which the academic system views such ventures in promotion decisions. It was great to hear the audience discuss these issues as many digital humanists have been writing and speaking about these issues over the last 5 years and it appears that they have been successful in making these questions more visible.

We’re very pleased to announce that ‘Towards a Taxonomy of Transatlantic Romanticism(s)’, a potentially groundbreaking article by Joel Pace, is now FREELY AVAILABLE online for 30 days! To read the article just click on the link below:

‘Towards a Taxonomy of Transatlantic Romanticism(s)‘ by Joel Pace (University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire)

Elizabeth Fay, Romanticism Section Editor for Literature Compass, here introduces the article:

Joel Pace’s “Towards a Taxonomy of Transatlantic Romanticism(s)” achieves the goal that its title suggests will only be some future endpoint. An extraordinarily clear and yet broad-reaching anatomy of the new field of Transatlantic Romanticism, Pace’s pamphlet-length article lays the groundwork necessary for an adequate scholarly understanding of the transatlantic nature of Romanticism itself, while providing students and teachers with the key terms and concepts of Transatlantic Romanticism as a field, as well as a survey of the existing scholarship. Pace highlights the interdisciplinary nature of this emergent field, and directs readers to areas needing future scholarly research.

- Elizabeth Fay (University of Massachusetts Boston)

Do feel free to send us your feedback at LICOeditorial@oxon.blackwellpublishing.com or via the comments features below. And otherwise, happy reading!

Over at History Compass there are two more podcasts now available, the second of which is a joint podcast between History Compass and Religion Compass:

History Compass Podcast #3 -

A discussion between Professor Ron Schechter, retired early modern Europe editor for History Compass, and Dr. Laura Cruz, a History Compass author. Examining Dr Cruz’s published essay, ‘The 80 Years’ Question: The Dutch Revolt in Historical Perspective’, they discuss the field of Dutch history, how it is being affected by new global and transnational histories, the need for further theoretical development in light of the cultural and linguistic turn, and the ways this article could be used in teaching.

Click here to download the podcast: http://www.gabcast.com/casts/1696/episodes/1187707007.mp3 (12.1 MB, 16 minutes 59 seconds).

History Compass / Religion Compass Podcast #4 -

A discussion between Yoav Di-Capua, co-editor of the Middle & Near East section of History Compass, and Tamara Sonn, Editor-in-Chief of Religion Compass and History Compass author. Here they skillfully examine Tamara’s article: Islamic Fundamentalism and Political Islam.

This succinct and engaging podcast explores common misconceptions about political actors from the Muslim world. An important distinction is made between Islamic fundamentalism and political Islam.

Click here to listen to the podcast: http://www.gabcast.com/casts/1696/episodes/1209545328.mp3 (9.7mb, 13 minutes 55 seconds).

**********

Download previous History Compass Podcasts for free at http://www.blackwell-compass.com/home_podpage.

Subscribe to future History Compass Podcasts for free via iTunes or other subscription options available here.

Send us your feedback via the comments feature here or at HICOeditorial@oxon.blackwellpublishing.com.

Image: Kalamazoo, Michigan (Source: Wikipedia)

As Kalamazoo fast approaches, we’re delighted to provide a list of panels below which Literature Compass editors and board members will be involved with this year.

As usual, we hope to have some post-conference coverage of ‘Zoo so do keep an eye on the blog in the days following the conference!

List of Kalamazoo Panels with Literature Compass editors or editorial board members:

Thursday May 8, lunchtime

Session 47
Bernhard Brown & Gold Room
The Political Arthur
Sponsor: Arthurian Literature
Organizer: David F. Johnson, Florida State Univ.
Presider: James P. Carley, York Univ.
Arthurus Rex, Alexander Imperator
Thomas Hahn, Univ. of Rochester
Who Would Write a Letter about Piers Gaveston in the Voice of Morgan le Fay?
Michael W. Twomey, Ithaca College
Arthur and Empire in Early Tudor England: Leland’s Assertio . . . Arturij (1544) and Laboryouse Journey (1549)
Stewart Mottram, Univ. of Aberystwyth

Thursday May 8, 3:30 p.m.

Session 126
Schneider
1140
Chaucer as Translator II: Latin
Sponsor: Chaucer Review
Organizer: David Raybin, Eastern Illinois Univ., and Susanna Fein, Kent State Univ.
Presider: Michael W. Twomey, Ithaca College
Chaucer’s Vernacular Epic of Translation and Creative Instability
Sarah Powrie, St. Thomas More College
Chaucer and Patristic Translation Theory
Sarah Baechle, Univ. of Notre Dame
Chaucer’s Translation of the Vulgate Parallels
L. Kip Wheeler, Carson-Newman College

Thursday May 8, 7:30 p.m.

Session 161
Valley I
Shilling
Lounge
The Influence of the Crusades on Middle English Literature
Sponsor: Rossell Hope Robbins Library, Univ. of Rochester
Organizer: Leila K. Norako, Univ. of Rochester
Presider: Leila K. Norako
Crusade Ideology and Conversionary Fears in The Siege of Milan
Alan S. Ambrisco, Univ. of Akron
Fantasies of Crusading and Conversion in The King of Tars and The Sultan
of Babylon
Kristi C. Castleberry, Univ. of Rochester
Following (in) Their Footsteps: Romance Cartographies of the East
Robert Rouse, Univ. of British Columbia

Session 165
Fetzer
1060
Reading Gower Aloud: An Experimental Workshop with Multilinguality
Organizer: Joyce Coleman, Univ. of Oklahoma
Presider: Joyce Coleman
A workshop with Alison A. Baker, California State Polytechnic Univ.–Pomona;
Mica Dawn Gould, Grambling State Univ.; Alexander L. Kaufman, Auburn
Univ.–Montgomery; James M. Palmer, Prairie View A&M Univ.; Michael W. Twomey, Ithaca College; and R. F. Yeager, Univ. of West Florida.

Session 183
Bernhard
213
New Voices in Anglo-Saxon Studies
Sponsor: International Society of Anglo-Saxonists
Organizer: David F. Johnson, Florida State Univ.
Presider: David F. Johnson
“This mystery is a pledge”: Some Lexical Aspects of Ælfric’s Theology of the
Eucharist
Matthias Ammon, Robinson College, Univ. of Cambridge
A New Approach to Understanding Variation in Beowulf
Karen Bollermann, Arizona State Univ.–Polytechnic Campus
Nominal Compounds, Discourse Structures, and Manuscript Presentations in
the Two Versions of the Old English Boethius
Jonathan Davis-Secord, Univ. of Texas–Arlington
The Sublime Avenger: Divine Vengeance in Anglo-Saxon Literature
Andrew M. Pfrenger, Univ. of Connecticut

Session 147
Valley III
Stinson
Lounge
Ploughing the Field of Cultural Production: Medieval Authorship and Pierre
Bourdieu
Organizer: James Hala, Drew Univ.
Presider: Burt Kimmelman, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Can the Field of Cultural Production Be Enfiefed?
James Hala
Who’s in Charge Here? Gendered Role Reversals and the Division of Authorship
in Alan of Lille’s Plaint of Nature
Amy L. Hume, Univ. of Kansas
Reconstructing the Italian Trecento’s Field of Struggles: A “Rerealization” of
Dante’s Poetry
Glenn A. Steinberg, College of New Jersey
Field of Power, Poetic Dispositions: The Literary Field in Ricardian England
R. James Goldstein, Auburn Univ.
Discussant: Burt Kimmelman

Friday May 9, 10:00 a.m.

Session 194
Valley II
Community
Building
Lounge
Teaching Piers Plowman (A Roundtable)
Sponsor: Yearbook of Langland Studies
Organizer: Emily Steiner, Univ. of Pennsylvania
Presider: Michelle Karnes, Univ. of Missouri–Columbia
A roundtable discussion with Larry Scanlon, Rutgers Univ.; Elizabeth Robertson,
Univ. of Colorado–Boulder; Louise M. Bishop, Clark Honor College, Univ. of
Oregon; Theodore L. Steinberg, SUNY–Fredonia; and Thomas Goodmann,
Univ. of Miami.

Friday May 9, 1:30 p.m.

Session 254
Valley I
106
New Scholarship on Ælfric: A Companion to Ælfric
Organizer: Mary Swan, Univ. of Leeds
Presider: Joyce Hill, Univ. of Leeds
Catechetic Homiletics: Ælfric’s Teaching and Preaching during Lent
Robert K. Upchurch, Univ. of North Texas
Ælfric and the Limits of “Benedictine Reform”
Christopher A. Jones, Ohio State Univ.
Boredom, Brevity, and Last Things: Ælfric’s Style and the Politics of Time
Kathleen M. Davis, Princeton Univ.

Session 280
Schneider
1330
Why Am I Me? On Being Born in the Middle Ages I
Sponsor: Medieval Club of New York
Organizer: Nicola Masciandaro, Brooklyn College, CUNY
Presider: Richard H. Godden, Washington Univ. in St. Louis
The Sorrow of Being in the Cloud of Unknowing
Nicola Masciandaro
Being Silly: On Non Sequitur
Anna Klosowska, Miami Univ. of Ohio
Losing Anthropocentrism: Folcuin’s Horse, Yvain’s Lion, and the Two Trueloves
Karl Steel, Brooklyn College, CUNY
Dying Is an Art, like Everything Else: The Lowly, Unsettled Aesthetics of
Guthlac-Becoming
Eileen A. Joy, Southern Illinois Univ.–Edwardsville

Session 272
Schneider
1140
Anglo-Saxon Studies in Memory of Stephen O. Glosecki I
Sponsor: International Society of Anglo-Saxonists
Organizer: David F. Johnson, Florida State Univ.
Presider: Elaine M. Treharne, Florida State Univ.
Performance and Audience in the Exeter Book Riddles (Animals and Birds)
Jill A. Frederick, Minnesota State Univ.–Moorhead
Making and Breaking a Crux in the Nine Herbs Charm
László Sándor Chardonnens, Radboud Univ. Nijmegen
Works as Words: Beowulf as Memorial Space
Mary K. Ramsey, Southeastern Louisiana Univ.

Friday May 9, 3:30 p.m.

Session 324
Schneider
1140
Anglo-Saxon Studies in Memory of Stephen O. Glosecki II
Sponsor: International Society of Anglo-Saxonists
Organizer: David F. Johnson, Florida State Univ.
Presider: Marijane Osborn, Univ. of California–Davis
Grendel’s Kin: Myths of Man-Eating Giants
John Edward Damon, Univ. of Nebraska–Kearney
Beowulf and the “Grendel” Charters: A Nativist View
John D. Niles, Univ. of Wisconsin–Madison
Totemic Reflexes in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth
Yvette Kisor, Ramapo College

Friday May 9, evening

Valley I 106
Reading Malory’s Morte Darthur Aloud: Man-Woman Dialogue in the Morte Darthur
Organizer: D. Thomas Hanks, Jr., Baylor Univ.
Presider: D. Thomas Hanks, Jr.
A readers’ theater performance with Dorsey Armstrong,
Purdue Univ.; Stephen Atkinson, Park Univ.; Alison A.
Baker, California State Polytechnic Univ.–Pomona; Karen
Cherewatuk, St. Olaf College; Julie Nelson Couch, Texas
Tech Univ.; Miriam Rheingold Fuller, Univ. of Central
Missouri; Melanie M. Gibson, Southern Methodist Univ.;
Mica Dawn Gould, Grambling State Univ.; Emily Huber, Univ. of Rochester; Kimberly Jack, Univ. of California–
Davis; Janet Jesmok, Univ. of Wisconsin–Milwaukee;
Timothy Jordan, Indiana State Univ.; Amy S. Kaufman,
Northeastern Univ., John Leland, Salem International
Univ.; Stephen Maulsby, Catholic Univ. of America; Maud
Burnett McInerney, Haverford College; Sharmila Mukherjee,
Purdue Univ.; Claire Nave, California State Univ.–
Fullerton; Leila K. Norako, Univ. of Rochester; Marlene
Ruby-Canaday, Independent Scholar; Gregory M. Sadlek,
Cleveland State Univ.; Kendra O’Neal Smith, Univ. of California–
Davis; John William Sutton, Univ. of Rochester;
Paul Thomas, Brigham Young Univ.; Michael W. Twomey,
Ithaca College; Karen Williams, Univ. at Albany; and
Joseph S. Wittig, Univ. of North Carolina–Chapel Hill.

Saturday May 10, 1:30 p.m.

Session 406
Valley III
Stinson Lounge
Papers from Dr. Kim’s Seminar: The Other Texts of the Beowulf Manuscript
Organizer: Teresa Hooper, Univ. of Tennessee–Knoxville
Presider: Susan M. Kim, Illinois State Univ.
Decius of Dagnus, Dog-Headed or No: The Many Faces of the Saint Christopher
Story
Eric Jurgens, Northern Illinois Univ.
The Betrayal of Alexander: Self-Fashioning, Hybridity, and Unreliable Narrative
in the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle
Michelle Kustarz, Wayne State Univ.
“And especially that they did not have the head for the body”: Transformation
and Group Dynamics in the Old English Passion of Saint Christopher and
Passion of Saint Edmund
Andrew Grubb, Univ. of Connecticut
Discussant: Eileen A. Joy, Southern Illinois Univ.–Edwardsville

Session 412
Valley II
Garneau
Lounge
Negotiating the Past with Lee Patterson I
Organizer: Candace Barrington, Central Connecticut State Univ.
Presider: Candace Barrington
Gower’s Ovidianism
Maura Nolan, Univ. of California–Berkeley
Chaucerian Ekphrasis: Question the Politics of Epic Vision in the Knight’s Tale
Andrew James Johnston, Freie Univ. Berlin
The Value of Chaucer
Robert J. Meyer-Lee, Goshen College
The Long Middle Ages: Varro and Civic Allegory
Ethan Knapp, Ohio State Univ.

Session 447
Schneider
2145
Textual Cultures/Cultural Texts, 1350–1600
Sponsor: History of Text Technologies (HOTT), Florida State Univ.
Organizer: Richard K. Emmerson, Florida State Univ.
Presider: Elaine M. Treharne, Florida State Univ.
Layout and Meaning in Late Medieval Bibles
Eyal Poleg, Centre for the History of the Book, Edinburgh Univ.
Reading, Textual Transmission, and Incarnational Play: The Libraries of the
English Benedictines of Cambrai and Paris
Nancy Bradley Warren, Florida State Univ./National Humanities Center
The Missing Book: Revising Some Ideas about the French Renaissance
Lori J. Walters, Florida State Univ.

Saturday May 10, 3:30 p.m.

Session 466
Valley II
Garneau
Lounge
Negotiating the Past with Lee Patterson II (A Roundtable Discussion)
Organizer: Candace Barrington, Central Connecticut State Univ.
Presider: Larry Scanlon, Rutgers Univ.
A roundtable discussion with Seeta Chaganti, Univ. of California–Davis; Patricia
DeMarco, Ohio Wesleyan Univ.; Matthew Giancarlo, Univ. of Kentucky; Carroll
Hilles Balot, Univ. of Toronto; Ellie Johnson, Univ. of California–Berkeley; Emma
Lipton, Univ. of Missouri–Columbia; and Jennifer L. Sisk, Yale Univ.

Session 500
Schneider
2145
The Materiality of Text, 1000–1500
Sponsor: Group for the History of Books and Texts, The English Association
Organizer: Elaine M. Treharne, Florida State Univ.
Presider: Jill A. Frederick, Minnesota State Univ.–Moorhead
Living by the Book in Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale
Karrie Fuller, San Diego State Univ.
The Power of the Fixed Text? Competing Functions, the Struggle for Authority,
and the Nature of Textuality in the York Register (British Library MS
Additional 35,290)
Liberty Stanavage, Univ. of California–Santa Barbara

Session 490
Schneider
1235
Cognitive Approaches to Medieval Literature III
Organizer: Ronald J. Ganze, Univ. of South Dakota
Presider: Michael D. C. Drout, Wheaton College
Augustine’s Confessions and the Neurology of Narrative
May 10, 3:30 p.m.
Cognitive Aging and Wisdom in Old English Poetry
Corey J. Zwikstra, Univ. of Notre Dame
Beyond Christian and Pagan: Beowulf and Theological Correctness
Eric Lutrell, Univ. of Oregon
Cognitive Theory, Sensual Performance, and Rhythmic Texts
Jill Stevenson, Marymount Manhattan College

Sunday May 11, 8:30 a.m.

Session 540
Schneider
1280
What Is the Place of the Present in Medieval Studies? (A Roundtable)
Sponsor: BABEL Working Group
Organizer: Eileen A. Joy, Southern Illinois Univ.–Edwardsville
Presider: Myra J. Seaman, College of Charleston
Hello, I Must Be Going: The Medievalist’s Theme Song (Opening Remarks)
Nancy F. Partner, McGill Univ.
Roundtable: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, George Washington Univ.; Betsy McCormick,
Mount San Antonio College; Andrew Scheil, Univ. of Minnesota–Twin Cities;
Angela Jane Weisl, Seton Hall Univ.; Glenn D. Burger, Queens College and Graduate
Center, CUNY; Steve Guthrie, Agnes Scott College; Karma Lochrie, Indiana Univ.–
Bloomington; and Bruce Holsinger, Univ. of Virginia.

Session 515
Valley II
203
Medieval Border Cultures I: Wales and England
Sponsor: Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Research (MEMO), Swansea
Univ.
Organizer: Helen Fulton, Swansea Univ.
Presider: Daniel Power, Swansea Univ.
“From comlye Conway unto Clyde”: Anglo-Welsh Border Culture in the
Chester Shepherds’ Play
Robert W. Barrett, Jr., Univ. of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign
Borders and Bodies: Spaces of Hybridity in Medieval Chester
Catherine A. M. Clarke, Swansea Univ.
The Welsh Troilus
Simon Meecham-Jones, Univ. of Cambridge/Swansea Univ.

Session 538
Schneider
1220
Using Twelfth-Century English Manuscripts
Sponsor: Production and Use of English Manuscripts 1060 to 1220, Univs. of
Leicester and Leeds
Organizer: Orietta Da Rold, Univ. of Leicester
Presider: Mary Swan, Univ. of Leeds
Translating the Translation: Latin and Vernacular Glossing in Anglo-Saxon
Manuscripts, ca. 1066–1200
Mark Faulkner, St. John’s College, Univ. of Oxford
An Anglo-Saxon Minster in the Margins: Detecting the Influence of Saint
Guthlac’s Minster in Twelfth-Century Hereford
Chris Tuckley, Univ. of Leeds
Dangerous Liaisons: Scribal Connections, 1050–1200
Elaine M. Treharne, Florida State Univ.

Sunday May 11, 10:30 a.m.

Session 588
Schneider
1280
Is There a Theory in the House of Old English Studies? (A Roundtable)
Sponsor: BABEL Working Group and The Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval
Northwestern Europe
Organizer: Eileen A. Joy, Southern Illinois Univ.–Edwardsville, and Larry J.
Swain, Univ. of Illinois–Chicago
Presider: Eileen A. Joy
A roundtable discussion with Kathleen M. Davis, Princeton Univ.; Renée R. Trilling,
Univ. of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign; Kathryn Powell, Univ. of Manchester/
Univ. of Cambridge; Mary Swan, Univ. of Leeds; Mary Dockray-Miller, Lesley Univ.;
Jacqueline Stodnick, Univ. of Texas–Arlington; and Stacy S. Klein, Rutgers Univ.

Session 576
Fetzer
1035
Medieval Border Cultures II: Cultural Frontiers in Britain and France
Sponsor: Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Research (MEMO), Swansea
Univ.
Organizer: Helen Fulton, Swansea Univ.
Presider: Simon Meecham-Jones, Univ. of Cambridge/Swansea Univ.
A Monetary Frontier? Money of Account and Coinage in the Angevin-Capetian
Borderlands
Daniel Power, Swansea Univ.
Trinkets and Charms: The Use and Socio-cultural Significance of Dress Accessories
from Two Border Regions in Britain, ca. 1300–1700
Eleanor Standley, Durham Univ.
Between the Living and the Dead: Late-Onset Anchoritism in the Middle Ages
Liz Herbert McAvoy, Swansea Univ.

Photo: Left>Right - Kelvin Everest, Carlo Bajetta, Stuart Curran and Paul Chirico.

We are very pleased to present the following panel reports from the recent (Trans)National Identities – Reimagining Communities, CISR/NASSR conference, held in Bologna, March 12-15, 2008. Carlo Bajetta provides an overview of the double sesssion he organized on ‘Editing Romantic Texts in a Globalized World’, while Diego Saglia  provides insight into the panel on ‘The Italian Plays of Mary Russell Mitford’. Isabella Imperiali then rounds things off with a detailed look at the panel on ‘Romantic Performances’. As usual, do feel free to use the comments feature below to provide feedback or pose questions!

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Panel Report - Carlo M. Bajetta (Università della Valle d’Aosta)

‘Editing Romantic Texts in a Globalized World’

This double special session intended to explore an area which, curiously, seems to have been neglected by editorial theory. Computer technology has had an impact both on the presentation of literary texts and on the sales of traditional book forms. Consequently a large number non-native speakers of English (who may also have a limited knowledge of British history and culture), access electronic texts via their computer screens or purchase printed editions through on-line bookshops.

Modern editorial thinking related to Romantic texts has been crucial in establishing new principles for scholarly editing: it has prompted a new way of looking at, and reinterpreting, textual criticism. The question which the panel speakers had to answer was: can Romantic editors cope with such a significant change both in medium and potential audience?

[Carlo M. Bajetta’s Powerpoint presentation is available here]

Friday 14th March

Kelvin Everest’s paper (’Shelley’s Adonais: Keats as a Classic’) helped the audience to understand the nature of editing itself, both from a theoretical point of view and from a practical perspective. Everest considered two basic questions of definition. What is the mode of existence of a literary culture, and in particular how should we conceive such a culture when it is historically remote? This (double) question connects with the different problem of the mode of existence of a literary text, and the relevance to that question of editorial activity. Everest took as an example Shelley’s elegy for John Keats, Adonais, which itself addresses these questions. His brilliant examination of this text showed that the efficacy of an edition is linked to one’s ability to defend one’s procedures and that the material presentation of the literary past is, first and fore