Folia Fugitiva

Folia Fugitiva: The Pursuit of the Illuminated Manuscript Leaf

Roger S. Wieck

Friday, June 19, 2009, 7 p.m.

In this illustrated lecture, Roger S. Wieck, Curator, Department of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, traces the history of collecting individual folios sliced from medieval illuminated manuscripts, a phenomenon that encompasses fifteenth-century piety, the nineteenth-century Gothic Revival, and twenty-first-century eBay. This talk coincides with the exhibition Pages of Gold: Medieval Illuminations from the Morgan.

Free admission.

For further information, please visit www.themorgan.org, or call 212-685-0008, ext. 560.

The Morgan Library & Museum

225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street,

New York, NY 10016-3405

212.685.0008

www.themorgan.org

Jo Ann Kay McNamara

JO ANN KAY MCNAMARA, FEMINIST SCHOLAR: A PIONEER IN TRANSFORMING MEDIEVAL HISTORY

by Dorothy Helly

Jo Ann K. McNamara died in New York City May 20, age 78, from complications from shoulder surgery in March. Her most recent book is a translation of Paris in the Middle Ages (2009), written by Simone Roux. Prof. McNamara was a scholar of world-wide renown. Her most widely acclaimed book, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millenia, was published by Harvard University Press in 1996 and reviewed in the New York Times Book Review by Antonia Fraser. She argued that women as nuns have struggled through the ages to create a separate life which subverts the traditional gender roles assigned to women in every era. The body of her scholarly work has focused primarily on the history of the early middle ages and has ranged broadly over the areas of religion, gender, institution-building, and an attempt to reperiodize and reinterpret the years from 400 to 1100.

Dr. McNamara was a pioneer in making visible women’s roles in medieval society, including the role of women in religion, bringing these perspectives into the mainstream of writing about medieval history and inspiring a new generation of medievalists. Scholars who undertake gender studies and medieval history today automatically turn to McNamara’s contributions. The broad sweep of her innovative thinking turned to rethinking the transition from Roman to medieval times. She early began to argue forcefully that Roman culture did not decline and fall in the 5th century (pace Edward Gibbon), but continued to influence subsequent centuries down to the 12th century.

Jo Ann McNamara was also among the first scholars to insist that the paradigms of women’s history could be applied to men’s history. In her first essay on the subject, she coined the word “Herrenfrage” to convey the concept that gender for men was as problematic and socially constructed as it was for women. This article, “The Herrenfrage: The Restructuring of the Gender System, 1050‑1150,” appeared in Medieval Masculinities (1994), edited by Clare A. Lees. Accordingly, McNamara saw the great ecclesiastical reform movement in 11th-and12th-century Europe as an effort to make celibate priests the new “manly men,” a concept of masculinity meant to replace the warrior as hero and still serve as the role model for Christian society. In this context, she wrote of “chastity” as comprising a “third gender.” Embracing chastity also made both women and men more nearly co-equals than were the two sexes whose separate reproductive roles in secular society underpinned their distinct and hierarchically assigned gender roles.

McNamara’s commitment to exploring new questions regarding sex and gender in the midddle ages was a part of a life of concern about the world around her. As a student in the 1960s all the burning issues of civil rights, the Vietnam war, and the women’s movment made her very politically aware. She actively joined antiwar activities and when the National Organization for Women brought a legal suit against the “men only” policy at McSorleys’ Old Ale House in New York City in1970, she joined a sit-in to make the point. She maintained the life of a political activist and sharp critic throughout her life, along with her deepening scholarly questioning all she had been taught about medieval history as a graduate student. Doing so, she was replicating the experiences of other feminist historians for whom the women’s movement opened up new question about their own lives and the lives of women in the past.

Prof. McNamara’s academic research began with a book on Giles Aycelin: Servant of two Masters (1973). Thereafter she turned to path-breaking work on women, gender, and power in both secular and religious contexts. For this work she was honored by two volumes of medieval history. The first, published in 2003, entitled Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages, is co-edited by Maryanne Kowaleski and Mary C. Erler. The volume is dedicated to her and published an essay by her reflecting on the first article she and Suzanne Wemple wrote in 1973, “Women and Power through the Family Revisited.” The second volume of essays dedicated to her is Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe (2008), edited by Lisa M. Bitel and Felice Lifshitz. It is inscribed: “To Jo Ann McNamara magistra doctissima et mater omnium bonarum.” Other essays in this volume examine many of the new interpretations she had brought forward in a series of articles that followed the publication of her book A New Song: Celibate Women in the First Three Christian Centuries (1983).

Asked to contribute an autobiographical essay to Women Medievalists and the Academy (2004-2005), edited by Jane Chance, McNamara wrote about her active participation in the causes about which she felt deeply. She entitled her essay “The Networked Life,” and with a nod to “sympathetic men,” she wrote: “I look back today at the women who befriended me in graduate school, the women who hired me and the innumerable women I knew and those I never knew who have struggled in my lifetime to secure our place in the academy and to advance a scholarship that gives us the means to understand our own experiences. Sisterhood is powerful indeed and it provides a working model for all humanity.”

Born in Janesville, Wisconsin, in 1931, McNamara moved every few years with her family, following her father who held a job as an executive with General Motors. Her early education was in Catholic schools run by nuns. Thereafter, she spent two years as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania as a theatre-arts major and completed her undergraduate education in Columbia University’s School of General Studies as an English major in 1956. To “recoup her finances,” as she put it in her autobiographical essay, she worked in the military for two years in France as an entertainment director. Back at Columbia University graduate school, she worked as a secretary in the Geology Department. She now turned to medieval history, earning her Ph.D. in 1967. By that time she had begun teaching part time at Hunter College, in its evening session, which was coed, the college itself becoming so in 1964 after a long tradition as a woman’s college. She joined its history department full time when she had earned her doctorate, and later, in the 1990s, became as well a mentor to graduate students at the City University Graduate School.

At Hunter, McNamara took part in the founding of the women’s studies program in the mid 1970s. She joined sister historians in the New York area to form a branch of the Coordinating Council on Women in the Historical Profession, established in 1969 as a caucus within the American Historical Association. She also joined the new Institute for Research in History, created to meet the needs of historians with and without an academic affiliation in the fiscal crises of New York City in the mid 1970s. She helped found a research group in Family History and continued to meet with it until her death, as she did with an equally long-lived interdisciplinary Hagiography research group she founded for studying the lives of saints. She played an active role in the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women from its beginning in1973, insisting on including medievalist in its programs and co-chairing the entire conference in 1982.

Jo Ann McNamara married Eldon Clingan in 1959, retaining her own name, and was divorced from him in 1973. She is survived by her son Edmund Clingan, who has followed in his mother’s footsteps to become a professor of history at Queensborough Community College, CUNY, in the field of modern German history. Her death is greatly mourned by friends and colleagues in this country and throughout the world.

Medieval Club Sponsored Sessions at Kalamazoo

The Medieval Club is sponsoring two sessions at Kalamazoo this year:

Visibility, Presence, Voice: Theorizing Gender and Authority in Late Medieval Writing

Presider: Katharine Jager, Univ. of Houston–Downtown

"Taking Cover: Gender and Vision in Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection"
Holly A. Crocker, Univ. of South Carolina–Columbia

"Masculinity’s Self Destruction: Philomena in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde"
Jennifer Garrison, Rutgers Univ.

"Resisting Reason: Authority and Desire in The Romance of the Rose and Piers Plowman"
Jessica Barr, Eureka College

Session 204, Friday 10.00 am, Valley I, Room 105

Glosynge is a glorious thyng: Medieval Studies and the Future of Commentary

Presider: Nicola Masciandaro, Brooklyn College, CUNY

"Dreaming of/as Commentary"
Erin Felicia Labbie, Bowling Green State Univ.

"Room for Commentary"
Christopher Taylor, Univ. of Texas–Austin

"Agamben: Singularity and the Principle of Individuation"
Bruno Gulli, Long Island Univ.

Session 269, Friday 3.30 pm, Valley I, Room 110 (note change of time)

Upcoming Event: David Gary Shaw @ Medieval Club

Information by the Way: Townspeople and Cultural Networks in Later Medieval England
David Gary Shaw

I argue that piepowder people were the most dynamic social class in later medieval England. They were the elite travellers. There were traders among them, but commerce was only a small part of what they achieved and it was not what they shared: piepowder people were united by the purposeful travelling life. They created an intricate social and informational network that accelerated culture by sharing ideas and sharing news. The responsible ‘riding servants’ were one segment of the group. These were often educated men, who worked for their masters by riding out to supervise key tasks, conveying messages, material and commands. They rode too with questions and curiosity. Examining a confidential servant like William Worcestre allows us to see the shape of the information networks that stitched later medieval society and culture together. It also allows us to see as well the way social value and personal identity was shaped by life on the road.

David Gary Shaw is Professor of History at Wesleyan University. He is the author of The Creation of a Community (1993) and Necessary Conjunctions: The Social Self in Medieval England (2005). He co-edited The Return of Science: Evolution, History and Theory (2002) with Philip Pomper. His current research interests include the circulation of people and ideas in later medieval England and bishops and indulgences in the later medieval English church.

Friday, May 1, 2009, 7:30 PM
CUNY Graduate Center (365 Fifth Ave. @ 34th St.) Room 4406
Reception, with wine and cheese, follows.

Walter Cahn @ The Morgan

At the Pearly Gates: Judgment, Heaven, and Hell in The New Yorker
Tuesday, April 21, 2009, 6:30 p.m.

In this richly illustrated lecture, Walter Cahn, Carnegie Professor of the History of Art (emeritus), Yale University, explores the imagery and views of the hereafter in our own time. Largely a product of the Middle Ages, these depictions surprisingly share the pages of The New Yorker with more familiar satires on the foibles of doctors, lawyers, and twenty-somethings, among other hilarious subjects. Presented in cooperation with the International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA). The exhibition On the Money: Cartoons for The New Yorker From the Melvin R. Seiden Collection will be open at 5:30 p.m. especially for lecture attendees.

Tickets: $15 for Non-Members; $10 for Morgan and ICMA Members

Free to students with valid ID. Reservations recommended (public_programs@themorgan.org)

For tickets, please visit www.themorgan.org, or call 212-685-0008, ext. 560.

The Arts of Intimacy @ the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute

Monday, April 27, 2009 at 6:00 p.m.

Join Dr. Jerrilynn D. Dodds and Dr. María Rosa Menocal as they engage in a dialogue on the subject of their recent publication, The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture (co-authored by Abigail Krasner Balbale).

This lavishly illustrated book explores the vibrant interaction among different and sometimes opposing cultures, and how their contacts with one another transformed them all. It chronicles the tumultuous history of Castile in the wake of the Christian capture of the Islamic city of Tulaytula, now Toledo, in the eleventh century and traces the development of Castilian culture as it was forged in the new intimacy of Christians with the Muslims and Jews they had overcome.

The authors paint a portrait of the culture through its arts, architecture, poetry and prose, uniquely combining literary and visual arts. Concentrating on the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the book reveals the extent to which Castilian identity is deeply rooted in the experience of confrontation, interaction, and at times union with Hebrew and Arabic cultures during the first centuries of its creation. Abundantly illustrated, the volume serves as a splendid souvenir of southern Spain; beautifully written, it illuminates a culture deeply enriched by others.

Jerrilynn D. Dodds is distinguished professor and senior faculty advisor to the provost at the City College of the City University of New York. She is author of the prize-winning Architecture and Ideology in Early Medieval Spain and numerous books and catalogs concerning cultural interaction in Spain, Bosnia, and the United States, including NY Masjid: The Mosques of New York and Al-Andalus: The Art of Islamic Spain, which she edited for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

María Rosa Menocal is director of the Whitney Humanities Center and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. She has written The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage, Writing in Dante's Cult of Truth: From Borges to Boccaccio, and Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric, and coedited a volume in the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature series, The Literature of al-Andalus. Her most recent book, The Ornament of the World, has been translated into eleven languages.

Please R.S.V.P. to Meryl 212-628-0420 or mhorn@queensofiasi.org

Upcoming Event: Sarah Kay @ Medieval Club

Vernacular Verse Encyclopedism in Medieval France: System and System-Failure
Sarah Kay
Princeton University

The age of the vernacular verse encyclopaedia in France is both remarkably productive, and remarkably short-lived, since it lasts from c. 1230 to c. 1290 at the outside. The rapid demise of the verse encyclopaedia may be due to the rise of prose, with its greater connotation of factuality, and in particular to the success of Brunetto Latini's prose Tresor of the 1260s. However, the energy that went into writing verse encyclopaedias seems to have been diverted into the production of what are often called 'encyclopaedic texts': works that contain passages of the kinds of material found in encyclopaedias but whose overall frame clearly belongs in another genre. The Romance of the Rose would be a good example, since it contains passages on disciplines such as optics and theology within the framework of a narrative dit. This talk reflects on this fall from the systematic character of verse encyclopaedias into the partiality of encyclopaedic verse, and includes discussion of works by Christine de Pizan, Froissart, and Chartier.

Sarah Kay is Professor of French at Princeton University. She is the author of Raoul de Cambrai. Edited with an Introduction, Translation and Notes (1992). Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry (1990), The Chanson de geste in the Age of Romance: Political Fictions (1995), The Romance of the Rose. Grant and Cutler Critical Guides no. 110 (1995), Courtly Contradictions. The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century (2001), Zizek: A Critical Introduction (2003), A Short History of French Literature, co-written with Malcolm Bowie and Terence Cave (2003), and The Place of Thought. The Complexity of One in French Didactic Literature (2007).

Friday, April 3, 2009, 7:30 PM
CUNY Graduate Center (365 Fifth Ave. @ 34th St.) Room 4406
Reception, with wine and cheese, follows.

Upcoming Conference: Glossing is Glorious, April 9-10

Click here for full schedule.

Click below for flyer.

Upcoming Event: Matthew Goldie on the Antipodes

The Antipodes: Maps and Travel Literature about Another World

Matthew Goldie
Rider University

The antipodes—the places where people stand on the other “side” of the globe from Europe—are usually thought of in comical, satirical terms; the land and its inhabitants are upside-down, offering an inverted mirror for Europeans to see themselves. However, in the earlier Middle Ages, the antipodes engendered debates about the very existence of people and land in other places on the earth. Later, in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, when theologians and others acknowledged the existence of the antipodes, the lands and their inhabitants troubled ways of thinking about the world. This presentation will briefly describe the earlier debates about the antipodes before exploring how the antipodes challenged the medieval geographical theories of Roger Bacon and others, the representation of the world on mappaemundi such as Lambert of St. Omer’s Liber floridus, and the discussions of circumnavigation in Caxton’s and Mandeville’s texts. Rather than reflecting Others for Europe’s conceptions of itself, the antipodes and antipodeans challenged epistemologies about the earth.

Matthew Goldie is Associate Professor of English at Rider University. He is the author of Middle English Literature: An Historical Sourcebook (Blackwell, 2003 & 2006), articles on Thomas Hoccleve and late-medieval drama, and a forthcoming book on the antipodes.


Friday, March 6, 2009, 7:30 PM
CUNY Graduate Center (365 Fifth Ave. @ 34th St.) Room C197
Reception, with wine and cheese, follows in Room 5109.

***PLEASE NOTE CHANGE IN ROOMS***

Upcoming Event:: Choirs of Angels at the Met

Choirs of Angels: Painting in Italian Choir Books, 1300-1500

Friday, February 6, 2009
6:30 PM
at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
(meet in the Medieval Sculpture Hall)

Barbara Boehm, Curator in the Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters, will lead a tour of this special exhibition.

NYU English Medieval Forum Events, Spring 2009

We are pleased to announce the list of the Spring semester events for the NYU English Department Medieval Forum. Unless otherwise noted, the Medieval Forum meets on Thursday evenings at 6:30pm.

Please note that our talks will be held in various locations around NYU this semester. (Visitors from outside NYU should bring photo ID to sign into NYU buildings).

All are welcome!

If you have questions, contact Liza Blake, elizabeth[dot]blake[at]nyu[dot]edu.

NYU English Medieval Forum
Fall 2008 Events

February 5
"The Weight of the Past"
Jeffrey Cohen
(George Washington University)
19 University Place, Room 222
Reception at 6pm; lecture at 6:30pm
Co-sponsored with the Anglo-Saxon Studies Colloquium

February 19
"Wondering through the World: Ibn Battuta, the Muslim World, and the 'aja'ib narrative"
Christine Chism
(Rutgers University)
To be held at Columbia University at 6 pm (details TBA)
Co-sponsored with Columbia University

March 10 NEW DATE! Tuesday!
"Cures and Closures: Surgery, Intersex, and the Demands of Difference"
Leah DeVun
(Texas A&M University)
IHPK Conference Room, 285 Mercer Street, 10th Floor
Co-sponsored with CELCE

April 2
"Mythic Capital: Medievalism, Heritage Culture and the Order of the Garter, 1348-2008"
Stephanie Trigg
(University of Melbourne)
19 University Place, Room 222
Co-sponsored with the Medieval and Renaissance Center (MARC)

April 23
"The Politics of the Subjunctive"
Paul Strohm
(Columbia University)
Department of Classics, 100 Washington Square East, Silver Center 503

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen at New York University

The NYU English Department's Medieval Forum and the Anglo Saxon Studies Colloquium present:

"The Weight of the Past"

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
(The George Washington University)

Thursday, Feb. 5
Reception 6:00pm
Lecture 6:30pm

Room 222 of 19 University Place
(visitors from outside NYU should bring photo ID to sign into the building).

A schedule of Spring Medieval Forum events will follow shortly. If you have questions, contact Liza Blake, elizabeth[dot]blake[at]nyu[dot]edu.

Upcoming Event: Cary Howie, December 5

Waiting for the Middle Ages
Cary Howie
Cornell University

What would it mean to wait for the Middle Ages? This talk is an exercise in a poetics of expectation; or, better yet, a poetics of attention, inwhich what we're looking at, what we're attending to, is also what we're waiting for. After all, the Middle Ages, like all the other kinds of middle age, are tough to isolate and quantify; their time repeatedly threatens to disrupt the time of criticism. This may be to ask, for example, what Marie Howe has in common with Tristan; or what the peasants of medieval pastoral share with Odysseus; but it is, above all, to ask what it means to have something in common, and how a past, no less than a future, is something that can all too easily be foreclosed.

Cary Howie is Assistant Professor of French Literature at Cornell University. He is the author of Claustrophilia: The Erotics of Enclosure in Medieval Literature (Palgrave, 2007).

Friday, December 5, 2008, 7:30 PM
CUNY Graduate Center (365 Fifth Ave. @ 34th St.)
Room 4406.
Reception, with wine and cheese, follows.

Upcoming Event: Paul Moses, November 14

"Uncovering the Story of Saint Francis and the Sultan"
Paul Moses
Brooklyn College, The City University of New York

During a major battle in the Fifth Crusade in 1219, Francis of Assisi crossed enemy lines and met with Malik al-Kamil, sultan of Egypt and a nephew of Saladin. Francis did not succeed in his goal of converting the sultan, although, remarkably, he was permitted to preach to him and others in the Muslim camp near Damietta, Egypt for several days. The encounter has largely been presented as an attempt on Francis’ part to achieve martyrdom, a theme initiated in thirteenth-century Franciscan accounts. The enduring image of the meeting is found in a Giotto work in the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi. Based on Bonaventure’s The Major Legend of St. Francis, it depicts Francis challenging the sultan’s religious advisors to an ordeal by fire that would prove who practiced the true religion. But this story, which did not surface until more than forty years after Francis and the sultan met, reflects Bonaventure’s need to portray Francis as highly orthodox, obedient and pro-Crusade at a time when the Franciscan order was under pressure from Rome due to a heresy scandal involving a group of rebellious friars.

To uncover what actually happened, it is necessary to view this event in the context of the larger stories of Francis and Sultan al-Kamil. Concerning the sultan, medieval Christian accounts imply or assert that the sultan secretly wished to be a Christian. But the sultan’s respect for Francis was authentically Islamic, based on passages in the Qur’an about Christian monks and on his interest in Sufism. Francis’ actions have to be considered in the context of his peacemaking; his conversion to a life of piety began in reaction to the trauma he suffered as a soldier and prisoner of war. The events in Egypt can be further understood by examining Francis’ own writings. In particular, his Earlier Rule included a revolutionary provision that the friars live peacefully among Muslims and “be subject” to them, avoiding contentious religious disputes. Francis, who taught largely through example, had approached the sultan unarmed to show Christians a peaceful alternative to the Crusades. He was not on a suicide mission but on a mission of peace.

Paul Moses is a professor of journalism at Brooklyn College/CUNY and a veteran journalist who has specialized in writing about religion. His book, The Saint and the Sultan, will be published by Doubleday in 2009.

Friday, November 14, 2008, 7:30 PM
CUNY Graduate Center (365 Fifth Ave. @ 34th St.)
Room 4406.
Reception, with wine and cheese, follows.

Re: Longing

Despite the fact that the adjective longus can be used to express lack (longe esse ab aliqua re, i.e. distance as lack), there does not seem to be any Romance equivalent to Germanic and English long as verb meaning to yearn for (as across distance). BUT, there is the fascinating possibility that desire (de-sidero) is originally related to a sense of uncrossable distance in the sense of being away from the stars (cf. considerare). Elena Lombadi's Syntax of Desire goes into this.

Would love to hear more thoughts about how desire itself and in general may be con-sidered as containing a reference to distance, place, space. Or as Erin Labbie put it last night at the beginning of her paper: "Courtly love is always already elsewhere."

Upcoming Lecture - Erin Felicia Labbie - Oct 17

"The Long Drive of Courtly Love: The Distance/Time Ratio of Amor de Longh."
Erin Felicia Labbie
Bowling Green State University

Courtly love is always already elsewhere. Characterized by longing, the stubborn maintenance of the obstacle, sublimation, and the refusal of synthesis, the enigma of courtly love offers a stratified concept of history as well as a critical methodology that relies on distance and a particular queerness that is at the heart of temporal and historical play. What Jacques Lacan calls the ‘meteoric brightness’ of courtly love has the potential to offer a way of thinking about space as time and to extend a layer of temporality to the long history of poetic drives. In the context of a developing queer historiography that has become a refuge for non-linear histories, the long drive of desire and the play between the Middle Ages and instances of modernity that it performs offers a way of viewing the distance and proximity of the politics of literature. This paper seeks to contribute to dynamic conversations about the processes of becoming, textual and identity politics, the vicissitudes of reading the traces of Medieval poetics, the rise of the rules of love, and finding a way of knowing the unknowable elements of desire.

Erin Felicia Labbie is Associate Professor of English at Bowling Green State University. She is the author of Lacan's Medievalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

Friday, October 17, 2008, 7:30 PM
CUNY Graduate Center (365 Fifth Ave. @ 34th St.)
Room 4406.
Reception, with wine and cheese, follows.

NYU Medieval and Renaissance Center Events

Wednesday, September 24 at 6 pm

Auditorium, Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò (co-sponsored with the Department of Italian)

"Performing Dress in Renaissance Italy"

Evelyn Welch (Professor of Renaissance Studies, Department of English, Queen Mary, University of London)

Tuesday, September 30 at 6 pm

Room 222, 19 University Place

"Noli me tangere: Cripple Aesthetic, Medieval & Modern Desires"

Christopher Baswell (Ann Whitney Olin Professor of English, Barnard College and Columbia University)

Thursday, October 30 at 7 pm

Room 222, 19 University Place

"Improvisation and the Genesis and Structure of the Quijote"

Roberto Echevarria (Sterling Professor of Hispanic and Comparative Literature, Yale University)

Thursday, November 20 at 6 pm

Room 222, 19 University Place (co-sponsored with CELCE and the Medieval Forum)

'Translating the Diversity of the Middle Ages'

Simon Gaunt (Professor of French, King's College, London)

Thursday, 11 December at 6 pm

Roundtable: "The Ethical and Political Responsibilities of the Medievalist: Iberia and Beyond"

Simon R. Doubleday, Organizer (Associate Professor of History, Hofstra University, and Visiting Scholar, NYU.

Celia Chazelle (Professor of History, The College of New Jersey)

Jerrilynn D. Dodds (Distinguished Professor of Art History and Theory, City University of New York)

María Rosa Menocal ( Director of the Whitney Humanities Center and Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University)

Amy Remensnyder (Associate Professor of History, Brown University)

Jesús Rodríguez Velasco (Visiting Professor of Spanish, Columbia University)

Upcoming Archaeological Events

The New York Society of the Archaeological Institute of America is glad to announce its first three lecture for this coming Fall 2008. We would like to invite you and any member of your Institutions to partecipate. Could you kindly post on your walls and local web site the following information? Thank you.
Sincerily Yours,

Michelle Hobart & Rachel Kouser
Co-chairs of the Lecture Program

September 25: Richard Hodges, U. Of Penn., on excavations at Butrint. Co-sponsored by the Archaeology Committee of the National Arts Club, at the Club, 15 Gramercy Park South. Reception 6:30 P.M., lecture at 7.

‘Butrint’ – at the Cross Road of the Mediterranean

The UNESCO World Heritage Site of Butrint – ancient Buthrotum – lies in south-west Albania on the Straits of Corfu. The lecture describes 15 years of excavations encompassing the Bronze Age, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Venetian and Ottoman periods and how today a successful archaeological park has been created here. The lecture, illustrated with many slides, aims to show how modern excavation methods offers many new interpretations of familiar histories from the=2 0Greek, Roman and Byzantine periods.


October 16: John Pollini, Professor of Classical Art & Archaeology Department of Art History, University of Southern California, Co-sponsored by the New York University Center for Ancient Studies, at Jurow Hall, NYU Washington Square. Lecture at 6:30 P.M., reception to follow.

Christian Destruction and Desecration of Images of Classical Antiquity

In popular culture Christianity is remembered for the art, architecture, customs, rituals, and myths that it preserved from the classical past. It is rarely acknowledged, however, that Christianity also destroyed a great deal in its conversion of the Roman Empire. The material evidence for Christian destruction has often been overlooked or gone unrecognized even by archaeologists. Professor Pollini’s talk examines various forms of Christian destruction and desecration of images of classical antiquity during the fourth to seventh centuries, as well as some of the attendant problems in detecting and making sense of this phenomenon. This talk is based on Professor Pollini’s present book project, “Christian Destruction and Desecration of Images of Classical Antiquity: A Study in Religious Intolerance and Violence in the Ancient World,” for which he received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies.


November 13: Brendan Foley, Research Associate, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; Lecturer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Co-sponsored by the Onassis Center, 645 Fifth Avenue, entrance on 52 Street, 6:30PM.

Shipwrecks in the Deep Mediterranean

Sea borne trade fueled human development since the Bronze Age, but some constant fraction of sea voyages ended in shipwreck. Working with colleagues in Greece, Italy, Egypt, and Algeria, Dr. Brendan Foley leads an interdisciplinary research team to study ancient civilizations through deep water Mediterranean shipwrecks. New robotic technologies rapidly document wrecks regardless of water depth, as highlighted by investigations of a Classical Greek wreck in the Aegean Sea. The teams' method of extracting ancient DNA from ceramic objects allows unprecedented views of agriculture and early economies. Combined, these advanced techniques provide new understanding of critical moments in human history.

NYU English Department Medieval Forum, Fall 2008 Events

We are pleased to announce the list of events for the NYU English Department Medieval Forum. The Medieval Forum meets fortnightly on Thursday evenings at 6:30pm. All events will be held in 19 University Place, room 224, unless otherwise noted (visitors from outside NYU should bring photo ID to sign into the building). All are welcome!

If you have questions, contact Liza Blake, elizabeth[dot]blake[at]nyu[dot]edu.


NYU English Medieval Forum
Fall 2008 Events

September 11
"'Variety': a study in pre-modern aesthetic values"
Mary Carruthers
(NYU and All Souls College, Oxford)

September 25
"Exempla and Authority in Fifteenth-Century England"
Amanda Leff
(NYU)

October 9
"A Taxonomy of Creatures in the Second-Family Bestiary"
Susan Crane
(Columbia)

October 23
"Informing Poetics: Soul, Body and Gender in Chaucer's Rhyme Royal Tales"
Elizabeth Robertson
(University of Colorado, Boulder)

November 6
"Embodied texts, entexted bodies: performance and performative poetics in and of Beowulf"
Mark Amodio
(Vassar College)
Co-sponsored with the Anglo-Saxon Studies Colloquium (ASSC)

November 20
"Translating the diversity of the Middle Ages"
Simon Gaunt
(King's College, London)
Co-sponsored with CELCE and the Medieval and Renaissance Center (MARC)

December 4
"Convert Identity in the Late Middle Ages"
Steven Kruger
(Queens College, CUNY)

Schedule of Events 2008-9

Friday, October 17, 2008, 7:30 PM
The Long Drive of Courtly Love: Amor de Longh and the Object of Desire
Erin Felicia Labbie
Bowling Green State University
The Nineteenth Annual Rossell Hope Robbins Lecture

Friday, November 14, 2008, 7:30 PM
Uncovering the Story of Francis and the Sultan
Paul Moses
Brooklyn College, CUNY

Friday, December 5, 2008, 7:30 PM
Waiting for the Middle Ages
Cary Howie
Cornell University

Friday, February 6, 2009, 6:30 PM
at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Choirs of Angels: Painting in Italian Choir Books, 1300–1500
Barbara Boehm
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Friday, March 6, 2009, 7:30 PM
The Antipodes: Maps and Travel Literature about Another World
Matthew Goldie
Rider University

Friday, April 3, 2009, 7:30 PM
Vernacular Verse Encyclopedism in Medieval France: System and System-Failure
Sarah Kay
Princeton University

Friday, May 1, 2009, 7:30 PM
Information by the Way: Townspeople and Cultural Networks in Later Medieval England
David Gary Shaw
Wesleyan University

Unless otherwise noted, all lectures meet at the CUNY Graduate Center (365 Fifth Ave. @ 34th St.), Room 4406. Reception, with wine and cheese, follows.

First NYU English Medieval Forum Event: Mary Carruthers

"'Variety': a study in pre-modern aesthetic values."

Mary Carruthers
Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford; Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Literature, NYU; Professor of English, NYU


Thursday, Sept. 11, 6:30 pm
Room 224 of 19 University Place
(non-NYU visitors, bring a photo ID to sign into the building)

Professor Carruthers will deliver the inaugural talk in the NYU English Department's Medieval Forum. The Medieval Forum will meet fortnightly on Thursday evenings, and all are welcome (a full schedule of speakers and events will follow).

If you have questions, please contact Liza Blake, eab429[at]nyu[dot]edu.

Medieval Club Sponsored Sessions at Kalamazoo

The Medieval Club is sponsoring three sessions at Kalamazoo next year:

Glosynge is a Glorious Thyng: Medieval Studies and the Future of Commentary
(organized by Nicola Masciandaro, not to be confused with CUNY conference with similar theme)

Animals and Ethics
(organized by Karl Steel)

Visibility, Presence, Voice: Theorizing Gender and Authority in Late Medieval Writing
(organized by Katharine Jager)

Glossing is a Glorious Thing -- Call for Papers

Glossing is a Glorious Thing: The Past, Present, and Future of Commentary
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
April 9-10, 2009

Keynote Event
The Future of Commentary, a roundtable discussion with:
David Greetham (CUNY)
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Stanford)
Jesús Rodríguez Velasco (Columbia)
Et al.

Sponsored by:
The Graduate Center and the Ph.D. Program in English, CUNY
Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary

CALL FOR PAPERS

Il y a plus affaire à interpreter les interpretations qu'à interpreter les choses, et plus de livres sur les livres que sur autre subject: nous ne faisons que nous entregloser. Tout fourmille de commentaires; d'auteurs, il en est grand cherté—Montaigne

[There is more to-do interpreting interpretations than interpreting things, more books on books than on any other subject: we do nothing except gloss each other. Everything swarms with commentaries; of authors there is a great lack].

Montaigne’s critique, which does not exclude his own Essais, is emblematic of the ambivalent status of commentary in modernity. Commentary is both an outmoded form of textual production tied to premodern constructions of authority and an indispensable dimension of scholarly work. This ambivalence is most conspicuous within the humanities where the commentary genre, like a popolo minuto of the academic city-state, holds an explicitly subordinate position beneath the monograph, the article, and the essay, however much, and maybe all the more so when, work of these kinds is constituted by commentarial procedures.

But there are clear signs, both intellectual and technological, of return to and reinvention of commentary. Several humanistic auctores of the last century have worked innovatively within the genre: Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, Martin Heidegger’s lectures on Hölderlin’s “Der Ister,” Roland Barthes’s S/Z, Jacques Derrida’s Glas, Luce Irigaray’s An Ethics of Sexual Difference, J.H. Prynne’s They That Haue Powre to Hurt; A Specimen of a Commentary on Shake-speares Sonnets, 94, and Giorgio Agamben’s The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, et al. In The Powers of Philology, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has described the material situation in which commentary may become ascendant: “The vision of the empty chip constitutes a threat, a veritable horror vacui not only for the electronic media industry but also, I suppose, for our intellectual and cultural self-appreciation. It might promote, once again, a reappreciation of the principle and substance of copia. And it might bring about a situation in which we will no longer be embarrassed to admit that filling up margins is what commentaries mostly do—and what they do best” (53).

This conference proposes a dialogue about the past, present, and future of commentary, not only as an object of intellectual and theoretical inquiry, but also with regard to commentary’s practical potentialities, to its place within the evolution and becoming of academic labor in the lived present. The prospect of a “return” to commentary, whatever forms it may take, renders conspicuous and questionable some of the most hallowed and taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature of scholarly practice, for instance: the distinction between primary and secondary text; the primacy of noesis over poesis, or thinking over making; the synthetic, thesis-driven, and polemical character of understanding; and so forth. Presentations that engage with such implications are particularly welcome. Please submit 250-word abstracts by October 1, 2008 to formicolare@gmail.com. Word attachments preferred.

Organizers: Nicola Masciandaro (nicolam@brooklyn.cuny.edu), Karl Steel (karltsteel@gmail.com), Ryan Dobran (ryandobran@hotmail.com)

Heart and Head at Kalamazoo, or, The Displacement of the Entirely Out of Place

“Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man. ‘Gravity, a mysterious carriage of the body to conceal the defects of the mind’—Laurence Sterne” (Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading, p.13).

Jeffrey Cohen's recent disembodiment, Karl Steel's counting of tears, Eileen Joy's profession of love, and Dan Remein's shimmering essay on being-together as theoretical practice and communistic labor recall to me the truth of these lines which, in a fit of shy humanistic terrorism, I once wrote on the chalkboard of an empty classroom about 20 years ago in the hopeful fantasy of their affecting unknown others in a manner that would create and confirm our invisible friendship. Now (not just now, but now including all the nows up to now), this note, which shared in the logic of Eileen's ethical "as if" and Anna Klosowska's insights about the posthumous futurism of non sequitur at the Place of the Present and Why Am I Me? panels at Kalamazoo, respectively, seems to be taking effect, or rather, is finding its way back to me, like Macarius's grapes, back to my future, or rather, is being revealed to be not my note at all, but ours, or rather everyone's and no one's, an index and instance of the possession of what can not be possessed, the proverbial treasure that increases when shared, or rather . . .

So, a couple comments:

First, about place. The framing of the question of the presentness of scholarship in terms of place is more than rhetorical or metaphorical. I.e. it does not mean role, much less topic in the weak sense, but has everything to do with the present as the topos of our work in the fullest sense, as the placeless, always present place where we and it take place. This was confirmed in the shared vocabulary of the presentations at the Place of the Present session (wandering, restless, affective, performative, presence, peripatetic, mendicant/monastic, communal, beside) which nearly took on the structure of a fugal composition on the theme of Sufistic Medieval Studies, with Nancy Partner's opening remarks serving as the generative countersubject, if I understand my music theory correctly (which I don't). For the place of the wandering scholar, in all the senses that this figure had meaning at the panel, is precisely the place of effective and affective embodiment, the ongoing present of our own taking place. To recognize this is not for one second to deny--clearly the obvious is what most needs repeating--the real specific material ends (public, political, pedagogical, philosophical, etc) for which scholarship can and should "most rigorous[ly]" work, as Steven Kruger's comment about good work made clear. Rather, to recognize the academic's performative, communal, brushed-up-against body as the placeless place of scholarly practice, is precisely the opposite, namely, the finding of the very space and means and opening for the actual realization of those ends. But this is not something that criticism or rather the critical subject, enthroned in the tomb of its Cartesian detachment, subsisting in the dungeon tower of 'if only' rather than wandering in the paradise deserts of 'as if,' is comfortable with. Such comfort belongs rather to the third area of the proto-discursive and the post-civilized:

"The localization of culture and play . . . is neither within nor outside of the individual, but in a 'third area,' distinct both 'from interior psychic reality and from the effective world in which the individual lives'[Winnicott]. The topology that is here expressed . . . has always been known to children, fetishists, 'savages,' and poets. It is in this 'third area' that a science of man truly freed of every eighteenth-century prejudice should focus its study. Things are not outside of us, in measurable external space, like neutral objects (ob-jecta) of use and exchange; rather, they open to us the original place solely from which the experience of measurable external space becomes possible. They are therefore held and comprehended from the outset in the topos outopos (placeless place, no-place place) in which our experience of being-in-the-world is situated. The question 'where is the thing?' is inseparable from the question 'where is the human?' Like the fetish, like the toy, things are not properly anywhere, because their place is found on this side of objects and beyond the human in a zone that is no longer objective or subjective, neither personal nor impersonal, neither material nor immaterial, but where we find ourselves suddenly facing [like Karl Steel before an animal, and the animal before you] these apparently so simple unknows: the human, the thing." (Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas, p.59).

Second, about torture and philosophy. At the Place of the Present panel I unsuccessfully posed or perhaps poorly articulated a question about what I perceived to be the philosophical agon "behind" the presentations, namely, the contest between the Cartesian subject (o the misfortune of nominal adjectives) which by believing in its rational transcendence of the world only ends up reducing itself to another, 'mere' thing in the world (cf. Agamben's definition of evil in Coming Community) and the phenomenological subject which sees itself as an inexplicable presence whose inherent wonder attends to and inhabits every act of world-making and understanding, as the place of the never ending beginning of philosophy. That my question was answered by an intentional non sequitur to the issue of torture is, now that I think about it, the best possible and the most telling of answers. For just as torture intends to disclose, materialize, prove the tortured subject only to destroy it, so is concern for torture the perfect place for the critical subject to hide (not that it might not do good work while it is there, caveat, bla bla, etc.) most intimately and unconsciously from itself and others.

So, lastly, it was lovely to see (and feel and know and witness) the displacement of the entirely out of place by the taking-place of medieval studies. All told, it was like being in several places at once, being antipodally (Cf. Matthew Boyd Goldie's wonderful paper on the antipodes), with and without a globe between. Je est un autre. Which of course is the work of love, the philia that forever haunts philosophy from the inside.

See You in Kalamazoo

The Medieval Club is sponsoring the following sessions at Kalamazoo:

Why Am I Me? On Being Born in the Middle Ages I (Session 280)
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


Why Am I Me? On Being Born in the Middle Ages II (Session 333)
Sponsor: Medieval Club of New York
Organizer: Nicola Masciandaro, Brooklyn College, CUNY
Presider: Nicola Masciandaro

"Contradictions towards Identity in Wolfram von Eschenbach and Meister Eckhart"
Claire Taylor Jones, Univ. of Pennsylvania

"The Shifting Example of Knighthood in Ywain and Gawain"
Debbie Killingsworth, Univ. of Colorado–Boulder

"'Ce que Christine dit': Self-Scrutiny in Christine de Pizan’s Le livre de l’advision Cristine"
Julie Fifelski, Fordham Univ.


The Global Middle Ages (Session 587)
Sponsor: Medieval Club of New York
Organizer: Matthew Boyd Goldie, Rider Univ.
Presider: Nicola Masciandaro, Brooklyn College, CUNY

"William of Rubruck’s Mission to Asia: Travel Writing and the Medieval Contact Zone"
Rebecca Campbell, Univ. of Western Ontario

"Windows on the World in Fifteenth-Century Venice: Geography, Cartography, and the Eyewitness Traveler"
Marianne O’Doherty, Univ. of Southampton

"Earthly Motions: The Antipodes and Antipodeans"
Matthew Boyd Goldie


See you (whoever you are) there!

Upcoming Event: Denis Renevey

"Out of Darkness, or Why and How the Fifteenth-Century Middle English Doctrine of the Heart Matters"
Denis Renevey
University of Lausanne

Friday, May 2, 2008, 7:30 PM
CUNY Graduate Center (365 Fifth Ave. @ 34th St.)
Room 4406.
Reception, with wine and cheese, follows.

Denis Renevey, Professor of English (UNIL), is the author of Language, Self and Love: Hermeneutics in the Writings of Richard Rolle and the Commentaries on the Song of Songs (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001) as well as numerous articles on medieval mystical texts. He is also co-editor, with Christiana Whitehead, of Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England (Cardiff: University of Wales Press; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000).

Upcoming Event: Maria Rosa Menocal

"Remembering Medieval Spain in the Twenty-First Century"
Maria Rosa Menocal
Yale University

Friday, April 4, 2008, 7:30 PM
CUNY Graduate Center (365 Fifth Ave. @ 34th St.),
Room 4406.
Reception, with wine and cheese, follows.

Maria Rosa Menocal is Sterling Professor of Humanities in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University and Director of the Whitney Humanities Center. She is the author of The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage (1987); Writing in Dante's Cult of Truth: From Borges to Boccaccio (1991); Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (1994); and The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Christians, and Jews Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (2002).

Nutus Divinus, or, Everything Depends on Seeing Each Other

I am teaching The Life of Christina of Markyate tomorrow and this passage catches my eye as incredibly relevant to much that was said at the friendship panel:

"The virgin of God lay prostrate in the old man's chapel, with her face turned to the ground. The man of God stepped over her with his face averted in order not to see her. But as he passed by he looked over his shoulder to see how modestly the handmaid of Christ had composed herself for prayer, as this was one of the things whic he thought those who pray ought to observe. Yet she, at the same instant, glanced upwards to appraise the bearing and deportment of the old man, for in these she considered that some trace of his great holiness was apparent. And so they saw each other, not by design and yet not by chance, but, as afterwards became clear, by the divine will [divino nuto]. For if they had not had a glimpse of each other, neither would have presumed to live with the other in the confined space of that cell: they would not have dwelt together : they would not have been stimulated by such heavenly desire, nor would they have attained such a lofty place in heaven. The fire, namely, which had been kindled by the spirit of God and burned in each one of them cast its sparks into their hearts by the grace of that mutual glance [gratia mutue visionis]: and so made one in heart and soul in chastity and charity in Christ, they were not afraid to dwell together under the same roof" (ed. and tr. Talbot, 101-3, my italics).

Cf. a passage Eileen cited here: "Claustrophilia . . . names the love that lights up a body, building, or book, from within, acknowledging what is discrete and irreconcilable in the beloved as the effect of one's own appropriative, organizing gaze. Relinquishing that desire for appropriation, one sees each former object in light of another, and thus beyond the logic of objectification: a light, hermeneutic and mnemonic, always refracted, always coming from elsewhere" (Howie, Claustrophilia, 151-52).

Claustrophiliac friendship, the love of/in enclosure, is ocular, a mutual dwelling housed in the projection of the eye's, our eyes', containment of the world.

In Memory of Elaine Block

Elaine Block passed away on Friday. Judith Bronfman has kindly sent along this notice:

"I know that many of our Saints' group and the Medieval Club knew Elaine Block, who passed away last night. The funeral service will be private, but a memorial service is being planned for later in the spring.

For those who didn't know her, Elaine was an amazing woman, who probably knew every misericord and choir stall in Western Europe (and had photographed all of them). Her projected five-volume Corpus of Misericords, published by Brepols, was underway; two volumes (France and Iberia) were out and a third was in its final proofing stage. With Frederic Billiet, she had just published the Lexicon (also Brepols), a dictionary of the terms for misericords and choir stalls, regularizing usage among languages.

If anyone wishes to make a donation in her memory, checks should be made out to Misericordia International and mailed to Randall Block, 45 Lafayette Road, Newton, MA 02462. The funds may be used to help with the Misericordia International colloquium scheduled for June in France.

Thank you for helping to communicate this sad news to those who knew and loved Elaine."

Here is a link to the Misericordia International website.

Friendship, Continued

Eileen, Franco, Yoshihisa, thanks again for a very enjoyable conversation last night. As a response, some prose: "To live in intimacy with a stranger, not in order to draw him closer, or to make him known, but rather to keep him strange, remote: unapparent -- so unapparent that his name contains him entirely. And, even in discomfort, to be nothing else, day after day, than the ever open place, the unwaning light in which that one being, that thing, remains forever exposed and sealed off" (Agamben, The Idea of Prose, 61). And a poem.

Upcoming Event: The Subjects of Friendship, Medieval and Medievalist

Friday, March 7, 2008, 7:30 PM

CUNY Graduate Center (365 Fifth Ave. @ 34th St.)
Room 4406.

Reception, with wine and cheese, follows.

The Subjects of Friendship, Medieval and Medievalist
Panel presentation and discussion

"Thomas Aquinas on the Ontology of Amicitia"
Yoshihisa Yamamoto

"Between What is Ours, and What is Not Ours: Claustrophilia, Anachronism, Friendship"
Eileen Joy

"Notes on Dante's Poetics of Friendship"

Franco Masciandaro

Yoshihisa Yamamoto is Associate Professor of philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, Chiba University (Japan). He is currently Visiting Scholar at the School of Philosophy of The Catholic University of America. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Tokyo. He was also visiting scholar at the Warburg Institute (University of London). He has published on Aquinas's ethics and metaphysics as well as on medieval Arabic Philosophy.

Eileen Joy is Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and her main interests are in Old English literature, cultural studies, embodied affectivities, and ethics. She has published articles and book chapters on: "Beowulf" and suicide terrorism; Tony Kushner's play "Homebody/Kabul" and the Old English poem "The Ruin"; eros and the Old English legend "The Seven Sleepers"; the Anglo-Latin "Wonders of the East" and the 2002 massacre of Muslims in Gujarat, India; and the intellectual history of early modern bibliography. She is the co-editor of "The Postmodern Beowulf: A Critical Casebook" (West Virginia University Press, 2007), "Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), and "Premodern to Modern Humanisms: The BABEL Project" (special issue, Journal of Narrative Theory 37.2 [Summer 2007]), and is also working on two monograph projects, tentatively titled "Postcard from the Volcano: Beowulf, Memory, History" and "We Must Speak What We Feel: Eros, Love, Regard and the Humanities."

Franco Masciandaro is Professor of Italian and Director of the Italian Program at the University of Connecticut. A specialist in Dante and medieval and Renaissance literature, he is the author of La problematica del tempo nella Commedia (Longo, 1976), Dante as Dramatist: The Myth of the Earthly Paradise and Tragic Vision in the Divine Comedy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), La Conoscienza Viva: Letture fenomenologiche da Dante a Machiavelli (Longo, 1998), as well as many articles on Dante, Machiavelli, Ariosto, and Boccaccio. He is currently writing a book on the poetics of friendship.

p.s. a pre-event conversation is already well under way over at In The Middle.

. . . and the Baby-Chopper

Thank you Laura Smoller for a very interesting lecture. Here is a continuation of some post-lecture thoughts.

I was particularly struck, as I mentioned last night, by the consistent withholding of judgment on the wife's butchering of her baby in the narratives. Following the lead of the symbolic/allegorical significance of the dismembered and reintegrated body in light of the Schism, one possible reading is that this withholding has to do with the preservation of the literal as a mere container for the symbolic, or more simply, with maintaining the proper hagiographic focus on the miracle. In these terms the woman is very simply the means of getting the baby chopped up so that it can be healed and in a sense spiritually birthed by the saint (Gloria Steinem gave a nice description of this patriarchal function in a recent lecture recorded at Yale, listenable here).

Yet the possibility that the narratives’ withholding of judgment on the mother is more deeply a way of preserving something significant in the literal act of butchering her baby is hard to ignore, especially in comparison to the Mary of Jerusalem story where cooking your baby equals self-condemnation in an irreversible and extravagant way. Even to speak of this and notice it as “withholding” seems to acknowledge that there is something else going on, that the intention to serve up one’s child may be following a logic that the meaning of the story somehow requires. One possibility, to follow Karl Steel’s paper last Kalamazoo on the (mostly virtual) deliciousness of manflesh as an index of the discursivity of the human (available to read here), is that the baby butchering has to do with a transgression of the animal/human boundary which only serves to maintain it, precisely because the intention to transgress it acknowledges in a profane/literal/material way that very superiority, namely, through the fact that the dead human body is not only meat but the choicest meat and that the serving of baby flesh, whether as sacrifice or gourmandise or an interrelationship of the two, is really the perfect way, in the sense of an impossible limit (like death), to follow your husband's meal orders or honor the saint who is coming to supper.

Which means that I am now fixated on the ape in the painting (see previous post, source?), who is placed above the regeneration miracle narrative and opposite the human in the other window, who is above the kitchen. Where the ape is looking downward and eating, the man is looking upward at/through something (anybody know?) and, maybe, knowing. I will resist the historicistically irresponsible temptation to spell out a detailed reading of this painting as representing a kind of factory for the production of transcendent human identity, but I think it could be captioned very productively with this statement from Agamben's The Open: "The anthropological machine of humanism is an ironic apparatus that verifies the absence of a nature proper to Homo, holding him suspended between a celestial and a terrestrial nature, between animal and human -- and thus, his being always less and more than himself" (29).

In these terms the miracle story, as about the unmaking and remaking of a human, has interesting similarities to the late medieval story about the origin of the apes, which later made its way into Grimms' Tales. The story goes, according to Janson's paraphrase: "Christ and St. Peter stop at a blacksmith’s shop, where they were hospitably received. To show His gratitude, Christ took the blacksmith’s old and ugly wife and placed her in the fire of the forge, from which she emerged young and strong as a girl of fifteen. As soon as the two travelers had taken their leave, the blacksmith tried to rejuvenate another old woman by the same procedure, but when he thrust her into the flames she screamed so pitifully that he had to take her out again. Two pregnant women, who witnessed all this, were so shocked when they saw the old woman hideously blackened and shriveled like an ape that shortly thereafter they gave birth to two apes. These escaped into the forest, where they multiplied and thus became the progenitors of the entire simian tribe" (H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore, 97). Here the craftsman's labor is a medium of likeness between man and the divine Artifex as well as a means of transgression that, when it overreaches its limit through an impossible copying of what is beyond it, produces the greater unlikeness of the hyper-mimetic hybrid as a secondary, grotesque creation. Does the Ferrer story incorporate a comparable principle regarding the differently structured domestic labor of the wife who, rather than doing what she wants without understanding, which is the manner of the blacksmith, does what she must with a kind of superb animal rationality?

Upcoming Event: Laura Smoller

"The Saint and the Chopped-Up Baby: Shaping the Image of St. Vincent Ferrer"
Laura Smoller
University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Friday, February 15, 2008, 7:30 PM
CUNY Graduate Center (365 Fifth Ave. @ 34th St.),
Room 4406.
Reception, with wine and cheese, follows.

In 1453, a woman testifying about the miracles of Dominican preacher Vincent Ferrer reported that the potential saint's intercession had restored a baby who had been cut to pieces by his meat-craving, pregnant mother. Even at that point, the story had something of a folkloric life of its own. After Vincent's 1455 canonization, this miracle was frequently depicted in art and hagiography. In this talk, Smoller explores how this single, bizarre miracle tale became crucial to the emerging image of the new saint, addressing nagging doubts about the holy preacher's career and loyalties.

Laura Smoller received her Ph.D. in History from Harvard University in 1991 and subsequently taught 6 years at Stanford University before returning to her native Arkansas to join the faculty at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She is the author of History, Prophecy, and the Stars: The Christian Astrology of Pierre d’Ailly as well as numerous articles on late medieval astrology, eschatology, and miracles. She is currently working on a book entitled The Saint and the Chopped-Up Baby: The Cult of Vincent Ferrer and the Religious Life of the Later Middle Ages, work that has been supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. A future book project, Astrology and the Sibyls: Routes to Religious Truth in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, arises from work she did on the Bolognese lawyer and amateur astrologer John of Legnano in 2003-06 in conjunction with the research group “Knowledge and Belief” sponsored by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

Upcoming Event: Manuscripts and Incunabula from the Rare Scripture Collection of the American Bible Society

Thursday, December 6th, 6:30-8:00 p.m.
2nd Floor, Museum of Biblical Art (northwest corner of 61st & Broadway)

Presentation of Manuscripts and Incunabula
Liana Lupas
Curator of the Rare Scripture Collection
American Bible Society

Dr. Lupas will give a presentation of manuscript and early print bibles from the Rare Scripture Collection of the American Bible Society.

PLEASE NOTE time and place, which differ from the Club's usual schedule.

See you there!

Upcoming Event: In the Footsteps of Marco Polo

Friday, November 2, 2007, 7:30 PM
In the Footsteps of Marco Polo
Denis Belliveau and Francis O’Donnell
CUNY Graduate Center (365 Fifth Ave. @ 34th St.), Room 4406.
Reception follows.

Over 700 years after Marco Polo set out on his travels, photographer Denis Belliveau and artist Francis O'Donnell became the first to retrace Polo's itinerary in its entirety by land and sea, traveling over 33, 000 miles in two years. In the Footsteps of Marco Polo, a film documenting their experiences, will be aired on PBS. This Friday, Belliveau and O'Donnell will present stories and images from their adventure -- one of the most daring and literal acts of textual interpretation!

Heterospecularity: Wanderings in the Mirror

Last weekend at the conference on "Medieval Bodies: Traversing Sex and Gender in the Middle Ages" organized by the Columbia University Medieval Guild, Karma Lochrie gave a keynote address entitled "When Heterosexuality Disappears: Queer Whereabouts in the Middle Ages." Lochrie presented her thesis that heteronormativity is not medieval and worked it out via a reading of Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls, arguing that medieval concepts of sexuality are grounded instead in ideals and the "disordered affectivity" that renders them rarely realized. The weekend before last Eileen Joy wrote on the question of medieval heterosexuality over at In the Middle: "Art Reveals More of Life than Life Does: Heterosexuality, Erotohistoriography, and Our Perverse Desires for a Pleasurably Queer Medieval Studies." Joy's post responds to James A. Schultz's essay “Heterosexuality as a Threat to Medieval Studies” [The Journal of the History of Sexuality 15 (2006): 14-29], touches most helpfully on much recent work on the issue, and turns overall, via Anna Klosowska's Queer Love in the Middle Ages, towards the erotics of reading, our reading: "Literature provides access, finally, not only to 'official' cultures, but also to their queer obverse and 'unofficial' wishes, desires, & bodies, and even to that which, even today, still remains unthought, untouched, and therefore, unfelt."

So I followed the call of the question of medieval sexuality into the classroom this week, on the lookout for textual moments to play it out. Or, to allegorize my own experience (which seems a pretty handy definition of reading), I was, unlike-like Adam and Eve, bound to fall into the question when the opportunity presented itself, in the form of the following passages from Erec and Enide (cited from Kibler translation, Penguin edition):

"What should I say of her beauty? She was truly one who was made to be looked at, for one might gaze at her just as one gazes into a mirror . . . He could not gaze at her enough; the more he looked at her, the more she pleased him . . . But the damsel, for her part, looked at the knight no less than he looked at her . . . They would not have accepted a ransom to leave off looking at one another. They were very well and evenly matched in courtliness, in beauty, and in great nobility. They were so similar, of one character and of one essence, that no one wanting to speak truly could have chosen the better one or the more beautiful or the wiser. They were very equal in spirit and very well suited to one another . . . When they were left alone in the room, they paid homage to each member. The eyes, which channel love and send the message to the heart, renewed themselves with looking, for whatever they saw greatly pleased them. After the message from the eyes came the sweetness, worth far more, of the kisses that bring on love; they both sampled that sweetness and refreshed their hearts within, so that with great difficulty they drew apart. Kissing was their first game. The love between the two of them made the maiden more bold; she was not afraid of anything; she endured all, whatever the cost. Before she arose again, she had lost the name of maiden; in the morning she was a new lady" (42-63).

About which I will find something to say in a moment. But first, the reason Adam and Eve came to mind is that before rediscovering these specular, sexy passages, Lochrie and Joy had rendered inevitable (as reflection from a mirror) rereading the chapter in The City of God (14.26) in which Augustine imagines, and precisely cannot imagine, prelapsarian sex, from which the following lines (cited from Walsh translation, Fathers of the Church edition) stood out:

"Surely, every member of the body was equally submissive to the mind and, surely, a man and his wife could play their active and passive roles in the drama of conception without the lecherous promptings of lust, with perfect serenity of soul and with no sense of disintegration between body and soul . . . the seminal flow could have reached the womb with as little rupture of the hymen and by the same vaginal ducts as it at present the case, in reverse, with the menstrual flux. And just as the maturity of the fetus could have brought the child to birth without the moanings of the mother in pain, so could connection and conception have occurred by a mutually deliberate union unhurried by the hunger of lust. [The online CCEL edition preserves the Latin here and thus the putative purity -- totally against the text's meaning -- of untutored minds. The histrionic language ('roles,' 'drama'), pace the performativity of gender, Butler's "constituting the identity it is purported to be," is the translator's not Augustine's] . . . The trouble with the hypothesis of a passionless procreation controlled by will . . . is that it has never been verified in experience, not even in the experience of those who could have proved that it was possible. . . . Hence, today it is practically impossible even to discuss the hypothesis of voluntary control without the imagination being filled with the realities of rebellious lust" (406-7).

The moment combines in a deeply fascinating way two crucial Augustinian principles (or at least principles that many medievalists, though perhaps not so clearly as when Exegetics was still controversial, would recognize as Augustinian) that Lochrie and Joy, apparently without thinking them as such, respectively evoke: 1) that human sexual desire as experienced is fundamentally disordered, i.e. structured by a being that is "out of order" in the sense of having a fractured will and thus destined to habits, passions, and other self-modifications that divide persons against themselves; 2) that reading, interpretation, understanding are similarly fundamentally acts of desire and its imaginations, expressions of a will that, wandering in this regio dissimilitudinis, is trying to find its way back to its own wholeness in the only object, God, that can satisfy its infinite desire.

A disorder of questions and ideas: What role can/do these principles play in the medievalist contribution to gender and sexuality studies? What are the possible and impossible alliances, covert or overt, between 'queer' and 'Augustinian'? Need to read: J. Joyce Schuld's Foucault and Augustine, Virginia Burrus on theology and eros, Amy Hollywood's Sensible Ecstacy, Catherine Conybeare's The Irrational Augustine, Rollan McCleary's A Special Illumination, Marcella Althaus-Reid's Indecent Theology. In Sexual Dissidence Jonathan Dollimore catalogs "the Augustinian echoes in several popular notions of sexual perversion in our time" (144). But might this genealogy not also have an intrinsic redemptive potential, for redemption of desire from codes, norms, ideologies that reduce persons unjustly, subjectively and objectively, philosophically and socially, to things they are not? One of heteronormativity's synonyms seems to be "healthy sexuality," the notion that there is a mode of sexuality, a "sex life" (simultaneously a life composed entirely of sex and sex wholly removed from life!) that is intrinsically good and worthwhile, a kind of mean to which all should keep and aspire. (This by the way suggests another angle on a problem which Steven Kruger raised at Karma Lochrie's lecture, about how to understand the coexistence and intersection of 'vertical' and 'horizontal' values, ideals vs. norms, across the medieval/modern divide, name, that the Aristotelian mean looks like a precursor and subtext for modernity's ethico-statistical averages). Insofar as Augustinian sexuality impossiblizes "healthy" sexuality and recognizes sex as always already a problem for self and society it offers at minimum a way to think around hetero/queer and other binaries through which sexual ideologies are thought and experienced. By contrast, medieval senses of the normal seem rather faithfully married to persepectives on worldliness or the civitas terrena, to a recognition of mass practice as fundamentally misguided, heedless, blind to the real nature of self and world. "Since the worldly, in their madness, never come to realize how the joy of eternal love penetrates the hearts of the elect, the mortal mind never ceases staggering along in the business of worldly affairs and in those sins which have proved fatal to others," opens Richard Rolle's Contra Amatores Mundi. How much are our "perverse desires for a pleasurably queer medieval studies" perverse desires for the normal, for the normalcy of the "queer," for the pleasurably queer as bourgeois? How much are they infinite desires, "perverse" in their insatiability, in their desire for the end and beginning of desire? How much are they desires for a both-and-neither space between these, for an enworlded-otherworldly queer grounded in the actuality of love?

"Seeing something simply in its being-thus -- irreparable, but not for that reason necessary; thus, but not for that reason contingent -- is love" (Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community 105). This needs reading into the Romance of the Rose.

I am not sure that the absent original procreative sexual act of Augustine's imagination is heterosexual. Nor am I sure that his imagination of it is. At minimum, this idealized heterosexuality is not, as heterosexuality is often construed and represented, a relationship of essentialized difference. Rather, each sexual person is portrayed as a harmony of body and soul, a harmony that is extended formally to a non-penetrative sex act. This is in keeping with Augustine's commitment to rational, spiritual equality of male and female natures and his location of difference and hierarchy in bodies (See Lloyd, "Augustine and Aquinas," Feminist Theology, ed. Loades, 90ff.) There is difference, but, where metaphysical order reigns, it is a maximally minimized difference. Except, of course, in the structure of the representation itself, which is conspicuously absorbed with the female organs to the elision of the male, an absent phallus present (like the unmoved mover?) as a kind of pure causality, present only in what it emits and its effect on the female. Shall we understand this as the product of an absolute masculinity, or more literally, as coded assertion that the male body as body is not fallen, a text that does not alter as the record of sexual origins is played backwards, which needs no emendation? Or shall we say, as the text more directly equips us and does not equip us to, that this is the expression of a fallen mind in a male body, a being struggling against yet bound within its own embodiment, a being founded on the "mistake" of being its body, of identification? What exactly would a conversation between Irigaray and Augustine look like?

My reading, perforce a desire for a certain kind of desire, is of Augustine's desire as a desire for a sexuality that is not heterosexual, for a sexuality that might be thought as heterosexuality's unfelt, its seized impossible, meaning something like a mutual structure or economy of desire to which both male and female are interreflecting witnesses, where there is, not infinitely regressing intersubjectivity, but an actual breakdown in duality. The dimension through which the text points to this, where it is negatively achieved, is the dimension of perversity, the way in which it can imagine our originary sexual encounter only in terms that transgress the reproductive heterosexual norm, the order of nature. The external ejaculation of Augustine's imagination, at once pure and polluted, defines the gratuitous, extra space of human sexuality, its desires for a sex that is both pure sex and not sex, and its externality, the being outside of what should be inside, signifies perfectly exile from Eden, the displaced state of the fallen self. Perversity, the queer, is a negative sign of transcendent essence and origin. Negative, but not in itself.

Cf. Agamben's "operations in which desire simultaneously denies and affirms its object, and thus succeeds in entering into relation with something that otherwise it would have been unable either to appropriate or enjoy" (Stanzas, xvii-xviii).

Plenty for now! Perhaps more later on the Erec et Enide passage.

Upcoming Lecture: Andrew Galloway

"Iconicity and Alliterative Poetry: Piers Plowman and the Bohun World"
Andrew Galloway
Cornell University
The Eighteenth Annual Rossell Hope Robbins Lecture
Friday, October 5, 2007, 7:30 PM
CUNY Graduate Center (365 Fifth Ave. @ 34th St.), Room 4406.
Reception, with wine and cheese, follows.

"Iconicity and Alliterative Poetry: Piers Plowman and the Bohun World"

Andrew Galloway

Late-medieval alliterative English poetry is often emphatically sumptuous in its imagery, but (with rare exception) its medieval copies are notoriously not de luxe nor, it seems, valued by the world of the higher nobility. Indeed very little is known of the origins and supporting patronage of the alliterative writings that appear in a large and rich quantity from the mid-fourteenth century, supreme among which is the work with the most complex social and intellectual vision and the most elusive social and intellectual immediate context of production: Piers Plowman. One earlier and much less popular alliterative work, however, from mid-fourteenth century Herefordshire or Gloucester, and indeed the earliest datable instance of the "alliterative revival," William of Palerne, directly claims noble patronage: that of Humphrey de Bohun, seventh earl of Hereford and Essex. This connection has long been pondered, as has the possible connection between the poet of Piers and that of William of Palerne. But one avenue—by way of visual materials—to pursue the connections between this one instance of alliterative poetry and the world that Humphrey also evidently supported hasn’t been pursued: the magnificent Vienna Bohun Psalter that appears to have been made directly for Humphrey. I will discuss the modes of visual and textual literacy that both the Vienna Psalter and William of Palerne present around the treatments of an ethic particularly relevant to the world of the higher nobility: pride. I will then consider some of the same elements in Piers Plowman, a popular, in some ways anti-aristocratic London work whose origins in some Hereford or Worcester background are clear in the poem. The present study cannot prove the connections between the author of the two alliterative poems, although it does present some new support. The comparison I will make does, however, show more clearly than ever how radically novel were the social ethics and poetic mode of Piers Plowman. The comparison I will set forth also offers a new look at the broad history of the visual and literary circumstances of late-medieval alliterative traditions, as those came into somewhat wider "public" prominence in the late fourteenth century—even as such growing readership continued to bypass the fifteenth century higher nobility.

Andrew Galloway is Professor of English and Medieval Studies at Cornell University. He is the author of The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman, Volume One: C Prologue-Passus 4; B Prologue-Passus 4; A Prologue-Passus 4 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), Medieval Literature and Culture (London: Continuum Press, 2007), and numerous articles on Middle-English literature.

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Questioning New York Medieval

Es necessario caminar, ¡de prisa!, por las ondas, por las ramas, por las calles deshabitadas de la Edad Media que bajan al río
[We’ve got to move – Hurry up! – through the waves, the branches, the deserted streets of the Middle Ages going down to the river]
(Frederico García Lorca, Poet in New York, trans. Greg Simon
and Steven S. White [New York: Noonday Press, 1998], 125).

Since coming to New York to teach at Brooklyn College in 2002, I have carried a question in the back of my mind, a question which suddenly finding myself the president of the Medieval Club of New York is pushing to the surface: what does it mean to be a medievalist in New York? So, by way of an appropriate inaugural post, I would like to write something on this question and invite others to take it up, or more poetically, to walk across it like a hermeneutic Brooklyn Bridge – but in which direction? – and reenter being a medievalist in New York.

But this is a very silly question. One does not come to New York to be a medievalist the way one comes to New York as an artist or immigrant or banker. Medievalist, the vocational category, is not part of the life-essence of the city, materially or symbolically (though of course it is both, especially if you are a medievalist). I did not choose New York as a place to profess medieval literature, perhaps some have, but instead found a job here. So I am here to be a medievalist, but not to be a medievalist here. And yet the silliness of drawing this distinction, a distinction which dissolves in the realities of present life and work, or must dissolve if we are to be present in place, suggests that the question may not be so silly after all. The question is also an index of larger questions, about thrownness, place, homelessness, and so on. Cf. the two sessions the Medieval Club is sponsoring at Kalamazoo 2008, The Global Middle Ages and Why am I Me? On Being Born in the Middle Ages, both of which promise to resituate the medieval in various ways. Which brings up the very ambivalent place of place within academic culture and identity more generally, the scholar as both someone who transcends place, through sheer intellectual self-presence, and someone who is dependent, even delicately so, as a person, upon place, for happiness, connoisseurship, good croissants, what not. A person who transcends place, but only in certain places! New York is a rightly desired place to be a professor (ergo the CUNY salary), but the idea and the reality are both wonderfully and frustratingly different.

The question is also silly, or maybe embarrassing, because it sounds like an expression of the emptiness at the heart of the mythology of big cities, namely, that everything that goes on within them is in some mystical or transcendent way of the city or about the city, so that simply being in New York is both always already a significance itself and a vacuum that must be filled by the fullness of one’s own being. So that not to fill it, which is not to fulfill the myth, by being nobody in a great city, by not being somebody, is to be a kind of double nothingness, a lost soul, just as being somebody in New York is a kind of double greatness. “If I can make it there / I'll make it anywhere / It's up to you, New York, New York.” Note the ambivalence of “you.” Is it oneself or the city? The city as maker of one’s self-making! But the emptiness of this mythic structure, its tautology, is also a site of fullness, a place for the small and the great, and the smallness and greatness of each, as events that equally happen here, in the unique nowhere of the city, and thus in a more true somewhere than the superficial somewheres of geographical, cartographical space. In the De Monarchia Dante defines action as a kind of turning up of the volume of individual being, whereby what is principally intended in every action is to “disclose one’s own likeness” [propriam similitudinem explicare], a disclosure that takes place through action as self-intensification, for “in acting the being of the agent is in a way enlarged” [ac in agendo agentis esse quodammodo amplietur]. Complementing the placelessness of this event, this becoming, the city is often experienced and construed as something that accomplishes this for us, calling forth the action of latent selves, wakes them from slumber. So rather than merely being a place for self-disclosure, does not the city, as something that structures action and experience, call forth even medievalist-becoming in a specific ways? The title of one local medievalist blog, Old English in New York, certainly suggests so. I would sum up my experience in this direction by saying that New York, as an ongoing spectacle of radical contrasts (cf. Huizinga's autumn) -- wisdom and heedlessness, arrogance and kindness, opulence and poverty, cosmopolitanism and parochialism, garbage and beauty, tradition and alienation, et al -- has made more insistent and present certain questions, above all the question of the human, its nature and limits, so that if the city nourishes being a medievalist, it does so by calling one to be more than medievalist.

Does being a medievalist in New York have something to do with the several points of contact between New York and the Middle Ages? Sure. Among those that come to mind are: 1) the closer-to-the-end-of-the-Middle-Ages-than-to-now origins of the city. Googling “new york medieval” led to this interesting slip: “By the 1660s the settlement had become a small fortified, European-like medieval city at the tip of Manhattan Island” (Anne-Marie Cantwell and Diana diZerega Wall, Unearthing Gotham, 169). In other words, Europeans re-medievalized themselves in the New World, which actually makes quite a bit of sense, and fits well with pre-modern concepts of reform and renovatio. 2) Gotham. 3) The formal presence of the medieval in New York, on which see the Medieval New York webpage by Paul Halsall and students. 4) The whole skyscraper as false cathedral (a.k.a. tower of Babel) critique, of which my favorite is the Australian poet Francis Brabazon’s

The sky-scrapers of New York are the cathedrals of America.
A cathedral is an aspiration, a glory, a peace –
a silence reaching to the Silence which is God.
. . .
You should go to New York. You should see culture
stockpiled. You should see the herd of faces which don’t smile,
the crowd of eyes which don’t laugh; the poor children of the rich
being wheeled in Central Park, buttoned to the eyes from the weak sun.
The skyscrapers of New York are beautiful in their reach to death –
lovely with red tears of undedicate labour. (Stay with God, V.15)

5) The modern metropolis as the site of a New Middle Ages, ala Umberto Eco: “What is needed for a good Middle Ages? First of all, a great Peace that is breaking down, a great international state power that had unified the world in language, customs, ideologies, religion, art, and technology, and which at a certain point, by it actual ungovernable complexity, collapses . . .” (“Towards a New Middle Ages,” in On Signs, 490)

My own take on this realm of contact is more about absence than presence, dissonance and discontinuity, and thus the possibility for the new, than connection with the past. In tune with the passage from Lorca, I tend to think and experience the medieval via New York not as an originary space the city is connected to but as an absence, even as its own absence to itself, like the gargoyles that are too high to see, its being medieval in a unrecognizable way, in a way that is signaled but not determined by the literal semblances of the medieval within it. Being in the hurried streets of New York is something like moving through the deserted streets of the Middle Ages, through a space that is the presence of an uninhabited place, a place of people who do not know they are in it. Is this a reasonable thought or a horrible entrapment within the very concept of the medieval as other? One point of entry into this perception is the idea that New York represents a kind of hyper-medieval. Where London and Paris, for example, constitute the modern metropolis as the horizontal ad infinitum expansion of the medieval city beyond its walls, so that the modern city equals the city without walls, without communitas, New York, at least through the (false) synecdoche of Manhattan, constitutes the modern city as more medieval than medieval: bounded, vertical, within itself, but on a scale to admit communities ad infinitum, not communities of dependence, of shared faith and fear, though there is also space for these, but communities of independence, of individualities, founded upon shared self-fashioning. A neo-medieval bourgeois fantasy? Yes.

So rather than projecting some specific significance onto being a medievalist in New York, for now I think it wiser to understand the intersection as an experience of disinhabiting the modern, not via medievalism or nostalgia, but by inhabiting the modern as an uninhabited space of the medieval, and therefore, as a future that is already present.

2007-8 Schedule of Events

Friday, October 5, 2007, 7:30 PM
Iconicity and Alliterative Poetry: Piers Plowman and the Bohun World
Andrew Galloway
Cornell University
The Eighteenth Annual Rossell Hope Robbins Lecture

Friday, November 2, 2007, 7:30 PM
In the Footsteps of Marco Polo
Denis Belliveau and Francis O’Donnell

Thursday, December 6, 2007, 6:30 PM
at The Museum of Biblical Art
Presentation of Manuscripts and Incunabula
Liana Lupas
Curator of the Scripture Collection
American Bible Society

Friday, February 15, 2008, 7:30 PM
The Saint and the Chopped-Up Baby: Shaping the Image of St. Vincent Ferrer
Laura Smoller
University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Friday, March 7, 2008, 7:30 PM
The Subjects of Friendship, Medieval and Medievalist
Panel Presentation and Discussion
Eileen Joy, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
Franco Masciandaro, University of Connecticut
Yoshihisa Yamamoto, Chiba University

Friday, April 4, 2008, 7:30 PM
Remembering Medieval Spain in the Twenty-First Century
Maria Rosa Menocal
Yale University

Friday, May 2, 2008, 7:30 PM
Out of Darkness, or Why and How the Fifteenth-Century Middle English Doctrine of the Heart Matters
Denis Renevey
University of Lausanne

Unless otherwise noted, all lectures meet at the CUNY Graduate Center (365 Fifth Ave. @ 34th St.), Room 4406. Reception, with wine and cheese, follows.