in The Routledge Companion to Middle English Literature
This chapter surveys the rich and vital debates – methodological, historical, and conceptual – th... more This chapter surveys the rich and vital debates – methodological, historical, and conceptual – that have marked the engagement of ‘postcolonial’ theory and a range of medieval literary texts. Emphasising the productive disagreements among critics and theorists, it argues for the salutary effect of these engagements on the field as a whole especially focusing on very recent work.
in Medieval Literature, Criticism and Debates, 2014
Well before Dorothy Everett remarked upon their "excessive" fascination with marvels, the audacit... more Well before Dorothy Everett remarked upon their "excessive" fascination with marvels, the audacity of the genre of Middle English romance had been raising critical eyebrows (Everett 1959: 6). As sensationalist "poetic disasters" (in Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert's words) rife with vanities, obscenities, and corruptions of all kinds, popular romance in particular has seemed to specialize in bad taste (Putter and Gilbert 2000: vii). The genre, moreover, regularly refuses categorical limits, encroaching on traditions of epic (in the Charlemagne romances), hagiography (as, for instance, the figure of Bishop Turpin in the Sege of Melayne), history (Arthurian particularly), science (think of the international tradition of Virgil, the Necromancer) and philosophy (the figure of Aristotle features prominently in the Alexander stories). One might describe Middle English romance as a particularly rhizomatic genre: spreading wildly (as annoying as crab grass, persistent as fescue, or delightfully surprising as wild ginger), breaching boundaries and borders, flourishing in unlikely places, or crowding out alternatives. It has certainly seemed a genre in need of critical discipline. The corpus of Middle English romances confronts us with an unruly jumble of redactions, variants, analogues, story-traditions. Nor is there complete agreement as to the institutions out of which these texts originated, to say nothing of the debate-still raging-over the history and limits of the genre itself. Do popular Middle English romances constitute the textual remainders of improvised minstrel performances given at fairs and festivals before audiences of ordinary folk? Or were these composed and copied for the entertainment of the newly literate, gentry classes (Mills 1962; Taylor 1991; Bradbury 1994; Putter 2000)? Some have suggested narrowing the generic definitions, such as by limiting romance to tales of knightly adventure (Finlayson 1980); these suggestions never seem to take hold. Romance, for these reasons and more, has seemed an overly pliable and undisciplined form of medieval poetic production, one with a particularly fraught relationship to historical grounding if not analysis. Marked by an institutional history combining textual and contextual overabundance with critical disdain, romance has needed sorting out. Such work has long been admired as a scholarly preoccupation. For decades professional attention to Middle English romance involved emphatically disciplinary activities, as scholars, many of them women, labored agilely at assembling, affiliating, and annotating diverse manuscripts versions, redactions, assessing sources and analogues. Sub-categories were devised as a means to manage the range of extant texts, and we still productively orient attention to Middle English romance by way of these categories, on the basis of content (the matter of Britain, the matter of France, the matter of Antiquity, the matter of England), or metrics (octosyllabic couplets, tail-rhyme, alliterative, or non-alliterating long lines) (Pearsall 1965; Strohm 1977).
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2022
Engaged with insights from trauma theory, this essay offers a reading of Geoffrey Chaucer&amp... more Engaged with insights from trauma theory, this essay offers a reading of Geoffrey Chaucer's Knight's Tale as a profound meditation on catastrophe and survival. This account refocuses the Knight's Tale's famous oscillation between consolation and devastation, philosophy and fate, to consider the unexpected forms that poetic representations of catastrophe take in a premodern poem.
Taking inspiration from a famous manuscript illumination of Fortunes Wheel, this article argues f... more Taking inspiration from a famous manuscript illumination of Fortunes Wheel, this article argues for a reconsideration of diverse uses of repetition legible in accounts of medieval curiosity, and in the association of curiosity with the figure of the ape.
This book brings together new essays by leading cultural critics who have been influenced by the ... more This book brings together new essays by leading cultural critics who have been influenced by the groundbreaking scholarship of Richard Helgerson. The original essays penned for this anthology evince the ongoing impact of Helgerson's work in major critical debates ...
“I’d rather be dead than misread,” confesses Joan Wallach Scott in the epilogue to the important ... more “I’d rather be dead than misread,” confesses Joan Wallach Scott in the epilogue to the important essays gathered together in The Fantasy of Feminist History. Of course, as the essays themselves testify and as Scott well knows, the two rhyming signifiers of this culminating avowal are not exactly alternatives to one another. And if none of us can escape the first fate, feminist theorists and historians may be particularly bound to suffer the second. The epilogue – her final meditation on “A Feminist Theory Archive” – pertains at least in part to the archive of Scott’s own work, attesting to the personal and political stakes in the problem posed by the title of her collection. Fantasy serves as a powerful analytic category for feminist history; psychoanalytic methods of reading illuminate history and culture, helping to unhook the categories of sexual difference from certain recursive prevailing assumptions. But these fantasies also impinge on feminism’s own, and Scott also troubles any strictly evolutionary account of the enlightenment project of feminism as linked to full liberation or progress. Oriented around the category of fantasy, this collection of essays, thus, has a doubled force: it attends, on the one hand, to the transformative legacy of feminist academic labor in the waning decades of the twentieth century; on the other, The Fantasy of Feminist History confronts throughout the persistence of a darker aspect to fantasies of sexual difference circulating through and around feminism, including the reappearance of troubling versions of gender asymmetry that Scott has spent her entire career working to dismantle. Scott’s groundbreaking blend of psychoanalytic theory and feminist historiography guided generations of scholars (myself included) in the ways and means of thinking historicism differently. She taught us to consider the interpenetration of important categories like difference with equality, and she lucidly deployed psychoanalytic protocols of reading to help us track such complications. A preeminent analyst of modern histories of gender and sexuality, Scott knows well the particular hermeneutic problems that attend archives (feminist, psychoanalytic, or historical) as well as the power of reading strategies capable of traversing recurrent fantasies of gender and sexuality, long analyzed and debated in psychoanalytic circles. And yet, as Scott’s long acquaintance with psychoanalytic theory has also taught her, fantasies of gender and sexuality are stubbornly persistent; indeed, psychoanalytic theory proves useful to her precisely as the “theory that posits sexual difference as an unresolvable dilemma” (p. 5). Those irresolutions might be understood to form the core of Scott’s meditations throughout this volume, and misreading is, in this context, something of a mixed blessing. Facing up to the problem – perhaps even the fate – of misreading, Scott offers her incisive
If the bodies of dead poets are “national possessions,” they are such regardless of their reliabi... more If the bodies of dead poets are “national possessions,” they are such regardless of their reliability as material artifacts, a fact that was suggested recently by the case of Petrarch’s “missing” skull. Or rather, the skull that isn’t Petrarch’s, a skull perhaps once belonging to a woman, recently discovered cohabiting with the poet’s remains. In preparation for a national celebration of the Italian poet’s birthday on July 20, 2004, scientists exhumed Petrarch’s body in the hopes of using his skull as a model for a lifelike portrait. The skull, however, was in fragments; even worse, it didn’t seem to have belonged to Petrarch in the first place. London’s Daily Telegraph reported that “DNA tests carried out on a tooth and one of the ribs exhumed from the tomb near Padua showed that they belonged to two different people.” Doubts about the skull’s authenticity surfaced well before the DNA result verified them; observers of the exhumation insisted that while “the poet was said to have been a strapping man… the head was too small” for such a skeleton. Mark Duff, reporting for the BBC, summed up the case: “The finding has put a damper on plans to mark the 700th anniversary of his birth.” “Instead,” Duff continues, “[scholars] will be indulging in feelings of ‘what if’ just as keenly as Petrarch did over his unrequited love for Laura.”1
in The Routledge Companion to Middle English Literature
This chapter surveys the rich and vital debates – methodological, historical, and conceptual – th... more This chapter surveys the rich and vital debates – methodological, historical, and conceptual – that have marked the engagement of ‘postcolonial’ theory and a range of medieval literary texts. Emphasising the productive disagreements among critics and theorists, it argues for the salutary effect of these engagements on the field as a whole especially focusing on very recent work.
in Medieval Literature, Criticism and Debates, 2014
Well before Dorothy Everett remarked upon their "excessive" fascination with marvels, the audacit... more Well before Dorothy Everett remarked upon their "excessive" fascination with marvels, the audacity of the genre of Middle English romance had been raising critical eyebrows (Everett 1959: 6). As sensationalist "poetic disasters" (in Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert's words) rife with vanities, obscenities, and corruptions of all kinds, popular romance in particular has seemed to specialize in bad taste (Putter and Gilbert 2000: vii). The genre, moreover, regularly refuses categorical limits, encroaching on traditions of epic (in the Charlemagne romances), hagiography (as, for instance, the figure of Bishop Turpin in the Sege of Melayne), history (Arthurian particularly), science (think of the international tradition of Virgil, the Necromancer) and philosophy (the figure of Aristotle features prominently in the Alexander stories). One might describe Middle English romance as a particularly rhizomatic genre: spreading wildly (as annoying as crab grass, persistent as fescue, or delightfully surprising as wild ginger), breaching boundaries and borders, flourishing in unlikely places, or crowding out alternatives. It has certainly seemed a genre in need of critical discipline. The corpus of Middle English romances confronts us with an unruly jumble of redactions, variants, analogues, story-traditions. Nor is there complete agreement as to the institutions out of which these texts originated, to say nothing of the debate-still raging-over the history and limits of the genre itself. Do popular Middle English romances constitute the textual remainders of improvised minstrel performances given at fairs and festivals before audiences of ordinary folk? Or were these composed and copied for the entertainment of the newly literate, gentry classes (Mills 1962; Taylor 1991; Bradbury 1994; Putter 2000)? Some have suggested narrowing the generic definitions, such as by limiting romance to tales of knightly adventure (Finlayson 1980); these suggestions never seem to take hold. Romance, for these reasons and more, has seemed an overly pliable and undisciplined form of medieval poetic production, one with a particularly fraught relationship to historical grounding if not analysis. Marked by an institutional history combining textual and contextual overabundance with critical disdain, romance has needed sorting out. Such work has long been admired as a scholarly preoccupation. For decades professional attention to Middle English romance involved emphatically disciplinary activities, as scholars, many of them women, labored agilely at assembling, affiliating, and annotating diverse manuscripts versions, redactions, assessing sources and analogues. Sub-categories were devised as a means to manage the range of extant texts, and we still productively orient attention to Middle English romance by way of these categories, on the basis of content (the matter of Britain, the matter of France, the matter of Antiquity, the matter of England), or metrics (octosyllabic couplets, tail-rhyme, alliterative, or non-alliterating long lines) (Pearsall 1965; Strohm 1977).
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2022
Engaged with insights from trauma theory, this essay offers a reading of Geoffrey Chaucer&amp... more Engaged with insights from trauma theory, this essay offers a reading of Geoffrey Chaucer's Knight's Tale as a profound meditation on catastrophe and survival. This account refocuses the Knight's Tale's famous oscillation between consolation and devastation, philosophy and fate, to consider the unexpected forms that poetic representations of catastrophe take in a premodern poem.
Taking inspiration from a famous manuscript illumination of Fortunes Wheel, this article argues f... more Taking inspiration from a famous manuscript illumination of Fortunes Wheel, this article argues for a reconsideration of diverse uses of repetition legible in accounts of medieval curiosity, and in the association of curiosity with the figure of the ape.
This book brings together new essays by leading cultural critics who have been influenced by the ... more This book brings together new essays by leading cultural critics who have been influenced by the groundbreaking scholarship of Richard Helgerson. The original essays penned for this anthology evince the ongoing impact of Helgerson's work in major critical debates ...
“I’d rather be dead than misread,” confesses Joan Wallach Scott in the epilogue to the important ... more “I’d rather be dead than misread,” confesses Joan Wallach Scott in the epilogue to the important essays gathered together in The Fantasy of Feminist History. Of course, as the essays themselves testify and as Scott well knows, the two rhyming signifiers of this culminating avowal are not exactly alternatives to one another. And if none of us can escape the first fate, feminist theorists and historians may be particularly bound to suffer the second. The epilogue – her final meditation on “A Feminist Theory Archive” – pertains at least in part to the archive of Scott’s own work, attesting to the personal and political stakes in the problem posed by the title of her collection. Fantasy serves as a powerful analytic category for feminist history; psychoanalytic methods of reading illuminate history and culture, helping to unhook the categories of sexual difference from certain recursive prevailing assumptions. But these fantasies also impinge on feminism’s own, and Scott also troubles any strictly evolutionary account of the enlightenment project of feminism as linked to full liberation or progress. Oriented around the category of fantasy, this collection of essays, thus, has a doubled force: it attends, on the one hand, to the transformative legacy of feminist academic labor in the waning decades of the twentieth century; on the other, The Fantasy of Feminist History confronts throughout the persistence of a darker aspect to fantasies of sexual difference circulating through and around feminism, including the reappearance of troubling versions of gender asymmetry that Scott has spent her entire career working to dismantle. Scott’s groundbreaking blend of psychoanalytic theory and feminist historiography guided generations of scholars (myself included) in the ways and means of thinking historicism differently. She taught us to consider the interpenetration of important categories like difference with equality, and she lucidly deployed psychoanalytic protocols of reading to help us track such complications. A preeminent analyst of modern histories of gender and sexuality, Scott knows well the particular hermeneutic problems that attend archives (feminist, psychoanalytic, or historical) as well as the power of reading strategies capable of traversing recurrent fantasies of gender and sexuality, long analyzed and debated in psychoanalytic circles. And yet, as Scott’s long acquaintance with psychoanalytic theory has also taught her, fantasies of gender and sexuality are stubbornly persistent; indeed, psychoanalytic theory proves useful to her precisely as the “theory that posits sexual difference as an unresolvable dilemma” (p. 5). Those irresolutions might be understood to form the core of Scott’s meditations throughout this volume, and misreading is, in this context, something of a mixed blessing. Facing up to the problem – perhaps even the fate – of misreading, Scott offers her incisive
If the bodies of dead poets are “national possessions,” they are such regardless of their reliabi... more If the bodies of dead poets are “national possessions,” they are such regardless of their reliability as material artifacts, a fact that was suggested recently by the case of Petrarch’s “missing” skull. Or rather, the skull that isn’t Petrarch’s, a skull perhaps once belonging to a woman, recently discovered cohabiting with the poet’s remains. In preparation for a national celebration of the Italian poet’s birthday on July 20, 2004, scientists exhumed Petrarch’s body in the hopes of using his skull as a model for a lifelike portrait. The skull, however, was in fragments; even worse, it didn’t seem to have belonged to Petrarch in the first place. London’s Daily Telegraph reported that “DNA tests carried out on a tooth and one of the ribs exhumed from the tomb near Padua showed that they belonged to two different people.” Doubts about the skull’s authenticity surfaced well before the DNA result verified them; observers of the exhumation insisted that while “the poet was said to have been a strapping man… the head was too small” for such a skeleton. Mark Duff, reporting for the BBC, summed up the case: “The finding has put a damper on plans to mark the 700th anniversary of his birth.” “Instead,” Duff continues, “[scholars] will be indulging in feelings of ‘what if’ just as keenly as Petrarch did over his unrequited love for Laura.”1
Much theoretical and historical work engaged with the question of the "postcolonial" is built upo... more Much theoretical and historical work engaged with the question of the "postcolonial" is built upon an imagined, unified premodern "Middle Ages" in Europe. One of the results of this has been that in recent years scholars in medieval and early modern studies have been critically assessing the uses of postcolonial and subaltern theoretical perspectives in their fields, and considering what their periods have to say to postcolonial theorists. This book offers a series of original essays that explore with specificity the methodological, textual, cultural, and historiographic moves required for postcolonial engagements with premodern times.
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2022
Engaged with insights from trauma theory, this essay offers a reading of Geoffrey Chaucer's Knigh... more Engaged with insights from trauma theory, this essay offers a reading of Geoffrey Chaucer's Knight's Tale as a profound meditation on catastrophe and survival. This account refocuses the Knight's Tale's famous oscillation between consolation and devastation, philosophy and fate, to consider the unexpected forms that poetic representations of catastrophe take in a premodern poem.
Postcolonial studies have often based their critiques of colonialism on critiques of modernity. A... more Postcolonial studies have often based their critiques of colonialism on critiques of modernity. As a result, they tend to limit their purview to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The essay collection "Postcolonial Moves" challenges these conventional limits by questioning prevailing assumptions about periodization. This essay is an introduction to postcolonial studies from the perspective of medieval studies.
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