Cornell University Press Medieval Studies Magazine March 2022

March 2022

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MEDIEVAL STUDIES

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The Article

BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX: A DIFFICULT SAINT FOR OUR TIME

by Brian Patrick McGuire In 1975, when I was first asked to write a biography of Bernard of Clairvaux, my immediate response was: ”I can’t do so, for I hate the man.” I was not alone in my view, but this has changed over the years. The abbot of Clairvaux from 1115 to his death in 1153, Bernard was in his own time a controversial figure.

He remains so today. My biography is not about a plaster saint. It tells the story of a real human being. As a saint, he is a difficult one.

A Dark Figure?

In standard treatments, Bernard of Clairvaux is looked upon as a representative of the dark Middle Ages, who opposed the insights of progressive theologians like Peter Abelard.

Bernard is remembered for preaching the Second Crusade, which turned into a terrible fiasco with great human loss.

Bernard is also thought to have been a vicious opponent of anyone he considered to be a heretic.

A New Biography A lifetime of reading Bernard’s writings and thinking about his world convinced me that Bernard deserved a new biography, especially because the last good one was published more than a century ago. I set out not to tell ”one thing after another”, as the writing of history often becomes in chronological order. My purpose and My purpose and method are method are to seek Bernard’s ”inner life”. He loved to seek Bernard’s “inner life.” learning and searched for God, in the words of the greatest Bernard scholar of the twentieth century, Jean Leclercq. I found that Leclercq to some extent idealized Bernard. I set out to find a believable and human Bernard, but with attention to his pursuit of the divine.

My Cistercian Friends I have been helped by visiting almost yearly since 1986 contemporary Trappist-Cistercian monasteries on three continents and speaking and praying with men and women who follow the way of life that Bernard outlined. Some of them do not like Bernard and admit it, but all of them are influenced by Bernard the monk who sought God.

A Defender of Jewish People The result is a portrait of a man who loved his monks and his monastery and did everything possible to look after them. He set limitations in his pursuit of heretics and even made up with Abelard before his rival’s death. As for his relations with Jewish people at a time when Christian fanatics were killing them, Bernard insisted that they had a right to exist and should be protected.

The result is a portrait of a

A Unifying Figure in World History man who loved his monks At a time in history when anger, polarization, and and his monastery and did divisive politics have taken over the public scene, I everything possible to look think it useful to look back and consider Bernard’s after them. twelfth century, when Christian Europe was growing. Wherever Bernard went, he left behind new monasteries. His letters and treatises tell of a man with multiple health issues but who continued almost to his dying day to preach and write. He remains for me a ”difficult saint”, quite unlike the more popular Francis of Assisi. Bernard is a foundation of modern culture, for better and worse, and my biography seeks to make him believable and relevant for the twenty-first century.

THE EXCERPT

INTRODUCTION

Locus enim, in quo stas, terra sancta est.

[The place, whereon thou standest, is holy ground.]

—Exodus 3:5

In the book of Exodus, God commands Moses to remove his sandals, “for the place,

whereon thou standest, is holy ground.”1 The same command is given to Joshua by the angel before the Battle of Jericho.2 In a sermon on the Burning Bush, Caesarius of Arles (ca. 470–542) cautioned against taking these words literally, asking: “How could that ground upon which they trod be holy, since doubtless it was like the rest of the earth?”3 “True holy ground,” he went on to argue, “is the body of our Lord Jesus Christ through whom everything heavenly and earthly is sanctified.”4 During the Middle Ages, however, the ground on which Moses trod was venerated as a relic.5 Parallels were drawn

1. Exodus 3:5. “Ne appropies, inquit, huc: solve calceamentum de pedibus tuis: locus enim, in quo stas, terra sancta est” (Vulgate); “Et dixit: Ne accesseris huc, nisi solveris calciamentum de pedibus tuis: locus enim, in quo stas, terra sancta est” (Vetus Latina, as given in P. Sabatier, ed., Bibliorum sacrorum Latinae versiones antiquae, 3 vols. [Reims: Florentain, 1743–49], 1:140).

2. Joshua 5:16. “Solve, inquit, calceamentum tuum de pedibus tuis: locus enim in quo stas, sanctus est” (Vulgate); “Solve calciamentum de pedibus tuis: locus enim, in quo stas, terra sancta est” (Vetus Latina, in Sabatier, Bibliorum sacrorum Latinae, 1:404).

3. “Numquid hoc, fratres carissimi, secundum litteram intellegi potest? Unde enim terra illa, quam calcabant, poterat esse sancta, quae sine dubio similis erat terrae reliquae?”; Caesarius of Arles, Sermones, 96.4, ed. Germain Morin, 2 vols., CCSL 103–4 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1953), 1:394–95; trans. Mary Magdeleine Mueller, Saint Caesarius of Arles: Sermons, 3 vols. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1956–73), 2:71–72. Caesarius gives the command as “Solve corrigiam calciamenti tui; locus enim, in quo stas, terra sancta est.”

4. “Vere terra sancta est caro domini nostri Iesu Christi, per quem sanctificata sunt omnia caelestia atque terrestria”; Caesarius of Arles, Sermones, 96.4, ed. Morin, 1:395; trans. Mueller, 2:71–72.

5. “De petra ista quem Mosis stetit quando vidit d(e)o”; Hartmut Atsma et al., eds., Chartae Latinae antiquiores: Facsimile Edition of the Latin Charters Prior to the Ninth Century, pt. 18, France, vol. 6 (Dietikon, Zurich: Urs Graf, 1985), 84, no. 2, for an eighth-century relic authentic from Chelles (Seine et Marne).

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introduction

between the place on Mount Sinai sanctified by the presence of God and the church interior sanctified also by ecclesiastical ritual and the remains of the saints.6 Indeed, on occasion, those standing on its own holy ground could be miraculously and forcibly unshod in deliberate reference to the biblical precedent.7 The example of Moses and its reception raise several issues to be addressed in the course of this book concerning the creation, definition, and veneration of sacred places in the Holy Land and the Latin West. More fundamentally, however, the passage draws attention to a relationship between body and environment that lies at the very center of the work.

The ground beneath our feet goes unnoticed for the most part. Yet it guides our steps and shapes our identity in many ways. We obey or disregard markings that indicate where to cross the road, stand back from the edge of the platform, or position ourselves on a sports pitch. A childhood game adds significance to cracks in the pavement. Crossing a college lawn or walking along a red carpet can reflect a certain status. Differing conventions in homes and places of worship remind us that our own treatment of the surface is culturally constructed. As I write this, pavements and floors across the world are newly marked with lines and signs that encourage social distancing in response to a pandemic. In the Middle Ages, too, the surface of the ground conveyed information to those who stood on it, prompted physical and imaginative responses, and marked out individuals and groups in accordance with the values and concerns of the time. Indeed, in some respects, it played a greater role than today in articulating space and identity, especially within ecclesiastical settings. With less seating than is now the case in most Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, the floor surface was more open, and processions and practices of prayer brought worshippers into more varied and dynamic engagement with it. This book focuses on medieval interactions with holy ground, within and beyond the church interior, asking how these shaped both place and person.

Relics of Mount Sinai were common throughout the Middle Ages. For example, Nicholas Rogers, “The Waltham Abbey Relic-List,” in England in the Eleventh Century, Proceedings of the 1990 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Carola Hicks (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1992), 173. For treatment of the site, including the removal of footwear by pilgrims, see Kristine Marie Larison, “Mount Sinai and the Monastery of St Catherine: Place and Space in Pilgrimage Art” (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Chicago, 2016), esp. 77–84.

6. Amalarius of Metz, Liber offi cialis, 1.12.36–39, ed. J. M. Hanssens, Amalarii episcopi opera liturgica omnia, vol. 2, Studi e testi 139 (Vatican City: BAV, 1948), 80–83, in the context of the washing of the pavement on Maundy Thursday; Sicardus of Cremona, Mitrale, 1.11, 6.13, ed. Gábor Sarbak and Lorenz Weinrich, Mitralis de offi ciis, CCCM 228 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 41–45, 485, on the space around a church within which certain acts could not be carried out.

7. The passage from Exodus is explicitly cited in the Miraculum Sancti Maximini, ed. and trans. in Thomas Head, “I Vow Myself to Be Your Servant: An Eleventh-Century Pilgrim, His Chronicler and His Saint,” Historical Refl ections / Réfl exions historiques 11, no. 3 (1984): 246–47. A similar reference may be implied in Eustathios of Thessaloniki, The Capture of Thessaloniki, ed. and trans. John R. Melville Jones, Byzantina Australiensia 8 (Canberra: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, 1988), 124–25, 218.

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Studying a Surface My main object of analysis is a surface—a point of encounter, and thus not primarily the substance of the ground, the people who moved across it, or even the actions that brought them together, though all of these play a part. Because of the logic of its subject matter, the book itself is also a point of encounter, between different fields and disciplines. In order to define the role played by the surface of the ground in articulating relationships between people and places, it has been necessary to bring together elements that are usually treated separately or as the principal focus of attention, in part as a result of broader historical and art-historical priorities concerning human actors and material objects. Commensurately, by illuminating the role of this surface, my intention is not only to establish it as a key agent in the definition of people and places, and a valid object of enquiry in its own right, but also to enrich these existing areas of interest and offer some new perspectives and avenues of approach.

Most sustained attention has previously been trained on the ground in the context of art-historical analysis of decorated paving. The present work has developed out of research interests in this area, and it complements existing treatment of this material and contributes to the field in various respects. Most notably, where art-historical discussion of decorated paving has tended to concentrate on the nature of the decoration, my approach here places the emphasis on its function as paving. Firstly, the book includes consideration of decorated pavements executed in different techniques—including opus tessellatum, opus sectile, and tiling—that are often considered separately.8 Of course, certain approaches were developed within particular technical and regional traditions.

However, regardless of technique, as a decorative surface that was walked on, indeed as the only surface of a church building with which people necessarily came into contact, all decorated pavements share a fundamental characteristic. The experiences that specific techniques and individual examples offered to those who came into contact with them can fruitfully be analyzed by looking beyond a single type or instance. At the same time, I do not so much explore connections between works in particular decorative techniques as set them within a wider framework of the pavement, adorned or otherwise.

This is because the phenomenon of use and physical interaction with which I am primarily concerned applies to the surface of the ground in general. Those aspects of decorated pavements that acknowledge the presence of the human body, through form,

8. Important studies of individual techniques include Dorothy F. Glass, Studies on Cosmatesque Pavements, BAR International Series 82 (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1980); Xavier Barral i Altet, Le décor du pavement au Moyen Âge: Les mosaïques de France et d’Italie, Collection de l’École française de Rome 429 (Rome: École française de Rome, 2010). Works that range across techniques include Hiltrud Kier, Der mittelalterliche Schmuckfussboden unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Rheinlandes, Die Kunstdenkmäler des Rheinlandes, Beiheft 14 (Düsseldorf: Rheinland Verlag, 1970); Jane Fawcett, ed., Historic Floors, Their History and Conservation (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1998).

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introduction

figure, or text, are not symptomatic of decoration per se. Rather, in my view, the decoration represents a particularly elaborate, visible, and enduring response to a universal potential of this weightbearing surface. Where contemporary sources refer to actions that brought people close to the ground, characterize the pavement as trodden underfoot, and engage with the surface in the rite of church consecration, they mainly treat it as a whole (“pavimentum,” “humus,” “terra”). Moreover, decorated paving is only part of a spectrum of different approaches to the composition and differentiation of the floor surface, which extends from the bare ground to the richest of Cosmati creations. This spectrum includes elements with other principal uses such as tomb slabs. Equally, different areas or eras of more functional flooring, repairs, reused components, and even individual flagstones created material and visual variety that could take on significance and shape the actions of those using the space.

For the same reason, my approach to the floor surface also goes beyond paving to acknowledge more ephemeral forms of covering. In this respect it embraces both the “soft architecture” of textiles and temporary designs on the ground in ashes, chalk, and sand—the former an art-historical subfield in its own right, the latter more commonly addressed as part of the material culture of ritual.9 As well as forming an integral part of how the surface was composed and experienced, such coverings show it to have possessed a dynamism that was not simply generated by the movement of people. Finally, while focusing mainly on the church interior, the book encompasses the holy ground of loca sancta trodden by Christ and the saints. While configuring the surface, or parts of it, as a contact relic, these places both stemmed from and remained subject to the same logic of use as the ground elsewhere, and they shared qualities with other sacred sites in terms of material and patterns of physical engagement. Studying a surface as a point of encounter, therefore, allows us to do two things. By providing a framework for juxtaposing different ways in which the ground was constituted, marked, and used, it allows connections to be drawn between them as well as distinctions to be seen more clearly.

It also establishes the expressive potential of the surface as a whole, especially as this involved those who came into contact with it.

Layers of Meaning In order to analyze an expansive surface that could take many different forms and support a variety of people and things, this book adopts a stratigraphic approach. While this is partly a means to organize material and structure the work, more fundamentally, it

9. For the term, see Avinoam Shalem, “Architecture for the Body: Some Reflections on the Mobility of Textiles and the Fate of the So-called Chasuble of Saint Thomas Becket in the Cathedral of Fermo in Italy,” in Dalmatia and the Mediterranean: Portable Archaeology and the Poetics of Influence, ed. Alina Payne, Mediterranean Art Histories 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 246–67.

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also encapsulates the manner in which I understand the significance of people, places, and actions to have been constructed at the time. The stratigraphic framework envisages the ground as made up of a number of vertically stacked layers: the earth itself, permanent floor coverings, and temporary floor coverings such as textiles and vegetation. It also brings together a wider group of layered elements, encompassing the bodies of the living above ground and the dead below. In this way, it provides a method to explore interactions between the fi xed environment, more ephemeral material and markings, and the people who—equally fleetingly—occupied particular places. Some of these interactions involved direct contact with the ground, such as Christ treading on the Mount of Olives before his Ascension, a bishop writing the alphabet cross on the floor in early versions of the church consecration rite, or a mendicant saint praying humbly on the bare ground.

Others involved a more complex configuration of layers, for example a king lying prostrate on precious silks spread over costly paving, catechumens trampling on a haircloth, or a chorister singing on the gravestone of a former choirmaster. In each case, I contend, meaning lies in the particular combination and ordering of elements making up the floor surface, the identities of the persons involved, and the nature of their actions.

In focusing on vertical layering, my work brings a new perspective to the study of sacred space as this was experienced in everyday life. In particular, it complements a dominant scholarly emphasis on the horizontal conceptualization of space, which has tended to address the boundaries of areas and movement across them. For example, there has been considerable interest in the extent of sacred spaces and how this was defined, drawing distinctions in terms of jurisdiction, access, and degree of sacrality. This process operated at different scales, from the development of the idea of the Holy Land as a distinct territory, through the marking of parish and civic boundaries in rogation day processions and the encircling of the church in dedication ceremonies, to divisions—however permeable—within the church building.10 If spatial defi nition along these lines stresses edges, the sense in which spaces are shaped by something emanating outward from a center, from sound to sacredness, also presumes a predominantly horizontal dynamic.11 Similarly, movement of people through space, from long-distance

10. See, for example, on the Holy Land, Robert L. Wilken, The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); on rogation day processions, Augustine Thompson, Cities of God: The Religion of the Italian Communes, 1125–1325 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 152–56; on consecration rites, Mette Birkedal Bruun and Louis I. Hamilton, “Rites for Dedicating Churches,” in Understanding Medieval Liturgy: Essays in Interpretation, ed.

Helen Gittos and Sarah Hamilton (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016), 177–204; on space within the church, Donal Cooper, “Access All Areas? Spatial Divides in the Mendicant Churches of Late Medieval Tuscany,” in Ritual and Space in the Middle Ages: Proceedings of the 2009 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Frances Andrews, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 21 (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2011), 90–107; Jacqueline E. Jung, The Gothic Screen: Space, Sculpture, and Community in the Cathedrals of France and Germany, ca. 1200–1400 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

11. On sound fields, see John H. Arnold and Caroline Goodson, “Resounding Community: The History and Meaning of Medieval Church Bells,” Viator 43, no. 1 (2012): esp. 124. On sacred space emanating

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pilgrimage to routes around individual settlements and structures, takes place across a terrain, even if it might involve a degree of ascent and descent.12 However, sacred space was also defined vertically. Most obviously, this applies to ideas of heaven and hell, but it has also been explored with respect to the church building and the parish in ways that connect these earthly entities with theological ones.13 My approach remains focused on the earthly. I concentrate on elements that came into physical contact or proximity immediately to either side of the surface of the ground, constituting a momentary whole.

Looking at the vertical axis in this way, with an emphasis on layers of elements incorporating a single body, sheds light on particular places within the spatial entities and networks that extended across the surface of the ground. Some examples—such as Christ’s imprints in the Holy Land or the treatment of the pavement during the church consecration rite—contributed to the definition of these established units; others—a processional halting spot, for example, or a place where people walked over a tomb—constitute a more subtle articulation of space within these parameters. While often evident to an extent on the surface of the ground, they are rarely circumscribed by upright structures and are sometimes not marked visibly or durably at all. I argue that these vertical configurations played an important role in defining and inflecting sacred space—a role that transcended the limited time or extent to which they might be visible, functioned together with horizontally defined conceptions of space, and involved a particularly close relationship between body and place.

If the term “stratigraphy” brings to mind archaeological and geological crosssections, the case studies capture a particular configuration of layers in a circumscribed place, such as might be found in a core sample. In suggesting this analogy to the modern reader as a way of visualizing my approach, I am not implying that this was a medieval

outward from objects, Richard C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 47–73; Robert W. Gaston, “Sacred Place and Liturgical Space: Florence’s Renaissance Churches,” in Renaissance Florence: A Social History, ed. Roger J. Crum and John T. Paoletti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 331–52.

12. See, for example, on pilgrimage routes, Adeline Rucquoi, Mille fois à Compostelle: Pèlerins du Moyen Âge (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2014), 113–217, and Martin Locker, Landscapes of Pilgrimage in Medieval Britain (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2015); on movement through built space, Franklin Toker, On Holy Ground: Liturgy, Architecture, and Urbanism in the Cathedral and the Streets of Medieval Florence (Turnhout: Harvey Miller, 2009), chap. 4, and Paul Crossley, “Ductus and Memoria: Chartres Cathedral and the Workings of Rhetoric,” in Rhetoric beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages, ed. Mary Carruthers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 214–49.

13. For an approach to the vertical within sacred architecture, which emphasizes looking and movement up and down, see Bissera V. Pentcheva, Hagia Sophia: Sound, Space, and Spirit in Byzantium (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), esp. chaps. 1–2; vertical dynamics are also explored in Nicoletta Isar, Χορός: The Dance of Adam; The Making of Byzantine Chorography; The Anthropology of the Choir of Dance in Byzantium (Leiden: Alexandros Press, 2011). For parallels between the heavenward movement of the Ascension and rogation day processions ending in church, see Johanna Kramer, Between Earth and Heaven: Liminality and the Ascension of Christ in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 147–200.

The Article

NOISE AND KNOWING IN LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLAND

by Adin E. Lears

Late medieval England was an age of ferment and noise: popular revolts protesting labor laws and restrictions on wages exploded across the country; the theologian John Wyclif and his Wycliffite followers, also called lollards, were increasingly vocal in expressing their sense of the injustices and spiritual impoverishment of the institutional church; an efflorescence of lay piety and writing in the vernacular sought to distribute knowledge and the authority that came with it outside of church hierarchy. World of Echo: Noise and Knowing in Late Medieval England examines this clamorous moment—not unlike our own today—attuning itself to noise and voice in order to probe how we have historically encountered ways being and knowing at the margins of our understanding.

World of Echo shows how medieval thinkers conceived of a range of sensoria and voice—including extrasemantic experience and expression—in terms of noise. In doing so, it attends not only to what we would call noise today but also amplifies how language and other signified sound could—and can—be experienced as noise, outside of precise signifying representation or meaning. While the Middle English word “noise” and related terms could have many of the negative connotations of pollution and disorder it has today, they also had positive associations. As a noun, “noise” denoted both unWorld of Echo shows how me- pleasant discordant sounds and also pleasant sound dieval thinkers conceived of a or music. The Middle English lexicon of noise was range of sensoria and voice— deployed in two directions. Those with institutional and educational power often used it to dismiss the including extrasemantic exvoices of those without power: women, the poor, perience and expression—in etc. In these formulations, those without the “corterms of noise. rect” knowledge or understanding were like animals, attending to sounds rather than doctrine and expressing their knowledge with bawling, bellows, grunts, and more.

At the same time, as the medieval authors at the center of this book show, noise was also means of exploring other ways of knowing and being based not in rational understanding but in what we would now call an aesthetic experience of language: a mode of perception attuned to sounds

and textures, and to the proliferation of significance that such experience creates. The mystics Richard Rolle and Margery Kempe both trace a kind of “echoic mysticism” through which each cultivates knowledge of divine and neighborly love through an immersive experience of heavenly sound echoed back in the mystic’s own voice. William Langland’s “poetics of lolling” offers a means of attunement to the ways that sounds of language can multiply its sense, opening space for slow and recursive habits of thought Noise was also means of exthat amplify interpretive significance. Chaucer’s ploring other ways of knowing early dream vision, The House of Fame, in which immersion in what medieval grammarians called and being based not in rational the vox confusa—the “confused voice” they assounderstanding but in what we ciated with objects, animals, and women—offer a would now call an aesthetic expekey means of invigorating the poetic voice of the rience of language. dreamer. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s halfdeaf Wife of Bath, with her exuberant “jangling” voice, traces a form of experiential lay literacy alternative to the violence of clerical authority.

Though these authors inherit long-standing anxieties about noise, all of them take seriously lay noisemaking and the knowledge it produces.

In 2020, the ways we talk about achieving social justice tend to focus on representation, insisting, for example, that we broaden the range of identities for the voices who get to speak, and so represent a fuller range of perspectives and experiences; or that we name the people who have suffered and died from the brutality of police, thus representing the people who have been tragically invisible. These impulses and actions speak vital truths that too often are silenced. Yet, as the world of echo of the Middle Ages reminds us, there are uses of language outside of or beneath direct representation that also matter: such an orientation may well help us to know and to feel others if we listen to their noise.

Two Questions with PETER W. SPOSATO author of Forged in the Shadow of Mars 1. What inspired you to write this book?

While studying the history of late medieval Florence (and Communal Italy generally), I was struck by the pervasive violence that plagued the city and its contado (the territory controlled by the city in the countryside).

Evidence of this violence could be found everywhere: contemporary chronicles, later humanist histories of the city, government records, romances, and even the great literary works of Dante Alighieri and Giovanni Boccaccio. My desire to learn more about this violence and its causes led me to a significant body of

2. What will attract colleagues in the field to your book?

My book helps to explain the violence which plagued Florentine society during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by examining the powerful influence chivalric ideology exercised on the martial elite of that city. While chivalry’s role in promoting and valorizing violence among elites elsewhere in Europe has been discussed at length by scholars, chivalry is all but absent in the scholarship of Italianists, especially those who work on Florence. As a result, my book complicates

“Chivalry was, after all, an inherently violent ideology and the dominant ethos of male elites in medieval and Renaissance Europe.” extant scholarship, which emphasized economic, social, and political catalysts. While I found these arguments to be illuminating and convincing, as a cultural historian of violence who studied with one of the leading scholars of chivalry, I felt like something was missing.

Chivalry was, after all, an inherently violent ideology and the dominant ethos of male elites (nobles, knights, men-at-arms) elsewhere in medieval and early Renaissance Europe. In these contexts, chivalry not only promoted violence, but also valorized it. And yet, chivalry seemed to have no place in Communal Italy, especially Florence, despite the fact that the large body of evidence mentioned above seemed to suggest the presence of chivalric attitudes and behaviors among Florentine elites.

And thus, the idea for this book was born.

traditional narratives about social, political, and cultural conflict in the city and its contado and challenges the traditional understanding in the larger field of late medieval and early Renaissance history that the rise of merchant and civic classes in urban centers necessarily undermined martial aristocracies. Also of note is the fact that my book draws upon a unique blend of original literary and archival evidence. Therefore, my book will appeal not only to historians of chivalry and elite culture in other areas of Europe and the Mediterranean World, but also to historians of Florence and other areas of Italy (and urban centers further afield).

INVITE A CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS AUTHOR TO SPEAK TO YOUR CLASS Learn more at cornellpress.cornell.edu/guest-lecturers/medieval-renaissance-studies/

1869

The Cornell University Press Podcast

Ceceilia Gaposchkin & Anne Lester, an interview with

Medieval Societies, Religions, and Cultures series, editors of

hosted by Jonathan

the transcript

Hall

Jonathan

Welcome to 1869, the Cornell University Press Podcast. I’m Jonathan Hall. This episode we speak with Cecilia Gaposchkin and Anne Lester, the editors of our exciting new series in medieval history: Medieval Societies, Religions, and Cultures. With the intention of fostering the best historical scholarship that focuses on the medieval past as multidimensional, this new series will prioritize work that investigates the profound interconnectedness of religions, politics, cultures, social lives and contexts, ideologies, and materialities that shaped the human experience between 300 and 1500. As a way of framing new narratives of the past, series editors Cecilia Gaposchkin and Anne Lester will seek out and cultivate scholarship that breaks new historical ground by highlighting these relationships, and that foregrounds links across methodological disciplinary, evidentiary, and geographical divides. Cecilia Gaposchkin is Professor of History at Dartmouth College. She is the author of The Making of Saint Louis: Kingship, Sanctity and Crusade in the Later Middle Ages, and Invisible Weapons: Liturgy and the Making of Crusade Ideo logy, among others. Anne Lester holds the John W. Baldwin and Jenny Jochens Associate Chair of Medieval History at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Creating Cistercian Nuns: The Women’s Religious Movement and Its Reform in Thirteenth-Century Champagne. Hello Anne and Cecilia, welcome to the podcast.

Anne

Hi, Jonathan.

Cecelia

Hi, John. Thanks for having us.

Jonathan

We’re excited to talk to you about the new Cornell series: Medieval Societies, Religions, and Cultures. Tell us a little bit about the backstory of how the series came about.

Cecelia

It sort of came up I think about three, three and a half four years ago, might be extending that a bit too long. When Mahinder mentioned to me that he was looking to start a new se ries or revive a series at the press, in part because the older series that was run by Barbara Rosenwein - Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past had sort of folded up. And Cornell has been for such a long time had such a strong reputation for kind of a cutting-edge version of medieval history. Anne and I have both published in that in well, not in the religion and power series, but we have both published our first books with Cornell and Cornell has always done the kind of history of the kind of medieval history, which was most kin to the kind of work that I was doing and was interesting to me.

When I was told, way back when, when I was doing my first book, how to choose a press, you sort of go through your footnotes and see who is publishing the books that have most excited you. And so the whole idea of starting series or thinking about a series for Cornell was enormously engaging and thrilling. Now, when when Mahinder mentioned it to me, I don’t think he was asking me whether I was interested in it, but I, you know, my ears perked up. And then Anne and I were talking about it just

because it was so... So Anne has been one of my most valued colleagues in terms of thinking about not just the very specific kind of history that I was doing, or she was doing, but what our profession was doing. And the idea of thinking about medieval history and where medieval history is going with Anne in particular as kind of an intellectual partner was super exciting and Mahinder seemed open to the idea and Anne seemed open to the idea. And so we began to think about what is the kind of history that we are doing, not in terms of geographical or time periods, but the kind of texture of questions and the approaches to the history that attracted us initially to Cornell, attracts us to each other’s work and attracts us to work out there, began to try to think about what it would look like to run a series that privileged that approach, those questions, and that texture to history.

Anne

Yes, I think that somewhat fits the timeline and certainly, you know, I’ve done a lot of editing work - I’ve different edited volumes and served as an editor for Speculum for a number of years. And so for me, I knew, for my own work as a scholar, that that kind of engagement with other people’s work, with projects that were taking shape and were going to grow in different directions is something that I really loved thinking about and engaging with. And so I think that we both kind of realized when observe that Cornell, this Press we really liked working with, people who really we had good experiences with, and an institution and press that we felt committed to for American medievalists, and the future of American medieval studies, had had this really significant series, that series, you know, had finished and run its course. And so it seemed like a really good moment. And I mean, I think, sincerely and I must have been in conversation with Mahinder sort of independently at different points and met together at different points, and it sort of was a snowball effect that happened. And we were all able to meet together and then begin to hash out what this might look like and had a fun sort of brainstorming session about what we even wanted to title the series - you know lots of different ideas about how to bring our different conceptions of what the Middle Ages were, how scholarship should and could be pursued about the Middle Ages, how to kind of bring all that together under the umbrella of one series. So yeah, it’s exciting. And we’re thrilled that it’s come together, you know, as smoothly as it did.

Jonathan

Excellent, excellent. How do you believe the books in this new series will have an impact on the field of medieval studies?

Anne

Yeah, um, one of our goals and thinking about it, this series was to, at least for my part, think about the idea of the Middle Ages, as a connected world, and this notion of connectivity. And part of that comes out of an interest in a new work about the global Middle Ages, the Mediterranean as a space that interacted with Northern Europe. I think, both Cecilia and I, are both pursuing research projects that had us think about the movement of ideas and objects and people through and across space. So one

of our real hopes with this series, is that it could foster scholarship that is interested in those ideas, and really is able to take in a very capacious understanding of the medieval world, and think about how different religious traditions were in contact with each other, how different types of people were in contact with each other, grappling with challenges or innovating in various ways. And I think the other thing that we feel strongly about with respect to this series, in terms of the field more broadly, is the funnest parts for us about putting this series together was coming up with our advisory board, and inviting people to take part and and having the great gratification of having everybody say yes, which was really wonderful. Because it really fostered again, a sense of community within us.

And everyone wanted to take part in this kind of vision of broadening and again, connecting the field.

Cecelia

Yeah, it was actually one of the interesting parts of thinking about who would make up an ideal advisory board and was thinking how far field both in time and space, we wanted to go in. Anne and I are both trained and our work primarily centers in the Latin West, although we’ve both pushed out from there in various projects. But as we began to think about the scope that we wanted our submissions and our books to cover, we found ourselves looking to North Africa, and Scandinavia and backwards to the Late Antique period. And so, in brainstorming our ideal advisory board, we really, it was a fun way of thinking about the scope of the Middle Ages, and how those different areas need and you want them to all be part of the same larger conversation about the experience of the past.

Jonathan

Nice, nice. So now, new books are potentially in the pipeline, or you have some ideas, perhaps of books that you’re looking for. In what ways do you hope the new books in the series may potentially shake things up in the field?

Cecelia

Well shake things up is in a braod category which is ambitious, and I’m not sure that’s how I would define my ambitions. My ambitions are to be and to foster the best quality and the most innovative, and so I can be skeptical of shaking things up for the sake of saying something new that nobody has said before, because people and past historians have tended to be smart, the new kinds of questions and the new approaches of interdisciplinarity and other all sorts of different crosses over between disciplines. So I would say I’m not so interested in, in shaking things up as doing absolutely the best publishing and the absolute best version of human history that I’m interested in. That’s a conservative answer.

Anne

And I think related to that, because I think the two actually go hand in hand in so many ways, because I think, excellent scholarship, as far as introducing two new methodologies and to new approaches and new ideas within medieval history. And so that’s, you know, another big myth or goal of the series was to promote work that brings together two geographic areas or two different ways of conceiving of the past or differ-

ent source types. And, and kind of gives us the medieval world, again, through a new lens that allows us to think about the field differently, whether that has to do with ecology, or materiality, or the application of different aspects of critical theory to sources that we understand or bringing into conversation two different or three or four different types of sources to do that. I also think I’ll say, for my part, you know, the legacy of medieval history is complicated. And medieval history, medievalism was pursued in the 19th century, in a complicated world where nationalism was a big part of bringing our discipline to the fore, and carving out these sort of different tool sets and parts of subfields of medieval history.

And it seems to me that one of the goals is actually to step back. And this is I think, what lots of new fellowship are doing in any case, nd to give us another assessment of the landscape and what we can do as medievalists to reinvent or reconceive our discipline again at this real level of excellent scholarship-highly researched, highly focused and refined thinking and not just kind of off the cuff reactions to a particular moment or a particular political development, but really think through what is a complicated history for medieval studies and to produce scholarship that is reflective of that, and reflect upon it.

Jonathan

Well, I’ve no doubt that the quality of the scholarship that you are both going to bring in is going to be of the highest caliber, and we’re super excited about you being a dynamic duo of great minds, leading the charge for this new series: Medieval Societies, Religions, and Cultures. It was great talking to you. And as I said before, we’re very excited to see the books that you both will bring in over the next few years.

Anne

Thanks, Jonathan.

Cecelia

We’re privileged to be here. We’re really excited.

Jonathan

Excellent, excellent. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to be on the podcast and again, congratulations on the new series. That was a Cecilia Gaposchkin & Anne Lester, editors of our new series, Medieval Societies, Religions, and Cultures.

Three Questions with ABIGAIL AGRESTA author of The Keys to Bread and Wine 1. What inspired you to write this book?

On the one hand Valencia is a unique environment, defined by this striking “second nature” (in William Cronon’s phrase) of the canal infrastructure. On the other, it is a place defined by religious conquest and colonization; a religiously mixed society that deplored religious mixing. In a place with such an uneasy coexistence of people of different faiths, where the landscape was clearly created and managed by humans—how did the rulers think about God’s role in the natural world?

3. What will attract colleagues in the field to your book?

Medieval environmental history is a fairly trendy area, and there are hardly any monographs on environmental history of medieval Iberia. There are also relatively few on the late medieval period in general. Late medievalists or medieval Iberianists who want to get into environmental history might be interested in this book. Likewise environmental historians interested in the premodern period.

“The book offers an expansive and original definition of “sanctuary” and “sanctuary cities.”.”

2. How will your book make a difference in the field?

It draws connections between the environment and the process of interfaith coexistence (sometimes called convivencia in the Iberian context). Convivencia (and its discontents) have been a major theme in medieval Iberian historiography for some time, but no one has examined how these dynamics played out in the environment. On the other hand, medieval environmental history has mostly been done in places that are religiously homogenous, so the relationship between environment and religious difference has been comparatively little studied. By bringing these two fields together, the book charts a new path forward for both.

The Article

WHY DO SWORDS MATTER?

by Kristen B. Neuschel “It’s not every day you step on a sword in a lake!” observed a museum curator in Sweden, after receiving a pre-Viking age sword that an eight-year-old girl had unwittingly discovered on her summer vacation. Medieval sword blades still turn up from time to time. Sword hilts turn up even more often, in hoards of coins, brooches, and rings, the “warrior bling” of the early Middle Ages. Not all of the swords found in lakes, rivers, or peat bogs are as rare as this pre-Viking sword, which dates from before about 700. But virtually every time a medieval or ancient sword appears, it earns a moment in the limelight.

Why? True, it’s not every day you step on a sword, but museums around the world are already bursting with sword collections. And really old swords are not much to look at; scaly strips of metal that look as if some creature has been nibbling on them. Sword hilts fare better, sometimes, but the elegant scabbards and sword belts that went with them have long since decayed.

Yet our fascination with swords is apparent every time a new find is reported, such as the BBC coverage of the Swedish girl’s discovery. Even modern swords headline museums’ displays. Just west of Appomattox Court House in central Virginia, a private museum squats next to the two-lane Yet our fascination with swords is apparent every time highway. Stretched across the side of the building, a new find is reported, such as a banner proclaims: “Robert E. Lee’s Sword!” The the BBC coverage of the Swed- owner clearly hopes to waylay tourists heading to the National Park up the road, the site of Lee’s surish girl’s discovery. render to Grant in 1865. This sword is presumed to be sufficient to attract their attention.

Swords are a particularly powerful instance of our impulse to anchor ourselves in the past through objects. We relish the experience of slipping great-grandmother’s thimble onto a finger, or hearing the creaking wood as we rock in great-grandfather’s chair. We are particularly vulnerable to objects as a way to connect with the past because we are surrounded, now, by disposable treasures – expensive cell phones that quickly become obsolete, for example.

Even worse, much of our “reality” is now virtual. Our attraction to things, like a thimble, is a nostalgic reflex. It invokes a past where the meaning of things was straightforward and endures from that time to the present. In fact, the past we encounter in that object exists only in the present. We do not think so readily about the long hours hunched over mending in inadequate light, wearing that thimble.

Swords matter in the here and now—even brittle, rusting fragments from lake bottoms—because we think we know what they meant, then, so that they become a means of connection for us to that remote past. This nostalgic reflex has dangerous overtones.

Our gesture of recognition obscures the long, complex history by which swords became the signature prop of warrior identity, and of the authority to commit violence that accompanies that identity.

Swords matter in the here and now because we think we know what they meant, then, so that they become a means of connection for us to that remote past.

Every ancient or medieval blade we recover should be scrutinized by experts to add to our understanding of technology or the importance of prestige objects in those days. But whenever an old sword appears both enchanting and familiar, then we should be on our guard. We should not want to live in a world where swords continue to have that kind of power.

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Introduction

Desire and Death in Elite Medieval Emotional Communities

Their hands were so cold they were touching only in intention, an illusion, in order for this to be fulfilled, for the sole reason that it should be fulfilled, none other, it was no longer possible. And yet, with their hands frozen in this funereal pose, Anne Desbaresdes stopped moaning.

—Marguerite Duras, Moderato cantabile

Ribald, raunchy, and rooted in the desires of the body, the fabliaux offer some of the most remarkable and least restrained problematizations of death, grief, and sexuality in medieval culture. The memorably vulgar thirteenth-century Cele qui se fist foutre sur la fosse de son mari, for example, imagines widows’ grief as barely masking untrammeled, uncontrollable desire. The story begins with a widow who refuses to vacate her husband’s grave after his interment; her steadfast grief is initially lauded by the narrator as an exemplary performance of spousal duty: Si a mout bien son preu prové, Ce semble, a toz vers son seignor, Ainz fame ne feist tel dolor, . . .

Et poins de tordre et cheveus trere (118–19) Thus, she proved her worth to her lord well, it seems, and no woman has ever shown such grief, . . . and wringing of her hands and pulling of her hair1 1. In this book, translations are mine, unless otherwise noted. Citations from De celle qui se fist foutre sur la fosse de son mari in Recueil général et complet des fabliaux des XIIIe et XIVe siècles, ed. Anatole de Montaiglon (Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles, 1872).

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The narrator cites the widow’s grief as a model performance of both spousal devotion and femininity, and a cursory reading seems to tie her performance of emotion to the performance of her gender. But the fabliaux are often deceptively simple, and here the widow’s grief does other kinds of work.

It also performs her husband’s prowess: the fabliau’s end-rhyme offers an audible alignment of dolor and seignor (“grief ” and “lord”) that links women’s grief to the construction of masculinity, tying emotion to the performance of both gender and status.

When the lady refuses to leave her husband’s grave, her cries eventually attract an errant lord and his squire, who ride up and interrogate her while she sobs, in a scene reminiscent of many episodes within romances both medieval and modern. The squire immediately rebukes his lord for pitying her grief, betting instead in vulgar language that “si dolente comme el se fait, / la foutrai” (even as sorrowful as she seems, / I will fuck her there). The squire’s wager that the lady’s performance is not what it “seems” resonates with widespread concerns about the relation between truth and appearance, and, as I discuss further in this book, with concerns about the veracity of emotions in patristic texts, sermons, trial records, and fictional texts. The misogynistic question asked in fabliaux—“Are women’s emotions reliable?”—may be transformed to be read as a question about whether any emotions represent a truthful testament to an internal psychological landscape, revealing concerns about how emotions intersect with veracity and intent as they are deployed to negotiate relationships between people.

Not only does this fabliau stage a critical disjuncture between emotional sign and signifier; it also imagines that the signs themselves are ephemeral in ways that undermine their significance. Indeed, the punch line here is that the squire vaunts his sexual prowess, claiming in explicit and vulgar terms that he killed his last lover by making love to her so well: Je avoie mis tout mon cuer En une dame que j’avoie.

Et assez plus de moi l’amoie, Qui ert bele, cortoise et sage; Ocise l’ai par mon outrage.

—Ocise l’as? Coment, pechierre?

—En foutant, voir, ma dame chiere, Ne je ne voudroie plus vivre.

—Gentilz bon, vien ça, si délivre Cest siècle de moi, si me tue I had placed all of my heart in a woman that I had

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and I even loved her more than myself, and she was beautiful, courteous, and wise; I killed her by my wantonness.

—You killed her? How, sinner?

—By fucking, truly, my dear lady, and I no longer even want to live.

—Dear good man, come here, and so deliver me from this century, and kill me thusly.

When the widow is aroused by the squire’s claims and acquiesces to his proposition, she becomes a sign of women’s general unreliability. Here, the lady’s unproblematized elision of death and desire resonates with widespread concerns about the sexuality of medieval widows, and in particular it recalls patristic concerns that widows’ loud laments were meant to attract nearby men.2 However, what interests me in this episode is not the veracity of its emotions, or its misogynistic view of women’s reliability, but rather its curious twinning of death and desire, of grief and love, in order to weave a complicated and multivalent picture of how emotional performances describe the contours of communities of privilege.

In this book, I explore how privilege is shaped by what I am identifying as an erotics of grief, and I explore what that can tell us about the interplay between gender, emotion, and power. Specifically, I focus on how twelfth- and thirteenth-century narratives designed for and commissioned by the medieval elite imagine the contours of their communities of privilege through eroticized grief. In texts as diverse as the fabliaux, travel narratives, chansons de geste, and romance, grief and sexuality are never far apart.

Ribald and outrageous, Cele qui se fist foutre both eroticizes and problematizes grief as imperfect; its genius plays upon the foundational fear that old lovers will be forgotten in the face of new desire. Yet it invites us to take a closer look at grief ’s erotics: what is it about the grieving widow that is so arousing? The widow may be beautiful in her grief, but as I argue in this book, that grief is also eroticized because of its promise to narrate and commemorate. The men’s wager is as much about actually having sex with her as it is about transferring her narrative potential from one man (her dead husband) to another (a new lover). As such, Cele qui se fist foutre not only ties grief and sexuality to a discussion of the nature of emotions, but also to the narrative functions of grief ’s power to commemorate, imbuing grief

2. See discussions of Jerome’s “Letter to Furia,” Ambrose’s “Concerning Widows,” and John Chrysostom in Leslie Callahan, “The Widow’s Tears,” in Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages, ed. Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 245–63.

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with not only sexual, but also narrative, power. This is our erotics of grief: a complicated weaving of death and desire, love and grief, power and loss; it is an erotics performed, policed, and explored in the nexus of medieval communities of privilege; it is an erotics that functions across and calls into being a spectrum of gender performances; it is an erotics of commemoration and sacrifice fundamental to narrating and producing patriarchy.

Defining Emotions In the past twenty years scholars have investigated emotions in fields as disparate as anthropology, sociology, neurology, and visual studies; entire institutes dedicated to the study of emotions are conducting investigations from perspectives ranging from neurobiological to sociological and historical.3 Nearly every field has had a critical discussion of what emotions mean, whether they are biological or cultural (or neither, or both), and how considering them relates to the primary focus of study; in the humanities, this has often been framed in terms of subjectivity and community. As this spate of recent scholarship attests, we cannot begin to discuss emotions without a common understanding of generalized emotion words such as “affect,” “feeling,” and “emotion,” and, more particularly in this book, “desire,” “erotic,” “grief,” “mourning,” amor, and dueil—words that are not only specific to discipline, but also to time, place, culture, and language.

In my writing, I distinguish between the terms “affect” as a physiological, biochemical process in the body; “feeling” as post-cognitive; and “emotion” as the deployment of feelings in community. Ruth Leys offers a good working explanation of the differences between affect (precognitive), feeling (personal, cognitive), and emotion (social) when she summarizes that “affect is not a personal feeling. Feelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social, . . . and affects are pre-personal. . . . An affect is a non-conscious experience of intensity; it is a moment of unformed and unstructured potential. . . . Affect cannot be fully realised in language.”4 Yet, as I explain in my

3. A mere handful of examples include Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd ed.

(New York: Routledge, 2014); Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 434–72; Jan Plamper, Geschichte und Gefühl.

Grundlagen der Emotionsgeschichte (Munich: Siedler Verlag, 2012); Carroll E. Izard, Human Emotions (New York: Plenum, 1977); Rom Harré, The Social Construction of Emotions (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); Nico H. Frijda, The Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

4. Shouse summarized in Leys, “Turn to Affect,” 442.

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readings, medieval texts—and in particular, medieval languages—resist such discrete differentiations, and I follow their lead in exploring how emotions are entangled with the communities in which they are expressed. In this book, and in keeping with recent scholarship by Stephanie Trigg, Barbara Rosenwein, and William Reddy, I use the term “emotion” to discuss how externalized, bodily expressions of feelings become read, exchanged, and socially contextualized as community.

While I am careful in how I use these terms, it is not my goal to reproduce a neat taxonomy of human feeling. Rather, I seek to shed light on how biological processes become socially mediated expressions of emotion that both expose and collapse this crucial difference. That is, I read the texts in this study as attesting to emotions as socially conditioned, produced within and for the communities in which individuals are socialized. In the medieval period that is the focus of this research, some languages themselves collapse this difference, tightening the relation between emotion and community. As I discuss below, whereas modern English scholarly usage may expect to differentiate between affective states, feelings, and the socialized practice of emotions, medieval terms are more capacious in ways that may be productive not only for understanding medievals and their communities, but also for challenging conversations insistent on cleaving feelings from their practices within affect studies.

Monique Scheer asserts that culturally contextualized displays of feelings are produced and received by what she calls “knowing bodies.” She views emotions as “acts executed by a mindful body, as cultural practices.”5 For Scheer, our widow’s grief would be an embodied performance that renders “cultural practices” visible in ways that confound distinctions between mental and physical, between private and public performance. As she explains, “the habits of the mindful body are executed outside of consciousness and rely on social scripts from historically situated fields. That is to say, a distinction between incorporated society and the parts of the body generating emotion is hard to make.”6 Here bodies producing emotions become generative, sites of social scripts that might also be construed as communal norms.

Hippocratic and Galenic medicine offered the predominant model of the body through which medieval physicians approached emotional

5. “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (And Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion,” History and Theory 51, no. 2 (May 1, 2012): 205.

6. Ibid., 207.

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disturbances in their patients.7 Galen held the body to be grounded in four essential humors (black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm), and affective states were tightly linked to the ratios of the four humors. In this model, all sorts of problems stemmed from humoral imbalances, including disease, reproductive difficulties, and, especially, mood and emotional disorders.8 The humoral model asserted that men and women had naturally different baseline humoral ratios, thereby naturalizing a gendered approach to describing and treating emotions. If women were to be aligned with cold and wet, they were more likely to be phlegmatic and aggrieved; similarly, since the Greeks first aligned men with dry, hot temperaments, they were “naturally” more choleric. Later philosophers and theologians followed the humoral approach presupposing gender-distinctive emotional patterns in men and women—a move that essentially socializes the biology of emotions and describes community (male, hot, rational) in opposition to “other” (female, cold, emotional). As Alison Levy points out, Augustine’s discussion of mourning suggests that he believed men and women should grieve differently, creating a “distinct dichotomy between male and female manners of mourning: Monica’s loud and constant lamentation is countered by Augustine’s stoicism and silence; presumed female hysteria is checked by male composure.”9 The humoral model invites us to consider how gender and emotion interface in our medieval texts. As I suggest here, medieval literature troubles the hierarchical naturalization of gender and emotion propagated in medieval medical discourses; some of the most powerful, poignant moments of medieval literature are those that complicate medical discourses, which seem to fall apart and become inadequate, as when Charlemagne wails in despair over the death of his beloved Roland, tearing out his hair in a wild display of grief. Medieval literary examples eroticizing grief offer another model for

7. As in Leys, who remarks, “the problem here is not the idea that many bodily (and mental) processes take place subliminally, below the threshold of awareness. Who would dream of doubting that they do?” “Turn to Affect,” 456.

8. For more on medieval medical theories of emotion see Olivia Weisser, “Grieved and Disordered: Gender and Emotion in Early Modern Patient Narratives,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 43, no. 2 (2013): 247–73; Ortrun Riha,“Emotionen in Mittelalterlicher Anthropologie, Naturkunde und Medizin,” Das Mittelalter: Perspektiven Mediävistischer Forschung 14, no. 1 (2009): 12; Mones Abu-Asab, Hakima Amri, and Marc S. Micozzi, Avicenna’s Medicine: A New Translation of the 11th-Century Canon with Practical Applications for Integrative Health Care (Rochester, VT: Healing Arts, 2013); Faith Wallis, Medieval Medicine: A Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010).

9. Allison Levy, “Augustine’s Concessions and Other Failures: Mourning and Masculinity in Fifteenth-Century Tuscany,” in Grief and Gender, 700–1700, ed. Jennifer C. Vaught and Lynne Dickson Bruckner (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 85.

Three Questions with CHARO B. D’ETCHEVERRY author of Celebrating Sorrow 1. What inspired you to write this book?

I am fascinated by the different ways in which people respond to the same thing—in this case, a famous Japanese court tale. After writing a book about how court authors rewrote strands of The Tale of Genji, I thought it might be interesting to see how later writers responded to one of their works, The Tale of Sagoromo.

This turned out to be an even better story, filled with even more divergent responses/ evidence of competing interests and tastes.

This time, I decided to make those responses accessible to my own readers, by translating them in full (when possible) or in substantial

modern readers of the tight link between reading and literary creation in manuscript cultures. If you could read creative work, you could (and usually did) write it, too, which is good for our students to keep in mind. They have just as much right to an opinion on world literature—and creative replies to it—as anyone else.

3. What about your book will attract your colleagues in the field?

My book allows readers with no knowledge of The Tale of Sagoromo to understand its medieval reception in a rich sense. Since most

“This turned out to be an even better story, filled with even more divergent responses/evidence of competing interests and tastes.” excerpts rather than just analyzing them. I’m sure that my readers will come up with their own competing opinions on the subject!

2. How will your book make a difference ot the field?

I give readers a detailed look at the varied uses and changing interpretations of a (previously) very popular work. The Tale of Sagoromo is famous—or notorious, depending on your tastes—for inspiring readers who had to hand-copy it if they wanted to keep it to personalize the story to suit their own tastes. My anthology represents the wide range of medieval anthologies, songs, plays, stories and commentaries inspired by Sagoromo, reminding

people in premodern Japanese lit know that Sagoromo was important, but few have had a chance to read it, this anthology gives them a great taste of the tale and its medieval reception (spanning multiple genres that they do know about) at the same time.

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Introduction The Benefits of Being Trans Historical Greta LaFleur, Masha Raskolnikov, and Anna Kłosowska

In 1782 Deborah Sampson applied for an “invalid’s pension”—effectively veteran’s pay—from the new United States federal government. Sampson, born in 1760 into a poor family in central Massachusetts, had been hired out as a servant to wealthy families in their community since they were a young child, and had joined the Continental Army under the name of Robert Shurtliff in 1782. While there is much we do not know about Sampson/Shurtliff, records suggest that they enlisted in the Continental Army not once but twice—the first time they enlisted and accepted the enrollment bonus, but then did not report for duty—and continued to live and work as a man for at least a year following their discharge. We also know that, after their time in the military, Sampson went on to live as a woman, marrying and having children, and reassuming the name Deborah Sampson as they waged a public campaign for their veteran’s pension. It is unusual that we should know so much about a poor enlisted person who fought in some of the smaller and less storied battles of the Revolutionary War, but Sampson’s life has maintained a great deal of staying power, in part because of the attention that they received both during their lifetime and after their death.

Herman Mann published a fictionalized memoir of Sampson’s life titled The Female Review in 1797, and Sampson appears in multiple nineteenth-century biographies of famous American women, to this day holding the honor of being the Official State “Heroine” of Massachusetts. Meryl Streep invoked 1

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Sampson’s status as an early gender revolutionary in a rally for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016, and in 2014, Sampson was the subject of yet another fictionalized memoir, this time by their distant descendant Alex Myers (who is himself trans), who rewrote their story as a narrative of sexual and trans awakening set against the backdrop of the Revolutionary War. It would be difficult to argue that Sampson’s historical notoriety is not due to the widespread knowledge of their life as a person who lived as both a man and a woman. But does this mean that Sampson was transgender? Are they part of transgender history? What do we make of the fact that Sampson seems to have chosen to live openly as both a woman and a man during their lifetime?

In his 2004 biography of Sampson, Alfred Young demurred on this point, writing simply that when it came to whether Sampson was a feminist or a lesbian, “we are in the dark.”1 (Young does not consider whether Sampson might have been transgender.) This volume takes Young’s statement as a challenge, a provocation, and an invitation, one that gathers a wide range of questions about the possibilities and limitations that inhere in producing histories of the transgender past. We consider what might be both broadly true and broadly wrong about Young’s assessment of the unknowability of a person’s political, sexual, or gendered experience before the advent of vocabularies—frequently derived from medicine, race science and pseudoscience, and religious doctrine—for gender nonconformity that would not arrive in North America, Sampson’s birthplace, until almost a century after the events described here, with the sexological sciences of the late nineteenth century.

Yet while this volume is concerned with the knowability of individual, gendered, and especially gender-nonconforming experience in the presexological period, it also builds on recent work in transgender studies by scholars such as C. Riley Snorton, Susan Stryker, and Jules Gill-Peterson (among many others), who argue for the importance of extending the purview of trans studies and trans histories beyond individual experience to serve as an analytical tool for inquiry into affective f lows, structures of power, and burgeoning epistemologies of difference. This volume explores what might be gained by importing some of these emergent frameworks from trans studies— a field that is, by and large, focused on the period after 1950—to earlier periods, when questions about the experience, performance, and meaning of gender were every bit as live as they are today.

The archaeology of knowledge production is central to transgender studies, and archival silences, gaps, and erasures bear a uniquely structuring inf luence on the landscape of the field, especially when it comes to trans history and historiography.2 These archival absences, whatever their origins,

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are also compounded in the medieval and early modern periods in particular by the realities of slavery and colonialism, which actively sought to erase the voices of African and Native peoples who found themselves the target of European and broader settler colonial violence and expropriation.3 The dynamism of current ways of understanding diversity in gendered presentation and behavior—think of the fact that Deborah Sampson was first claimed as a feminist, then as a lesbian, and then as a trans person—both expands and limits what the past looks like to twenty-first-century readers, and at times makes it more difficult to perceive what medieval and early modern texts have to say about how gendered experience, knowledge, performance, and embodiment were understood in their own times. The trans past cannot be considered without a commensurate reckoning with the politics of historiography.

One of the pleasures of studying historically distant periods is the possibility of being confronted with the deep alterity of the past. In distant periods and geographies, notions of the gendered subject are surprisingly different f rom that which modern readers find familiar. Some scholars emphasize that alterity, insisting on the radical difference between “now” and “then,” “us” and “them.” Others cope with that same alterity and strangeness by finding patterns of similarity, seeking universal experiences, or refusing charges of anachronism with claims to excavating what Lillian Faderman called a “usable past.”4 We have collected the essays that follow under the umbrella of trans history, but they also highlight critical differences in the way that gender-nonconforming behavior was embodied, understood, and disciplined, as well as the different ways in which the past might, at times, be simply unknowable.

This volume takes up a widely discussed contemporary category— transgender—and looks in a necessarily partial way at both real people and fictional characters from the pre- and early modern periods who might have had something in common with that designation. Does this approach amount to a claim about a universal human experience? Does it show how genuinely different past understandings of human sex and gender were from present ones? A little of both, and also neither. This volume looks at stories about what we might now term gendered experience and at how they are told. It is bound to the utter specificity of long-ago ways of representing heavily racialized terms such as man and woman, and listens carefully to the way that both fictional works and discussions of historical people and events consider gendered experience that does not fit easily within either category.

What further complicates the project of studying early gendered, gender-nonconforming, and transgender experience is the reality of mediation.

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All that we know about early periods comes to us via the interventions of the authors, scribes, and amanuenses who told the stories; by people who recorded and passed down the stories; and by those who either permitted or did not permit the written texts of such stories to survive until the present day. The power of discourse, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick cannily reminds us, has always included the power to ignore, trivialize, and indifferently destroy the evidence of lives deemed not worth preserving for the future; as Martha Vicinus put it, “Ignorance now and in prior times can be willed.”5 Given the great powers massed against those who transgress norms—a term whose etymological stem also gives us normal and normative but that did not bear its modern meaning until the nineteenth century—it is extraordinary how many records of gender plurality we have from early periods.6 Trans studies has a history problem, albeit one that scholars from all branches of the field are busy working to address.7 Because the movement for trans recognition is a development of the last century or so, and because assertions of the putative “newness” of transgender experience have been consistently used to undermine the legitimacy of nonbinary genders, trans people, activists, and scholars have had to fight to claim the historicity of trans lives. Some scholars have argued, and still do argue, that prior to the coinage of the term, transgender experience did not exist. Compounding this issue is the fact that transgender studies, like many other interdisciplinary fields, leans toward the present. And yet, gender-nonconforming and transgender people appear consistently in fiction, religious texts, church and court records, and even in texts authored by trans people themselves from antiquity onward. Furthermore, narratives about gender transition and gender confirmation were told long before any of those terms came into being.

While none of these figures had the word transgender—not to mention a host of other modern vocabularies—at their disposal as a framework for characterizing their experience, we strongly believe that their stories can and should be united under the mantle of the transgender past.

Medieval and early modern studies also have a trans problem. Because these fields are concerned with historical moments that precede the coinage of transgender, transsexual, and related terms, writing about transness can appear to some as the imposition of contemporary concerns upon the past. How could a trans identity have expressed itself prior to contemporary trans rights activism, prior to medical and legal interventions and architectures supporting gender transition and affirmation, prior to the worldmaking efforts that trans people from across the globe have embarked upon to take space and create protections for trans people, trans communities, and trans futures? While identity itself is a more or less modern framework

INTRODUCTION

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for understanding the relationship between one’s experience and one’s role in the social and political world, trans and gender-nonconforming peoples more broadly appear consistently in medieval and early modern records— emphatically so. If trans studies has seemed to be an awkward fit to some scholars of the medieval and early modern periods, perhaps it is not because transgender experience is anachronistic to these periods but rather because medieval and early modern scholarship needs its own trans studies, one responsive to the historical particularities and methodological challenges of studying an era at least seven hundred years behind us. Laying claim to the persistence of gender crossings over historical time and geographical space has been critical for those who seek to historicize and assert the longtime existence of transgender people, and scholars of all genders from medieval and early modern studies now have the unique opportunity to join efforts with current trans political movements in this endeavor.

But how to recognize, identify, or theorize trans peoples, sensoria, or ways of knowing in the past? Furthermore, how might we recognize, identify, or theorize what is not trans about the past? While not a self-identical (or even necessarily overlapping) term, the word “queer” has been put to work, in the development of queer theory and in the traction that the word has found in gender and sexuality studies more broadly, to describe a capacious range of subjects and ideological formations that are positioned against the normative. Beyond just describing queer people, the term is usually used to describe politically or socially agonistic (or antagonistic!) relations between peoples, communities, or ideas and hegemonic structures of power. Some scholars have worried, however, that the word or idea of “queer” has become too capacious, broad to the point of risking an emptiness of signification. While this volume is built on a curious, capacious, and extensive sense of what trans experiences, ways of knowing, ways of being, and forms of relating to the world might be, we are also wary of reducing the descriptive, categorical, or ontological powers of trans analytics to a metaphor, if it is to serve real populations who find themselves particularly vulnerable to violence and stigmatization. We want a past replete with trans people and fictions, and we also want a proliferation of trans futures. In that spirit, we hope that this volume indexes the eff lorescence of archaeologies of the past: a past that may hold a space for forms of transness that have not yet been fully articulated or imagined, a past that, in the future, may unfold forms of alterity unknown to us at present.

Ultimately, this collection engages but also moves beyond the alterity/ continuity debates that have been so central to scholarship in queer studies and queer historiography in favor of tarrying with the specific methodologies,

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forms of inquiry, and scholarly conversations at the center of trans studies in our moment and in recent years. It does so in part to emphasize the way that queer theory, sometimes in consort with women’s history and feminist theory, has at times overdetermined or made impossible forms of critique that are revealed by trans studies frameworks. Insofar as broad understandings of queerness rely on assumptions of fixed sexual difference—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick defined this paradigm, that of how homosexuality came to be almost wholly defined by a sexual preference for the “same” sex, as the “Great Paradigm Shift”—there is much that queer critique, and early queer theory in particular, could not “see” about the gender nonconformity of especially early writers and texts, reading this nonconformity as queerness to the exclusion of transness.8 Queer theory has a symbiotic—some have said parasitic—relationship to trans studies; the inverts and gender-fuckers of the past have done heavy double duty for both fields.9 While queer theory and trans studies have in many ways experienced similar institutional fortunes, and have at times shared many political and intellectual priorities, there can be, and has long been, active transphobia in queer communities and among queer scholars, and queer and trans people have not always or usually articulated the same (or even overlapping!) scholarly prerogatives or claims for justice.10 Some queer studies scholars have, fortunately, begun to ask critical questions not only about what scholarship in queer theory made possible, in terms of the emergence and institutionalization of trans studies, but also about what queer theory’s particular optics and analytics precluded, in terms of objects of inquiry. In 1995, for example, Ruth Karras and David Boyd published an article in the fourth-ever issue of the f lagship journal of queer studies, GLQ, titled “The Interrogation of a Male Transvestite Prostitute in Fourteenth-Century London.”11 The article discusses the now famous medieval arrest of Eleanor Rykener, who may have been assigned male at birth and was arrested for prostitution at the turn of the fifteenth century (1394).

In her testimony, Rykener told the court the story of how she had come to be a sex worker, explaining the process by which a number of other sex workers had taught her the etiquette of the profession. Eleanor Rykener’s story was important to the then emergent field of queer theory insofar as it seemed to provide evidence that what was then termed “same-sex” sexuality—often understood under the broad rubric of “sodomy” in the Middle Ages—existed and was expressed in that era. Karras’s and Boyd’s reading of the Rykener case also crucially misses a series of details that, to readers today, would likely seem obvious: that Rykener very intentionally chose to work, and perhaps also to live, as a woman, and, as our contributor M. W. Bychowski points out,

Three Questions with SARAH KAY

author of Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera 1. What inspired you to write this book?

A desire to better understand the sung dimension of medieval song – What did medieval singing sound like?

3. What about your book will attract your colleagues in the field?

Originality, range, clarity, combination of theoretical reflection and practical application.

2. How will your book make a difference ot the field?

I hope it may encourage non-musicians to write about song, and musicians to look at texts differently.

My argument is controversial in proposing that song is not best analyzed as words plus

“At a stop in Pennsylvania, he was stunned to see a Chicago newspaper announcing the transfer’s approval.” music. Instead, it can be understood as a way of sounding words. And any text intended to be sung, or associated with song, can tell us something about singing.

My project is innovative because I teamed up with a professional singer, Christopher Preston Thompson, who in turn involved his ensemble, Concordian Dawn. As a result of this collaboration, 20 or more recordings of medieval songs discussed in the book are hosted on a companion website.

MEDIEVAL SOCIETIES, RELIGIONS, AND CULTURES A series edited by M. Cecilia Gaposchkin and Anne E. Lester

With the intention of fostering the best historical scholarship that focuses on the medieval past as multidimensional, the new series Medieval Societies, Religions, and Cultures (MSRC) published by Cornell University Press will prioritize work that investigates the profound interconnectedness of religions, politics, cultures, social lives and contexts, ideologies, and materialities that shaped the human experience between 300 and 1500. As a way of framing new narratives of the past, series editors Cecilia Gaposchkin and Anne Lester will seek out and cultivate scholarship that breaks new historical ground by highlighting these relationships and that foregrounds links across methodological, disciplinary, evidentiary, and geographical divides.

By cultivating a collection of books that define the period and place of the Middle Ages in broad, interdisciplinary, and multi-confessional terms, we would also be responding to, and taking part in, changes in the field exemplified by new work and critical questions related to the study of gender, race, global history, religious difference and hybridity, migration and mobility as agents of change, and a new interest in class and the material past. The series will be committed to the study of a new Middle Ages, one vibrant in its diversity, vigorous in its lived depth, and vital in its methodological engagements to shaping the discipline of history.

MSRC ADVISORY BOARD Elisheva Baumgaten,Hebrew University Paul M. Cobb, University of Pennsylvania Hussein Fancy, University of Michigan Samantha Kelly, Rutgers University Maria Mavroudi, UC Berkeley Maureen C. Miller, UC Berkeley Helmut Reimitz, Princeton University Daniel Lord Smail, Harvard University Anders Winroth, Yale University

MSRC EDITORS Anne E. Lester holds the John W. Baldwin and Jenny Jochens Associate Chair in Medieval History at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Creating Cistercian Nuns.

M. Cecilia Gaposchkin is Professor of History at Dartmouth College. She is the author of The Making of Saint Louis and Invisible Weapons, among others.

Please send inquiries to: M. Cecilia Gaposchkin (m.cecilia.gaposchkin@dartmouth.edu) and Anne E. Lester (alester5@jhu.edu) For additional information about publishing with Cornell University Press, please contact: Mahinder Kingra, Editor in Chief (msk55@cornell.edu)