Travels in Deleuzean Time: Virtual Pilgrimage, Temporal Paradox, and the Newberry and Bicester Stacions of Rome

Abstract

ABSTRACT Extant in nine manuscripts, the fourteenth-century poem The Stacions of Rome is often relegated to the dustbin of pilgrimage propaganda. Turning to its presence in two understudied manuscripts, Newberry Case MS 32 and National Archives PRO SC 6/956/5 (known as the “Bicester” roll), this article proceeds from C. David Benson’s recent argument that the Stacions should be reconsidered within the larger tradition of medieval imaginative travel in order to explore the relationship between the manuscripts’ texts and material surfaces. Through the production of temporal paradox, created between the Stacions’ spatiotemporal details and the physical rolling action of manipulating the manuscripts, the Newberry and Bicester rolls offer their readers an experience of reality that moves the reader outside the step of typical human temporal understanding. This process is most legible when considered through the lens of Gilles Deleuze’s theory of bipartite time, as laid out in The Logic of Sense ([1969] 1990), and reveals valuable lessons for understanding the genre with respect to the relationship between imagined time and space. When read as tools for vicarious travel, in other words, the Newberry and Bicester Stacions demonstrate how the collision of dueling temporal orders can help to produce the effect of virtual pilgrimage.