Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/10412573.2022.2099128
M. Min
ABSTRACT In Cynewulf’s Elene — an Old English verse narrative in the Inventio Crucis tradition, which survives in the Vercelli Book — the figure of Judas stands out among the Jews of Jerusalem as the only person present who can answer Helena’s questions about the location of the True Cross. Although critical consensus has considered Judas to be an archetypal representative of the Jewish population of the city, this article argues that the poem actually constructs the religious race of Judas as a strangely liminal one, shifting him back and forth between the categories of Jew and Christian. Drawing upon concepts from medieval critical race studies and work on Jewish-Christian relations, it examines how Judas’s racial liminality lays the groundwork for the narrative’s culminating anti-Semitic fantasy of effortless universal conversion; furthermore, it offers a critique of allegorical reading practices in medievalist scholarship, and underscores the need for deliberate distancing between the medieval text and the modern reader.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/10412573.2022.2099126
E. Steiner
ABSTRACT This essay considers how the experience of being a Jewish heritage traveler inflects the author’s approach to reading and teaching medieval literature. For the author, Jewish heritage travel, whether medieval or modern, tells alternative histories which rely upon alternative ways of seeing and interpreting in the face of ongoing, chronic crisis. Just as the medieval travel narrative of Benjamin of Tudela lists Jewish monuments in Rome alongside Christian ones, modern heritage tours intersect with and deviate from mainstream historical narratives, highlighting the achievements — and suffering — of the Jewish minority. To examine medieval literature from this vantage point leads the author not only to construct a parallel archive of Jewish-authored narratives, but also to find surprising examples of collective identity, borne of trauma and the shared experience of crisis, in Christian anti-Semitic sources.
本文探讨了作为一名犹太遗产旅行者的经历如何影响了作者阅读和教授中世纪文学的方法。对于作者来说，无论是中世纪还是现代，犹太人的遗产旅行都讲述了另一种历史，这种历史依赖于面对持续不断的长期危机的另一种观察和解释方式。正如《图德拉的本雅明》(Benjamin of Tudela)在中世纪的旅行叙述中列出了罗马的犹太纪念碑和基督教纪念碑一样，现代遗产旅行与主流历史叙述交叉，并偏离了主流历史叙述，突出了犹太少数民族的成就和苦难。从这个有利的角度审视中世纪文学，作者不仅构建了一个平行的犹太人撰写的叙事档案，而且还在基督教反犹太主义的来源中找到了令人惊讶的集体认同的例子，这些例子带有创伤和共同的危机经历。
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/10412573.2022.2094602
Tarren Andrews
ABSTRACT My contribution to this cluster seeks to situate and understand the Vita Haroldi through slipstream — a genre of Indigenous Sci-Fi writing that enacts temporal sovereignty in the past, present, and future. The Vita Haroldi (BL Harley MS 3776), a story about King Harold II’s life living in the Welsh borderlands after the Battle of Hastings, can be understood as an alternate temporality constructed as a response to a crisis. Specifically, this essay will read Vita Haroldi alongside Gerald Vizenor’s short story “Custer on the Slipstream” which details the resurrections of General George Armstrong Custer, the infamous US soldier who graduated bottom of his class at West Point in 1861 and was killed by the Oceti Sakowin and their allies at the Battle of Greasy Grass in 1876. This essay will not “i/Indigenize” Harold or early English people more broadly, but instead open up the productions of early medieval settlers to the gaze of contemporary Indigenous scholars, and offer a temporally sovereign theoretical approach to early medieval narrative.
我对这个集群的贡献是通过滑流来定位和理解维塔·哈罗尔迪——一种土著科幻写作类型，它在过去、现在和未来制定了时间主权。《维塔·哈罗尔迪》(BL Harley MS 3776)讲述了国王哈罗德二世在黑斯廷斯战役后生活在威尔士边境的故事，可以理解为对危机的回应而构建的另一种暂时性。具体来说，这篇文章将阅读维塔·哈罗迪和杰拉尔德·维齐纳的短篇小说《流上的卡斯特》，后者详细描述了乔治·阿姆斯特朗·卡斯特将军的复活，这位臭名昭著的美国士兵于1861年以全班最低的成绩毕业于西点军校，并于1876年在脂草战役中被Oceti Sakowin及其盟友杀死。本文不会更广泛地将哈罗德或早期英国人“本土化”，而是将中世纪早期定居者的作品开放给当代土著学者，并为早期中世纪叙事提供一种暂时的主权理论方法。
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/10412573.2022.2094601
Catherine Sanok
ABSTRACT This paper seeks to contribute to recent work that explores the relationship between affect and temporality by looking at the relationship between crisis, ambivalence, and futurity. The cluster’s operative definition of crisis, highlighting its early use to indicate a turning point in the progress of a disease, already links crisis to possible alternative futures: unlike a catastrophe — an event that is disastrous, irreversible, and final — a crisis is in process, its course and outcome undetermined. Or rather a crisis is experienced as such: although it’s not usually defined in this way, crisis is necessarily as much an affective category as an ontological one, a situation that allows for feeling fear and hope, and an experience of being oriented to the world by both terror and possibility. Borrowing from recent feminist and queer reconceptualizations of ambivalence to understand its bearing on experiences of crisis, this essay explores ambivalence in two Middle English romances — namely Amis’ ambivalence about the sacrificial killing of his children in Amis and Amiloun and Criseyde’s ambivalence about returning to Troy in Troilus and Criseyde — to explore its implications for medieval models of futurity.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/10412573.2022.2088190
J. Sisk
ABSTRACT Originally imagined as both granary and church writ large, Langland’s Barn of Unity morphs into a space of refuge-in-crisis as it is besieged by Antichrist and the Seven Deadly Sins in Piers Plowman’s apocalyptic finale. Central to Langland’s imagining is a conundrum at the heart of hospitality, the Latin root of which means not only guest and friend but also stranger and enemy. Within Unity, the allegorical figure of Conscience practices hospitality, welcoming others, yet attempting to set conditions for entry to keep his space morally intact. Unity is intended to be a refuge from the violence of sin, but with every act of welcome Conscience risks letting sin in. This essay breaks new ground by interrogating Langland’s representation of these acts of welcome in relation to recent hospitality theory (of Derrida and others) to illuminate how the satirical bent of the ending of Piers Plowman coexists with reformist idealism.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/10412573.2022.2099120
Elizabeth Allen, Gina Marie Hurley, M. Hurley
This collection of essays was conceived and drafted on the cusp of 2021 at a moment of feverish attention to a future that no one could fully capture. From the layered crises of pandemic, protests, and elections, the country turned toward vaccination and a new American government while at the same time fearing further death and destruction, as we witnessed higher than ever unemployment, skyrocketing rates of illness and death, and a violent invasion of the US Capitol. As sociologist Rodrigo Cordero writes, “in a way, crisis is the moment where we are compelled to ask questions: where are we, what is going on, what went wrong, how we can get out of here?” (2017, 1) For medievalists working within the university, an institution already facing an array of challenges in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, such questions have a particularly existential cast. Accordingly, we seek medieval resonance with the modern world: In the face of frayed communities and uncertain futures, we ask how the past thought about crisis, how medieval writers grappled with isolation, conflict, precariousness, and disaster. In line with recent projects such as The Decameron Project: 29 New Stories from the Pandemic, Why the Middle Ages Matter , and the recent issues of New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession focused on trauma-informed and pandemic-era teaching, we explore what scholars the Middle Ages — historical moments riven by uprisings, usurpations, and plagues — have offer in our state uncertainty. we
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/10412573.2022.2099123
Gina Marie Hurley
ABSTRACT In the late fourteenth-century romance, Le Bone Florence of Rome, the titular heroine finds herself at the center of a crisis. Her reputation has been the subject of so many lies and so much deceit that it is hard to imagine she will ever be vindicated, or indeed, that anyone’s words about anything could be trusted again. To remediate this hopeless situation, Florence takes an unusual step, forcing her many assailants to publicly confess their sins. What is more, she presides over this unusual confession as their confessor. This essay considers Le Bone Florence in light of the literary tradition of false confessors and untrustworthy penitents, examining how concealment operates within the sacrament more broadly. I argue that, within this text, the space of confession is one in which the truth can be heard and believed. Nevertheless, the resolution it offers proves all too precarious, because for a woman in Florence’s position, crisis is only ever one well-told lie away.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/10412573.2022.2094603
Karma Lochrie
ABSTRACT This essay explores the medieval idea of contingent futurities, especially as it is explored by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde. In contrast to the prevalent understanding of the divine experience of futurity as an eternal present made famous by Boethius and The Consolation of Philosophy, the human experience of sublunar futurity is plagued by uncertainty, fear, anticipation, and even regret. In the face of what Lady Philosophy in the Consolation called hap, a puzzling and undecipherable confluence of events in the future, the human condition is necessarily one of radical uncertainty. This essay considers how Chaucer imagines Criseyde in the grip of a hap whose outcome the readers of his poem knew well, but which none of his characters could have known, the fall of Troy. Interestingly, the Middle English word for “future” occurs for the first time in this poem (outside of Chaucer’s translation of Boethius) in two speeches of Criseyde.
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Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/10412573.2021.1991725
Hélène Merlin-Kajman
Mere Civility. Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration. By Teresa M Bejan. Harvard University Press. 2017. In Pursuit of Civility. Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England. By Keith Thomas. Yale University Press. [2018] 2020; Brandeis University Press. 2018. Descartes et la question de la civilité. La philosophie de l’honnêteté. By Frédéric Lelong. Honoré Champion. 2020. Hélène Merlin-Kajman
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Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/10412573.2022.2070362
J. Hines
ABSTRACT This article analyzes the role of pity in the construction and management of structures of antisemitism in late fourteenth-century English literature. Reading poet John Gower’s “The Jew and the Pagan” from the Confessio Amantis and his close contemporary Geoffrey Chaucer’s the Prioress’s Tale as in dialogue with one another, I ask how to make sense of the logic of these two tales that espouse pity and mercy and enact violence and cruelty. I argue that in these narratives we can see Gower and Chaucer explore the relationship between pity and violent justice, and, in the process, we can see how the tales enact a strategic essentializing of Jews as unjust, pitiless, and unpitiable to justify antisemitic violence. Study of these two texts together, then, can help both to shed light on the perennial question of authorial intention in the Prioress’s Tale and also the importance of pity in studying long histories of antisemitism.
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