Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/10412573.2023.2229683
Adin E. Lears, Tekla Bude
New materialism is often understood as a modern theoretical solution to a modern ontological problem (that is, it critiques the forms of violence against human and nonhuman beings that the Enlightenment birth of “humanity” and “humanism” engendered). This cluster’s introductory article argues that the Anglo-European Middle Ages, rather than being historically absolved from the effects of Western Eurocolonialism and Enlightenment hierarchies, are rather a particularly strange and thorny forerunner to them. Through an examination of the Polychronicon’s treatment of the Fall, an event closely aligned with the transformation of matter, we show how specific aspects of new materialist critique, namely, liveliness, affective effects, and animate language, are anticipated in and central to early English conceptions of the scala naturae. We compare the approach in Higden’s Polychronicon to some examples of agential matter in non-Western cultural spaces prior to Eurocolonialism; these non-Western accounts help us to understand the limits of a medieval new materialism that centers European, and specifically English, voices, cautioning us against rethinking the history of new materialism without incorporating global perspectives.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/10412573.2023.2224150
Wan-Chuan Kao
Shamanism is as much a cultural technology as a material hermeneutics. In its westward transmission, the legend of an Asiatic shaman who rode a horse into the sky and foretold the Mongol imperium transformed into a dream vision of a knight in white armor on a white horse who uttered the prophecy to Genghis Khan. Yet the divide between the Oriental shaman and the European knight is illusory, as whiteness indexes the figural modulations of race and belief, both of which operate through a politics of affective perception. The permutational “white knighting” of the shaman suggests that race-making not a nonce act of categorical naming but a serial resignification of the material inclusive of skin tone but extending beyond it to the non-human and the inanimate. In the entanglement of premodern race and faith, semiotic mediation is indistinguishable from information embodiment. That is, the whitened shaman-knight is a biomediated body open to the flux of informational traffic; race-making is biomediation. An articulation of the felt materiality of belief, shamanism is periodizing, colonializing, and racializing.
{"title":"Shamanizing Matter: Whiteness and the Materiality of Belief","authors":"Wan-Chuan Kao","doi":"10.1080/10412573.2023.2224150","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10412573.2023.2224150","url":null,"abstract":"Shamanism is as much a cultural technology as a material hermeneutics. In its westward transmission, the legend of an Asiatic shaman who rode a horse into the sky and foretold the Mongol imperium transformed into a dream vision of a knight in white armor on a white horse who uttered the prophecy to Genghis Khan. Yet the divide between the Oriental shaman and the European knight is illusory, as whiteness indexes the figural modulations of race and belief, both of which operate through a politics of affective perception. The permutational “white knighting” of the shaman suggests that race-making not a nonce act of categorical naming but a serial resignification of the material inclusive of skin tone but extending beyond it to the non-human and the inanimate. In the entanglement of premodern race and faith, semiotic mediation is indistinguishable from information embodiment. That is, the whitened shaman-knight is a biomediated body open to the flux of informational traffic; race-making is biomediation. An articulation of the felt materiality of belief, shamanism is periodizing, colonializing, and racializing.","PeriodicalId":43692,"journal":{"name":"Exemplaria-Medieval Early Modern Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135718059","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/10412573.2023.2228150
Jamie C. Fumo
In attributing the punishment of Lot’s wife to a culinary misuse of salt, the Cleanness-poet evinces salt’s potential as a vexed and unstable signifier in medieval cultural discourse. Far from clarifying the workings of divine justice, the poet’s rationale for Lot’s wife’s punishment actually exposes the inconsistencies of her story in its moral setting. Cleanness deviates from the predominantly favorable coding of salt in the Bible and in various medieval social and intellectual domains, where it was associated with sacrifice and covenant as well as preservation, table-fellowship, and prudence. Building on Derrida’s concept of hostipitality, this article investigates how salt figures in Cleanness’s consideration of the hostility or coercion latent within rituals of commensality, through which the Christian collective is modeled. Furthermore, I propose that the fate of Lot’s wife as saltlick establishes “the eater eaten” as a topos that adds piquancy to Cleanness’s many homiletic representations of feasting, from the Wedding Feast to Baltazar’s banquet. By destabilizing the exemplary structures Lot’s wife’s punishment traditionally buttresses, the backstory of salt points instead to the uncanny as a route into the poem’s subtle deconstruction of commensality.
{"title":"Eating Well/Well Eaten: Lot’s Wife’s Folly and the Wisdom of Salt in <i>Cleanness</i>","authors":"Jamie C. Fumo","doi":"10.1080/10412573.2023.2228150","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10412573.2023.2228150","url":null,"abstract":"In attributing the punishment of Lot’s wife to a culinary misuse of salt, the Cleanness-poet evinces salt’s potential as a vexed and unstable signifier in medieval cultural discourse. Far from clarifying the workings of divine justice, the poet’s rationale for Lot’s wife’s punishment actually exposes the inconsistencies of her story in its moral setting. Cleanness deviates from the predominantly favorable coding of salt in the Bible and in various medieval social and intellectual domains, where it was associated with sacrifice and covenant as well as preservation, table-fellowship, and prudence. Building on Derrida’s concept of hostipitality, this article investigates how salt figures in Cleanness’s consideration of the hostility or coercion latent within rituals of commensality, through which the Christian collective is modeled. Furthermore, I propose that the fate of Lot’s wife as saltlick establishes “the eater eaten” as a topos that adds piquancy to Cleanness’s many homiletic representations of feasting, from the Wedding Feast to Baltazar’s banquet. By destabilizing the exemplary structures Lot’s wife’s punishment traditionally buttresses, the backstory of salt points instead to the uncanny as a route into the poem’s subtle deconstruction of commensality.","PeriodicalId":43692,"journal":{"name":"Exemplaria-Medieval Early Modern Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135717860","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/10412573.2023.2228152
Bethany Dubow
This article focuses on the literary-critical metaphors of late sixteenth-century England, taking as its starting point Thomas Lodge’s 1579 call to “roote out those odde rymes which runnes in euery rascales mouth.” In contrast to the humanist poetics that envisioned poetic form as geometric, even transcendent, artifice, Lodge’s language (“roote out,” “runnes”) suggests the earthbound and invasive. In this, it belongs to a cluster of early modern metaphors that figure poetic structures (rhyme, metric feet, alliteration) as material, biological forms. Moving between Lodge’s, William Webbe’s, Gabriel Harvey’s and Edmund Spenser’s “ecopoetic” metaphors, this article proposes an early modern “ecopoetics.” It argues that to recognize how such poetic structures “act as quasi agents … with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” is to reapproach early modern poiesis, centering less on the individual poet’s delimiting techne and more on how extra-human patterns and rhythms find their way onto the page.
{"title":"“Roote out those odde rymes!”: The Unruly Matter of Early Modern Verse","authors":"Bethany Dubow","doi":"10.1080/10412573.2023.2228152","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10412573.2023.2228152","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on the literary-critical metaphors of late sixteenth-century England, taking as its starting point Thomas Lodge’s 1579 call to “roote out those odde rymes which runnes in euery rascales mouth.” In contrast to the humanist poetics that envisioned poetic form as geometric, even transcendent, artifice, Lodge’s language (“roote out,” “runnes”) suggests the earthbound and invasive. In this, it belongs to a cluster of early modern metaphors that figure poetic structures (rhyme, metric feet, alliteration) as material, biological forms. Moving between Lodge’s, William Webbe’s, Gabriel Harvey’s and Edmund Spenser’s “ecopoetic” metaphors, this article proposes an early modern “ecopoetics.” It argues that to recognize how such poetic structures “act as quasi agents … with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” is to reapproach early modern poiesis, centering less on the individual poet’s delimiting techne and more on how extra-human patterns and rhythms find their way onto the page.","PeriodicalId":43692,"journal":{"name":"Exemplaria-Medieval Early Modern Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135717861","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/10412573.2023.2237831
Chad Córdova
ABSTRACT This article delineates two principles of the grotesque in Renaissance visual art, texts, and garden grottoes, one more superficial and one more radical. In sixteenth-century Europe, the latter mode finds its most striking manifestation in the Essays (1580–95) of Michel de Montaigne. The Essays offer a paradigm for grotesque thinking, one that crucially inflects contemporary ideas on the potentialities, and aporias, of posthumanist theory, life, and ethics. Grotesque ornaments, garden grottoes, and the essay à la Montaigne are here reread as provocative object lessons for bringing into focus the difference between a superficial and a constitutive posthumanism still to come.
{"title":"Life in the Grotto: Montaigne & the Meaning of Posthumanism","authors":"Chad Córdova","doi":"10.1080/10412573.2023.2237831","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10412573.2023.2237831","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article delineates two principles of the grotesque in Renaissance visual art, texts, and garden grottoes, one more superficial and one more radical. In sixteenth-century Europe, the latter mode finds its most striking manifestation in the Essays (1580–95) of Michel de Montaigne. The Essays offer a paradigm for grotesque thinking, one that crucially inflects contemporary ideas on the potentialities, and aporias, of posthumanist theory, life, and ethics. Grotesque ornaments, garden grottoes, and the essay à la Montaigne are here reread as provocative object lessons for bringing into focus the difference between a superficial and a constitutive posthumanism still to come.","PeriodicalId":43692,"journal":{"name":"Exemplaria-Medieval Early Modern Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135717883","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/10412573.2023.2224153
Nat Rivkin
This article examines how Paradise Lost serves as a source for trans studies from the field’s inception in the 1990s. Susan Stryker cites Adam’s fallen lament as a conclusion to her landmark essay “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Mountain of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” but she uses his speech without attending to the troublingly misogynistic direction in which it turns. Two decades later, Karen Barad’s “TransMaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings” reproduces large portions of Stryker’s essay while obscuring her Miltonic source material — as well as the distinction between the terms queer and trans. Following Stryker’s citation of Milton and Barad’s use of “My Words,” this article offers alternative genealogies of trans femininity in Paradise Lost, from Eve’s surgical birth to Adam’s prelapsarian pregnancy. I argue that the imposition of Eve’s labor pains and the denial of Adam’s feminization expose postlapsarian sex assignment as tragically cisgender. Moreover, the persistent masculinity of Milton’s angels renders them less resonant with trans femininity. Milton’s portrayals of sexual difference challenge the modern evangelical argument that transphobia is biblically sanctioned. It is Milton’s expansion of Genesis 2:23 in Paradise Lost that enables rather than restricts gender identities we would now call trans.
{"title":"“Manlike, but Different Sex”: Genealogies of Trans Femininity in Milton’s <i>Paradise Lost</i>","authors":"Nat Rivkin","doi":"10.1080/10412573.2023.2224153","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10412573.2023.2224153","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines how Paradise Lost serves as a source for trans studies from the field’s inception in the 1990s. Susan Stryker cites Adam’s fallen lament as a conclusion to her landmark essay “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Mountain of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” but she uses his speech without attending to the troublingly misogynistic direction in which it turns. Two decades later, Karen Barad’s “TransMaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings” reproduces large portions of Stryker’s essay while obscuring her Miltonic source material — as well as the distinction between the terms queer and trans. Following Stryker’s citation of Milton and Barad’s use of “My Words,” this article offers alternative genealogies of trans femininity in Paradise Lost, from Eve’s surgical birth to Adam’s prelapsarian pregnancy. I argue that the imposition of Eve’s labor pains and the denial of Adam’s feminization expose postlapsarian sex assignment as tragically cisgender. Moreover, the persistent masculinity of Milton’s angels renders them less resonant with trans femininity. Milton’s portrayals of sexual difference challenge the modern evangelical argument that transphobia is biblically sanctioned. It is Milton’s expansion of Genesis 2:23 in Paradise Lost that enables rather than restricts gender identities we would now call trans.","PeriodicalId":43692,"journal":{"name":"Exemplaria-Medieval Early Modern Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135717863","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/10412573.2023.2224154
Rebecca Davis
Geoffrey Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale offers a rich case study of the dynamic materiality of food and its relation to literary practice. A particularly complex version of what Jane Bennett describes as “edible matter,” spices challenge our assumptions about material passivity, both because of their well-documented allure and because of their charismatic but finally insubstantial quality as a foodstuff. Typically ground, sieved, and combined with other ingredients in such a way that their tangible material substance virtually disappeared, their presence was known only by the traces of flavor, aroma, and color that they imparted. Spices thus model a recombinative materiality that was attractive to Chaucer precisely because spice can do what rhetorical and literary language can do: it can color, it can add flavor, it can obscure, it can augment, it can make one thing appear to be another thing.
{"title":"“Of spicerie of leef, and bark, and roote”: Recombinative Materiality in the <i>Pardoner’s Prologue</i> and <i>Tale</i>","authors":"Rebecca Davis","doi":"10.1080/10412573.2023.2224154","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10412573.2023.2224154","url":null,"abstract":"Geoffrey Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale offers a rich case study of the dynamic materiality of food and its relation to literary practice. A particularly complex version of what Jane Bennett describes as “edible matter,” spices challenge our assumptions about material passivity, both because of their well-documented allure and because of their charismatic but finally insubstantial quality as a foodstuff. Typically ground, sieved, and combined with other ingredients in such a way that their tangible material substance virtually disappeared, their presence was known only by the traces of flavor, aroma, and color that they imparted. Spices thus model a recombinative materiality that was attractive to Chaucer precisely because spice can do what rhetorical and literary language can do: it can color, it can add flavor, it can obscure, it can augment, it can make one thing appear to be another thing.","PeriodicalId":43692,"journal":{"name":"Exemplaria-Medieval Early Modern Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135717862","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 1990-01-01DOI: 10.1179/EXM.1990.2.2.687
D. Elliott
{"title":"The historian and her past","authors":"D. Elliott","doi":"10.1179/EXM.1990.2.2.687","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1179/EXM.1990.2.2.687","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43692,"journal":{"name":"Exemplaria-Medieval Early Modern Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"1990-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79304140","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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