Stéphanie la deuxième

One of the great joys of the Centre of Excellence has been the appointment of nine fabulous post-doctoral fellows in various hubs of the Centre around the country. We have two at Melbourne: Sarah and Stephanie. Both are fabulous young women who are throwing themselves into the work of the Centre with such enthusiasm it is quite inspiring. They have their own projects to work on; they are establishing networks with other post-docs; they are going to conferences; they are helping us organise conferences; they will be doing a little graduate teaching; they are setting up reading groups; they are exchanging work for commentary and discussion; they are making our little suite of rooms feel like a very active and buzzing little hub.

Today was the first meeting of the Old French reading group Stephanie had organised, with the assistance of Véronique in the French department. There were a dozen people in the room, reading Marie de France's Laüstic, learning not to do eighteenth-century "r"s, counting octosyllabic lines, and looking at photocopies of the sole Harley ms., which also features the music and lyrics of "Sumer is i-cumen in."

Staff, post-docs, doctoral students, honours students, retired folk, all just concentrating together. A very happy hour, reminding me of the best things a university can be.

Blogging, tweeting, conferencing and speaking with Chaucer

Once again, medieval studies demonstrates its technological magic-loving supremacy, with Eileen Joy's virtuosic tweeting of Jeffrey Cohen's plenary talk, "Between Christian and Jew," at the Leeds Congress of Medieval Studies. Of course, you have to read it backwards, unless you scroll down to the bit where Jeffrey appears at the lectern. Eileen says she had to tweet discreetly, but Jeffrey describes it as "finger magic."

If I had been giving a talk, and seen the formidable Eileen tapping into her phone in the front row, it would have made me very nervous, but I guess, as with the Hansard reporters, one could get used to it. Not that I personally am used to Hansard reporters, but you know what I mean. Actually, I get a little nervous when my students cite my lectures in the footnotes to their essays, but I try not to let that show.

Anyway, this feed (and I must admit I was following it last night as Jeffrey was speaking in Leeds on Monday morning), reminds me to prompt medievalist readers of this blog to send me a proposal for the New Chaucer Society Congress in Siena (Si, Siena!!) next July.

Jeffrey has already agreed to appear on this panel: hooray! I was also thinking if there was enough interest in this topic that I might even start a new blog a few months prior to the congress, devoted simply to the discussion of medieval blogs, so that the panel's deliberations could include those who weren't going to be at Siena, and those who wanted to remain anonymous, etc. But wait, there's more.... I have every reason to promise that such a pre-conference blog will feature occasional contributions from the ultra medieval blogger. So this is your great chance to speak with Chaucer.

Here's the call for papers: the deadline is officially tomorrow, but I'll accept offers for at least the next week.

SESSION 7 (PANEL): ROUNDTABLE BLOGGING, COMMUNITIES, AND MEDIEVAL STUDIES
Session organizer: Stephanie Trigg (sjtrigg@unimelb.edu.au)

For those scholars who are aware of them, the professional landscape of medieval studies has been changed, in recent years, through the advent of blogs and other online fora for the exchange of ideas. From the wildly engaging Chaucer blog to the collaborative scholarship of In the Middle, and a range of more or less anonymous blogs from individual medievalists, it seems that certain medievalists love to blog. But why? To what extent has blogging changed the way medievalists communicate with each other? In the idealised answer to this question, blogging makes it possible for isolated scholars, junior scholars, graduate scholars, disabled scholars and others to take part in a more democratic, more easily accessible exchange of ideas. But blogging can’t escape hierarchies or intellectual imprecision altogether, while the ease of anonymous or pseudonymous publication potentially threatens the accountability of more formal and more highly regulated mode of publication and intellectual engagement. Other questions arise, too. What are the copyright implications of sharing drafts or published material on blogs? How has blogging changed our understanding of medieval studies and its communities? Is there anything distinctive about medieval blogs? What is the future of medieval blogging? Papers are invited from bloggers, lurkers on blogs, and non-bloggers.

OK? So get to it and wing me a proposal.

Conference blogging/Hobart/One

Conference blogging. Meant to do this over the last week, but am now going to do it in several posts. This is the first. Scroll up for more.

Someone said to me over coffee during this recent ANZAMEMS (Aust and NZ assoc. for med. and early mod. studies) conference that it was becoming the third in the series of the big three. How does that sound? Leeds/Kalamazoo/ANZAMEMS?

A couple of riders, though. This analogy would work only for medievalists: ANZAMEMS has a much broader historical range, though is similarly multi-disciplinary. Second, ANZAMEMS is much smaller: about 190 papers over nearly five days. Third, as a society, not a place, ANZAMEMS offers a range of great locations in Australia and New Zealand. This is absolutely a plus, of course. I'm on my way back from Hobart, and am sitting in the Qantas club, having come out to the airport early with Paul and Joel, who came down for the weekend, and were booked on an early flight so Joel could get to school on time (though having got up at 4.15, he didn't look, 30 minutes ago, as if it was going to be his most productive day).

But it used to be that the only international visitors to ANZAMEMS were the plenary speakers we fly in. This is no longer the case. ANZAMEMS is also wonderfully friendly to postgrads, and reminds me of NCS in its mixture of absolute seriousness and its collegiality. It is also truly interdisciplinary, and over the years, the sometimes brusque encounters between historians and literary critics have given way to much more respectful engagements. Sometimes it isn't even possible to tell.

Like NCS, too, ANZAMEMS now has a respectable medievalism thread. A highlight this time was hearing Kim Wilkins, well-known fantasy and horror writer, who is also Dr Kim Wilkins, lecturer at UQ, give a wonderfully reasoned account of Australian adult medievalist fantasy writing.

My own paper was a discussion of Bruce Holsinger's The Premodern Condition. Perhaps I'll post that paper here too.

Plenary speakers of greatest interest to this blog were probably Ruth Evans and Mary Carruthers. Ruth spoke about Freud and Lacan and Chaucer's dream theory, and Mary developed more of her work on the arts of memory. Both were model conference participants, giving tightly argued, original papers, and attending session after session, valiantly fighting jetlag and contributing to debates.

It is also a great occasion for catching up with friends and colleagues, though given the threat to medieval studies at the University of Tasmania, and the threat to the job of another medieval scholar at the University of Melbourne, the overall mood was less than joyous.

I'm also heading back to a meeting where we will have to discuss the way we teach Old English in the new Melbourne model. More curriculum reform. Sigh.

Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies

An announcement about three new books in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies series published by Brepols and co-ordinated by an editorial team from Melbourne and Arizona (specifically, me, Charles Zika, Ian Moulton and Fred Keifer, with a larger advisory board).

Here is our blurb:

Jointly directed by Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the University of Melbourne and published by Brepols, this series covers the historical period in Western and Central Europe from ca. 1300 to ca. 1650. It concentrates on topics of broad cultural, religious, intellectual and literary history. The editors are particularly interested in studies that are distinguished by

• their broad chronological range;
• their spanning of time periods such as late medieval, Renaissance, Reformation, early modern;
• their straddling of national borders and historiographies;
• their cross-disciplinary approach.

A list of books in the series is available in Brepols’ online catalogue at www.brepols.com. The Brepols code for the series is LMEMS.

If you have an idea for a book that you think would fit this series' remit (a word I only started to use once I got involved with this series), please contact me or any of the editors.

These three latest titles might be of particular interest to readers of this blog, as they deal with gender studies, the medieval/early modern transition in English literature, and the theatre of the body in seventeenth-century England. All are fabulous!

Practices of Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Megan Cassidy-Welch and Peter Sherlock

The Theatre of the Body: Staging Death and Embodying Life in Early Modern London, by Kate Cregan

Performing the Middle Ages, from 'Beowulf' to 'Othello', by Andrew James Johnston

Scroll down for order forms and deadline for 20% discount...

Medieval Literature at Tasmania

I was very sorry to hear about the proposal to abolish the teaching of Medieval English Literature at the University of Tasmania. Like lots of other places around the country — my own Arts Faculty; ADFA — the School has become overstaffed, and they are looking to abolish medieval literature (and the position of Jenna Mead, who teaches there).

This kind of thing is always tricky. It's a small department; and enrolments in medieval literature will never be enormous. But there are certainly ways to integrate medieval literature into the curriculum. The School has particular research strengths in C19 and C20, and in regional literature and colonial and post-colonial studies, and wants to focus its undergraduate teaching in that area. (Oh, but an exception is made for Shakespeare, which just seems weird to me.) All the more reason, then, to give students the historical depth that medieval studies offers.

I've just written to the vice-chancellor at UTas. In part, my letter read:

Contemporary medieval studies is a cutting-edge field that readily engages not only with its traditional interdisciplinary partners — historical studies, art history, architecture, music, etc. — but also with a wide range of sophisticated theoretical approaches to literature and cultural studies. Moreover, medieval studies is an exemplary way to study the literature of the past, of cultures and societies other than our own, especially through dialogue with the field of medievalism, the study of various attempts to revive, re-create and re-work medieval culture in contemporary literature, film, and in other cultural forms.

Professor _____ remarks that medieval literature is not taught in many Australian universities. All the more reason, then, to preserve it in the syllabus at Tasmania, where it is well supported by the team of excellent medievalists in the School of History and Classics. English departments, even small ones, have an obligation to give students the widest possible exposure to the many traditions of English literature, not just those relevant to the School’s research strengths. Professor _____ comments that Medieval Literature is a specialized subject that “cannot be readily integrated into a reinvigorated and restructured English programme”. Permit me to register my most profound disagreement with this statement: the teaching of Middle English language skills may well be specialised, but there is no reason why medieval literature and medievalist literature and film cannot be fully integrated into a lively curriculum, as is seen in other universities in Australia and internationally.

It felt a bit odd to be writing, given that my own Faculty is grappling with forced redundancies of our own, though there is a growing tide of resistance to this next stage. Anyway, if you are reading this with concern, and would like to know more, and perhaps write your own letter, I suggest getting in contact with Jenna directly, or leaving a comment here in support of medieval literature.

Reasons to be cheerful

Ahem.

I was checking my email at the airport in Sydney last week when I picked up a message from the Australian Learning and Teaching Council, saying I had won one of their awards for university teaching. I've been sitting on this news for a couple of days, but there are reasons (beyond the usual narcissistic bloggy ones) for posting about it here.

The Council (formerly known as the Carrick Institute) has given 22 such national awards this year, just two in the Arts and Humanities area, though there are some awards dedicated to indigenous education, etc. The prize is $25,000(!) some of which I'll use to fund a little symposium on the teaching of medieval and medievalist literature, probably in 2010, when I return from my year's leave next year. There's a presentation dinner in Canberra at the end of November, when they'll announce one of these 22 winners to be the Prime Minister's Australian University Teacher of the Year. Ooh the suspense! I'm thinking of taking Joel as my guest, so he can get to see the Ruddster in his full glory.

Apart from the general loveliness of winning something you apply for (the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at Melbourne helped me re-shape my application for the mentoring award), I'm really chuffed about this award for four reasons:

• the Humanities Researcher blog played a big part in the application, so it's nice to see blogging being taken seriously in a pedagogical context
• it's good for medieval studies, which is often under threat in this country, to be given this profile
• it's good for English studies, which is often ridiculed as over-theorised in this country, to be given this profile
• it's good for the Arts faculty at Melbourne, which is increasingly being written about for its budgetary difficulties and its current programme of job-shedding. We are indeed about to enter a round of involuntary redundancies, so times are grim. Of course my award doesn't help those who are facing up to this brutal process, but it might be a reminder that the faculty is filled with dedicated teachers and researchers, who work hard to preserve that very delicate nexus between teaching and research.

OK, stepping down from soapbox now.

I found a bottle of vintage Yarra Valley Chandon, and chilled it to drink with our friends on Friday night. Not to be outdone, Paul descended into the cellar (which he dug himself), and pulled out a bottle of St Henri (cousin to "the Grange"). Perfect accompaniments to ... pizza!

Cheers, everyone.

Naked Philologist Triumphs

Congratulations to The Naked Philologist, who has just picked up the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship's award for the Best Paper by an Undergraduate Student, for “Gender, Power and Heroism in Ælfric’s Judith.” Well done, NP!

Medievalism at Wollongong

Got back home again on Thursday night, after getting to most of the postgraduate/early career training seminar on medievalism and contemporary media at Wollongong, co-ordinated by my dynamo of a research collaborator, Louise D'Arcens. The idea was to bring a small group of folk together with proposals, drafts, or even just glimpses of ideas for research or creative projects and see what kind of expert assistance and training would be useful to bring them to fruition. In fact the participants were mostly working on film and television, not so much on other media, and so Louise tailored the two main sessions on Wednesday to match.

The event was reported on the University of Wollongong's website, complete with photo of most of the group (curses! got there too late to be in the photo).

Most medievalist scholars in our neck of the woods, at least, have come to the field from medieval literary studies, but there was also a strong interest in the group in music and performance studies. Because I had only got back from the Great North-East Victorian Bike Ride the previous day, I flew up on Wednesday morning and unfortunately missed most of Chris Barker's presentation on Cultural Studies, but boy, am I glad I was there for Adrian Martin's discussion of film and medievalism.

Sometimes when two disciplines meet, or attempt to talk to each other, it's a very wary and uneasy process; by contrast, this was a perfect meeting. Adrian spoke for an hour and a half, and I could have listened to him all day. Just sometimes you get a perfectly pitched, directed and thoughtful talk; and this was one such. Adrian had thought quite carefully about medievalism, and even made me think more warmly of Umberto Eco's Ten Little Middle Ages, which sometimes irritate me. Adrian also moved us away from the obvious territory of Hollywood cinema, and showed us bits of Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky and Roehmer's Perceval, while also mentioning a number of other European film-makers who experiment with medievalism. He then led an equally long and fascinating discussion.

Wollongong is a most beautiful campus, and the town itself also seems interesting, though I didn't see much beyond a pub and a Thai restaurant. I stayed near the beach and in the morning, took myself for a good long walk along the beach, and ate my yoghurt and muesli and fruit in the sun. It was very warm, and people were swimming sans wetsuits: must be New South Wales.

The second day was devoted to workshopping the various projects, and while we were all exhausted at the end, the session as a whole was wonderful, leading to lots of productive dialogue and plans for future events and collaborations. I wish I had had the opportunity for this kind of seminar when I was a postgraduate. In Australia, the PhD is conducted by research alone, and so our graduate students often have to work extra hard to get the skills and training they need.

And in fact, yesterday, back in Melbourne, we held a meeting of medievalists working in the Melbourne area with Sarah Rees Jones from York, visiting Australia on behalf of the World Universities Network. Interesting to think about possibilities for collaboration with this network, even though neither Melbourne nor Monash is affiliated with WUN. But we also talked about the idea of postgraduates being able to spend time in different universities, so we can all share expertise and resources, as well as the advanced coursework in medieval studies that at the moment is hard to get in Australia. Lots to think about. But a good three days of talking about medieval and medievalist things, and the kinds of connections and networks it's possible to make with different disciplines and different institutions. Lovely!

The Time of Medievalism

At the NCS congress in Swansea, it was clear that there was a renewed interest in medievalism. There were a couple of panels on the topic, echoing the series of panels organised by David Matthews at Leeds, the previous week, while Carolyn Dinshaw's paper on Michael Powell's 1944 film, A Canterbury Tale, as a meditation on time and spatiality in our connections with the medieval, really gave the field a new impetus, though David Wallace's Presidential Address at NCS in New York two years ago, had similarly made a strategic point of affirming the interest of medievalism to medieval studies.

Of course there is already a journal, Studies in Medievalism, devoted to the subject, and an annual conference, and all; but work in this field has tended to take place adjacent to, rather than in much dialogue with, medieval studies. It's interesting to see this new wave of interest.

On a more personal note, during one of the medievalism panels at Swansea, my co-author and I were both in the audience, dithering in different parts of the room as to whether we should stand up and draw attention to an essay we had recently published, that rehearsed some of the moves being presented in that panel. We maintained our scholarly modesty, and did not do so, though it is by no means an unheard-of thing to do. Just seemed a bit unseemly, is all.

But what the hell? A blog is different; and I'll self-promote here if I want to.

In the latest issue of New Medieval Literatures (volume 9, for 2007), Tom Prendergast and I have an essay, "What is Happening to the Middle Ages?" It derives a little from the talk I gave at NCS in July, 2006. We talk about the opposition between medieval studies and medievalism studies, and argue that medieval studies often abjects the latter as involving too much pleasure to be taken seriously. The real "work" belongs to medieval studies proper. "Contemporary medievalism is now tarred by the same brush that in conservative circles continues to dismiss cultural studies as mere chat about television, cinema and the Internet; that is the accusation that there is too much pleasure, too little work in its study." We also suggest that while the opposition between the medieval and the post-medieval is a crucial component in the formation of the modern subject "who thus emerges as capable of both forgetting and remembering the past," this dynamic also characterises the relationship medieval men and women had with their own past; that the medieval is just as often medievalising, as it is not. That is, that the opposition between medieval and post-medieval, medievalist or even, we might say, the non-medieval, is never as crystalline as the strictest medieval scholars might like to maintain. That in fact, the medieval is always being made, by medieval scholars, as well as by popularising medievalists.

And, what's more ... the essay is followed by a response from Carolyn Dinshaw, which in part takes up some of her paper given at the New York NCS, on Rip van Winkle, engaging with the pleasure of this text, and its "temporal heterogeneity", courting the dangerous threats to one's professional identity as a medieval scholar that might ensue from engaging with popular fiction. What's not to like about that?

I'm just saying...

Chaucer Conference Blogging (1a)

I will blog about the content of the conference, but starting at the end first, this is an account of the practically perfect day that got me back from Swansea to London. There is no doubt that this last week of my trip away has been a thousand times more pleasant and instructive than the first.

The day began with a brisk hour-long walk around the rocky cliffs from Langland to Caswell bay, shared with a few other walkers, dogs, and joggers, and with a taste of Welsh sea water on the beach before I headed back up the cliff face. We had promised our landlady we would have a cooked breakfast on the last day — there had been unmissable sessions at 9.00 each morning — though Christine didn't think my order of egg, tomato and mushrooms was "full" until I added a piece of bacon. My companion, of course, had the sausages.

We packed up in leisurely fashion, then set off. I navigated us most of the way to Caerleon before setting us on the wrong path which sent us driving north towards Birmingham, but we cut across and made it to our second destination through luscious valleys and woods. Tintern Abbey sits on the banks of the Wye, and though the tour guide said it got oppressively busy in the middle of the day, there were only a handful of people wandering through its lovely bare ruin'd choirs. The sun was gentle; the grass was soft; the workers shoring up the fragments of the west face were having lunch; and the swallows swept and dived through the arches. We marvelled at the one room that would have been warmed; and had a debate with the guide book that said the chapter house was so named because there the monks would have had a chapter of St Benedict's Rule read to them. That can't be right, can it? Surely the chapter refers to the part of the church (i.e. the body of people), rather than the part of the book.

We lunched at the pub, on pickles, salad, bread, and three Hereford cheeses (one yellow, one pink, one green) and I was able to phone home. My phone's coverage hadn't been very good up in the hills, and during the day at the conference was often a bad time to talk to Australia, and it was great to talk to Paul. (I've just now talked to Joel, too: yay!!!.) We then abandoned the idea of nipping back to Caerleon, and hit the road.

I drove straight into London and all went well. Though we were surprised to realise Tom's hotel was on the way. We thought about dropping him off, but he thought it might be better to have a navigator, and he was right. It was when we drove past Harrods I realised we had come in a different way from the route we had taken out of London, and had to get from Knightsbridge to Bloomsbury. It was 5.15, and we had to get the car back by 6.00. Undeterred (and I am used to driving in cities), Tom navigated us across the end of Oxford St, and north and east, and we made it to Hertz with about ten minutes to spare, only narrowly missing clipping a tour bus. That was exciting. It was only when we got into the car park that I lost my nerve, and got Tom to drive this quite big car into the quite small car parking space.

We then separated and I checked into my very nice hotel over on Gower St, with sheets of crisp white Egyptian cotton. But the day was not done! I showered off the road, and then met Tom again for dinner at this gorgeous Moroccan restaurant in Kensington, that looked like a set from an Indiana Jones movie, complete with belly dancers — though here again I lost my nerve and refused the invitation to join in; oh well. But wait, there's more: we then nipped over to the Albert Hall for a 10.00 p.m. session at the BBC Proms: the Tallis scholars singing two C15 masses, one by Josquin des Prez. The Hall was only two-thirds full, but to hear these unaccompanied voices, at night, after our trip to the Abbey, was just about perfect.

Of course, all day we had been dissecting the conference, and talking about our friends, and making plans for the next phase of our book: first thing is to make some revisions to an essay for a collection. Next post, I'll try and think about the ideas the conference raised for me. But in the meantime, in lieu of the Friday garter blogging I've fallen behind on, is a bit of Wordsworth...

    And so I dare to hope,
     Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
     I came among these hills; when like a roe
     I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
     Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
     Wherever nature led: more like a man                            70
     Flying from something that he dreads, than one
     Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
     (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
     And their glad animal movements all gone by)
     To me was all in all.--I cannot paint
     What then I was. The sounding cataract
     Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
     The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
     Their colours and their forms, were then to me
     An appetite; a feeling and a love,                              80
     That had no need of a remoter charm,
     By thought supplied, nor any interest
     Unborrowed from the eye.--That time is past,
     And all its aching joys are now no more,
     And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
     Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts
     Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
     Abundant recompence. For I have learned
     To look on nature, not as in the hour
     Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes                    90
     The still, sad music of humanity,
     Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
     To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
     A presence that disturbs me with the joy
     Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
     Of something far more deeply interfused,
     Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
     And the round ocean and the living air,
     And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
     A motion and a spirit, that impels                             100
     All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
     And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
     A lover of the meadows and the woods,
     And mountains; and of all that we behold
     From this green earth; of all the mighty world
     Of eye, and ear,--both what they half create,
     And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
     In nature and the language of the sense,
     The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
     The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul                  110
     Of all my moral being.

Between papers: between medieval studies and medievalism

Poor neglected blog…

I’m just over half way through my trip, and have been struggling a bit to find the energy and spirit to blog.

Before I came away, I had to put together my application for the National Teaching Awards, and I talked a bit there about this blog, so I have been thinking of it a little as a teaching instrument. When you are a bit down, and you have to go into the classroom, you have to put all that aside and gather yourself up with the help of adrenaline. And that’s usually possible without too much trauma: I usually find I’m fine once I enter the room. But blogging doesn’t have the same immediacy, so there’s not been the same drive. I’ve also had goodly amounts of time on my own, so I’ve not needed the blog’s therapeutic charms. I’ve had very social bursts, but also lots of time walking around in the morning, and sitting in the library.

Anyway, I’m in the space between two conferences, back in London from my couple of days in Leeds, and setting out for Swansea two days from now. It’s still pretty chilly in London, though the sun was out this morning.

The Leeds trip was pretty good. I tried hard not to write a paper out, and did end up talking to my notes, rather than reading a script. So it felt very imperfect and ragged, but was probably no worse than a lecture from notes. I was talking about the blurry lines between medieval studies and medievalism, and tried to talk about the moment when Malory’s Guenevere falls down laughing at the tournament of Surluse, when Dinadin is brought into the court dressed as a woman, as a moment that challenges us to think about the different models of time and temporality in the medieval text, the medievalist text, and the way we think and talk about those things. As a means of bringing the two together — teaching the medieval, and re-enacting the medieval — I enacted this moment, literally falling to the ground in the middle of my paper, asking whether that was an act of medieval studies (demonstrating the play between realism and non-realism in the text) or of medievalist re-enactment. This stuff is so hard to think about, and the paper felt very much like work-in-progress. Completely terrifying to fall down like that, but also fun, too. The text says “and so did all that there were”, so I invited the audience to fall down too. They didn’t, of course, and Louise was right to say later that if I had been a real queen, they would have!

A highlight was meeting the redoubtable Eileen Joy (will do some links when I get home: too hard in transit) at Leeds. She made a great contribution to the discussion, that John took up later that day on the round table on medievalism. We had been talking about medievalism as play, and she reminded us that it was also a very serious business for folk like Bruce Holsinger, etc. So I’m trying to think a bit about this for the Swansea paper.

[Edit: part of this post has been removed by the author]

Anyway, the great highlight today was La Bohème at Covent Garden. On my friend Paul's advice, I treated myself to a glass of champagne and smoked salmon sandwiches, before climbing up to my seat. Not too bad, actually; right down the front of the top tier, which raked steeply up behind me, and pretty much in the centre. And it was beautiful. Wonderfully sung, especially the tenor; and surprisingly moving. I didn't think it would get to me, but I did shed a tear at poor old Mimi's death, and the difficult reversals of her love with Rudolpho. Sigh.

Conference blogging

It was just a two-day conference: the fifteenth annual symposium of the Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group. This is a group that is part of the excellent core of medieval and renaissance studies in Perth that put together the successful bid for the Australian Research Council Network for Early European Research. Perth, and more particularly, the University of Western Australia, has an unusually strong concentration of scholars in these fields, across a range of disciplines. They are energetic and original scholars, and also lovely people. This group has always had a number of members in the broader Perth community beyond the university, and this gives it a wonderful atmosphere of engagement.

Now that they are linked to the Network, they, like many such groups around Australia, are able to draw on additional resources to fund symposia and conferences: this one featured a number of local, interstate and international speakers, with about seventy people attending.

The theme was "reading religious change in medieval and early modern europe". I might not have gone, but it was a good chance to meet up with the other Australian members of my grant team, and talk with the people who are going to set up our online database for Australian medievalism in WA. My work isn't really about religious change, but I gave a paper on Edward VI's changes to what he saw as the overly catholic/medieval Statutes of the Order of the Garter.

The conference featured three wonderful plenaries: Juanita Feros Ruys from Sydney spoke about Heloise's fourth letter to Abelard, and showed how her discussion of bodily desire was a deliberate reworking of monastic discourse on temptation to take account of the female monastic body. James Simpson gave another brilliant paper from his new work on iconoclasm. In Melbourne he had spoken of abstract expressionism: in Perth he talked about Reformation images as "containers of the past", and offered a very moving reading of the poet's encounter with the image in Hoccleve's Lerne to Die. And Brian Cummings offered a wonderful reading of Thomas More's understanding of Conscience.

James and Brian both moved effortlessly backwards and forwards between the medieval and the early modern in a way that is still pretty unusual. I found all three plenaries completely compelling and inspiring; and I did some careful work on my own book today; and left this blog entry till the evening.

I also took a tour of the WA Parliament, as part of our Australian medievalism project. This image of the Parliament's emblem shows the state's distinctive black swan, above the medieval mace and black rod. One wonderful moment on the tour. We had been in the upper house and admired its fancy carpet which included the crown, but before we went to the lower house our guide warned us that the carpet had recently been replaced, and did not feature the crown design. "Tsk", clucked the person next to me. The Education Office then explained that if Australia became a republic, many of the carpets, windows and carvings might have to be replaced; and a shocked silence descended on the group, as these dire implications sank in.

Later that afternoon Louise and I went to St Georges Cathedral, where Sir Paul Hasluck's Garter banner and heraldic crest have been hung. Sir Paul's helmet features a stylised version of the wonderful xanthorrea, or grass tree, its green spikes sprouting triumphantly from the helmet. No picture, alas, but here's a lovely two-headed specimen:


Such fun to think about the incorporation of native plants and animals into these medieval heraldic formations.

I ate breakfast, my three mornings, up in the cafe at the top of King's Park: first alone, then with one, then with three companions. Each morning the city was washed with fresh rain; the mist drifted across the river; the lorikeets and wattlebirds sang; and the xanthorreas sent up their spikes and flowers in the soft morning light. Beautiful.

My Tutor Comes Home

Back in the dim and distant past — 1977 — I was a second-year student who had already decided to complete double English honours. One of the compulsory subjects was called Epic and Romance, and it had been devised by the charismatic, but recently retired Ian Maxwell. I loved this subject, and while I was also doing History of the Language and learning Old and Middle English, I found this subject, which ranged from Homer to Njal's Saga, the Song of Roland, Dante's Inferno and Troilus and Criseyde, I think — all in translation — a wonderful introduction to medieval literature. Simply, I was hooked.

My tutor was James Simpson, and it must have been in the brief interlude after finishing his honours degree and heading to the UK. I'm not sure of the timing, but I also saw James act brilliantly in a couple of student Chekhov productions: once as a languorous Trigorin, and another time in The Bear, a two-hander in which my sister played the female lead. I thought they were both electric.

Every couple of years, James comes back to Melbourne to visit family, and he is giving a talk tomorrow night. I'm always incredibly proud to have him here, as he is such a great speaker, and a delightful person, and such a wonderful model to my students as to what is possible from Melbourne origins. OK, I do sometimes experience a moment of envy when I look at his brilliant career (Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard), and think about the fact that I am still here in Melbourne and the choices I made and the ones I wasn't able to make, but then I look at it from another point of view, and think ... but at least, I am still here in Melbourne!

Anyway, if you're in town, you might want to get along to this talk. It's not on a medieval topic, and it's not even on literature. It stems from work James is doing on iconoclasm, a project that stems from his recent interest in the Reformation; and so he has moved into art and art criticism. In fact, I have his most recent book, Burning to Read on my desk, with its endearing opening to his Acknowledgements page: "I love writing books."

James will also be in Perth later this week, for this conference: Reading Religious Change in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. I'm going to rehearse my section on Edward VI's changes to the Order of the Garter statutes in front of an audience of experts on the Reformation. How's that for scary?

Here's the notice about James's Melbourne talk: click to enlarge.

Signing up to the Tower of Babel

I'm pleased to say I've just joined the BABEL working group - an engagingly engaged and non-hierarchical network of scholars interested in ... all sorts of things. The ideas that intrigue me most are their interest in pre-modern cultural studies, in multiple temporalities, and in the subjectivity of the humanities scholar. Their website is brilliantly energetic. I've never met Eileen Joy, but she is clearly a dynamo. Lots of people talk about re-thinking the hi-falutin' formality of literary studies, but this looks like a place where a different kind of work might be done.

Here's some of what they say:

... how could we have a collective that could act as a lever for a new discourse within the academy aimed at reformulating and redefining what we think we mean by "humanism" and "the humanities," such that we could also advocate for the important role of humanities study in the post-historical, post-human, hell, post-everything university, and also in public life? We also desired to be able to undertake this venture, as well as engage in various collaborative activities, with scholars working in more modern humanities fields, as well as with artists, and also with scientists working in cutting-edge fields such as biotechnologoy, robotics, artificial life, particle physics, etc. ... Finally, how could we create a space where, following Bill Readings, "the question of being-together is raised, raised with an urgency that proceeds from the absence of the institutional forms (such as the nation-state), which have historically served to mask that question" (The University in Ruins, p. 20). After much scribbling of all of this on Meantime Lounge cocktail napkins, BABEL was born. Well, kind of.

....

As to another reason why we are attracted to the Tower of Babel as a source of inspiration, we begin with the image of the Tower in ruins. As historians, we are the sifters of the fragments of this site, but we are not its rebuilders. We are collecting these disjointed fragments and we are bearing them to the present, not as artifacts of the past, but as tablets on which new possibilities can be written, read, and even lived.

And here is the official BABEL Sonnet (oh! Friday poetry blogging! a convention I might try to activate on Humanities Researcher):

If there be nothing new, but that which is
Hath been before, how are our brains beguiled,
Which, labouring for invention, bear amiss
The second burden of a former child!
O, that record could with a backward look,
Even of five hundred courses of the sun,
Show me your image in some antique book,
Since mind at first in character was done!
That I might see what the old world could say
To this composed wonder of your frame;
Whether we are mended, or whether better they,
Or whether revolution be the same.
O, sure I am, the wits of former days
To subjects worse have given admiring praise.

(William Shakespeare)

How neat is that?

But best of all, I followed the link on Pavlov's Cat and did the What Tarot Card Are You? test last night. If I sometimes follow such links, I don't always paste the results, but this is irresistible. I know almost nothing about the Tarot, but the synchronicity of this result is perhaps a good argument for finding out more...

You are The Tower

Ambition, fighting, war, courage. Destruction, danger, fall, ruin.

The Tower represents war, destruction, but also spiritual renewal. Plans are disrupted. Your views and ideas will change as a result.

The Tower is a card about war, a war between the structures of lies and the lightning flash of truth. The Tower stands for "false concepts and institutions that we take for real." You have been shaken up; blinded by a shocking revelation. It sometimes takes that to see a truth that one refuses to see. Or to bring down beliefs that are so well constructed. What's most important to remember is that the tearing down of this structure, however painful, makes room for something new to be built.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

Lucky medievalists

Great to see the wonderful list that Eileen Joy has put up over at In the Middle, of her round-up of recent discussions in ancient and medieval studies, as that blog's contribution to . Not just because Humanities Researcher gets a mention here, either.

What a great time to be a medievalist this is!

Bayeux down; Roland to go

One lecture down ... twice.

It's 39 in Melbourne today: people are moving rather slowly around campus. But a respectable number of first-year students turned up to hear a lecture about the Bayeux Tapestry (Ok, I know: it's really an embroidery) as the first of two lectures on medieval romance warfare. This is one of our new interdisciplinary subjects, called Homer to Hollywood. They have already looked at the Iliad, for example; while my lecture on Wednesday is on The Song of Roland.

Today's lecture couldn't help but frame its discussion with the problem of medievalism that occupies me these days: how can we tell the medieval thing from the medievalist contexts and frames around it?

It was also fun to think about the difficulties of actually observing the tapestry, short of heading off on a field-trip to Bayeux. I had access to a good CD-Rom, but I couldn't easily download jpeg files for a powerpoint presentation. There are lots of good pictures in books, but they cannot give anywhere near an idea of the scope and scale of the thing.

One picture I got onto the powerpoint, but can't translate into a format blogger will recognise is a photograph of the tapestry hung around the walls and arches of Bayeux cathedral, too high for the eye to read comfortably, suggesting the tapestry's commemorative and possibly civic function: "look what a big tapestry belongs to this town!"

But there are lots of great web resources. For anyone interested in how technology facilitates the study of the middle ages, here are three great sites.

Images of discrete panels, in terrific colour and detail.

A panoramic thread, which you can scroll backwards and forwards.

And the YouTube link. This animates (only minimally, and that's all it needs to do), the second half of the narrative.

I also found a great drawing of the winch the linen used to be stored on, with a big handle. Presumably when curious visitors asked, it could be rolled out for inspection, then rolled up again.

There's no doubt in my mind that our modern mediated digital images make it easier to study and read the images, though they do tend to flatten out the textual/textile "thatness" of the thing as object.

And thanks to Wombat World, and the link to it I found at In the Middle, here's a recent example of many appropriations of the tapestry. What I love about this version of the Simpsons' couch gag is that it reinforces my argument about the tapestry commemorating a war almost between families, rather than nations. And it's certainly nothing like the situation in the Song of Roland, where "Christians are right and pagans are wrong". The Normans and the Saxons don't really look all that different, except for the Normans' tonsured haircuts. William's and Harold's families were related by marriage; hence William's claim to the throne. They were about as different from each other as the Flanders and the Simpsons.

And of course, I also held up my Bayeux tapestry teatowel. And weirdly, actually used it this morning to mop up the mess I made when I spilt my waterbottle over my desk on the way to the second delivery of the lecture. How's that for appropriation!

And a postscript: as I write, it's 39 degrees, and the weather pixie has sensibly put on her bathers (this is, I think, a Melbourne usage: what do you call the garments you wear to go swimming where you are?), and I don't mind at all....

Writing lectures ...

... has changed completely.

The very first lecture I ever gave was on the poetry of Sylvia Plath (and Adrienne Rich, I think) to first year Modern Literature students. There would have been several hundred of them, and it would have been about 1985. I wore a long-sleeved purple cotton shirt. This was back in the days when women, though present in my department, were more likely tutors than lecturers, and certainly not senior lecturers or professors. I'm sure it was the surprise of seeing a young woman lecturing, and the astonishing poetry of Plath, or perhaps just kindness at seeing someone inexperienced making it through to the end of the lecture without falling over, but I received a round of applause and was instantly, thoroughly hooked.

The writing of lectures, and the nervous anticipation of presenting them, is upon me again this semester. I'm writing new lectures for my own medievalism subject, and next week I will also give two lectures in one of our new multi-disciplinary subjects, Homer to Hollywood. So on Monday I lecture on the Bayeux Tapestry at 10.00, then repeat the lecture at 12.00; then on Wednesday it's the Song of Roland at 10.00, then 45 minutes on Malory and the myth of Camelot to the medievalism students. One of my tutors will then give his first half-lecture in the course on Tennyson's Lady of Shalott (this is a ridiculous 90-minute lecture spot for the 118 students in this course), while I dash back to repeat the Roland lecture at midday.

Over the years I have become more economical in the preparation of lectures. My Plath lecture was a pretty complete script, written well in advance. These days, if I prepare too soon, or too comprehensively, I feel the lecture falls flat. I must also admit, even though I once made a speech about how Powerpoint was not a necessary component of good teaching, I do use it now, as a way of organising my thoughts and concentrating my preparation. So I'll prepare an outline on one slide, load up any images or text I want to analyse, add in a few notes at the bottom of some slides ... and just start talking.

It's a bit risky, this method. It's possible to spend too long finding good images and playing with the powerpoint designs, and forgetting about the actual points you want to make, though it's easier if, like me, you have no design imperatives or skills: default settings usually work just fine. I still find it a little hard to make the best use of powerpoint. It's great for images, and for close textual analysis, and that makes it great for teaching medieval culture, but it does tend to reduce everything down to dot points, when we know - and when we want our students to know - that things are usually a lot more complicated than that.

So while the hot northerly winds bluster around the house*, I'm uploading images of the tapestry, and re-reading the poem, and thinking about Malory, and trying to judge that perfect balance between preparedness and freshness that will see me through those 4.75 hours of lectures next week.

* Thank goodness the weather pixie hasn't put her bikini on, though. I had to think long and hard before choosing this model, because of the swimsuit option that came with it. What if people thought she was me? Worse than wearing the wrong frock to a lecture...

How to Write a Book

The way books (or theses, for that matter) get written never ceases to amaze me. I'm always intrigued by the different ways my graduate students go about putting words together, and how they strike their own balance between reading, writing and talking about their work.

For me, the most fun part by far is the writing. I'm dreadful at the filing and organising my notes; and often put off the necessary reading, too.

The book I'm writing now is a little like my book on Chaucer, in that it runs from the fourteenth century through to the present, but this time it ranges over much broader cultural fields: literature, ritual practice, costume, religion, historiography, tourism, etc. My shorthand answer to the question "what's your book about?" is to describe is as a cultural history of the Order of the Garter, but it also stems from my interest in how the medieval is figured and re-figured as the point of origin of this more or less continuous form of ritual practice.

I gave my first paper on this topic way back around 2001; and have only just recently locked my chapter structure into place (I've nearly finished drafting the fifth of seven chapters, so there's still a way to go). How am I going to balance the imperatives of chronologies and histories against the thematic threads I want to draw out? I think I have a solution; and am grouping the first three chapters into one section, "Ritual Histories"; and the next four as "Ritual Practices". Neat, eh?

But this struggle has taken place in a part of my brain that has repressed a memory. In the latest edition of Studies in the Age of Chaucer, I've reviewed David Wallace's Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aprha Behn. The title alone will give you an idea of the scope of this book, if you're not a medievalist. If you are, it's certainly come across your horizons. In part, I wrote:

Wallace’s practical method is dizzying, as he moves through what must be an extraordinary archive of filing-cabinets filled with photographs, maps, references and allusions to events, emotions and memories of these six locations across several centuries, and from many different kinds of writing. He lays a rich and fascinating wealth of material before us in this book, as he traces the patterns of remembering and forgetting that influence the cultural histories of place and period.

This is not a narrative strategy without risk, however. Premodern Places is a wonderful and practical exercise in the multiple temporalities invoked by postcolonial criticism, in critiques of periodisation, and especially by scholars working in the fascinating territory between the late medieval and the early modern, a problem neatly solved by the inclusive “premodern” of its title. It is a book preeminently concerned with the shaping power of broad cultural forces, and many will find it an inspiring, even liberating project in uncovering multiple forgotten histories, places and voices. Wallace is interested, after all, in the way literary scholars can sometimes fall silent, and let texts speak “in the past’s own idiom”; indeed, he gives the last word of his book to the pseudonymous poet “Tryphossa”, writing in 1973, in the hybrid language Sranan: “Èn beybi-Jesus krey a fosi: yè-è-è.”

Nevertheless, the book depends on an extraordinary mastery in marshalling and organising its materials. Wallace’s narrative voice is engagingly candid and modest, but the hand of the compilator remains firmly in control. Moreover, the impulse to write of the superego and the id of the Renaissance, for example, to speak so broadly of what history, or cultural history represses, skirts dangerously close to re-instituting the unfashionable grand narratives of modernism and colonialism. Perhaps it is impossible to write this kind of long history without such perspectives. Premodern Places will undoubtedly stand for a long time as a important test-case for this method.

Apart from my propensity to over-use the word "extraordinary" (an early draft had a third usage in these three paragraphs), what strikes me only just now are the obvious similiarities between David's book and what I'm trying to do in mine — though my prospective publisher has indeed suggested I take Premodern Places as a model for a book that might appeal to a somewhat broader audience than a narrow specialist one. This is daunting indeed.

But perhaps the filing cabinet I had in mind when I wrote the review is my own. I have drawers and drawers of Garter stuff: books, articles, pamphlets, photographs, newspaper cuttings, even a drink coaster.

So my questions are ones about mastery. How do we master these vast and complex archives without re-instating master narratives over them? Or perhaps a master narrative is appropriate here? Does the last paragraph of my review speaks more to my own anxieties? And perhaps they are more about my fear that I won't be able to find a grand narrative.

So as I often say to myself, Beckett-like, when writing: "I can't go on. I'll go on."

Malory on the Radio

Some time over the next week, while it's still available, check out David Wallace's BBC Radio feature on Malory. Alas, the segment we recorded at the College of Arms didn't make it into the final cut, even though Bluemantle Pursuivant was so wonderful.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/sundayfeature/

The program begins and ends at Winchester College. Contributors include Helen Cooper (on the Winchester MS, BL), ASG Edwards (on the Caxton edn, Manchester), Richard Barber (House of Lords Robing room), Martin Biddle (Great Hall at Winchester), Anne Sutton (Mercers' Hall, Newgate), Geoffrey Day (Fellows' Librarian, Winchester College), Lawrence James (biographer), Tim Sutherland (battlefield historian, Towton), poet laureate Andrew Motion (as the voice of Malory), and poet Geoffrey Hill (as himself). Producer: Paul Quinn.

Love the sound effects of the footsteps and creaking door as they re-enact the discovery of the Winchester MS in the Warden's bedroom in 1934...

Calling all medievalists...

Get ready to run, fly, swim to Hobart for a pre-Christmas treat. Seriously, Carolyn Dinshaw is simply one of the most exciting medievalists going around at the moment. She's a brilliant speaker and this will be a rare opportunity to spend a day or two with her in beautiful Hobart (place of my birth: ahem). As you can see from this outline (click to enlarge), her current work engages a "queer history" of temporalities, and I think this will be a conference Not to Be Missed. You'll have made your Christmas pudding well before then, anyway.