Here I am again

Apologies, folks, for the break in transmission. It's been an incredibly busy couple of months. Though as I always maintain, blogging really isn't about having the time, or not. It's something more to do with mental and social energies, which have been pushed and strained somewhat over the last year. I have now finally given my last talk for the year, though, and am starting to think about winding up at work. I'm taking a couple of weeks' leave from Monday week, so that's a week in which to attend a symposium, finish marking some late-submitted work, catch up with my graduate students, and finalise some budget stuff for the Centre.

I've moved in to my new office, which was then painted and re-carpeted around me. I've started looking at furniture catalogues for some comfy chairs, and will look forward to making it a beautiful place. Photos will follow next year when I've got stuff up on the walls, and all. The office is lovely: light, bright and big. It has fans, air-conditioning, and windows that open, as well as lots of cupboards and shelves.  Our first post-doc has arrived and has started work, and our second arrives in January, so the Melbourne hub of our Centre is feeling real, and populated, with two wonderful new appointments to help with (a) the administration and (b) the education and outreach aspects.

The last talk was at the International Medievalism and Popular Culture symposium in Perth, the last event of our four-year grant on Medievalism in Australian Cultural Memory. And what a way to finish! One of those lovely events where no one is a keynote, and everyone is a plenary. About 45 folk listening to fifteen papers, none of which went over time. I'll write more about my own joint paper another time, perhaps. John Ganim, Nick Haydock and Eileen Joy braved the horrors of the half-world trip (and the spectacular Perth thunderstorms that messed up everyone's trip home), and Andrew Lynch held it all together with a light touch that put everyone at ease.

Even so, I am already planning a new year's resolution, which is to stop taking on too many things. Even though I cancelled two talks in September when I was just too sick to write them, let alone give them, I do still feel I took on too many things this year, with the result that I don't feel I did them all justice.

We are now being invited to submit the details of our publications to the dreaded research database. This is a pain in many ways. First, the system is incredibly unwieldy and time-consuming. Second, so many things follow from it: automatic calculations of one's teaching load, study-leave entitlements, etc.  Third, my two articles scheduled for this year haven't appeared yet. It is ridiculous for this to matter (they'll both appear in January, I think). One of them, at least, will have a 2011 publication date. But again, it's ridiculous that this is going to matter. Anyhoo, I have turned down a couple of things this year, and I have to keep doing that till I am back on top of things, and to make sure I leave enough time to do things well, not just meet the deadlines.

When we started all this bean-counting, and evaluation of journals, etc., a few years ago, I always swore I wouldn't let it get to me. But little by little, it has crept up on me, so that I do count the number of publications and "points" accruing to my CV.

Still, today was lovely. I made beetroot and raspberry borsht; and artichoke frittata for a birthday lunch; did a huge pile of ironing, straightening out the world; and had a sleep on the couch. Tomorrow I do the final check of the index of the book (proofs are already on the way to Philadelphia) and get to work on the next chapter of the next book.

So, hello again, blog: it's nice to be back.

Late with essay: here's a tiny installment

Oh dear. I am running along as fast as I can, whizzing past a series of writing deadlines. I'll keep going, but will just pause to paste a couple of paragraphs:

In yet another display case in the same hall in Canberra are three petitions on bark from the Yirrkala people in Arnhem land, presented to the parliament in 1963, and 1968, requesting that their submission protesting the proposed excision of land from the Arnhem Land reserve be heard before the relevant committee. The petitions are typed on paper, with English translation beneath, and pasted onto bark that is decorated with traditional Yirrkala designs, including fish, turtles and lizards. They are accompanied by an appropriate certification from the Clerk, affirming that their form on bark was acceptable to parliamentary bureaucratic requirements: ‘I certify that this Petition is in conformity with the Standing Orders of this House.’ An information card in the case also draws attention to the medieval antecedents of the form of the petition:

The three bark petitions displayed here are vivid examples of the fundamental right, dating back to the thirteenth century, of citizens to petition parliament concerning their grievances.

There’s a lovely and not atypical contradiction here between the anxiety about the  form of the bark petitions that needs to be reassured with the Clerk’s certification; and the affirmation, taking the longer historical view, that these petitions are ‘vivid’ exemplars of a medieval tradition. These differences may reflect changes in attitudes to indigenous culture between the 1960s and the more recent present: they are just as likely to reflect the contradictory relationship between modernity and its medieval inheritance.

I just remembered why I love my job. Now, back to it!

Gosh, I'm busy!

Oh my goodness. Gasp. Take deep breath.

I am very busy. There is much to do. All due pretty much tomorrow. Much of it exciting (our Centre of Excellence application); much of it deeply enjoyable (my teaching, once I get into the classroom); some of it less so (organising the timetable of the English program's teaching for next year, etc.). My research is absolutely on the back burner, though hopefully just for one or two more weeks while the semester takes shape. Things are particularly tricky today as I managed to rub my eyes last night after handling (a) fish food or (b) potting mix. After 30 minutes both eyes were bright red and the eyelids swollen to three or four times their normal size, to say nothing of the huge pouches underneath the eyes. After a dash to the late night pharmacy in Sydney Road I dosed up with drops and antihistamines, but today it still looks pretty gruesome. Even that bony bit of skin between nose and eye is puffy. I'm about to go in to work to welcome the fourth year students: hope I don't frighten them away!

But here's something to look forward to:

Wednesday, March 17

Professor Stephen Knight

Cardiff University (formerly HOD English University of Melbourne)

The Arctic Arthur

King Arthur has had many manifestations, from the warrior giant of early Celtic to the bearded ancient of DC Comics Camelot 3000. Few have been as surprising or downright bizarre as a formation that developed in the eighteenth century and found its apotheosis in Bulwer Lytton's 1848 epic poem King Arthur. This was a very northern Arthur, fighting in Scandinavia, engaging with Odin and his cohorts, captaining a Viking Ship into the Arctic ice. This paper will seek a passage through the perils and excitements of this unusual domain of the Arthurian myth.

Stephen Knight is the author of Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1980); Arthurian Literature and Society (London: Macmillan, 1983); Geoffrey Chaucer Oxford: Blackwell, 1987); Continent of Mystery: A Thematic History of Australian Crime Fiction (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press 1997); Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); A Hundred Years of Fiction: Welsh Writing in English (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004); Crime Fiction 1800-2000: Detection, Death, Diversity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); and Merlin: Knowledge and Power (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, forthcoming).

Lecture Theatre C, Old Arts 4.30-6.15pm

(http://www.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/seminars.html)

Drinks at University House afterwards

Free of charge and open to all staff, postgraduate, undergraduate
students and members of the public

There and back again

Wednesday, Jan 27.

I’m writing this on a plane from Melbourne to Perth. After a goodly 75 minutes sitting on the tarmac we’re now apparently making good time. We’re heading west, and into a late summer sunset. There’s a disc of burnished gold reflected on the wing outside my window, and we’re flying over miles and miles of flat-looking clouds. The white tip of the wing, behind me, is pointing up, just at the point where deep pink meets deep blue. As I look across the clouds into the west, the lines of blue are fading into pink and gold, and little scraps of dark grey cloud look like low rock formations rising up from still, golden waters.

Today was my first gig at speaking on behalf of the English programme as head. It was Academic Advice Day, when the new students come on campus to shop for subjects, and we all spruik our wares. Someone told me that’s a uniquely Australian word. Spruiking is not entirely dignified, but I tend to find it’s ok if you embrace the genre. And it wasn’t hard for me and two colleagues to talk up our programme. Even though our staff numbers are lowish, we’re a good team, I think, of energetic and productive researchers and teachers. What I must do soon is finalise my teaching materials for first semester. There’s another month before classes start, and yet I am already behind the various deadlines for getting stuff printed.

Tomorrow is a one-day symposium at UWA on medievalism and modernity. A bunch of us who attended the Wollongong symposium are heading there: Chris Jones, Seeta Chaganti, Louise D’Arcens and me. Also, two PhD students from UWA are presenting.

Update: two days later I’m on the plane coming home. Leaving around 11 in the morning, I touch down at 5.30 in the afternoon, because of the 3-hour time delay. It’s an odd way to spend a day, mostly in transit. We’re flying in bright sunlight, in a brand-new shiny plane with a new slick-looking entertainment system. Little screens on the back of the seat in front of you in economy class is a good look, and the seats seem a reasonable distance from each other for once. I started with Clare Bowditch and Prince, but now I have Scarlatti —  La Santissima Trinità — on the headsets, an empty seat next to me, and a bunch of work and reading to do.

The symposium was good. Seeta and Chris both gave excellent papers I’d not heard before. Both write and speak so beautifully about poetry and poetics: I found it quite inspiring to listen to them, and am going to pinch some of the poems from Chris’s paper on twentieth-century revivals of Old English poetic tradition for a lecture I’ll give half-way through my “Romancing the Medieval” subject on medievalism in English poetic tradition. I’m also going to try and recover something of the energetic love of poetry both demonstrated in their papers. Louise and I both gave papers we’d heard each other give before: Louise on comic medievalist tourism, with some lovely stuff on faciality and the idea of laughing in the face of the middle ages such tourism makes possible. I presented the paper I gave last week at Wollongong on medievalism in Australian parliamentary practice. I have to say I’m not really good at doing that, and probably should have insisted on giving something else. I tried to recover the nervous energy and adrenaline this second time around, but still felt a bit flat as I was speaking, until I couldn’t find pages 10-12. That got me going a bit better, and I remembered what fun it is to fly without a safety net. I think this time I made the mistake of half-writing the paper. I didn’t have a word-perfect script, but I had a lot of text. So it was too tempting to read, not talk. I don’t do that — talk to my paper — as often as I should. Chris did it beautifully, so I must remember, next time, how lovely it is to listen to someone speaking, not reading.

The great irony of this trip was a call from Pavlov’s Cat, in Melbourne for the day. Curses!

Oh look: lunch is coming down the aisle… Time to eat and then get to work.

The funny thing about going to the gym ...

... is that one night you can be bench-pressing more weight than you ever thought possible, and doing all kinds of tough and difficult exercises under Sophie's gentle guidance; and then next morning, you can hardly lift a cup of coffee.

I have an hour, now, to work on my new subject outline — Romancing the Medieval — before we head off to Melbourne Park for a day's tennis. It's unearthly quiet on the main road outside our house this morning: a slow start to Australia Day. Another occasion for the nation to ponder its past, its present and its future. Should we change our song? our flag? And can I just say? This was the burden of my Wollongong paper. If, as I argue, (royal) medievalism sits closely behind many of our parliamentary rituals and objects — the Mace, Black Rod, the cult of Magna Carta, etc. — then what will happen to those things should Australia become a republic? And perhaps an even more difficult question: what would medievalists who are also republicans advise? It would be hard, I think, not to register some sadness at the loss of those medieval rods of office, even if their use becomes/is already anachronistic. But doesn't the perpetual interrogation of those traditions, and the popularity polls perpetually conducted about our song, our flag, etc. bear out the idea that Australia as a nation-state is still relatively young? Strikes me as not unlike a teenager deciding what to wear that day.

Another question: will we sing at the tennis today? pity all the Australians have been knocked out by their betters...

Screening the Past is Live

Regular readers may remember a series of posts in May and June this year, in which I solicited assistance with an essay on the representation of stained glass in medievalist cinema. I'm grateful to all those who wrote in with ideas and suggestions, and who commented on the fragments of the essay I posted on the blog.

I'm pleased to say the essay has been uploaded today, on the excellent Melbourne journal, from La Trobe University: Screening the Past. This is a fully refereed (and for Australians, an A* ranked) online journal. It is part of a special issue, on Early Europe, edited by the indefatigable Louise D'Arcens, whose introduction, "Screening Early Europe: Premodern Projections," would be worth the price of admission alone, except — wait for it — there's no charge. But honestly, this woman has an enviable knack of bringing people together and making excellent things happen. I'm so lucky to get to collaborate with her on this, and at least two other projects.

Anyway, the beauty of online publication is that little changes and corrections can still be made. So if you should get as far as my essay, and then get as far as the second footnote, and feel you would prefer to be mentioned, or not mentioned, or mentioned by some other name, do please let me know as soon as possible.

Because it's the night before the last day of my leave and the last day before our three day Christmas feast begins, I haven't yet had the chance to do more than skim the other essays, but for the record, I got terrifically helpful readers' reports for this essay, and I'm confident this will turn out to be a very important collection. I heard a version of the fabulous Adrian Martin's talk at the postgraduate masterclass that was the starting-point for this collection: it was great to see a cinema specialist coming to visit the medievalists, just as we have repaid the visit in this screen studies journal. Well, something to look forward to, anyway, when I get a chance to sit down and read them properly.

Here's a list of contents: sorry, no links...

Louise D’Arcens: Screening Early Europe: Premodern Projections.

Adrian Martin: The Long Path Back: Medievalism and Film.

Stephanie Trigg: Transparent Walls: Stained Glass and Cinematic Medievalism.

Anke Bernau: Suspended Animation: Myth, Memory and History in Beowulf.

Sylvia Kershaw and Laurie Ormond: “We are the Monsters Now”: The Genre Medievalism of Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf.

Robert Sinnerbrink: From Mythic History to Cinematic Poetry: Terrence Malick’s The New World Viewed.

Helen Dell: Music for Myth and Fantasy in Two Arthurian Films.

Narelle Campbell: Medieval Reimaginings: Female Knights in Children’s Television.

Louise D’Arcens: Iraq, the Prequel(s): Historicising Military Occupation and Withdrawal in Kingdom of Heaven and 300.

Christina Loong: Reel Medici Mobsters? The Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance Reassessed.

Laura Ginters: “A Continuous Return”: Tristan and Isolde, Wagner, Hollywood and Bill Viola.

Appendix: Raúl Ruiz: Three Thrusts at Excalibur.

I'd love to know what you made of any of these essays.

Rusty and Cate do Robin and Marion

Apart from Cate looking particularly beautiful in dark brown hair, is there anything about this trailer that suggests any new, or different kind of Robin Hood? Or are there now so many television and movie versions that each new one now appears in relation to the others as if it were simply a new installment in a long running television series?

[Ed. I'm removing that link because it keeps playing as soon as I open the blog: I find there are only so many horses' hooves that make a bearable accompaniment to everyday life... I'm sure it's easy to track down.]

Something to look forward to: the modern medieval

Here's a schedule, with abstracts, for a symposium in beautiful Perth next month. It'll be hot – and fabulous! All welcome.

 

UWA Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies

The modern medieval: a one-day symposium

Old Senate Room, Irwin St Building, UWA.

Thursday, January 28, 2010.

What do Australian parliamentary ritual, heritage tourism, fantasy fiction and cinema, and modernist poetry have in common? Answer: the middle ages.  The relation of contemporary culture to the medieval period keeps transforming itself at every level from the popular to the highbrow, with surprising results.  In this one-day seminar, a group of distinguished international scholars will examine what the middle ages mean to the modern world, and how we make that meaning.

All interested are welcome to attend. There is no charge. For catering purposes, please RSVP to Pam Bond, pam.bond@uwa.edu.au; phone: 6488 3858.

For enquiries, please contact Andrew Lynch, andrew.lynch@uwa.edu.au; phone: 6488 2185.

Programme.

28 January, 2010

9.15 am: Coffee and welcome

9.30 am

Seeta Chaganti (University of California, Davis) 

http://english.ucdavis.edu/people/directory/seetac

Wild Surmise: Medieval studies and the realms of history and poetry.

For medievalists, the relationship between studying poetic form and studying history has always been complicated. On the one hand, as Lee Patterson has argued, formalist criticism always contained within itself the seeds of new historicism. On the other hand, practices of formalist and historicist reading can find themselves at odds with each other for various reasons. Privileging literary form is sometimes seen as hegemonic, and such conservatism can run counter to the Marxist-inflected historical analysis in which new historicism is rooted. In addition, as Gabrielle Spiegel has noted, because historicist study tends to absorb history into textuality (so that diverse kinds of historical evidence are all treated as interlinked symbolic systems), the particular forms that texts take are vulnerable to occlusion.  In this paper, I address this uneasy relationship between history and poetry in medieval studies, suggesting ways in which poetics and poetic form unexpectedly reveal themselves in visual and material aspects of medieval culture. I argue that by looking outside the realm of textuality, whether toward aesthetic objects or nonverbal performances like dance, we can ultimately derive a fuller sense of what the poetic meant in the Middle Ages, and what kind of work poetic form did.

10.30: Morning tea

11.00-11.30

 Laurie Ormond (UWA):

Fantasy fiction and the individual claim on cultural memory

It is a commonplace that the medievalism invoked in works of contemporary fantasy fiction has been uncoupled from historical context. There is pleasure for the fantasy reader in recognizing the past, but such recognition occurs through the reader’s appreciation of the adaptation and transformation of ‘traditional’ material. Many elements of European cultural memory that might be associated with the communal or even the national are refocused in fantasy fiction through the individual, emotional experiences of its protagonists. Indeed, fantasy fiction sharpens its focus on individual development around a character who is exceptional; exceptionally magical, exceptionally gifted, exceptionally persecuted, exceptionally questioning of his or her culture.  Following the work of Jane Tolmie, I will investigate how the ‘exceptionality’ of the protagonist constructs ideas of the medieval past.

Within fantasy fiction, 'the past' is experienced as something that necessitates exceptionality in the protagonist.  There is an element of otherness to the past even when it is experienced, in the logic of the fantasy novel, as the present. A critique of the medievalist past is usually focused through gender, in such a way that the medieval experience is claimed as it is rejected. The heroes and heroines of fantasy fiction seem to reflect the readers’ desire to inhabit a medievalist fantasy and yet to challenge it at the same time. The utterly contemporary nature of fantasy fiction’s presentation of an oppressive, dualistic, sexually paranoid past, and the tension in the novels between a desire to inhabit and to condemn this imagined past, seem to me to be revealing about present attitudes in medievalism towards gender and patriarchy.

11.30- 12.00:

Sylvia Kershaw (UWA)

 The Gaiman/Zemeckis Beowulf

Robert Zemeckis' 2007 film Beowulf presents itself not as an adaption of the Anglo-Saxon poem, but as a creative rediscovery of emotional and psychological truths that have been obscured by the original source. Zemeckis' film performs a dual transformation of the epic narrative of Beowulf, presenting it simultaneously as a modern story and a 'timeless' myth. This paper examines some of the effects of this transformation, particularly with regard to the film's approach to gender.   

Zemeckis' film constructs 'myth' as simultaneously more ancient and more modern than 'literature,' as a pattern that maintains a presence in the present. The transformation of Beowulf into 'myth' encourages a reading practice that, to some extent, naturalizes ideas of gender and heroism that underlie particular film-genre conventions. Perhaps too the medieval setting provides a space where such 'essential' ideas of gender, heroism, and monstrosity do not seem out of place to a modern audience, where they seem in fact to be 'appropriate.' This discussion will examine some of the ways in which the medievalism of Zemeckis' Beowulf has been constructed through the conventions and expectations of popular genre, and, in turn, the ways in which its appeal to the medieval exposes some of the desires embedded in popular forms. 

12.00-1.00 pm

Chris Jones (St Andrews)

http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/english/people/academicstaff/chris/

‘Wordum wrixlan’: modern poets reading Old English

Beowulf presents us with an image of an Anglo-Saxon poet composing, we are told that the poet began 'wordum wrixlan', 'to vary or alter the words'. Scholars have sometimes seen in this detail a glimpse into the workings of a poetic culture that is, at least residually, partly oral-formulaic in character; the poet appears to take pre-existing poems and alter their words in order to create a new work to suit his circumstances of composition. The 'Beowulf'-poet's image of Old English poetic practice also provides us with an analogy for thinking about how modern poets have made use of early English poetry as a resource for their own compositions, taking pre-existing Old English poetry as a starting-point in order to 'wordum wrixlan'. This illustrated reading will provide a 'tour' of modern poets who use Old English in their own work, and will include readings of work by characters such as Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, Jorge Luis Borges and Seamus Heaney among others. The session will also provide commentary on the types of use being made of Old English, accessible to non-specialists as well as specialists. It will be shown that Old English remains a contemporary part of the living English poetic tradition.

1.00-2.00 pm: Lunch.

2.00-3.20 pm

Stephanie Trigg (University of Melbourne)

http://www.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/people/stephanie-trigg.html

The traditional, the quaint and the medieval in Australian parliamentary practice

In 2004, Harry Evans, the Clerk of the Senate in the Australian federal parliament, gave a paper, “The traditional, the quaint and the useful: pitfalls of reforming parliamentary procedures.” In this paper he explored the deep affection in the parliament for many of its traditional rituals, regardless of their relationship to legislative or constitutional reality. “There comes a stage,” he wrote, “when the traditional and the quaint may not only conceal or repudiate substantial legislative values, but simply overwhelm them and bury them in such a pile of tradition and quaintness that they can scarcely be exhumed.”

This paper explores the medieval component of many parliamentary rituals and traditions, especially the offices of the Serjeant and the Usher of the Black Rod, and their accompanying instruments of authority: the Mace and the Black Rod itself. What is the relation between the medievalism of such practices and the idea of “tradition?” and how do we encode the “traditional,” the “medieval” and the “quaint” in Australia? The paper will also interrogate the changing role of the medieval at different moments of parliamentary reform in Australia.

I will suggest that modern parliaments perpetually define themselves against tradition, which is coded as predominantly medieval.

Louise D’Arcens (University of Wollongong)

http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/selpl/scd/UOW030513.html

Laughing at the Past: Satire and Nostalgia in Medieval Heritage Tourism

Satire and nostalgia would seem to imply opposing attitudes to the medieval past: one laughs at it, the other longs for it. And yet they operate within a shared cross-temporal frame, in which past and present are made to pass comment on one another. So is medievalist satire just a form of crypto-nostalgia? Does it increase or contain our sense of nostalgic distance from the Middle Ages? How does nostalgia function as a tool of satire? Can we laugh at the Middle Ages and long for them at the same time? These and other questions will be explored in relation to a range of satirical medievalist strategies used within heritage tourism in its attempt to make us laugh at the Middle Ages … or perhaps at ourselves.

3.20-3.50 pm Afternoon Tea

3.50-5.00

Panel discussion: Making the modern medieval

How to Become a Saint. Australian Medievalism #456

Some circles in Australia have become awfully excited about the prospect of our first saint, and it seems the final condition has now been met, with the declaration of Mary McKillop's second miracle (it takes two, apparently). The first was a cure from leukemia in 1961; now a woman in the Hunter Valley's prayers to Mother Mary have been certified as curing her cancer in the mid 90s. The report says, "The approved miracle ... had to be scientifically and theologically assessed before it was decreed by the Vatican." An announcement of her sanctity is expected from the Vatican next year.

I would have liked to hear a little more about this assessment process. Was it a joint committee? Did the same conditions have to be met by each body of experts? Apparently the woman in question does not yet wish to be identified. So her testimony has been taken over by the professionals, institutionalised and certified, and lifted out of the possibility of personal witness.

I guess this is similar to the medieval process, where miracles similarly had to be declared or authenticated by the church. I don't know enough to know if doctors were involved then as well. But I'm pretty sure that witnesses didn't often have, or want, the option of anonymity.

Mary's intercession apparently also played an important role in the recent successful separation of conjoined twins Trishna and Krishna in Melbourne, the survival of burns and car crash toddler Sophie Delezio, and the awakening from his seven-month coma of David Keohane, the Irish backpacker who was assaulted in Sydney. So that's good to know...

She was also known as an educator, establishing her first school in Penola, South Australia. I've been there twice: most recently on a road trip with some medievalists (some Catholic, some not). The Mary McKillop centre did seem, indeed, as if it was in suspension, just waiting for some news... My companions and I walked carefully through the question of religion: it can be a sensitive issue for medievalists.

But here's a funny section from the report in The Age:

Former Pentridge Prison chaplain Father Peter Norden said he was ''very pleased and happy to celebrate the fact that recognition is given for Mary, that it's a woman chosen for sainthood." ... "Even though many would view nuns as creatures of the past, we see the earnest goodness in the way in which she lived and dealt with adversity and met challenges,'' he said.

Well, Mother Mary died in 1909, so yes, she was indeed a "creature" of the past, though I suspect Father Norden really means something more like "medieval", or "not-modern" here. Do others find a bit of a back-hander here, though? He's pleased that it's a woman who's been chosen, but nuns — creatures — belong in the past? A little unconscious condescension here, I can't help but feel.

Update: Helen's sent me this photo, taken a few kilometres away up near St Vincent's in Brunswick St. So she's really a local Fitzroy saint as well...

World's Last Gothic Cathedral is Finished

Well, I guess this is a milestone of sorts:

From The Australian today:

OPPOSITION Leader Malcolm Turnbull tonight swapped the unholy noise of parliament for angelic tones in Brisbane's St John's Anglican Cathedral. Mr Turnbull and wife Lucy were among hundreds of guests from around the globe to celebrate the world's last Gothic cathedral to be completed. St John's was designed by English Victorian Gothic architect John Pearson in 1889. But it was not until this year that the third and final stage of its construction was finished - at a cost of almost $40 million. Brisbane's third Anglican bishop William Webber was mocked when he suggested the northern outpost have a cathedral, but he continued to push for the building because it would "inspire lofty thoughts and noble aspirations". The service combined the ancient and modern. It was webcast on the internet and featured indigenous elements including a traditional welcome and a Torres Strait island hymn. A didgeridoo played as Anglican Primate Dr Phillip Aspinall offered the consecration prayers. "We give thanks to God to everyone since 1906 who has laboured to create this magnificent building," he told the congregation.

I can't download them, but in my searching around I did see some rather intriguing images of the cathedral's new stained glass windows: I may have to go and visit. The picture above makes it look rather small, in fact: the spires look rather short and squat to me (especially in contrast to the new spires of St Mary's cathedral in Sydney - seen here on the left). Though both images interestingly demonstrate the difficulty of fitting gothic architecture into the format of modern cameras.

Weirdly, although the completion of Brisbane's gothic cathedral seems to establish a rather odd temporal disjuncture, there is also something medieval about taking a hundred years to build something.

Has anyone seen the Brisbane one recently? Is that picture a good image?

Tuesday Sydney medievalism blogging

I don't suppose Bruno really needs to offer any explanation for any of his costumes, but I do kind of like his medieval armour ensemble for his Sydney premiere. Not quite so keen on the metallic hip bones of his skeletal attendants, though.

And look! He even had a horse...

No stained glass, not really.

Help! I'm getting distracted in this essay I'm supposed to be writing on medievalist stained glass, and have got lost in the world of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1944 A Canterbury Tale. Some readers will remember Carolyn Dinshaw's wonderful paper on this film at NCS in Swansea last year. I've been watching it less for the oddly repellant/attractive queer Colpeper, and more for what it says about the relation between the movies and cathedrals. Witness the English soldier who dreams of playing the organ in a cathedral but plays only for the movies. There is a grand scene of a stained glass window in the film's magnificent closing sequence, but apparently this was filmed in a studio, as the windows of the cathedral were boarded up during the war; and many buildings in Canterbury destroyed. Indeed, the film makes much of a poignant scene in which Alison walks along a street with great cavities where the shops used to be, and a passer-by comments that at least you get a better view of the cathedral now. The need for light coming into the nave must have been greater than the need for historical accuracy, so the windows aren't shown boarded up.

In September 2007, this was the first film to be shown in Canterbury Cathedral, as part of a fund-raising effort to restore roof, walls and .... the stained-glass windows.



If A Canterbury Tale shows a beautiful, ahistorical fake, it also made me think of the final scene in Mrs Miniver, held in the small parish church, whose roof and main stained glass window have been bombed, in an attack that has also killed several characters. The priest preaches of the war of spirit they are all fighting now, against a view through the gothic arches of the English countryside they are defending. Warning: tissue alert.



Hmm. I wonder if the Vicar of Dibley was quoting this in the episode where Geraldine raises money for a new stained-glass window, but donates it to the Columbian earthquake victims and instead puts in a plain glass window that similarly looks out onto a beautiful setting sun?



I feel I'm in danger of losing my focus, but this is all very interesting material. Now I just have to make an argument about it.

What a PhD in Medievalism Feels Like

There was a time, not so very long ago (and it's a time that still persists in many institutions) when any graduate student wanting to write on medievalism was firmly discouraged from doing so. And if said student is keen to pursue a career in medieval studies, I would say that was probably still good advice. Let me come clean: I've given that advice myself, even quite recently. And I don't have enough fingers and toes to count the times people have remarked that my own PhD (an edition of Wynnere and Wastoure) has somehow licensed my more theoretical and speculative work. For people wishing professional accreditation as a medieval scholar, medievalism still does look, in many quarters, like a secondary field.

However, this is in process of change. And yes, there are lots of aspects of medievalism that don't require detailed immersion in medieval languages and literature. And when the medievalism in question is linked to another established critical field, the results can indeed be spectacular.

Dr Melanie Duckworth has written two terrific posts here and especially here about the viva process of her PhD on medievalism in Australian poetry at Leeds. Meli has blogged about the writing and revising of such over the past few years at Northern Lights. I've heard her speak at two conferences. I've read stuff she's published in an Australian newspaper. I've talked and emailed with her a little about her work. (She's also been fearless and candid with me on the chapter she's writing on the poetry of my former partner: ok, since it's 18 years since we separated, you'd think I'd be fine about this, wouldn't you?) I can say that her work is really terrific and very important, both to medievalism studies and Australian literature studies.

The second post, which summarises the questions her examiners put to her, poses a fantastic cluster of issues to think about; e.g. the perennial question about what "medievalism" refers to: the actions/effects of the primary texts we study; or the secondary act of studying such primary texts. Where "primary", against normal usage, doesn't refer to medieval, but rather postmedieval texts. Texts which scholars of the medieval, also known as medievalists, regard as secondary. You can see the problem.

Questions about the relation between medievalism studies and cultural studies; and about the nature of national and post-colonial studies and medievalism. About the distinctiveness of medievalism, as opposed to the revivals of other periods, etc. etc. All would be good questions for anyone writing on medievalism to think about. None of them is easy. And so all power and congratulations to Meli, who obviously acquitted herself brilliantly in her answers, and who can now graduate, without having to make a single change to her thesis. I, for one, will be watching that space, to see what she does next.

Shameless Request for Assistance: Medievalist Stained Glass

I have a theory. And a deadline. Not the most comfortable collocation.

The theory is that many medievalist films shy away from representing "real" or "realistic" medieval stained glass when they show interiors of churches. There are a number of possible reasons for this:

• technical: "real" medieval windows can seem very dark
• practical: (a) they might distract from the main action and (b) their scale and point of view is all wrong for the big screen
• respectful: real medieval stained glass shows Biblical imagery that sits uncomfortably, potentially, with the chivalric ethos that dominates much medievalist film
  
• ideological: (a) real medieval stained glass would risk interpellating the viewer as Christian; and (b) the medieval church is often presented as corrupt and forbidding, not joyful and celebratory
  
• aesthetic: movies like their churches to appear either austere and cold (Name of the Rose), not full of riotous colour; or lit by candles: e.g. the wedding scene in Camelot
  
• stylistic: medievalist movies prefer abstract or new age symbolism to Christian symbols (The Magic Sword: Quest for Camelot; Excalibur?)
  

There are a few other things I want to talk about here: Vincent Ward said, for example, that when making the coloured stock parts of The Navigator he wanted to use a colour palette that drew on the vivid reds and blues of medieval stained glass. I also want to talk about the scene in the Tale of Beryn where the Pardoner and the Miller try and decipher the stained glass images in Canterbury Cathedral.

What I have to do now is watch as many medieval movies as I can in a short time. And it is here, dear readers, that I would welcome your input, whether it seems to confirm my theory or not.

What can you remember about the representation of stained glass, or glass in churches, in medievalist movies?

Srsly, my deadline is very tight; and this is for prospective publication in an on-line format later this year. I wouldn't normally present such half-baked ideas on the blog; and am just going to risk someone thinking this is a good idea for an essay and writing it instead. I reckon I can do this faster than just about anyone, anyway!

I'll be very happy to credit assistance, either by name or pseudonym, as you prefer.

Wednesday Melbourne musical medievalism blogging

Thoroughly recommended...

Monday Melbourne Medievalism Blogging (6) Montsalvat

Not sure when The Age started reporting on weddings (not long after it started putting Paris and Britney on the front page of its website, I guess), but my attention was certainly caught by this medieval/gothic wedding at Montsalvat.

I like the way medieval and the gothic run into each other here (tattoos; guests all wearing black; bride wearing big black boots and mauve corseted gown). Whatever their original significations, these terms are both used together here to signal "non-conventional", even though this is completely contradictory, like "breaking with tradition" to use an old truck, or proposing in the Northland (the outer suburban, very unchic shopping mall we quite like hanging out at) carpark, but espousing conventional values like family dinners and insisting on marriage before children. And the very idea of a themed wedding to begin with.

Montsalvat (it is three-quarters of the way from here into the heart of the worst of the fires) was founded in the 1930s as an artists' colony, and is still the base for a dozen or so artists. Concerts are held there too, though it is principally known as a wedding venue.







Sarah Randles writes about the ideology of medievalist architecture in Montsalvat in Medievalism and the Gothic in Australian Culture. But as a setting for a wedding, it reminds me of the heterosexual romance of the medieval: that sense that people are comfortable in invoking its ethos to give meaning and shape to their relationship. It isn't always coded, then, as historical.

Monday Melbourne Medievalism Blogging (5) Postera Crescam Laude

Well, yes, again, it's Tuesday. But better late than never.

I'm thinking of writing something this year on the various coats of arms of Australian universities, as a kind of medievalism through form and structure, if not imagery as such. Heraldry is alive and well in the life of institutions; and students and staff at Melbourne and other such places work daily under its signs and symbols but it's not often considered as a version of medievalism. There are some great examples of Australian universities using heraldry to signal their allegiances or affiliations. Sydney, for example, combines the arms of Oxford and Cambridge in its coat of arms, while Macquarie University cites Chaucer's clerk in its motto: "and gladly teche".

The University of Melbourne's coat of arms is a blue field with a figure of Victory (presumably for Victoria, the state; and Victoria the queen [the university started teaching in 1854], surrounded by the four stars of the Southern Cross, with the motto postera crescam laude. This used to be translated as "later I shall grow by praise", but in recent years the standard translation has become "We shall grow in the esteem of future generations."

I used to know a bit about how to blazon, but this one defeated me. However, I found it in A.C. Fox-Davies' A Complete Guide to Heraldry, and it's fantastically elaborate, given that the shield shape is not divided or quartered:

Azure, a figure intended to represent Victory, robed and attired proper, the dexter hand extended holding a wreath of laurel or, between four stars of eight points, two in pale and two in fess argent

The azure is of course the blue background or field; the or and argent name the gold and silver of heraldic colours. In pale and in fess refer to the vertical and horizontal axes across the shield where the stars of the Southern Cross appear.

Here are two images: the first, a sculpture on the east side of the Union building (note the gothic arch made of cream brick):

Second, a rather lurid painting in the Council Chamber (click to enlarge):

The previous vice-chancellor's growth strategy was called "Earning Esteem", and when the new VC appeared at Melbourne, he gave a lovely disquisition to Academic Board in this very chamber on the Horatian ode from which the motto comes, and eventually launched the current strategy, "Growing Esteem", from which the very controversial "Melbourne model" emerged.

I'm actually in favour of the intellectual and academic program of the model (broader undergraduate degrees; deferring specialisation into law and medicine, for example, into graduate programs), though the process of change and reform has been immensely difficult.

Recently, I had occasion (ahem) to give my card to Somerset Herald, who was in Australia on a lecture tour; and then in the second lecture he gave, he held up my card and observed that the University had now altered its shield substantially, by repositioning the stars to the left side of the shield, and actually adding a fifth star, for a more naturalist image of the Southern Cross. Of course, as he said, the University can do what it likes, but this new shield, shown below, is not the coat of arms as it was granted to the University by the College of Arms, and as it is registered there.


Such radical change (to curriculum, as well as coat of arms) naturally needs an advertising campaign. There have been a series of expensive television and media advertisements. Here's a link to a news item produced by the university, which features a tiny grab from the "dreamlarge" campaign. "Dreamlarge", as an advertising logo, has displaced the coat of arms, to some degree, while the university also wants to hold on to its traditional appeal.

You'll see in this video an awful banner, saying "The Evolution Starts Here", which for two years I could see out my office windows (just above the right ear of the man speaking). It's now been replaced, I'm glad to say, with the much less problematic "Welcome"; but this very insistent signage is everywhere.

It's easy to tell the difference between a coat of arms, a Latin motto, and an advertising slogan. But when a (medievalist) coat of arms is modernised, at what point does it become a logo?

Monday Melbourne Medievalism Blogging (4) The Wide Brown Land

Today is Australia Day. Recent custom suggests we are supposed to be having a barbeque to celebrate, though we had one last night, and called in the neighbours at the last minute, only to remember that Dokic was playing in the fourth round. Andy (Alan's temporary tenant) and Sophie (Alan's friend) don't follow the tennis, but Alan came in and watched the end of the first set with us. I was thrilled to see her win in three hard-fought sets, appalled to see the replays of her rolling over on her ankle at 7-6 in the third, but equally appalled at the crowd who lost its composure in the last game and cheered when Klebanova missed her serve, then equally loudly shooshed each other (itself, I guess). Given she played her best points to echoing silence from a packed arena, I thought the Russian showed a remarkable temperament, but I'm just so impressed with Dokic's composure and concentration. According to the press in Serbia who have hunted him down, her father is threatening to come to Melbourne if she makes the final. Judging from the crowd support, I think Australians would link arms at the immigration desk to stop him coming in and messing with her head again.

Today's medievalism is a bit oblique. I was listening to the radio while making coffee before (I'm reading drafts of ARC applications today; and a girl needs a break now and then), and they were taking talkback on the moment listeners came to love their country, and one woman recounted an experience I have had many times. She was flying to Alice Springs and looked out the window to see the vast expanses of red beneath her, and realised she loved her home. How many times have I climbed aboard a plane in a cold London night and fallen asleep to wake at 4 in the morning and look out to see a pale blue sky over the reddening rosy expanses beneath me. You go for hours, looking down, and barely seeing a road or a light. The wide brown land, indeed.

Why is this medievalist? Angela Catterns on the radio replied to this woman, and said, yes, it was a spiritual experience, like going into one of the great cathedrals in Europe. And there it was: the direct and easy equivalence between medieval spiritual heritage and the sacredness of land. Or home. This is, of course, quite different from indigenous notion of sacredness and custodianship. But in the sense that this vision of the red heart of the country takes your heart and soul into a different place, it's interesting to me that the analogy for this lifting out of the self is drawn from the medieval European past.

Monday Melbourne Medievalism Blogging (3); OK, it's Tuesday, but surely that's ok...

Hmm. Have slowly started cleaning up my office at work in preparation for eleven months' absence; and am very slowly going through my list of things to do before I can really get down to some writing: examining PhD theses; assessing journals for the ARC; chasing up signatures from colleagues on new graduate applications; hunting down illustrations for an essay for antiTHESIS; deciding on the content of another essay; trying to find accommodation in Philadelphia and New York. It's also been very hot. It got up above 40 in Melbourne today, and then suddenly crashed to the high 20s. Much more comfortable.

Anyway, yesterday's medievalist blog topic was voted by the readers of the Melbourne Age in 1987 as Victoria's favourite building. It is the "Gothic bank" in Collins St, designed by William Wardell, a devoted follower of Pugin who migrated to Australia in 1858. It is magnificent.



And possibly looks even better in black and white:


Scroll down here for best images, especially of the interior. Keep scrolling on this site: there are some great shots here.

ANZ also built a skyscraper with postmodernist neo-Gothic arches up the top behind the bank, which you can see in the first picture above:



Discussing Wardell's building (we'll have occasion to re-visit his work on future occasions, especially when we look at St Patrick's Cathedral), Brian Andrews, in Australian Gothic (p. 25) quotes J. M. Freeland, Architecture in Australia on the building boom that was responsible for much of this very elaborate building style:

The pumped-up prosperity based on over-extended borrowing which was to envelop the whole of eastern Australia during the eighties was to reach its hysterical climax in Melbourne. In that town financial caution was to be thrown to the winds; crazy ventures were to be launched with loans over-subscribed within an hour or two of opening and with people fighting for the opportunity to invest their money: clever unprincipled financiers, many of them penniless when the decade began, were to float dozens of finance companies and building societies and, by the peak year of 1888, create an artificial and frantic land boom which was to be the prelude to the greatest and most terrible of depressions in Australia's history.

Sound familiar?

And a personal note. My aunt, who now lives in Sydney, was a very resourceful woman, who used to love coming into the city from Moonee Ponds and Keilor, where she used to live. In fact, she would take friends and visitors around to visit various banks of architectural or stylistic interest: and this was always the centrepiece of the tour. My uncle was not really one for much travelling or going out at night; and I can remember marvelling one evening, when my mother, sister and aunt and I had seen a movie in the city one evening, and Muriel commented on how beautiful her beloved city looked at night, all floodlit, and all. For she had mostly only seen it during the day. It was just one of those moments that consolidated the difference in our lives, just one generation apart.

Monday Melbourne Medievalism Blogging (2)

... and here are the ruins of the old city walls ...

I hadn't been down this part of Royal Park for years, but we rode past these little ruins a week or so on our way to dinner with Heikki and Katerina in Parkville. Riding back at night they looked even more mysterious and gothic, and I wasn't even sure what they were, but I've just ridden over in the early evening sunlight to photograph them; and of course, they are crenellated gatehouses.

Or perhaps guard boxes.

With extra piles for flagpoles.
On the outside they are beautifully pointed with lead.
And here is how you make crenellations when you have cut big blocks: just tip them up on their sides.
Further up the road the mystery is revealed: this was the entrance to Anzac Hall.
From the www.australia.coop website.

Anzac Hall is part of the Urban Camp. It was built between 1940 and 1941 for the RSL as a cinema and recreation hall for troops at Royal Park.

In 1942 a large part of Royal Park was used as a staging camp for US troops on route to the Pacific. The Americans called their area Camp Pell.

After the war Royal Park was the principal demobilisation centre for all Victorian service personnel and the area known as Camp Pell was used by the Housing Commission for emergency public housing until its demolition during a clean up campaign for the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne.

Why Camp Pell? Does anyone know what this refers to?* The Urban Camp is used for country kids to give them a means of exploring the city. There was a group having a meal, so I didn't go too close, but here's a taste of its current architectural style.

Anyway, I'm struck by the survival of the gate houses in the modernisation of the 1950s — even though they weren't very old, someone must have thought them distinctive enough, or invested with enough heritage value to preserve — and also the choice of medieval crenellations for the 1940s. When we think of medievalist architecture, we often think of ecclesiastical, education or commercial applications, but military ones are probably just as common.**

And now I know why Gatehouse St has its name. It's not particularly near these gates, but I wonder if there were, or are, others, closer to that street.

It was a beautiful time to be out riding. The day is pleasantly warm; and because it's still school holidays, there's very little traffic. I rode over almost entirely on bike tracks and parks, and rode back through the empty car park outside the zoo. A large roaring could be heard. Bear? Lion?

* answer. Ahem. Should have looked this up in Brown-May and Swain's Encyclopedia of Melbourne. Major Floyd J. Pell was a US airman killed in 1942, defending Darwin against a Japanese air attack.

** correction: seems that Royal Park was used as a barracks in the First World War, too, so the gatehouses may well be much older than the 1940s. Will have to do some more work on this one. Here's a history of the Park. Brown-May comments that in 1946, 3000 people were temporarily housed at the camp, which became known as "Camp Hell", and was "popularly represented in slum stereotypes as a hotbed of immorality and disease, while its residents struggled with the vagaries of rotting wooden and rusting metal huts, inadequate amenities and streets turned to mud whenever it rained" (Encyclopedia of Melbourne, p. 109). Lovely!