Medieval Identity Machines (Medieval Cultures, V. 35)

Medieval Identity Machines

Series Editors Rita Copeland Barbara A. Hanawalt David Wallace Sponsored by the Center for Medieval Studies at the University of Minnesota Volumes in this series study the diversity of medieval cultural histories and practices, including such interrelated issues as gender, class, and social hierarchies; race and ethnicity; geographical relations; definitions of political space; discourses of authority and dissent; educational institutions; canonical and noncanonical literatures; and technologies of textual and visual literacies. Volume 35 Jeffrey J. Cohen Medieval Identity Machines Volume 34 Glenn Burger Chaucer’s Queer Nation Volume 33 D. Vance Smith Arts of Possession: The Middle English Household Imaginary For more books in the series, see pages 323–25.

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M e d ie va l Identity Machines Jeffrey J. Cohen

Medieval Cultures, Volume 35 University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London

A version of chapter 3 was previously published as “Masoch/Lancelotism,” New Literary History 28, no. 2 (1997): 231–60; reprinted by permission of New Literary History and The Johns Hopkins University Press. Chapter 6 is an expanded and revised version of “On Saracen Enjoyment: Some Fantasies of Race in Late Medieval France and England,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31, no. 1 (2001): 111–44; copyright 2001 Duke University Press; all rights reserved; reprinted with permission of Duke University Press. Publication of this book was generously supported by the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences at The George Washington University. Copyright 2003 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Medieval identity machines / Jeffrey J. Cohen. p. cm. — (Medieval cultures ; v. 35) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8166-4002-5 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8166-4003-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Civilization, Medieval. 2. Social history—Medieval, 500–1500. 3. Philosophy, Medieval. 4. Civilization, Medieval—Study and teaching. 5. Middle Ages—Study and teaching. 6. Medievalism. 7. Body, Human—Social aspects—History. 8. Body, Human—Symbolic aspects—History. 9. Identity (Philosophical concept). 10. Identity (Psychology). I. Title. II. Series. CB353 .C64 2003 940.1—dc21 2002154611 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

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For Wendy, again

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Possible Bodies

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1. Time’s Machines

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2. Chevalerie

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3. Masoch/Lancelotism

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4. The Solitude of Guthlac

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5. The Becoming-Liquid of Margery Kempe

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6. On Saracen Enjoyment

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Postscript: Possible Futures

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgments

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Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari wrote that “un livre lui-même [est] une petite machine” (a book itself is a little machine): my little machine would not have been possible without a vast network of support, encouragement, and love. Michael Uebel and D. Vance Smith have been constant coconspirators in theory and other vices. Glenn Burger and Steven Kruger have honored me with their friendship. David Wallace ensured that this “nutty project” would have a home at Minnesota (I am told that “nutty” is an affectionate term, and I choose to believe that). Richard Morrison once again proved himself everything one could hope for in an editor and a delight to work with. Doug Armato has my gratitude for making Minnesota a welcoming place for my work for so long. Deborah A. Oosterhouse improved the text immensely through her careful copyediting. Among those with a long history of stimulating my thinking and aiding these chapters to mutate into strange new forms are Marshall Alcorn, C. David Benson, Larry Benson, Carolyn Betensky, Kathleen Biddick, Robert E. Bjork, Beth Bryan, Carolyn Dinshaw, Daniel Donoghue, Tom Hahn, Joe Harris, Bruce Holsinger, Jim Miller, Carol Braun Pasternack, Derek Pearsall, Todd Ramlow, Kellie Robertson, Lee Salamon, Francesca Canadé Sautman, Stephen Shepherd, R. A. Shoaf, Stephen Slemon, Michael Slevin, Bob Stein, Bruce Venarde, Jeffrey Weinstock, and Lisa M. C. Weston. As reader of the manuscript for the University of Minnesota Press, Vance Smith offered suggestions for revision that were frightening in their acuity, range, and usefulness. I am grateful for the seriousness of his collaboration on this project. My colleagues at The George Washington University have been a daily inspiration, especially Robert McRuer and Gail Weiss. Also worthy of special mention are Faye Moskowitz, department chair extraordinaire, and Connie Kibler, who never ceases to provoke me. My thanks to Keith Ward for a superb job as research assistant and intellectual companion.

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Gail Kern Paster and Bonnie Wheeler manage at once to be role models and good friends. Two informal collectives have provided a nourishing intellectual environment: the secret cabal of absinthe-drinking medievalists known as Front 190, and the members of the “Body Reading Group” who have for so many years shared conversation and good meals (Sara Castro-Klarén, William Cohen, Melani McAlister, Robert McRuer, Katherine Ott, Mark Robbins, Rosemarie Garland Thompson, Gail Weiss, Stacy Wolf). Although I did not know him well, I would also like to acknowledge the influence of Michael Camille. His untimely death is a severe loss to medieval studies. I am grateful to my siblings Marie, Kristina, Brenda, John, and Kathleen for their never failing encouragement. My brother and friend Mark is the only lawyer I know who reads all of my work and encourages me to produce more. My parents Robert and Barbara will be shocked by this book, and I thank them for raising me in such a way that after thirty-six years I still have that ability. Words fail in trying to express the many ways in which Wendy, my partner in every important achievement, is integral to the real-life identity machines that have enabled this book. My son Alexander taught me during these first four years of his life what a “possible body” is, not only by changing almost daily in his own physical form but through his own radical experiments with corporeality (who knew, for example, that an armor-protected Ankylosaurus could be hybridized with a vicious T. Rex to create a candy-eating composite monster to frighten the neighborhood on Halloween?). My research was facilitated by the helpful staffs of the Gelman Library, the Bodleian Library, the British Library, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Finally, because this book argues that identity does not end at some organic limit, I would also like to acknowledge that its contours would perhaps have been very different had it been written without the alliance I formed with my PowerBook laptop, a coffee maker, and the stillness that holds the world in the early hours of the morning.

introduction Possible Bodies

T We write the best history when the specificity, the novelty, the awe-fulness, of what our sources render up bowls us over with its complexity and significance. . . . Every view of things that is not wonderful is false. —Caroline Walker Bynum, “Wonder” This intensive way of reading, in contact with what’s outside the book, as a flow meeting other flows, one machine among others, as a series of experiments for each reader in the midst of events that have nothing to do with books, as tearing the book into pieces, getting it to interact with other things, absolutely anything . . . is reading with love. —Gilles Deleuze, “Letter to a Harsh Critic” in Negotiations We know its contours from biology textbooks, from the charts in the doctor’s office and health reports, from Leonardo da Vinci’s circumscription of its energetic form within the boundaries of a circle, from forensic outlines that trace the murdered dead. The human body consists, simply enough, of a torso to which are attached a head, two arms, and two legs. We have glimpsed this familiar body’s insides through numerous technologies of visibility: anatomical diagrams, x-ray machines, magnetic

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resonance imaging, fiber-optic scopes. We have viewed the organs in all their alien variety, synapses crackling their electrochemical language, architectural flourishes of bone, blood pulsing through tangled networks of arteries. We know the human body is divisible into semidiscrete systems (nervous, digestive, circulatory, excretory, reproductive), but that these structures nonetheless form a bounded whole, a singular organism. The human body is therefore described as a marvel of God or of evolution, a system so autonomous from its environment that it can dream theology and science in order to envision how it came to be the culminating creation in a world of similarly distinct bodies and objects. Feminist critics have pointed out that the problem with this awestruck model of the body is that it elevates to universal status a fleshly form that presents itself as unmarked by sexual difference, but is in the end inherently and unthinkingly male. Queer theorists have demonstrated that this archetypal figure is synonymous with the heterosexual body, making it normalizing rather than normal. Postcolonial and critical race theory agree that the universal body universally carries the assumption of whiteness; only colored or ethnic bodies are inscribed with difference, which thereby becomes deviation. Scholars in the emerging discipline of disability studies have argued that this particular representation of the body is ablist. Not everyone has a body conforming to the dominating somatic ideal, and in contemporary culture the unhesitating response to that realization is often surgical, chemical, or institutional intervention.1 This important line of feminist, queer, postcolonial, and disability studies criticism could be pushed even further. What if the body is more than its limbs, organs, and flesh as traced by an anatomical chart, as united into a finite whole? Microbiology, for example, describes the human body not as a self-sealed microcosm, but as a porous environment in which colonies of bacteria symbiotically enable digestion or poisonously invade wounds; in which tiny worm-like creatures contentedly inhabit the follicles of the eyebrows, oblivious to the emotions that traverse the face and animate their home; in which cells are semiautonomous beings that communicate, labor, multiply, die. What if the body were conceived in other disciplines as likewise open and permeable? What if corporeality and subjectivity—themselves inseparable—potentially included both the social structures (kinship, nation, religion, race) and the phenomenal world (objects, gadgets, prostheses, animate and inanimate bodies of many kinds) across which human identity is spread? Suppose

Introduction

the wheelchair were not judged an enabling supplement to a defective form and instead hands, wheels, metal, plastic, and muscle were seen to form a loose, mutable, but powerful alliance that calls into being new possibilities for embodiment? Suppose the flesh were not some pregiven architecture, stubborn and inert, but were alive with flows of heat and cold, fluxes of phlegm and blood and choler that in their changing distributions connect the body to perturbations in the weather, the rising of the moon, the distant circuit of the stars? Donna Haraway propounded in her antitechnophobic “Cyborg Manifesto” that the body does not end at the culturally imposed limit of skin, but has seeped already into a diffuse material world.2 Contemporary theorists of identity tend to label this body “posthuman,” implying that its challenge to the boundedness of the flesh is a possibility enabled only through a recent proliferation of technologies.3 As my conjunction of disabled, humoral, and cybernetic bodies has already implied, however, medievalists have long known better. When considered a finite object, the body tends to be analyzed only to discover a pregiven essence, a stability of being: how do its pieces fit together into a coherent whole? What are its secrets, its genetic destiny, its unchanging ontology? When bodies become sites of possibility, however, they are necessarily dispersed into something larger, something mutable and dynamic, a structure of alliance and becoming. Medieval Identity Machines takes its title in part from the opening salvo of the first collaborative work published by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, where through the neologism machines désirantes they envision just such a possible world.4 The Anti-Oedipus distributes bodiliness across a proliferation of “desiring-machines,” decomposing the human and conjoining its fragments to particles organic and inorganic. I employ the admittedly odd conjunction of nouns “identity machine” to emphasize that the body, medieval and postmodern, becomes through these combinatory movements nonhuman, transformed via generative and boundary-breaking flux into unprecedented hybridities: It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. . . . Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source

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machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it. . . . All the time, flows and interruptions. (AntiOedipus, 1–2) In this humming, pulsing, infinitely copulative vision, the body is a “schizo” and disharmonic concatenation of parts rather than a tidy collection of individuated systems and organs. Desiring-machines incessantly collide, combine, converge, combust, rendering bodies a perpetuum mobile of production and metamorphosis.5 Fearing that the machines désirantes of the Anti-Oedipus had been taken to imply a reductively mechanistic conception of identity, Deleuze and Guattari deploy in that volume’s sequel the synonym agencement (assemblage), emphasizing that their machines were always meant to be understood as nonteleological and non-functionalist, possessed of no foundational raison d’être and governed by no overarching principle of order (A Thousand Plateaus, 4). I return to their discarded term machine in the hope that the noun is still capable of being haunted by its medieval ancestor, machina. As Mary Carruthers has made clear in her work on memory and cognition in the Middle Ages, whereas we moderns are likely to assume that “human” and “machine” are antonyms, self-sufficient categories laden with values irresolvably opposed, medieval culture possessed no such binarism: “their machines were fully human” (The Craft of Thought, 22). The cosmos, the human body, knowledge, and memorialization all consisted of machines. According to Gregory the Great the force of love (vis amoris) is a “machine of the mind” (machina mentis) capable of exalting the soul. Contemplation (contemplatio) and allegory (allegoria) are likewise machinae that propel identity out of somaticity.6 Whereas these Gregorian examples have faith in a singular selfhood that can be elevated and then lost to divine embrace, however, the identity machines detailed in this book fragment that same selfhood, scattering its particles across an intimate, animate, but inhuman world, frequently much to the surprise and against the best intentions of its medieval envisioner. A first reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s work is like walking into a room in which a lively conversation has been unfolding for quite some time. References seem obscure and partial, no one pauses long enough to bring the new arrival up to date. Yet the intensity of the speech engages,

Introduction

Figure 1. Zodiac Man dispersed across the cosmos. Bibliothèque Nationale MS lat. 11229, fol. 45r. Used by permission of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

and after one listens for a while patterns begin to emerge and concepts solidify. Charles Stivale has suggested that a reason Deleuze and Guattari’s writing can seem so intimidating even in translation is that they frequently allude to authors, theorists, clinicians, and philosophers not well known to North American audiences. Stivale explicates Deleuzoguattarian thought by transposing its concepts onto a reading of Apocalypse Now, an innovative mapping that is nonetheless unlikely to make Deleuze and Guattari seem any more relevant to the study of the Middle Ages.7

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An immediate medieval analogue to Deleuze and Guattari’s “machinic” or “rhizomatic” body is offered by humoral and astrological theory, both of which consider the human corpus to be aqueous, as susceptible to celestial pull as is the tempestuous sea. The moon radiates such penetrative force, writes Giraldus Cambrensis, that as its luminescence waxes, the oceans grow turgid, the marrow and brains of every living creature swell, arboreal sap rises in its flow (Topographia Hiberniae, II.36). This pancosmic fluidity that mingles the human, animal, vegetal, and inorganic is strikingly visualized in the so-called “Zodiac Man” images common to fourteenth-century medical treatises. As in contemporary medical charts, this obviously male body inscribes the supposedly ungendered category “human,” but contrary to expectation does not grant this universalized form any stability of being. In a typical illustration from a manuscript now held at the Bibliothèque Nationale (MS lat. 11229, fol. 45r), a man’s body is drawn with arms and legs in motion, long hair flowing toward his sides. This energetic form is encircled by concentric rings tracing the eternal whirl of the planets, machina universalis. Each celestial body is materially connected via a thin line of ink to one of the internal organs visible beneath the man’s skin.8 The wheel of planets is surrounded by another rotating circle, the zodiac, populated not with stars but with animals (ram, fish, bull, lion), human bodies (twins, virgin, archer), even objects (scales). Each zodiacal sign within this outer circuit is in turn connected by a vivid line to its related planet, and then attached by yet another to whatever organ it permeates with astral force. This asymmetrical geometry of radiation and connection pulls the human outside of itself, breaking its self-contained organization to disaggregate the body into pieces more intimate with stars and planets than with each other. Scorpio, for example, beams a line of influence directly to the figure’s penis, then—following the line back to its origin— bounces that force into the wandering orb of bellicose Mars. Human desire, human sexuality, become inextricable from sidereal desire, celestial sexuality. Michael Camille points out that such depictions were used by barber-surgeons to determine the proper time to bleed the various regions of the body (“The Image and the Self,” 67), a use that exactly captures the dual trajectory of such illustrations: on the one hand they aim to fix the body and render it knowable; on the other, through sheer proliferation of lines and arcs in perpetual motion, they acknowledge that

Introduction

there is something more to human form than can ever be captured by anthropomorphic representation. Dissolving corporeality into an infinite rotation of concentric but self-interested forces, the Zodiac Man is in turn uncannily similar to the perpetual motion machines imagined by Villard de Honnecourt in the thirteenth century, wheels propelled into eternal spin through uneven mallets and quicksilver. In precise and beautiful renderings, Villard envisioned devices to harness the boundless energy of the cosmos, intersections of human labor with flows of wind, a rush of waters, hydraulic energies.9 Not every medieval inscription of body and universe was so grand. Whereas Augustine wondered what kind of machina God had employed to create the cosmos (Confessions, XI.v), a late medieval manuscript illustrator wondered who was keeping the empyrean mechanism in motion now that it was complete. In a deflationary analogue to the awesomely self-propelled machina aetherea, this Provençal manuscript of the fourteenth century attaches the celestial circuits to hand cranks. Two angels labor at the device to ensure that the sky properly rotates.10 Likewise, the ostentatious Zodiac Man dispersed within his machine of nested circles is elsewhere inscribed more humbly as a star-marked body with the constellation of the scorpion in the place of his genitalia: a beastly rendering of a vitalistic, eroticized cosmos and a painful destabilization of the integrity of the masculine corpus.11 Removed from that system of judgment so intent on organizing its parts into a well-managed and diminutive unity, the body unravels. Ceasing to exist as a bounded organism, it becomes what the mad poet Antonin Artaud called a “body without organs” (corps sans organes), a resonant phrase that Deleuze glosses as “an affective, intensive, anarchist body that consists solely of poles, zones, thresholds, and gradients . . . traversed by a powerful, nonorganic vitality.”12 A medieval counterpart to Artaud was the mad cosmographer Opicinus de Canistris, who conceived of his “body without organs” in minutely detailed pen drawings. In these amalgams of flesh, history, and desire, continents become bodies that open up to divulge other bodies. Opicinus reveals within himself Africa, a woman, copulating with Europe, a man. His own pubic hair he maps as a distribution of European vineyards, while his constipation or farting predicts perturbations in the worldly order.13 In his breathtaking analysis of this cosmological self-inscription, Michael

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Camille writes that Opicinus “does not recognize where he ends and the universe outside begins,” for “the boundaries of the self have become bound up with his remembered schemata for hieratic religious figures, complex geometrical diagrams, medical illustrations, and above all maps” (“The Image and the Self,” 88). Having lost his hold on his individuated, social, historical body—fragmenting his body to reveal continents in the heat of sexual desire, transforming his flesh into a painful and ever expanding world-machine—Opicinus de Canistris is only the most literal, most extreme version of homo signorum, Zodiac Man. I share Camille’s affection for “crazy” bodies like those illustrated by Opicinus. Medieval Identity Machines argues that the body is likewise a site of unraveling and invention in medieval texts of numerous genres. The Middle Ages were fascinated by composite monsters like centaurs and griffins, as well as by corporal transformations like the Irish werewolves that intrigued Giraldus Cambrensis, the princess imprisoned in dragon’s flesh described by Mandeville, the snake-woman Mélusine in the romance Huon de Bordeux. Such metamorphoses find inspiration in Ovid, the Roman poet of mutability who was obsessed by what might be called possible bodies, bodies whose seeming solidity melts, flows, resubstantiates into unexpected configurations that violate the sacred integrity of human form. Yet the identity machines that possible bodies construct are not reserved to fantastic creatures and humans transformed into estranging flesh. Fabliaux grant the body an astonishing autonomy of organs. Le Débat du con et du cul stages a lively conversation between a vagina and its neighbor, the anus, while in Les Quatre sohais Saint Martin, pricks (vits) and cunts (cons) proliferate, transforming every inch of the dermis into an obscenely erogenous zone.14 There is something not quite human about these bodies, with their refusal to respect the boundaries that are supposed to limit their form and to emplace agency within a controlling and singular subjectivity, a soul. Even more surprising, however, is that this inhuman body can as easily be found in chansons de geste, romance, manuals of chivalry, hagiography, mystical revelation, scientific texts, crusading propaganda, history. The bodies that populate these medieval texts are discursively constructed in ways that are inescapably specific to histories behind their production and dissemination, serving particular and often readily identifiable cultural needs. This historical construction, however, never fully captures the flesh in all its pos-

Introduction

sibility, especially as that body escapes the confines of somber individuality and connects itself via some “circuit of intensity” with other bodies, other worlds. Take, for example, the case of King Alfred’s hemorrhoids. Despite a fire that consumed the single surviving medieval manuscript, a remarkable biography of Alfred survives in transcription. Originally composed in 893 by Asser, a Welshman christened with a Hebrew name, the text now known as the Life of King Alfred demonstrates that the West Saxon monarch truly deserves the epithet “the Great” bestowed on him by sixteenth-century historians.15 Having been as a child anointed by no less an authority than Pope Leo (8), Alfred distinguished himself early in life by his love of books, poetry, and scholarship (23), the fixity of his religious faith (37), and his astounding success on the battlefield, especially when enormously outnumbered (passim). Not only did he eventually unite the disparate and factitious Anglo-Saxon kingdoms against Viking invaders, Alfred also forced the submission of several Welsh kings and ensured that his court was an international center of learning and commerce. And—Asser emphatically notes—this exalted king was afflicted with various diseases, the most memorable of which was ficus, “piles” or “hemorrhoids.” Alfred receives this painful ailment as a divine reward, sent at his own request to assist him in resisting carnal desire: “he contracted the disease of piles through God’s gift; struggling with this long and bitterly through many years, he would despair even of life” (74). This boon of swelling and blood is eventually transmuted by God into an unspecified but “more severe illness” that remains with him to the end of his days. I am going to guess that for many readers a discussion of King Alfred’s hemorrhoids seems distasteful, and for that reason I am probably better off not translating the safe Latin word ficus (literally meaning “fig,” and more suggestive to contemporary ears of decorative houseplants than of the aching capillaries of a sanguineous anus). Yet Asser is working within an established tradition of hagiography within which bodily infirmity of any kind is taken as a special mark of sanctity. Saints like Guthlac and Cuthbert suffer terribly, and gratefully. Bede represents his beloved Pope Gregory’s energetic output of texts in the face of frequent fevers, weakness, and “bowel trouble” as a special proof of the man’s holiness (Ecclesiastical History II.1). Alfred, rex omnium britannie insulae christianorum (as Asser’s dedication to his

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text reads), possesses a body that is at once regnal and saintly because it suffers. Ficus and the unnamed diseases that it later becomes are signs of spiritual strength, corporal signifiers that Alfred is powerful enough to triumph over the limitations of mere flesh. Recurring hemorrhoids also suggest that Alfred’s body does not quite belong to Alfred. Bruce Holsinger has detailed the sexual connotations of ficus in the later Middle Ages, and it cannot be an accident that the illness that originates as anal hemorrhaging is divinely transmuted at Alfred’s wedding feast, just as he enters into institutionalized heterosexuality.16 Even more suggestively, the narration of the original onset of Alfred’s ficus is provocatively framed by repetitions of the same event, foreign invasion: 72. In that same year the Viking army, which had settled in East Anglia, broke in a most insolent manner the peace which they had established with Alfred. [73–75. Narration of Alfred’s ficus, bodily sufferings, marriage, children] 76. Meanwhile the king, amidst the wars and the numerous interruptions of this present life—not to mention the Viking attacks and his continual bodily infirmities. . . . Chapter 76 opens by conjoining Viking incursions and Alfred’s suffering body, making explicit the interlacement that the narrative implies in its sequencing of the five chapters as a whole. In case we readers are not astute enough to be surprised by the conjunction of hemorrhoids and Vikings here, moreover, Asser cheerfully repeats it later, this time adding a reference to the thief crucified next to Jesus, ensuring that the passage resonates with religious overtones as well: 91. King Alfred has been transfixed by the nails of many tribulations17 . . . he has been plagued continually with the savage attacks of some unknown disease, such as he does not have even a single hour of peace in which he does not either suffer from the disease itself or else, gloomy dreading it, is not driven almost to despair. Moreover, he was perturbed—not without good reason—by the relentless attacks of foreign peoples, which he continually sustained from land and sea without any interval

Introduction

of peace. What shall I say of his frequent expeditions and battles against the Vikings and the unceasing responsibilities of government? Like the ravages of ficus, the Vikings are—quite literally—a pain in the royal ass. Their threat to the fragile coherence of a united England needs to be overstated by Asser because in the face of that threat Alfred’s ascendancy and permanence as king of the majority of the island cannot be questioned. Asser describes Alfred not simply as ruler of Wessex (rex Occidentalium Saxonum) but with the grandiose title Angul-Saxonum rex. The appellation is unlikely to raise eyebrows today, since the word “AngloSaxon” has become an accepted term within the critical vocabulary for describing this era. Yet as Keynes and Lapidge are quick to point out, the ambitiously compound royal appellation that Asser employs became current only in the 880s, the same decade that saw the Viking capture of London and its Alfredian restoration, the subsequent submission of the insular kings to Alfred, and the stabilization of the Danelaw (Alfred the Great, 227). “King of the Anglo-Saxons” is not Asser’s invention, but is nonetheless a title of quite recent vintage and obvious political utility. Angul-Saxonum rex performs an important suture. Over and against the Viking menace (a threat predicated on rendering as alien as possible peoples who were in fact ethnically continuous with the “AngloSaxons”), the collective force of the compound noun Angul-Saxonum gathers a fragmented variousness into an imagined community.18 This new thing, this kingdom that can suddenly conceptualize itself as a corporate entity rather than a scattering of smaller affiliations, is a body afflicted with ficus, with Vikings who cause pain and bleeding and who menace the integrity of the whole, but who also precipitate that unity into heroic consciousness. In a move that conflates the island, its people, and their king, a move that concatenates history, the sacralizing power of religion, realignments of the past, and the eruption of new futures, Asser opens the regnal body to a becoming-nation, probes its most private regions, transforms its every affliction into movements of armies and a war of the flesh against itself. Alfred’s body in Asser’s account could be read as mere agitprop for the emergent West Saxon hegemony, in which case the Life of Alfred would be a narrative reducible to a simple and definitive purpose. Considering

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the recurrence in Old English poetry of prosopopoeia, considering that even a jewel that likely contains a contemporary portrait of the AngulSaxonum rex himself can declare “ÆLFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN” (“Alfred ordered me fashioned”)—considering, that is, that even objects were alive in the ninth century, and still speak today—we should probably hesitate before rendering the text so inert, so small. In Asser’s conjunction of Alfred, his hemorrhoids, the creation of community, Viking incursions, marital relations, disseminations of texts, there is something that resists diminution into mere context. These heterogeneous components form an identity machine full of potential for the reconceptualization of somaticity, unlikely to be constrained by reformation into a singular, larger form. The body of venerable King Alfred is, in Asser’s textualization, not so far removed from a babewyn, from those monsters of hybridity who populate the margins of illuminated manuscripts. In the Luttrell Psalter (London, British Library, Add. MS 42130, fol. 175r), the sober Latin of Psalm 98 is framed by two remarkable figures: an avine body topped by the crowned and dour face of a queen, and a sphinxlike animal bearing a bishop’s severe visage and an ornate mitre, a doubled becoming-animal that maps the plasticity of corporeal form.19 The haunches of the sphinx dissolve into a long, curlicued tail that disperses its bestial form into pendulant clusters of thistles, while the serpentine caudal appendage of the bird-queen creeps with sensuous curls of ivy inward, outward, downward. The babewyns scatter the human into fragments of fauna and flora, opening the flesh to animal and vegetal transformation. Medieval people did not simply fantasize such corporeal hybridity, moreover, but experimented with their own flesh. Susan Crane has described the ritual of Maying as a kind of becoming-plant (“Maytime in Late Medieval Courts,” 174). Hobbyhorse plays, mummings, village rituals enacted at the changing of the seasons (May Day, Plough Monday, Christmas, New Year) engendered miraculous transfigurations, a surrender of the burden of humanity to fantastic new skins made of hides and painted cloth, to masks concatenated from animal skulls, agricultural tools, domestic objects, even from vegetables like turnips.20 Halfhuman stags, horses, and calves and a plenitude of other hybrid monsters were familiar as both images and as bodies in the process of becoming something other than themselves. Medieval Identity Machines is a book of possible bodies. Its pages are populated by a warband of demons, who in their shared corporeality

Introduction

tempt a solitary saint to abandon his hermit’s subjectivity; a perturbing flow of voice that separates itself from a woman’s mouth to reverberate through churches and books, to join itself to thunderstorms, to catalyze new possibilities of community; the composite body formed by the passionate union of a knight with his horse; Saracens who wear masks in order to resemble themselves; masochists whose sexual perversion is not their self-abnegation but their passion for history. Although mainly concerned with England and its borders (and especially with how those borders were maintained), this book examines materials derived from a span of almost eight hundred years, journeying from the inner struggles of eighth-century Mercia to the violence between Christians and Muslims over the Levant, from the literary explosion at the twelfth court of Champagne to a “boystows” cry arising from the mercantile port of Bishop’s Lynn. What unites the disparate medieval bodies that Medieval Identity Machines collects is an insistence that subjectivity is always enfleshed; that human identity is—despite the best efforts of those who possess it to assert otherwise—unstable, contingent, hybrid, discontinuous; that the work of creating a human body is never finished; that gender, race, sexuality, and nation are essential but not sufficiently definitive components of this production; that sometimes the most fruitful approach to a body or a text is to stop asking “What is it?” and to start following Deleuze and Guattari’s injunction to map what a body does. Medieval Identity Machines consists of six chapters, each of which examines possible bodies in relation to specific historical moments, examines the interspaces created between the stability of rigid social demarcation and a diffusive movement toward increased connection. Each utilizes in some form the collaborative and individual work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as well as the feminist reframing of their critical corpus by Elizabeth Grosz. Deleuzoguattarian “rhizomatics” and Lacanian psychoanalysis make strange bedfellows, but recent queer work in medieval studies has demonstrated that strange bedfellows are ultimately the most interesting ones.21 I have therefore also made use of the writings of
i
zek, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and especially Slavoj Z whose nuanced readings of the centrality of enjoyment to the structuration of ideology and fantasy are invaluable to anyone employing psychoanalysis to read the social. This hybrid methodology enables an investigation of the medieval as a site of infinite possibility, as an uncanny

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middle that can derail the somber trajectories of history and bring about pasts as yet undreamed. These chapters explore texts and events separated from contemporary readers by six hundred to twelve hundred years. “Time’s Machines,” chapter 1, therefore pauses to examine that which distinguishes medieval studies from more contemporary focused disciplines, the temporal distance of the field from its objects of study. Through a critical survey of recent work on temporality, I argue that time itself can be conceptualized within the same open, connective, machinic frame within which I read bodiliness and identity. Three loosely related schools of inquiry hold much promise for medievalists interested in thinking about time as something more than the linear unfolding of history: postcolonial theory, especially recent work by Antonio Benítez-Rojo that articulates a nontotalizing analytical frame for speaking about the heterogeneity of the Caribbean; critical temporal studies, especially within an emerging strain of thought derived from continental philosophy and now being amplified by Manuel de Landa and Elizabeth Grosz, arguing for a nonlinear dynamic to history; and corporeal theory, especially as the body at its fleshly limits is imagined by Michel Foucault when he unearths from the archive the lethal memoir of a parricide. What these three far from separate strains of thought have in common is a shared fascination with time’s destinationless trajectory, with the effects of temporal openness on human flesh, and with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. “Chevalerie,” the second chapter, turns to an engagement with an uncanny (or untimely) convergence: the body and its sexuality as imagined within queer theory, the academy’s most promising challenge to the boundedness of corporeality, and the identity machine constructed through the rigorous training of the aristocratic male body known as chivalry. With its challenge to all things natural and normative, queer theory would seem well poised to assist in an investigation of the limits of the human in the Middle Ages. Yet contemporary articulations of queerness tend to fall back into the essentializing materiality that they profess to discard, probably because they have not yet undertaken a critique of the humanism that underwrites their claims. The fluidity of the species line is the queerest, most effective medieval disruption of the imagined stability of the human. In medieval culture, the horse, its rider, the bridle and saddle and armor form a Deleuzian “circuit” or “assemblage,” a dispersive network of identity that admixes the inanimate and

Introduction

the inhuman. Manuals of chivalry, chansons de geste, and romances were fascinated by the commingling of man and horse, describing at length the bonds of desire that pulled one body toward the other to find in their union new possibilities of becoming. Chivalry contains within it two competing movements: a corporeal inventiveness that potentially unmoors the flesh from its solitary existence, and a social coding that attempts to delimit precisely the proper contours of the chivalric subject in order to produce a knight as docile at court as he is deadly in martial engagement. The knight and his horse must submit to a disciplinary regime which, if successful, will produce them as lawful, obedient subjects. The masochist realizes just how much is at stake in this social discipline, and surrenders himself so completely and with such bliss to its corporal machinery that he threatens to make the whole structure crumble. “Masoch/Lancelotism” argues that even as it mutates over time, masochism remains a strange constant in human history. Masochism is an inherently intersubjective sexuality that involves a transposition of quotidian relations of dominance and submission into new arenas of performance; a subsequent queering of that relationship through this theatricalization; the production of some surplus, of some narrative at once superfluous to the masochistic scene and absolutely necessary to its interpretation; and the introduction of revolutionary possibility, perversely dependent upon a loving embrace of the disciplinary structure of power. An introductory section brings together some classic work on male masochism by Richard von KrafftEbing, Sigmund Freud, Theodor Reik, and Kaja Silverman, arguing that trenchant social critique motivates this nonmajoritarian sexuality. I then turn to a close reading of two of history’s most famous masochists, the knight Lancelot and his equally self-abnegating creator, Chrétien de Troyes. The possible bodies envisioned by Chrétien’s romance are read within the twelfth-century redefinition of marriage as a contractual relationship predicated upon submission and consent. Lancelot’s adultery transposes this new structure of conjugal sexuality outside of its licit circuit, but nonetheless loves it, fetishizes it, for its authoritarian excess. This gesture of abasement then becomes the palimpsest for Chrétien’s inscription of the relation of patronage that connects him to Marie de Champagne. As Chrétien surrenders his power as author, he seeks invincible strength through self-dissolution, assertion through negation, an excess of visibility through an identity machine that brings about his

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vanishing. Masochism becomes a world-ordering assemblage that perversely strengthens the subjectivity it dissolves by breaking every border within which it comes into contact: body/text, patron/author, male/female, future/past. My discussion of medieval chivalry opens the widest spaces of possibility for the body, and subsequent chapters examine in more detail the series of constrictions against which identity machines labor. Chrétien’s Lancelot participates in the twelfth century obsession with delimiting the gendered roles of the matrimonial couple. “The Solitude of Guthlac,” the fourth chapter, details the social and historical forces in eighthcentury Mercia that embrace the expansive possibilities that inhere in human flesh only to diminish the body and fantasize its perfect analogy to the well-ordered community. Latin and Old English texts detailing Saint Guthlac’s fenland struggles do not record a lost time and place so much as interpose themselves into the subjectivity of their readers and auditors, attempting to reconfigure contemporary communities. Guthlac was a saint who came to know himself only by scattering his selfhood across a legion of demons. As these monstrous bodies attack Guthlac, they reveal themselves as fragments of his own history, the war of his enfleshed memory against himself. The demons figure the warband that Guthlac led in his youth—figure, that is, the dominant formulation of male identity available to eighth-century Mercians. In resisting the demonic call for a return to community, Guthlac stages a public rejection of secular, heroic masculinity and the intersubjectivity upon which it depends in favor of the solitary individualization of eremitic sanctity. Saints like Guthlac mapped new paths of masculine becoming for eighthcentury bodies, circumscribing the possible by attaching identity to constricted physical and psychological spaces. Guthlac’s body is a site of multiple overlap, condensing in its fantastic flesh recent histories of Mercian colonization and consolidation; a racialized imagination of “Anglo-Saxon” community predicated on the expulsion of the Britons as nonsensical monsters, as demons whose identities do not coalesce into human shape; a suturing point at which the dispersed identity of the contemporary island could imagine itself a unity, projecting into the future a Mercian hegemony characterized by solidity, racial integration, and a divinely mandated colonialist destiny. At the same time, by dispersing Guthlac’s “unfinished” body across an assemblage that includes

Introduction

a legion of frenzied demons and a text without obvious borders, a different model of the body in potentia is simultaneously advanced. The chivalry, masochism, and sanctity analyzed in these three chapters illuminate the complexities of medieval masculinity. Women figure prominently in many of the texts discussed (mothers and wives in chivalric romance, Guenevere in Chrétien’s narrative, even Guthlac’s sister in his vita), but the patriarchal bias of medieval culture assured that the textual record would be tilted toward the recordation of a dominating gender. This inequity was denounced and resisted by women like Christine de Pizan, who argued repeatedly for the importance of feminine presence and feminine voice. So, famously, did Margery Kempe. The Fens where Guthlac struggled against his infernal adversaries were eventually drained to form prosperous cities like Bishop’s Lynn, where the fifteenth-century mystic fought her entire life against the desire of others to render her a latter-day version of Guthlac, an anchoress immured in ecclesiastical stone. Kempe’s deadliest enemies were those who called her to a self-accounting in a discourse based upon her exclusion. Because she was a woman, because she was forbidden to speak of scripture, because every English word from her mouth could be turned against her by the community of Latin-speaking men intent on silencing her, Kempe deployed the extralinguistic power of tears, sobs, and screams. “The Becoming-Liquid of Margery Kempe” follows the mystic’s voice as it leads her out of her own body and into the vastness of cathedral, community, world. Lacanian theory holds the voice is an object, an alien presence to which subjectivity clings but which it cannot assimilate. Con
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zek, and Mladen Dolar to Deleuze joining work by Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Z and Guattari’s notion of an “unnatural alliance,” I argue that Kempe emptied herself from her self, exteriorizing her subjectivity by following her voice out of her body. Her sobs and cries were a “boystows,” an irradiating force that translated her divine experience into a wordless but instantly comprehensible flow of sound, allowing her to be understood across linguistic difference and failure. This exteriorizing impulse, moreover, intermingled Kempe with the sonority of tempests, birdsong, celestial melody. In a strange and—for her—unspeakable way, it also made her voice resonate not only as queer (as Carolyn Dinshaw has demonstrated) but as Jewish, as a racial other whose English words might be silenced but whose thunderous voice still echoed.

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The Jews of Lynn had been massacred in 1190, and those remaining in the kingdom had been expelled a century before Kempe was born, but her Book is typical of fifteenth-century texts in the attention that it pays to these absent figures. “On Saracen Enjoyment” examines how fantasies of the racial other come to exert such a tenacious grip over the cultural imaginary of their persecutors, becoming resistant to any subsequent historical change—including the complete removal of the monsterized group. The first section of this chapter sketches a brief overview of medieval race, arguing that race spread identity over an amalgam of biology, physiognomy, astrology, humoral serousness. The human body was medically viewed as porous, and so its contours, color, and internal workings were thought to be profoundly influenced by the impingement of climatological and celestial forces. Dark skin, often a morally neutral fact in the classical period, became an absolute marker of somatic deviance once the Crusades provided the impetus for reading the Saracen body as inherently inferior to the corpus Christianum. Fascinated narratives of the exorbitant sexuality and perverse desires of the Saracens began to circulate. That such “facts” about the racial other were impervious to later correction by an incongruent reality can be explained using the psychoanalytic notion of “enjoyment in the Other.” Fantasies of ethnic and racial alterity were typically sustained by locating in the Saracen or Jew enjoyment denied the Christian self, so that these detested others were persecuted to destroy something they never in fact actually possessed. This insight might seem too postmodern, but it forms the thesis of the Middle English romance The Sultan of Babylon (c. 1400), a narrative attempt to “traverse the fantasy” of the other’s enjoyment and divest late medieval England of its xenophobic impulses, acknowledging at once the intimacy of the other and the dispersiveness of the self. Medieval Identity Machines is, admittedly, a rather strange book. It prefaces an exploration of the queer mingling of man and animal in chivalry with a discussion of a renowned Anglo-Saxonist enjoying a naked nighttime swing. Chrétien de Troyes, putative first promulgator of courtly love, finds himself introduced by a happily married husband whose sexual performance depends upon a vividly imagined fantasy of castration by the biblical god Moloch. Margery Kempe, love-object extraordinaire of recent medieval studies, is analyzed not to discover her repressed voice but because that voice is thunder, a storm, the sound of a

Introduction

Hebrew God. The Middle Ages are read as a period no longer innocent of race. Celibacy becomes a kind of colonialism. A fascination with monsters and perversity and bodily fluids recurs throughout. I cannot argue that these chapters provide a truer Middle Ages, since I do not think we can ever really know—and that we do a reductive violence in trying to formulate—what the truth of such a vast geography and time period might be. Yet I do believe that these pages offer a more capacious Middle Ages than some previous accounts, one that grants an irreducible complexity to the cultural moments that it explores, as well as one that, I hope, conveys some of the enjoyment I have felt in applying Caroline Walker Bynum’s dictum “Every view of things that is not wonderful is false.”

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1 Time’s Machines

T How to think of direction or trajectory without being able to anticipate a destination? —Elizabeth Grosz, “Thinking the New” I confess to you, Lord, that I still do not know what time is, and I further confess to you, Lord, that as I say this I know myself to be conditioned by time. —Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

Although the adjective “exciting” is not often linked to the noun “medieval studies” in the popular imagination, these are in fact invigorating times in the field. Anyone who has kept abreast of the recent proliferation in journal articles, edited collections, and monographs surely recognizes that as a discipline medieval studies is critically engaged in a process of self-reinvention. A geography that had begun to seem too familiar feels somehow new, capable of inspiring that wonder (admiratio) so prized by medieval writers themselves.1 Yet however occupied medievalists have been with rethinking interpretive practices and idées reçues, we have yet to undertake a sustained examination of the very thing that distances medieval studies from more contemporary-focused disciplines. We have not yet approached critically the question of time. With a few notable exceptions, time has been doomed to the vast realm of that which is unthought, perhaps because it at once seems so obvious (as did

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gender and race, until recently), and on closer examination seems impossible. “What then is time?” Augustine of Hippo famously wondered. “Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know” (Confessions, XI.xiv). Few of us would dare second guess Augustine, especially because whenever something new arrives in critical theory, it so often turns out that the African bishop was there long before. To speak of time is difficult, if not baffling, and for that reason alone time deserves closer analysis. Contemporaneous to but not yet intersecting with the recent vigor of medieval studies is a burgeoning critical literature on temporality, an interdisciplinary dialogue to which philosophers, feminists, physicists, cultural theorists, social psychologists, and literary scholars have been contributing. This chapter examines some of this recent work in its potential relevance to the study of the Middle Ages. Medieval writers were just as enamored of investigating the complexities of both temporality (the nature and working of time) and history (the transformation of time into narrative) as recent theorists have been. Medievalists have in turn adroitly examined the topic in monographs, scholarly essays, and editions and translations of texts.2 My aim here, however, is not to analyze medieval time “from the inside,” employing an authentic conceptual language drawn from surviving treatises on the subject in an attempt to get medieval time “right.”3 This introductory chapter might instead be described as Boethian in its methodological ambitions. The author of five orthodox tractates on theology, Boethius decided in his Consolation of Philosophy not to employ the language of Christian exegesis, but utilized exclusively the terminology and imagery of classical philosophoi and auctores. Within this estranging discourse he meditated upon divine providence and the relation of a single man’s suffering to the eternity of time in which it is encased. By thinking the system from its exterior, by employing an unfaithful conceptual mode that could only by the fifth century be labeled anachronistic, Boethius was able to ponder the structure of the world anew. More humbly, my intention is to survey recent critical work on temporality to discover how time might be thought beyond some of its conventional parameters, outside of reduction into a monologic history (especially when “history” is understood as either simple context or a chain of flat, serial causality), outside of enchainment into progress narratives, with their “ever upwards” movement of evolutionary betterment and abandonment of the past for a predestined,

Time’s Machines

superior future, and outside of linearization, the weary process through which a past is not encountered for its own possibilities, but either distanced as mere antecedent or explored only to understand better the present and to render predictable the future. In fidelity to the themes of this book, I am most interested in engagements with time that stress the open-ended movements of becoming over the immobilities of being, that stress mutating interconnections over the stabilities of form. By rethinking temporality as “unfinished,” intimately entwining the past within “the future we must live” (Patterson, Negotiating the Past, 45), medieval studies can productively form alliances with three closely related schools of analysis: critical temporal studies, a field of inquiry that receives its inspiration from sources as diverse as continental philosophy and particle physics; postcolonial theory, not only in its traditionally invoked arena of English India, but also within an analytical frame derived (for example) from the study of the Caribbean; and corporeal theory, that disparate field devoted to the exploration of the human body in all its perverse potential.4 The common thread that I will follow through these intertwined discourses is their shared interest in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s work on machinic assemblages, on what I have been calling identity machines, ever-active conglomerations of animated parts that resist constitution into those bounded and eternal wholes that fascinated Augustine and Boethius. One of the most important texts on medieval chronology, Bede’s Little Book Concerning the Fleeting and Wave-tossed Course of Time (known in English succinctly but unpoetically as The Reckoning of Time) concludes, naturally enough, with a discussion of “the eternal stability and stable eternity” of paradise (71). Time’s machines offer no such “blessed repose,” but operate in ceaseless motion, in strange middle spaces unperturbed by questions of delineative beginnings or definitive ends.

Nonlinear Dynamics Time is not a whole, for the simple reason that it is itself the instance that prevents the whole. —Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs

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Time, it is often assumed, is an autonomous stream of unfolding events, a unidirectional movement organizing past, present, and future. This horizontal alignment is often referred to as “time’s arrow” or “clock time.” In highly industrialized countries, the omnipresent wristwatches, wall clocks, and digital displays attached to everything from the exteriors of banks to microwave ovens and cell phones assume that time is discrete and quantifiable. Time might flow unceasingly in the chronologic model, but it can nonetheless be arrested via division into measurable units of recordable duration and regular repetition (I am writing these words at 5:17 AM, according to the menu bar clock on my laptop, a time that will repeat in precisely twenty-four hours, ad infinitum). Because it is part of a system of culture, clock time can also be exchanged for other things that come to be closely associated with it, such as money (via labor) or redemption (via prayer). With its insistence on universality and predictability, clock time is the indispensable base of any capitalist society: how could interest be compounded or appointments kept without a division of temporal flow into years, months, minutes, hours, seconds? Jacques Le Goff labels the medieval version of clock time “merchant’s time,” and sees in the twelfth century fairs of Champagne an international nexus of commerce obsessed with precise temporal measurement, integral to “the orderly conduct of business.”5 Merchants who reaped profits from speculation and credit were condemned by clerics for selling time, which belonged to God alone, but both groups were united in their faith that time consisted of a past and present organized by an immutable eschatology.6 The church and the laity likewise agreed that lived time was knowable through computus, the science of constructing an accurate calendar. Even if it could be fragmented into potentially commidifiable pieces, medieval time was ultimately a totalized system, bounded by eternity (Augustine’s nunc stans, the celestial “immutable now” from which temporal, created beings were excluded) and guaranteed by an omniscient divinity who dwelled, like all master signifiers, at that system’s exterior.7 Such standardized and reassuringly stable conceptualizations bear little resemblance to temporality as described by contemporary philosophers, scientists, and some non-Western societies. Clifford Geertz argued that time in Balinese culture does not move, but exists in a kind of eternal present.8 The Kachin and the Hopi, according to Edward Hall, speak languages that do not employ verb tenses. They represent time not as

Time’s Machines

quantity but as intensity (“summer is a condition: hot”).9 Biological time like the circadian rhythms, pulsing in their primal regularity, is composed of interlaced cycles that are not synchronous with the twenty-four hours of the clock’s day. Julia Kristeva uses a psychoanalytic framework to argue that female subjectivity partakes of a uniquely gendered time very different from the linear modalities of masculinist history and civilization. Against “monumental temporality, without cleavage or escape,” Kristeva posits women’s time, cyclic repetitions that are at once extrasubjective, pre- or anti-human, and profoundly maternal (“Women’s Time”). According to physics, time is irregular and not strictly predictable in its flows. Relative rather than absolute, time can speed up, slow down, grind almost to a standstill. Stephen Hawking even writes of “imaginary time” in which there is no difference between forward and backward (Brief History of Time, 148). Bruno Latour goes so far as to dismiss as a modernist fantasy the idea that time ineluctably progresses. An effect rather than a cause, time (Latour argues) is “not a general framework but a provisional result of the connection among entities.”10 History and periodization are therefore the byproducts of such networks, “collectives of humans and nonhumans” in which ideas and entities circulate, mutate, vanish, and re-emerge but do not inevitably ameliorate or evolve (We Have Never Been Modern, 77). In Latour’s formulation, time is unloosed from the flat space of teleology, from determinative reference to origin and destiny. “No one has ever been modern,” he declares in his confidently nonprogressivist mode, “Modernity has never begun” (We Have Never Been Modern, 47). “Do we live in the same time or different times?” With this disarmingly simple question Rita Felski identifies what might be called the temporal crux: is time universal and uniform, or multiplicitous and particular? Do we inhabit shared or incommensurable worlds, coeval or discontinuous moments? “Is it possible,” Felski wonders, “to carve up the continuum of time into segments, to talk meaningfully about men’s time and women’s time, Western time and non-Western time?” (Doing Time, 1). Such an articulation of temporality may seem postmodern, with its delight in difference and the power of the partial. Yet postmodernism, Felski argues, disavows “overarching laws of development governing temporal processes” while nonetheless deploying a problematic model of history. Conceptualizing time as a triumphal succession of epochal stages

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(medieval to modern to postmodern) and attendant sequences of enlightenment, postmodernism has been unjust to women and minorities because it has for the most part denied these groups temporal depth.11 Time might lose its arrow in the postmodern model, lose its unidirectional purposiveness, yet postmodernism’s new and “dazzling plurality” is, according to Felski, content to imagine that the disenfranchised possess only a present, never a deep history (3). Felski’s feminist intervention into the problem of doing justice to the past is to advance a vertical model of temporality. Like Latour, she rejects the purity of periodization and the isolating force of epochs for a messy but mappable interlacement: Individual groups have their own distinct histories, rhythms, and temporalities quite apart from traditional forms of periodization. History is not one broad river, but a number of distinct and separate streams, each moving at its own pace and tempo. . . . Women qua women, for example, have a unique relationship to time outside conventional, male-centered forms. Feminine difference pervades the entirety of history rather than being confined to a particular epoch. (Doing Time, 3) Felski refuses the traditional metaphor of a singular “river of time” because the narrow banks of such a waterway would reduce the world’s immensity into a normative evolutionary framework. Yet Felski’s alternative figuration of numerous but “distinct and separate” temporal streams fails an argument that stresses sameness within difference. Her interpretive frame implies temporal contiguities while metaphorically disallowing them. Streams, after all, have both an origin and a clearly discernable end, the arche of a mountainous source and the telos of the ocean’s embrace. Perhaps time is not in fact possessed of some fluvial purity, but finds its companion element in the liquid solidity of lava, in geological strata, in sedimentations of rocks. Hybridizing physics and history, Manuel De Landa argues that time is possessed of a nonlinear dynamic. History, in this formulation, does not have an exterior, is not possessed by goals outside itself such as evolutionary progress, equilibrium, or a drive towards advanced civilization. De Landa labels the familiar stages of human culture (hunter-gatherer, agriculturalist, city dweller) as phase transitions that are not amenable to a simple developmental hierarchy:

Time’s Machines

Much as water’s solid, liquid, and gas phases may coexist, so each new human phase simply added itself to the other ones, coexisting and interacting with them without leaving them in the past. Moreover, much as given material may solidify in alternative ways (as ice or snowflake, as crystal or glass), so humanity liquefied and later solidified in different forms. . . . In other words, human history did not follow a straight line, as if everything pointed toward civilized societies as humanity’s ultimate goal. On the contrary, at each bifurcation alternative stable states were possible, and once actualized, they coexisted and interacted with one another.12 Time, according to De Landa, can therefore be described as geological. It flows in places, hardens in others, irregularly, with frequent crystalizations (individuated moments of self-organization), drift, unpredictable movements toward increased or decreased complexity. As the sheer materiality of these images makes clear, this conceptualization of time contains within it the possibility for temporal short circuits. The present, always a work in progress, might encounter within itself the sedimented past, thence to erupt with the intensity of an unanticipated future. Gilles Deleuze, a philosopher instrumental to De Landa’s work, has similarly argued that “the past and the present do not denote two successive moments, but two elements which coexist: One is the present, which does not cease to pass, and the other is the past, which does not cease to be but through which all presents pass” (Bergsonism, 59). De Landa is among a growing cadre of philosophers engaged in a rigorous rethinking of temporality by abandoning traditional chronometrics and chronology, describing time instead as movement and becoming. Building on the work of Nietzsche, Bergson, and (of course) Deleuze, Elizabeth Grosz likewise writes that clock time is not abstracted from scientific observation or analysis, but is instead the imposition of a regularizing structure (“Thinking the New,” 17). She argues that time is activity, difference, and “a repetition [that] is never the generation of the same but the motor of the new” (“Thinking the New,” 5). A model that is at once “wholistic and fragmentary,” Grosz’s articulation of temporality has as its main strength the ability to conceptualize outside of some pregiven relation the interlacement of past, present, and future. Time becomes an “intrication and elaboration . . . that frees up, undetermines,

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and deflects rather than causes” or mechanistically repeats (“Thinking the New,” 28), opening the present to difference, upsetting and resorting a past that is many-layered, complex, too full, as well as pregnant with possible futures. To “free up” and “undetermine” the Middle Ages is precisely the goal of those medievalists who have begun to realize that in order to transform their discipline, they will have to supplant the predictability of history with philosophically complex notions of temporality. In the memorable words of Lee Patterson, historicism, the dominant impulse in the field, “is always discontented” (Negotiating the Past, xiii). D. Vance Smith has therefore called for what he describes as “irregular histories,” accounts of oblivion rather than of memory, of the possible rather than of the predictable or the supposedly inevitable. “To think differently about the Middle Ages,” he writes, “may amount to thinking differently about the world” (“Irregular Histories,” 178). L. O. Aranye Fradenburg argues that psychoanalysis can move medievalists, “specialists in temporal alterity,” to a more complex engagement with the past than the boundary-drawing mediations of historicism (“‘Be not far from me’”). Carolyn Dinshaw argues for time-bending “queer histories,” glossed as “affective relations across time” (Getting Medieval, 142), that touch the past “to build selves and communities now and into the future” (206). Nicholas Watson likewise negotiates the temporal intricacies of the past’s life in and for the present through an affective “zigzag” reading that embraces history’s tactility (“Desire for the Past”), while Paul Strohm argues that medieval texts like Chaucer’s Troilus are composed of multiple, “alien temporalities,” or “residues of an unexhausted past” provocatively conjoined to “intimations of an uncompleted or unrealized future.”13 Michelle Warren locates medieval historiography in a border zone that is as temporal as it is geographic.14 Catherine Brown in a special issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies devoted to “Decolonizing the Middle Ages” convolutes the temporal trajectory of the journal’s theme and ponders what it would “feel like to be colonized by the Middle Ages” (“In the Middle,” 551). What if “time turns around on itself,” she asks, what if the medieval and modern are coeval?15 After all, having carefully studied the dynamics of chronology (consideratis temporibus), Augustine concluded that Plato took all his good ideas from Christ.16 Critical temporal studies holds much promise for renewing the medieval, but as an emergent discipline it has both weaknesses and blind

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spots, especially in its unthought presentism and its difficulty relating time to historical bodies. Grosz tends to privilege the unforeseen future and the emergence of the new to such an extent that she deracinates both. The past is often either wholly omitted from consideration or becomes so abstract that it lacks any particular content. Manuel De Landa argues that time is not only geological but biological, a circulation of flesh, genes, and “biomass,” yet the section of A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History on “Biological History” (103–79) is mainly about medieval towns in their dependence upon nonhuman life and their “conversion of the world into a supply region to fuel economic growth” (106). The flesh and genes that he describes include bodies, plants, and microorganisms in their relation to urban structures, climate, ecosystem—an exuberant commingling in which some of the raced and gendered specificities of human bodies are unfortunately lost. I would like to conclude this section on critical temporal studies by considering an apparently minor episode in a recent, best-selling book on time’s malleability to reassert the medievalist mantra that history matters. Even when certain transtemporal claims have been accepted about time (about its openness, about its lack of a fixed trajectory or eschatos), the localized cultural matrix or meshwork within which time moves cannot be disregarded. Time unfolds and enfolds within “individuations,” creating what Duns Scotus called “haecceities,” historical differentiations and particulars. Time therefore cannot be divorced from the material and social world, from particular significations and from particular bodies. The social psychologist Robert Levine has gained an international reputation for his studies of how various cultures keep time differently. In A Geography of Time, Levine concludes that time is variable across culture because tempo (“the pace of life,” “the flow or movement of time”) is culturally relative. Temporal flow is quickest, Levine concludes, within industrialized cities possessed of booming economies, large populations, cool climates, and “a cultural orientation toward individualism” (Geography of Time, 9). Tempo for Levine is a measurable phenomenon, extracted via observation of quotidian events like the speed at which a randomly selected pedestrian traverses a crowded street. If time is discernable in the movement of bodies across space, we should expect Levine to conclude that time is, therefore, an embodied phenomenon. As he details the different temporal flows of Rio, Boston, Japan, African villages, however, one of the surprises of Levine’s research is that his devotion to

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detailing the velocity of human bodies in abstract aggregates prevents him from examining the contingent and the local. In New York, for example, the researcher encounters insurmountable resistance as he attempts to replicate one of his standardized transactions for measuring time, a protest that when taken seriously casts his project of transforming bodies into temporal quantities in a very different light. In an experiment conducted in numerous cities throughout the United States and in thirty other countries, a single postage stamp of standard denomination is purchased using a handwritten note in the local language. Payment is always made with the equivalent of a five-dollar bill. The transaction is timed, recorded, and compared with the identical transactions that have been performed elsewhere in order to discover which locales have the fastest tempo. When conducted at a post office in New York City, however, the experiment does not unfold according to plan: In the main post office (the proud owner of zip code 10001), one clerk held my note over her head, and proceeded to announce, very slowly and very loudly, to the line behind me and to much of midtown Manhattan: “YOU . . . MEAN . . . TO . . . TELL . . . ME . . . THAT. . . YOU . . . WANT. . . ONE . . . LOUSY. . . STAMP . . . AND . . . YOU’RE . . . GIVING . . . ME . . . A . . . [speaking even more slowly and loudly now, her cadence beginning to sound like the score from Bolero] . . . FIVE . . . DOLLAR . . . BILL?” After a short pause, and a handful of double takes at both the note and me, she cranked up the volume a few more decibels, announcing “GOD, HOW I HATE THIS CITY.” Not only was this my most embarrassing moment as a researcher, but her speech so frightened me I forgot to time her progress. (133–34) The episode is presented in Levine’s text as a humorous anecdote, and indeed it is quite amusing in context. But anyone who, like Levine, bought a postage stamp in midtown Manhattan during the early 1990s is likely to suspect something more lies behind the story than a typical illustration of infamous “New Yawker” rudeness. Levine steps to the woman’s window and says nothing. He presents her with a note asking for a single stamp and pays with a large sum of money relative to the meager purchase. He expects her to comply without question, comment, or evaluation (she is not supposed to have input into his experi-

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ment; she exists purely in order to record the amount of time her body consumes in order to fulfill a task, and within the parameters of the exercise possesses no history or desires). One gets the feeling that what Levine really wants from this postal worker in New York City is the “luxury service” that he encountered in Japan, where clerks wrapped stamps in little packages and provided receipts, unbidden (133). What he receives instead are the angry words of a specific person in a specific place whose refusal to play along with his demand for silence and obedient service condemns his abstract experiment’s blindness to its context of gender, of class, and—more likely than not—of race at an especially troubled time in the city’s history. Levine exorcises the embodied rebuke of this New York moment to the abstract time in which the experiment supposedly unfolds by transforming it into a humorous anecdote, by dissipating its force into dismissive laughter. Despite absorption into decorporealized abstraction, time remains a phenomenon of the body, a possibility and a constraint of specific bodies in historically explicable relations of power. These are lessons in temporality that Levine could have learned from that burgeoning conglomeration of fields known as postcolonial studies, a loosely affiliated set of disciplinary practices that finds as one common value the necessity of localizing identity machines, of excavating their embedment in histories of race and gender and unequal distributions of power, of seeing in their functioning processes of cultural admixture, conflict, hybridization.

Islands and Middles How does one encounter the past as an anteriority that continually introduces an otherness or alterity into the present? —Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture Unlike Hamlet’s description of unknown futures, time is probably less an “undiscover’d country” than a postcolonial expanse. Medieval studies has long known that its lands, peoples, texts are nearly always indelibly marked by long histories of colonization, resistance, assimilation, coexistence. This section explores some recent scholarship on another

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hybrid geography, the Caribbean, to suggest the ways in which a particularly Deleuzian strain of thought in postcolonial theory might be useful to medievalists interested in rethinking the relations among space, time, and cultural admixture in their discipline, as well as to theorists of the contemporary postcolonial who might want to account with greater depth for the temporal complexities of colonialism’s histories. A vastness of islands scattered over a confluence of troubled seas, the Caribbean is difficult to totalize. Produced over centuries through multiple colonizations (five European tongues have mingled with numerous aboriginal and African languages, catalyzing hundreds of dialects, creoles, pidgins), Caribbean space is diverse, a place of categorydefying syncretism, symbiosis, fusion. Collective designation, moreover, runs the risk of simply repeating the colonialist demand that the heterogeneity of the islands be reduced into some neatly describable territory in order to better dominate its supposed disorder with Western technologies of government and industry. In his attempt to articulate the “discontinuous conjunction” of this wide expanse, Antonio Benítez-Rojo deploys a conceptual construct that he labels la isla que se repite, the “repeating island” or “meta-archipelago.” Because a chain of islands consists of a territorial harmony, a geographic unity plotted across the still space of a map, Benítez-Rojo insists that such a domineering view can never capture the fullness of Caribbean reality. Possessed of neither center nor absolute limits, indifferent to any precision of green spots fixed with individuating latitudes and longitudes in an ocean of blue, the meta-archipelago that he describes is not a collection of islands but an amalgam of “processes, dynamics and rhythms” conjoining familiar repetitions of history to unexpected eruptions of the new. The Caribbean meta-archipelago gathers into loose alliance a volatile mixture of phenomena not amenable to easy synthesis: “unstable condensations, turbulences, whirlpools, clumps of bubbles, frayed seaweed, sunken galleons, crashing breakers, flying fish, seagull squawks, downpours, nighttime phosphorescences, eddies and pools, uncertain voyages of signification” (The Repeating Island, 2–3). This sensuous mélange assembles into animated conjunction the geographic, the topological, the natural, the human, the mythic, the material, covering “the map of world history’s contingencies, through the great changes in economic discourse to the vast collisions of races and cultures that humankind has seen” (5). Lands, waters, and histories exist in a dispersed togetherness that never

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congeals into finite unity. In an essay that Benítez-Rojo does not cite, Gilles Deleuze similarly envisions a conceptual archipelago that could also be described as anti-universalist, conjugative, perspectivist, “an affirmation of a world in process”: Not even a puzzle, whose pieces when fitted together would constitute a whole, but rather a wall of loose, uncemented stones, where every element has its value in itself but also in relation to others: isolated and floating relations, islands and straits, immobile points and sinuous lines . . . an infinite patchwork with multiple joinings.17 Within remarkably similar poetics of fluidity and movement, Deleuze and Benítez-Rojo independently transform the quotidian archipelago into an aqueous assemblage that has less to do with actual islands than with a multiply connected meshwork of scattered “middles” that might decenter the world, but does not necessitate the abandonment of speaking about that world’s shared immensity. The meta-archipelago, BenítezRojo writes in summary, is a restless machine of uncertain borders, of unceasing flux (5). Postcolonial theory directed toward the study of the Americas has a tendency to describe western Europe as a community of nations with a shared set of values, especially in the outward thrust of their imperial zeal. Even within national boundaries, European countries are imagined to be homogeneous: the French, the English, the Spanish, and so on are supposed to have discrete identities intimately tied to the stable and apparently natural boundaries of their homelands. Europe is thus composed of coherent corporate entities with a tendency to act uniformly, even when in competition with each other. In describing the exploitation machine erected by Columbus as a kind of “medieval vacuum cleaner” that sucked resources from the New World for deposit on distant shores, Benítez-Rojo can therefore assume that Europe acted as a singular agent in perfecting a structure that was initially rather inept, augmenting its Columbian bricolage with la flota (the machine formed of ships, ports, and flows of raw material and wealth), missionaries deployed to effect religious transformation, plantations with their adaptable structures for quick implementation and lasting domination, “an entire huge assemblage of machines” (8) whose conjunction enabled

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efficient colonization and maximum profit.18 Medievalists who study the European West are unlikely, however, to recognize the singular geographical actor at the receiving end of this impressive apparatus. Strangely enough, it is the culture of the meta-archipelago and the dynamic Caribbean machine that reverberate as possible figurations for the psychical and cultural complexity of the occidental Middle Ages.19 Recent work in medieval studies has undercut the possibility of assuming a transhistorical, corporate identity for Europe, arguing that the term organizes into an imaginary totality communities that did not necessarily perceive themselves as part of any such grand collective.20 Linguistically and culturally diverse, connected by shifting alliance and multiple affiliation, medieval Europa was a machine animated as much by conquest, alliance, and shared history (consolidating or integrative movements) as by violent counterstruggle and ultimate inassimilability (eruption, assertion, sedimentation of difference). Benítez-Rojo is writing of a specific time and place in their relation to constitutive histories and topographies, of a geotemporality of which the Middle Ages knew nothing and that—“medieval vacuum cleaners” aside—had in turn little knowledge of the European medium aevum. Yet his “polyrhythmic” conceptual figurations are useful in struggling toward a language in which to collect an entity as big as the western Middle Ages even while insisting upon the inherent inadequacy and potential violence that all such generalization performs. What if like the Caribbean space described by Benítez-Rojo the western Middle Ages consists of islands of difference made contiguous through the shared embrace of turbulent, confluential seas? Bede, after all, described the flow of time (lapsus temporum) as both “churning” (volubilis) and “wave-tossed” (fluctivagus).21 Why not extend Bede’s oceanic metaphors to include the possibility of more solid spaces within the temporal flux? Some of these islands might, like the barren outcroppings sought by early Irish eremites, stand in relative isolation. Most, however, would be more like monkish Iona. The loneliness of this supposedly remote island dissipates the moment we recall that Saint Columba assembled there a polyglot community drawn from many nations; that the monastery that he founded was visited with some regularity by merchants from Gaul; that flows of books and boats and pilgrims traversed its shores; that little Iona’s history is inseparable from epic battles waged in Ireland and Scotland, from the consolidation of a Christian Northumbria by Oswald, from the missionary effort to convert those Pictish kingdoms

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now lost to history.22 Adomnán, Columba’s eventual successor and composer of his vita, even entertained at the monastery a storm-tossed pilgrim returning from the Holy Land.23 The Life of Saint Columba is a weirdly heterogeneous text, as likely to narrate a relentlessly local anecdote about a demon dwelling in the bottom of a milk pail or the saint’s predicting an imminent spilled inkpot as to provide a sweeping evocation of how this “island at the edge of the ocean” disseminates miracles known beyond “the three corners of Spain and Gaul and Italy beyond the Alps.”24 Iona in the Life is not ultimately much of an island. Even when Columba resides on its rocky shores his spirit wanders, participating in distant martial clashes, communing with angelic visitors, scattering his selfhood across the wide world. The Life of Saint Columba textually performs this sacred fluidity, resolutely refusing linear chronology or recognizable biography. Names and events recur irregularly; sometimes Columba is dead and sometimes he is alive; the action often unfolds in Iona, but sometimes we are in Ireland, or among the Picts, or watching the Loch Ness monster attack. We are constantly transported across marine expanses without transitional signals, taken back to Iona without warning, in movements that draw together distant geotemporalities without synthesizing them into a homogeneous whole. The western Middle Ages as expanse of diverse conceptual isles means existence in intimate, unexpected connection through the swirl of manifold currents, through swiftly changing movements that rapidly commix flows of peoples, goods, ideas, armies, languages, architectures, books, genes, religions, affects, animals, technologies. Scatterings of lands gathered in their mutual relations, gathered with the currents that animate but do not totalize them, a medieval meta-archipelago would lack fixed boundaries and contain multiple centers.25 European cultures, communities, nations become relational and provisional imaginings rather than ontological, self-possessed wholes. Think, for example, of Custance in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale, inscribing a colonial trajectory at once provincially English and transnationally Christian upon a world that includes Syria, Rome, Northumberland. A meta-archipelago requires that this cosmos be seen not only through that imperial gaze that frames the narrative, but also through the eyes of the Sultaness, the Northumbrians, Custance herself as a woman caught in a gendered game of cultural, religious, mercantile, bodily exchange. David Nirenberg has demonstrated that violence not only established medieval communities of diversity,

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but was integral to sustaining them (Communities of Violence). As the Man of Law’s Tale also indicates, violence plays an important role in the instigation and maintenance of the flows that forcibly bind one conceptual island in the medieval archipelago to another. Yet, in a kind of decolonization, the meta-archipelago enables the supposed margins of Europe to lose their status as peripheral geographies, so that Wales, Ireland, Brittany, Iceland, the Midi, Catalonia become centers in their own right, dynamic points of reception and dispersal in an open meshwork of transverse, transformative differences. No circumscribing map could capture the proliferating fullness of such islands, for every time the borders of a homogeneous Britannia seem to have been securely delineated, another story begins to circulate of some interior, underground civilization where the people speak a long dead language, have green skin, or give other marks of their fairy alterity, of their inassimilable difference to an island that will never achieve its ambition of becoming a well-ordered self-same.26 These “figures of secret and unknown origin” (as Gervase of Tilbury called them) inhabited the interiors of mountains and ruled submarinal demesnes. Even the skies were populated by alien navigators of inscrutable intent. In the Otia imperiala, Gervase describes how a congregation leaving church beholds an anchor falling from the sky. In the distant clouds sailors can be heard struggling to pull the device back aboard their ship. Soon one of these mariners shimmies down the rope, hand over hand. He is immediately seized by the crowd, struggles for his life, and drowns because the “moistness of our denser air” is intolerable to his etheradapted lungs.27 When “our” previously invisible air becomes weighty enough to function as someone else’s sea, then “our” skies become the currents by which the medieval archipelago exuberantly connects difference to sameness in unanticipated ways. In mentioning such fantastic peoples living below the earth, under the waters, and in the clouds along with the real denizens of places like Wales and Ireland—people who were themselves sometimes represented in just such “magical” and dehumanizing ways in order to exaggerate the challenge that they posed to English hegemony—my intention is not to take any measure of concrete, lived reality away from any denizen of the medieval archipelago but rather, in sympathy with a medieval impulse, to populate its land, seas, and air with as much life as possible, to restore to this world its vastness, its vitalism, its irreducible heterogeneity.

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As David Wallace observes in his “General Preface” to The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, the Middle Ages have been badly treated by scholars who desired to find in them a “future that comes too early”—who wanted to discover the same delineations of nation and imperial power that they unproblematically celebrate in their own present. Wallace’s succinct, insightful reading of The Cambridge History of the British Empire (first volume published 1929) and Cambridge History of English Literature (first volume 1907) emphasizes the awkwardness that such teleological rhetoric engenders. Because medieval England with its “plurality of languages” was “a culture more colonized than colonizing,” no “secure point of origin for imperial history” exists, mandating that the Middle Ages be commemorated in order to be quickly forgotten (xii–xiii). In contrast, Wallace’s own edited volume ambitiously aims for and largely achieves a “dizzying complexity” of cultures, languages, and material realities (xiv). In envisioning a British Isles resistant to harmonization rather than a unified and premature England, The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature attains something like the archipelago-like spread articulated by Benítez-Rojo. In the dazzling series of chapters labeled “Writing in the British Isles” (179–309), sections on Wales, Scotland, and Ireland are allowed to “write their histories, so to speak, from the inside out (with the English sometimes visible, sometimes not)” (179). In decentering the island into a scattered multiplicity, the volume’s project is admirable, even awesome. It therefore feels almost criminal to critique its achievement, especially because Wallace’s editorial restructuring of how insular history gets narrated will be felt in the field for a long time, catalyzing further decolonizations of the “English” Middle Ages. Yet one might object that within the large geographic and collective structures that the volume keeps in place, communities of difference (what Anne McClintock calls the “internally colonized”) are left out, are rendered ineligible to write their histories.28 The preface to this bulky and inclusive book argues that the chapter on London in the “Writing in the British Isles” section “must stand in, methodologically, for accounts of other places that have yet to be written, cannot yet be written, or have found no space for inclusion here.” Among these excluded narratives are “the writings and public inscriptions of the Jews” (xvi). One cannot say that such a Jewish account cannot be written; see, for example, the documentary narration of exactly

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this history in Joseph Jacobs, The Jews of Angevin England, published in 1893. That such an account has simply “found no space for inclusion here” is not a reassuring explanation for why a volume notable for its capacious embrace of cultural difference nonetheless presents an unselfconsciously Christian—and therefore an ultimately singular and reduced—Middle Ages. A reconsideration of geographical emplacement is as vital to the future of the Middle Ages as it is to the analysis of Caribbean and other postcolonial spaces. Just as importantly, as Wallace has already implied, within these places of shared histories conjoined to disparate experience and expression, time likewise loses its smooth universality, its exteriority, its rigidity. While contemporary critical theory has developed a sophisticated vocabulary for dealing with that which is unheimlich (uncanny, unhome-ly, out of place), a problem just now being explored is that posed by the untimely. Without much further elaboration, Antonio BenítezRojo observes that inside the fluid and sinuous Caribbean machine, time “unfolds irregularly and resists being captured by the cycles of clock and calendar” (11). Benítez-Rojo’s throwaway observation can be usefully extended using recent work by other postcolonial theorists.29 The Caribbean, the medieval West, English India, and any other geography produced through colonizations are likewise composed of multiple, hybridized temporalities, of what Sara Suleri has called disparate, thick, “colonial intimacies” in which time unfolds differently at different vantage points, according to divergent “logics of origin.”30 The adjective “postcolonial” has been accommodated comfortably enough into the contemporary critical lexicon for the hyphen that used to divide its constituent parts to vanish. This disappearing punctuation, like all ghosts, tells an interesting story about time. “Post-colonial” suggests straightforwardly enough that a historical period exists that is after colonialism. “Postcolonial,” the hyphen digested but its constituent elements bumping against each other without synthesis, has come to signify a temporal contiguity to rather than an evolutionary difference from the noun that forms its linguistic base. The postcolonial can be said to originate “from the very first moment of colonial contact,” as a “discourse of oppositionality which colonialism brings into being.”31 Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge describe the postcolonial as “a splinter in the side of the colonial itself,” leading Michelle R. Warren to conclude that postcolonial theory opens a window “into any time or place where one social group dominates

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another.”32 Just as there was never a time before colony, there has never yet been a time when the colonial has been outgrown, left behind. For this reason Gayatri Spivak has suggested replacing “postcolonial” with “neocolonial,” but for accuracy’s sake it would make more sense to speak of the “midcolonial”: the time of “always-already,” an intermediacy that no narrative can pin to a single moment of history in its origin or end.33 Anne McClintock has cautioned that the term “postcolonial” is nonetheless haunted by a “commitment to linear time and the idea of ‘development’” (“The Angel of Progress,” 85). One could go farther and argue that postcolonial theory in practice has neglected the study of the “distant” past, positing instead of interrogating the anteriority against which modern regimes of power have supposedly arisen. This exclusionary model of temporality denies the possibility that traumas, exclusions, violence enacted centuries ago might still linger in contemporary identity formations. It also closes off the possibility that this past could be multiple and valuable enough to contain (and be contained within) alternative presents and futures. No definition of postcolonial theory has gained the same citational weight as that by Homi Bhabha: “Postcolonial criticism bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority within the modern world order.”34 Postcolonial interventions into the “discourses of modernity” fragment the clean and easy identity narratives that cultures tell themselves, offering “critical revisions” that stress difference, conflict, and (to cite Bhabha citing Habermas) “widely scattered historical contingencies” (The Location of Culture, 171). “Bearing witness” would seem to be an activity one does in the present in order to address a recent past—thus the haunting of Bhabha’s definition by the modern. Yet there is nothing especially recent about the “differential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races,” social antagonism, and irreducible difference he describes.35 Indeed, the temporal boundaries that Bhabha draws seem especially arbitrary in that an important challenge offered by this essay and by his work in general is a rethinking of temporality itself from a postcolonial perspective. The progress narratives of that traditional history that has left its traces in the names assigned to the major epochs of the West declare that the Middle Ages began in darkness and ended at a rebirth that rendered them obsolete. As the possible alliance between the contemporary Caribbean, English India, and the medieval West suggests, however, a

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progressive or teleological history in which time is conceived as mere seriality and flat chronology is inadequate to the task of thinking the meanings and trauma of the past, its embeddedness in place, its active relation to the future.36 Once homogeneity and hierarchizing, developmental, or overarching models are denied history, time becomes an active component within the open structure of alliance that both BenítezRojo and Deleuze call a machine, an assemblage “of diverse elements . . . which generates new structures without homogenizing the components . . . the emergence of a form, a form in which the materials themselves have a say.”37 An advantage, moreover, of conceptualizing temporality as multiply centered movements among unstable isles rather than as a unidirectional river is that distance in space no longer implies distance in time. Too often that which is geographically far from some ideological center is represented as primitive and undeveloped, so that travel toward the periphery is coded as travel back in time. Because it possesses no margins per se, the medieval archipelago resists such easy conflation. Dublin and St. David’s c. 1300 are no more nor less backward than London c. 1300 or Washington DC c. 2001. Creation of a nonspatialized, shared, coeval time allows the possibility of what the anthropologist Johannes Fabian calls “the radical contemporaneity of mankind,” the opening up of a world without temporalized violence against that which is different and distant.38 In arguing that temporalities separated by centuries may also in a sense be coeval, I am taking Fabian’s argument further than he intended, since for him coevalness applies to cultures contemporary to each other but geographically removed. Once progressivist narratives of chronology have been abandoned, can movement in time ever be “back,” with all the negative connotations that anterior temporality (as undeveloped, as primitive) carries? The possibility of coevalness across time, it must be noted, does not imply a radical moral relativism, but simply carries an insistence that “advanced” civilizations cannot claim an innate ethical superiority over those at their temporal or geographical margins. Coevalness requires as well an acknowledgement that the achievement of a tolerant or non-persecuting society is at best a fragile and temporary gain rather than the irreversible attainment of some higher stage of societal evolution, some permanent state of enlightenment. A constant vigilance is by implication absolutely necessary to maintain these moments as tenuous as they are rare.

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The Middle Ages has been too often characterized as a field of undifferentiated otherness against which modernity emerged, an exclusionary model of temporalization at least as old as the construction of the “Renaissance” as an epoch of classical rebirth. By establishing a continuity between the pre- and post-medieval, this periodization precipitated the Middle Ages as middle while at the same time banishing them from any kind of center.39 The medieval thus constructed becomes, in L. O. Aranye Fradenburg’s words, unchanging, inert, “lost to us by its very pastness.” Alterity removes the Middle Ages from temporality altogether, rendering it inviolate.40 Conceptualizing this same temporal expanse as a middle space of scattered islands collected via ceaseless currents produces a rather unmedieval Middle Ages. The medieval as meta-archipelago—as interminable, difficult middle—stresses not simple difference (the past as past) or predictable similarity (the past as present) but temporal interlacement, the impossibility of choosing alterity or continuity (the past that opens up the present to a multitude of futures). This resolutely medium aevum therefore lacks both a Genesislike in principio at which to locate a destiny-laden foundation and a Day of Judgment to organize manifold circulations into a linear temporal movement.41 If this Borromean knot that entwines disparate temporalities, supplanting the teleological chronology of more traditional history, seems uncannily similar to the theoretical displacement of linear history within postcolonial studies, that is no coincidence, since the “middle” of the Middle Ages is already forging a productive alliance with the nontemporal “post” of postcolonial theory. It makes sense, then, to explore the complex ways in which the medieval touches the “midcolonial,” making both more familiar and more strange. The past need not function as a field of simple origin, as a time of mythic wholeness that underwrites contemporary fantasies of ethnic, national, or even epistemological homogeneity.42 Janus-faced, biformis, the Middle Ages perform a double work, so that the alliance of postcolonial theory and medieval studies might open up the present to multiplicity, newness, difficult similarity conjoined to complex difference. A conceptualization of time as unbounded middle is not simply the recent invention of critical temporal studies and postcolonial theory, but is evident even in medieval authors, including one of the most canonical writers, Geoffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales are best known for a

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temporal opposition between the still and confident eternity of which the indestructible bodies of saints partake (incorruptible Cecilia in The Second Nun’s Tale, the murdered but uncannily animate “litel clergeon” of the Prioress) and the hurried measurement of days and hours that obsesses Harry Bailey and the Canon’s Yeoman (“capital time,” a figuration of temporality that has much in common with the transmutational fixations of alchemy and humoral theory).43 Yet this same collection of heterogeneous narratives also produces a meta-archipelago of its own. Like Salvation History itself, The Canterbury Tales are possessed of a beginning (the General Prologue, the departure from Southwark, the instigations of Fragment I) and a definitive end (the approach at sunset into Canterbury, the Parson’s sober recitation, the contrite Retraction), but this unfinished assemblage is actually all middle. The Tales combine politics, religion, art, commerce, social critique into an unsynthesized amalgam of romance, hagiography, history, fabliaux, fantasy, sermons, exemplary narratives, poetry, prose. They produce a motley assortment of persons who often overstep the boundaries of their textuality and begin to act as if alive. Deleuze and Guattari label such works transversal or rhizomatic, lacking an exterior unity and composed not of a “system of units” but of “directions in motion.” As nonhierarchical and acentered as a meta-archipelago, rhizomatic books do not argue a point or mirror a world, but create an assemblage that “operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots” (A Thousand Plateaus, 21). Chaucer appears to have finished the concluding section of his opus fairly early in the project, and so we know, therefore, that The Canterbury Tales were supposed to culminate at the tomb of the “holy, blissful martyr” Thomas à Becket, where in the sacred space of a cathedral the quotidian pilgrimage is transubstantiated into the soul’s journey to celestial eternity.44 Yet, having written that orthodox ending in the face of which there would seem to be nothing more to say, Chaucer sabotaged at every point the possibility of everlasting resolution. Not only did he continually rework the General Prologue, energizing its wide-ranging fellowship by adding an inspired assortment of new characters (including himself), he also seems to have been constantly revising the overall plan for the taletelling.45 Derek Pearsall has argued that Chaucer’s original plan was for each pilgrim to provide one story on the way to Canterbury. Chaucer later modified the tale-telling frame to allow two or more narratives by each figure before arrival at the final destination, then at a later date

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opened up the possibility of multiple tales by each pilgrim on the journey to the cathedral as well as during the return trip to London.46 It is perhaps shocking enough to think that the Canterbury that the Parson transfigures into Jerusalem Celestial allows a return. Yet Chaucer also decided to introduce the possibility of expansion for the company via chance encounters along the road, such as the alchemist and yeoman who explosively overtake the narrative, rendering the Canterbury company less pilgrims defined by their destination than simple compagnons de route, fellow travelers. The Canterbury Tales project could not be finished by Chaucer because it aspires to no totality. Bernard of Clairvaux described the body as the tabernaculum (tent) “in which we wander as pilgrims,” a vivid image that Bruce Holsinger glosses as a body that “is not a permanent home or native residence, but . . . an ever-present but mobile reminder of humanity’s displacement from the true Holy Land above” (“The Color of Salvation,” 172–73). Chaucer likewise intricated pilgrimage with bodies, but without reading the peregrinations of these pilgrim corpora back from what for Bernard is their overarching goal. Infinitely dilating, framed but in no way contained by the artificial bookends of London and Canterbury, The Canterbury Tales construct a middle space that is all motion, containing a vision of pilgrimage that does not end at the bones of a long dead martyr. In this world between worlds, Egeus declares in his inept but unexpectedly insightful way, “we been pilgrymes, passing to and fro” (Knight’s Tale 2848): an extraordinary pilgrimage that is simultaneously towards and from, a journey without telos or simple origin, a journey of pure movement, pure encounter, pure becoming. Chaucer’s rhizomatic drift has allowed me to wax utopian, but in the end it is necessary to pull back and make one final observation about such assemblages of proliferation. Despite Benítez-Rojo’s frequent claim that the meta-archipelago that he describes structurally excludes the possibility of violence, the history of the Caribbean would suggest otherwise.47 In the same way, even the extraordinary middle space that Chaucer envisions has its imperialistic movements of colonization, reclamation, and control. The action unfolds in distant geographies, but is always ultimately quite English. Although marked by occasional eruptions of Latin, French (the urbane friar of The Summoner’s Tale, with his “je vous dy sanz doute”), and Flemish (the proverbial quotation of The Cook’s Tale, “sooth pley, quaad pley”), as well as regional English dialect (the

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“northernisms” of John and Aleyn in The Reeve’s Tale), as a whole The Canterbury Tales are linguistically reductive, promulgating London English as the only possible literary language for the nation.48 The Canterbury Tales even contain a narrative that takes great joy in purging itself of non-Christian presence, reducing a ghetto that affronts Christian integrity with its resistant difference to a heap of mutilated and eternally silenced bodies (Prioress’s Tale). The Jews suffer a doubled temporal death. Not only do they represent an anachronism for Christianity, since they refuse to believe that Christ is the messiah and therefore consign themselves to perpetual inhabitation of an outmoded Old Law, these Chaucerian corpses are a reminder of a specifically English history, the antiSemitic violence of the twelfth and thirteenth century that culminated in the Expulsion of 1290. English national identity is sutured around the figure of the absent Jew, a body out of time that reminds us not only of the violent limits of the British Isles as a medieval archipelago, but more generally of the centrality of bodies to any thinking about time.49

Calibenes of Time and Body It is no longer a question of judging the past in the name of a truth that we can only possess in the present, but of risking the destruction of the subject who seeks knowledge in the endless deployment of the will to knowledge. —Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Geneaology, History” On August 15, 1355, the governor of the county of Artois approved the construction of a bell tower so that local citizens would be constantly aware of the passage of time. Regularized chimes would delineate the licit hours for commercial transactions and signal the change of shifts for those employed in the manufacture of textiles. In this communal Werkglocke, Le Goff observes, we see “the beginning of the organization of work, a distant precursor of Taylorism.”50 Like that nineteenth-century movement obsessed with perfecting the embodiment of time in labor, or like the drum-accompanied regulation of the prisoner’s day with which

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Foucault famously begins Discipline and Punish, or even like Saint Benedict’s organization of the monastic day into the sacred performance of prayer at seven precisely delineated intervals (Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, Compline), the bells of Aire-sur-la-Lys were intended to have a transformative effect on human flesh, their sonic vibrations entering through ears and skin to implant a corporeal knowledge of temporal discipline. In the Middle Ages, even the counting of time required full bodily participation. Because Roman numerals cannot be added in a columnar fashion, the calculation of years and days necessitates a dynamic choreography of fingers, palms, joints, breastbone, thigh, belly. According to the precise embodiment of computation worked out by Bede, to figure the number one requires simply that the little finger of the left hand be bent to the middle of the palm, while thirty requires locking the tips of the middle and index fingers “in a gentle embrace.” Ten thousand is indicated by the flat placement of the left hand upon the chest, ninety thousand by grasping the hip with a thumb pointed towards the groin, and one million by crossing both hands and linking the thumbs (The Reckoning of Time, 1). When Bede’s computus is employed to calculate the passing of time between historical events recorded in a chronicle, the years and centuries that unfold in the historical text are actively performed across the body of the reader.51 Temporal flow is inextricable from the flesh caught in its whirl. In this last section I will consider temporality as a somatic phenomenon, arguing that Michel Foucault, theorist par excellence of the body and a philosopher whose influence on medieval studies has been vast, provided in a neglected work a useful model for understanding the energetic relations among corpus, textus, historia, and tempus. I end with Foucault’s account because he best underscores the active presence of the past within every identity machine, from the most banal to the utterly murderous. The last three decades have seen an exponential growth in critical work on the body, catalyzed in part by the publication in French and then in English of Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History of Sexuality. Employing a discipline-shattering methodology, Foucault argues in these books that social and sexual identity are not immutable, natural facts but oppressive cultural phenomena produced via inscription and surveillance by power structures seeking ever more minute means to exert their control. These two works together advance important theses about the interrelation of discourse, culture, corporeality, and

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temporality, theses that have exerted a wide influence over the interpretation of medieval sexuality.52 In Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, as well as in much of the critical work inspired by these works, time unfolds irreversibly because it is marked by rupture, and could therefore be described as a series of disjunctive shifts in a determinative structure of legibility.53 For this reason psychoanalytic theorists like Joan Copjec conflate Foucault’s methodology with that of Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida and sneeringly label the Foucauldian body historicist, meaning something like “contextual.” In this section, however, I would like to recover a prehistory of the body in Foucault’s own work, examining an overlooked text published just prior to Discipline and Punish. My argument is a simple one. Foucault might now be known as the theorist of epistemological disjunction, but during a neglected middle period in his intellectual career he imagined temporality rather differently. In the early 1970s Michel Foucault’s work was caught within a spiral of time that brought together a twentieth-century radical philosopher, a nineteenthcentury murderer, and a saint whose legend was popular throughout the Middle Ages. From this assemblage of warring elements he constructed an extraordinary device that he christened, provocatively, a calibene. In 1973 Foucault edited a strange little book that has been mostly neglected in the vast exegetical literature accumulating around his name. “I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother. . .” is at once the title of the book and the opening sentence of the memoir that forms its heart.54 The volume appeared during what might be called a Foucauldian medium aevum. Having gained national recognition and election to the Collège de France through the publication of Madness and Civilization and The Order of Things, Foucault was now rethinking both body and identity, spurred in part by the work of his friend and fellow philosopher Gilles Deleuze, whose own collaborative work was just then challenging dominant conceptions of what philosophy might accomplish. Published in 1972, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus had astounded, perplexed, and intellectually energized Paris with its desiring machines, bodies of possibility, and contempt for social regulation and individuated subjectivities. The controversial book was, significantly, destined to receive an appreciative footnote in the sparse documentary apparatus of Discipline and Punish, the project that immediately follows the publication of “I, Pierre Rivière”. Deleuze himself even participated in the seminar at the Collège de France from which the edited collection

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derived.55 Whereas in Discipline and Punish Foucault would trace how the soul became the prison of the body, “I, Pierre Rivière” insists in a recognizably Deleuzian vein that even the most carceral structure of subjectivity fails in the end to constrain identity and flesh as they form their own time-bending alliances with the world. On November 12, 1835, Pierre Rivière was sentenced to death for parricide. His crime was premeditated, scripted in advance by a protoversion of the confession that he recomposed in prison.56 Because of his religious hallucinations, Rivière’s death sentence was eventually overturned and the murderer declared insane, absolved of guilt—despite the lucidity of his written narrative, and despite his closing plea for “the penalty I deserve, and the day which shall put an end to all my resentments” (IPR, 121). The transubstantiation of the guilty criminal into the absolved madman predictably indicates for Foucault that Rivière lived through an epistemological shift during which the juridical was suddenly medicalized, replacing a discourse of free will, autonomy, and justice with a regime of power-knowledge stressing genetics, determinism, and psychiatric cure. The bulk of the contents of “I, Pierre Rivière” is simply a gathering of archival evidence: a collection of judicial proceedings, coroner’s notes, testimonies of witnesses, newspaper accounts of the trial, transcripts, official correspondence, and Rivière’s recordation of his crime. The critical essays are modestly labeled “Notes” and appended at the back of the volume. Foucault’s own piece is the second of seven. He explains this uncharacteristic demureness in a foreword: Owing to a sort of reverence and perhaps, too, terror for a text which was to carry off four corpses along with it, we were unwilling to superimpose our own text on Rivière’s memoir. We were captivated [subjugués] by the parricide with auburn eyes. (IPR xiii [translation slightly modified], MPR, 14)57 The documentary evidence is made to speak for itself, as if it contained an effective and self-unfolding truth outside of any theorization of its content, as if a text long forgotten in the dust of the archive could endanger and perhaps transform a present world with its touch. Foucault’s “reverence,” “terror,” and “captivation” at the potential transtemporal animism of the memoir ensure that history in his analysis becomes something more than a narrative told by and through large discursive

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structures that determine what is thinkable within a given era. Like The Order of Things and Madness and Civilization before it, the argument of Discipline and Punish would be structured around vast epistemei that change precipitously but mysteriously over time, leaving mainly unanswered questions about the agency behind the large-scale rupture and resortment of the cognitive fabric of society. Panopticism, the disciplinary society, and the carceral archipelago are described in Discipline and Punish as expansive configurations of recent power/knowledge permeating contemporary society at every level, so that any archival evidence is legible to the extent that it can be folded back into the systemization in which it is suspended as both cause and effect. The archive in IPR, in contrast, is not a source from which to excavate a genealogy of what power has already accomplished, but a place from which dangerous forces seep, unbidden and undirected, from a simultaneously deadly and venerable text that even after one hundred and forty years is still possessed of uncanny agency.58 Perhaps the “sort of reverence” that Foucault describes is an effect of the memoir’s formal structure. Rivière inscribes his biography as if it were a saint’s life in the tradition of Antony of Egypt, the heroic thirdcentury recluse who battled in his life deadly visionary intrusions. The Life of Saint Antony, Rivière’s self-inscription, and Foucault’s writing of Rivière are versions of the same hagiographic script. Composed by Athanasius in A . D . 357 and translated into Latin by Evagrius of Antioch shortly thereafter, the Life of Saint Antony was perhaps the single most influential piece of medieval hagiography.59 Although no evidence exists for Rivière’s direct knowledge of the Life, it is likely that he would have at least known the abbreviated form contained in the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Voragine (widely read in translation in nineteenth-century France) or its redaction in a clerical calendar of saints.60 Even if Rivière had no direct knowledge of the Vita Antonii in some version, Antony’s accession to sainthood formed an enduring component of the textual unconscious of the ecclesiastical narrativization of heroic sanctity. That Rivière was modeling his own life after the passion of Christ and the self-sacrifice of his imitative saints and martyrs is made clear throughout the memoir by repeated reference. Rivière and Antony therefore share an intertextual bond that likely operates on the level of specific content, and most certainly unites the two texts through a shared rhetorical structure. Thus the parricide Rivière and the desert father Antony

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are both lonely men who fight against a fantastic and fluid world whose every intention against them is inimical. Early in life both were set apart from other youths by a reverent difference (Antony’s childhood passion was for sermons, while the young Rivière “was very devout,” fasted frequently, preached sermons, and intended to become a priest [IPR, 101]).61 Their narratives valorize an extreme form of individuation through struggle, utterly reject social networks and familial bonds, emphasize bodily suffering as the locus of redemption (imitatio Christi), stage grand visions of conflict that mix history with monstrosity, insist that identity and especially sexuality are visible only through an antagonistic engagement against externalized demons who condense into estranging flesh essential components of the self, disseminating subjectivity across bodies in time rather than containing it within a single human, present form. This entanglement of body and time is best seen in the passionfilled visions that for both men erupted with alarming frequency to refigure completely the world in which they lived. Antony’s antagonists were mainly diabolical. Athanasius entitled the sixth chapter of his account of the saint’s life “Of the Assaults of Demons,” detailing the monsters’ multiplicity and provenance. Devilish flesh is malleable, shifting from women’s forms to animals to fantastic beasts to vast armies of hostile soldiers. Any landscape that the metamorphic demons inhabit becomes unstable, for they confound the human senses by conjuring extraordinary visual displays that dissipate as quickly as they burst forth, that fill the once still air with alien chants to which cling fragments of familiar psalms, that perform in the present terrifying scenes from personal and biblical history. “Consumed by ideas of greatness and immortality” (IPR, 102), convinced that God had destined him to become an instrument of the divine, Pierre Rivière was likewise besieged by exorbitant visions. His waking moments were replete with grand scenes of martyrdom: “warriors who died for their king and country”; students massacred defending Paris; shipwrecked sailors sacrificed to feed their friends; soldiers offering their bodies in war to Rome; Eleazar of the Maccabees, crushed by an elephant to save Israel from her enemies; the agonies of the Christian saints; the passion of Jesus—“I too will sacrifice myself for my father,” Rivière declared, “everything seemed to invite me to this deed” (IPR, 106).62 His daily life was so disrupted by the sudden advent of magnificent images and the unfolding of grandiose fantasies that he

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could be described as inhabiting a chaotic world of unstoppable movement and flow, a world that was not content to remain within the small contours of his physical body. Indeed, Rivière was convinced that, much against his will, his body produced a “fecundating fluid” that “incessantly flowed from his person,” so that he perpetually feared committing incest merely by remaining in the room with a female member of his family (IPR, 129).63 Rivière battled these rapturous eruptions with fantastic armaments. “I was also resolved,” he wrote, “to distinguish myself by making completely new instruments [des instruments tous nouveaux], I wanted them to be created in my imagination” (IPR, 103, MPR, 127). In his mind he engineered self-operating butter churns and miraculous carriages formed of springs. With his hands he fabricated special bows that he christened “albalesters,” contraptions so odd they seemed the devices of a madman.64 He determined to fashion a weapon “such as had never before been seen”: I named it “calibene” [ j’y donnai le nom calibene], I worked on it for a long time on Sundays and in the evening, and finding that it did not succeed as I had expected, I went and buried it in a meadow and later dug it up again and it is still on the floor in one of the houses. (IPR, 103, MPR, 127) Despite Rivière’s protestations of failure, Foucault insists that he succeeded in creating effective albalesters and calibenes, “completely new instruments” christened with familiar but strange names.65 Even if inept at constructing bow-like weapons, Rivière triumphed as the author of a memoir/murder, a composite verbal machine so powerful that, once sprung, it propelled its originator into a future that he could not know in advance. The text and the murder “kept changing places,” they “moved one another around”: The narrative of the murder, originally intended to come at the beginning of the memoir, fuses with it and becomes diffused in it. . . . The successive placing of the text and the deed are simply stages in the operation and production of a mechanism: the murder/narrative. The murder would rather appear to be a projectile concealed at first in the engine of a discourse which recoils

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and becomes unnecessary in the propulsion discharging it. We might well call this mechanism the mechanism of the “calibene” or “albalester,” from the names of the instruments invented by Rivière, fabricated words, instruments to discharge arrows, weapons to bring down clouds and birds, wrought names that brought death and nailed animals to trees, all at the same time . . . those engines of death whose names were fabricated and whose corpses were buried, those words/projectiles which were from now on never to cease springing from his lips and spurting from his hands (Foucault, “Tales of Murder,” in IPR, 202–03) A machine concatenated from bodies, objects, texts, and a sedimented series of histories—a machine that triggers the emergence of a passionate, violent, unholy act that alters the predictable course of local history—the calibene that Foucault describes actuates an explosive circulation of force that obviates the supposed integrity of the assemblage’s constituent components. Igniting almost at the moment it comes into being, the deadly calibene is not reducible back to the murderer, the memoir, and the corpse that it catches up in its diffusive machinery. It is, further, as much a textual as a material object. In a slightly more lucid description of the calibene’s power in the Foreword, Foucault stresses the temporal inversions that the text-object instigates, and implies that “I, Pierre Rivière” is itself a kind of calibene. When placed among the other documentary evidence of the volume, Rivière’s memoir comes to assume the central position which is its due, as a mechanism which holds the whole [of “I, Pierre Rivière”] together; triggered secretly beforehand, it leads on to all the earlier episodes; then, once it comes into the open, it lays a trap for everyone, including its contriver, since it is first taken as proof that Rivière is not mad and then becomes . . . a means of averting that death penalty which Rivière had gone to such great lengths to call down upon himself. (IPR, xii–xiii) Pierre Rivière engineered a discourse-machine that compiles its own past from fragments personal and grandly historical, then alters the course of the future, becoming both cause and effect of its inventor’s “lyrical

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position as murderous subject” (IPR, 208). Rivière lost control of his selfhood the moment his discourse-calibene was sprung, forming a propulsive identity machine—a time machine—that rendered him something he did not anticipate, a madman rather than a criminal or martyr. By transforming his life into text and forming a strange alliance with that possible self, Rivière’s already fluid identity was reconfigured, his present transubstantiated, and murder became his inescapable destiny, his ruinous future. Rivière’s punishment, perpetual incarceration in an asylum, figures the new fate of criminals whose deeds had previously been moralized (capital punishment as the wages of sin) and now start to be psychologized (only an insane person would kill his mother and yearn for his own destruction). Denied his passionately desired destiny as martyr, Rivière is locked away, his writings condemned as irrational. “Rivière,” a doctor writes, has become “a totally different person,” a “wretched being” who is “incapable of strength of mind, timid, and irresolute” (IPR, 132–33). In Foucault’s analysis, however, Rivière retains those dangerous powers that a reduction into pathology would deny him. The calibene renders writing an act of violence that entangles in its demonic machinery a family feud, a medico-juridical complex, a way of conceptualizing historical change. Body, identity, temporality, and material fragments of the world become interdependent points of agency within a nonintegrated circuit, announcing that history progresses not through the actions of great men, nor through technological innovation, but through a chaotic play among narratives, objects, and intentions in which all are caught up in a potentially lethal relationship of movement and transformation. The memoir, reverently returned from the archive, threatens to endanger the epistemological self-confidence of those who believe that Rivière can be reassuringly reduced into a “wretched being” through simple reference to a madness that seized hold of him and then left him again. Because it pulls human identity out of human bodies and scatters subjectivity into amalgams of fantasy and materiality, the calibene, Foucault insists, is too menacing, too challenging, too full of force for any asylum to contain. Carolyn Dinshaw has found in Foucault’s embodied response to what he called the “Lives of Infamous Men” a vibration or intensity in which one can discern “the beauty and terror, perhaps, of queer community, constituted by nothing more than the connectedness (even across time) of singular lives that unveil and contest normativity” (Getting Medieval,

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138). The instantiation of intertemporal community is one important possibility opened by Foucault’s temporal short circuits in his captivation by the infamous, but he also calls into being something more unstable, more dangerous, more solid and dispersive. Like the medieval saints who embraced with delight the most hideous deaths, who lived in worlds that with their divine omens and sudden miracles bore little resemblance to quotidian reality, who always outlived their own demise by spectacularly reproving the temporal logic of past and present by inhabiting an unmoved eternity, Rivière is inhuman, “not subject” (in the words of the District Prosecutor Royal) “to the ordinary laws of sympathy and sociability” (IPR, 9). A responsive reader, Foucault interprets Rivière’s memoir as if it were one of those hagiographies that so enthralled its author, interprets the text with the full measure of perverse veneration with which Rivière inscribed it. The narrative becomes exemplary, revealing powers operating through and around bodies and texts, powers that have their own intentions and potentials outside of merely human understandings of the world. The dynamic model of agency and history that he elaborates around the parricide is Foucault’s own calibene, a critical engine that allows him to understand how Rivière’s selfinscription came to exert a murderous fascination capable of disrupting the linearity of time. “I, Pierre Rivière” unexpectedly imagines the body not as an involuted site of discipline and despair, but as a movement toward the expansion of boundary that is at once catastrophic and libratory. Although Foucault had proclaimed “the death of man” long ago, this book reveals for the first time the extent of the philosopher’s antihumanism. Just as Rivière cannot be thought outside of the alliance he forms with his engineered objects, identity cannot be considered outside of its constant escape from the limits of corporeal form. Identity machines convey subjectivity into impassioned and mutually transformative encounters with landscapes and material objects, with texts, and with worlds. Identity machines pulse with intersection and interchange; for Rivière, this conversation included the disembodied but nonetheless forceful voices of Napoleon, cannibals, Christian saints—that is, with history. Identity machines constitute a flow of desire that connects disparate bodies and times, that opens subjectivities to monstrous becomings, sometimes against their will. Through the very process of inscription texts take on an uncanny agency all their own, wandering the world as triggers to profound change, perversely allowing new potentialities

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for the body to emerge even against medical, juridical, carceral attempts to discipline that body and render it docile, circumscribed. Just as Rivière was transfigured by his own words, Foucault insists that all bodies and sexualities are likewise susceptible to a calibene-like opening up of possibilities, a process that interjects a living and volatile past into the suddenly unstable present to ignite unimagined futures. At the threshold of this interlaced temporality stand both eremitic Antony and bloody Pierre Rivière, indicating that Foucault’s calibene offers not only terrifying danger but also, somehow, a world of possibility worthy of potential awe, a world where a murderer transformed into an identity machine can still captivate with his auburn eyes.

2 Chevalerie

T We believe in the existence of very special becomings-animal traversing human beings and sweeping them away, affecting the animal no less than the human. —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Body and World Allen J. Frantzen is best known for his scholarly work on Anglo-Saxon penitentials, rigorous investigations of the distant history of the human body and its ecclesiastical regulation. Surprisingly, his book Before the Closet: Same-Sex Love from Beowulf to Angels in America closes with a poeticized account of his own body’s past. Frantzen’s eloquent depiction of an adolescent awakening to selfhood and to pleasure is worth quoting at length: I remember another night one summer on the farm when I was in high school. For some reason, I was home alone, a rare event; I seldom felt unwatched. The moon was full and my room was bright with its light. I got up, took off my pajamas and walked down the stairs and outside, where I stood on the porch in the warm silence. Then I ran to an old swing that hung from a huge elm tree by the garage. I jumped on the seat, surprised at how smooth the old wood felt under me, and began to swing as fast

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as I could, leaning back, legs spread, sailing naked through the night and the warm air, hearing only the creak of the rope and the wind rushing past me. Eventually I saw headlights in the distance, surely from my parents’ car. . . . As the gravel crunched and my father’s Impala pulled into the driveway, I fell into bed. There I lay, heart pounding, scandalized, sweaty, thrilled. I never wrote about that experience. Neither boy nor man shared it. . . . It was a moment of awakening to the nearness of forbidden pleasure, to danger, darkness, mystery, and to the possibility of feeling at home in my body, which was, just then, in every sense and for once, my own. (Before the Closet, 308) At first glance, this culminating moment of the book seems (to adopt Frantzen’s own punning term for the history of same-sex love) straightforward. A strictly disciplined and consequently rather repressed young man comes to realize his “dangerous, dark, mysterious” sexuality, a discovery synonymous with learning how to inhabit comfortably (“feel at home in”) a body whose enjoyments have been previously estranged. Like all epiphanies, the narrative is structured around the coming into awareness of something already present but until now unperceived. Placed immediately after a description of Frantzen’s self-acceptance of his homosexuality while stationed in Korea, the vignette forms part of a coming out story, a well-established genre of contemporary narrative that depends upon the belief that sexual identity is a discrete and timeless thing that can be alienated by some punishing institution (church, state, family) but always awaits sudden and final recognition in its true form. Sexuality has discernable contours, has its own immutable ontology: one “comes out” of the closet (or, in Frantzen’s similar formulation, the shadows) by discovering and then publicly embracing what one always already was.1 Frantzen’s narrative seems to depict a self-enclosed world in which the limits of the body are unproblematic, in which individuality and embodiment are coterminous—even if one has to learn how to feel at home within that flesh. Yet the naked swing through the moonlit night is so beautifully rendered that it is impossible not to share in its exuberance, to be caught up in its poetic momentum and enjoy, as Frantzen enjoys, an intersubjective moment in which author meets audience for the

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making communal of what had been solitary pleasure. On closer reflection, somatic boundaries are far more tenuous than Frantzen acknowledges. The adolescent would not be able to awaken to his corporeality without the sensuous impingement of warm moonlight, the haptic smoothness of the wooden seat, the sonorous rhythm of the ropes. The act of disrobing, the caress of nocturnal air, the undulations of the swing constitute intensities of light, heat, speed, and touch that at once are integral to the experience of embodiment and pull somaticity out of the body. In his lover’s embrace of moon and stars, elm and board, naked flesh and restless air, Frantzen discovers not an estranged sexuality that was always awaiting in some preexistent form, but rather a series of sensual alliances to be entered upon with a wide world of natural and inanimate phenomena outside the walls of his home, outside the place he must leave in order to experience the dilations of a desire that is nondomestic, nonfamilial, unsocialized. Before the reinstatement of boundary precipitated by the arrival of the parental Impala, the limits of Frantzen’s adolescent body do not necessarily form a second circumscribing house within which he must learn to dwell. Desire and bodiliness are in fact dispersed across an exquisite summer night. I open with this examination of the closing paragraph of Frantzen’s important book because Before the Closet argues wistfully for a return to the certainties of the “history of sex” over the “lack of critical rigor” supposedly inherent in contemporary queer theory (15–25).2 Merely linear histories of sex or of the body that stress temporal continuity and essential immutability will only bring criticism back to its own point of departure, like Frantzen at the close of his book retreating from the freedom of the dispersive night to the safety of the family house. If sex, sexuality, embodiment are as fragmentary and heterogeneous as Frantzen’s moonlit swing and queer theory make them out to be, then even the most ossified bodies of history can productively be explored as sites of possibility and invention. With Frantzen I will argue that contemporary queer theory has limitations, especially when applied to premodern culture and texts. Unlike him, however, I contend that queer theory can usefully become more queer, not less. This chapter examines a series of medieval texts in which masculine embodiment functions only within what, following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, could be called an inhuman circuit, an identity machine that violates the sanctity of the human body

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by disregarding the natural boundaries of fleshly form. This medieval assemblage decomposes the human to intermingle as dynamic pieces the inorganic and the animal. An amalgam of force, materiality, and motion, the inhuman circuit offers much to challenge scholars who reject queer theory out of hand as well as critics who, like the classicist David Halperin, number themselves among its most ardent proponents.

Queer in Theory For scholars engaged in the interdisciplinary study of the body, queer theory’s tremendous strength is its insistence upon the historical instability of epistemological categories, especially those involving sexuality. Unlike straightforward histories of sex, queer theory joins constructivist strains of feminism to emphasize the contingency of identities that have so far successfully passed as solid, monolithic, timeless. In general, queer theory does not turn to the past in order to find identity categories familiar from the present, but instead grants the past the potential to conjoin its undeniable intimacy to a surprising alterity. Queering is at its heart a process of wonder. Recent work by medievalists has therefore insisted upon the queer’s deconstructive effect, its ability to reopen to possibility what had seemed beyond interrogation. Glenn Burger observes that “in contrast to the stabilizing categories of identity politics, the term ‘queer’ would resist nominalization . . . stressing epistemology rather than ontology.”3 Underscoring Eve Sedgwick’s emphasis on “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances” in the queer (Tendencies, 8), Robert Mills defines queering as the rendering visible of the processes through which certain kinds of identity are made to pass as normal, as well as the exploration of that which challenges the fiction of “sexual binarism” (‘Whatever You Do Is a Delight to Me!’ 2). Carolyn Dinshaw gives the queer an inherently unruly definition: Queerness works by contiguity and displacement, knocking signifiers loose, ungrounding bodies, making them strange. . . . It makes people stop and look at what they have been taking as natural, and it provokes inquiry into the ways that ‘natural’ has been produced (“Chaucer’s Queer Touches / A Queer Touches Chaucer,” 77).4

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Something in the queer prevents its full reintegration into whatever matrix of identity it arises to challenge with its perversity, its excess, its defiant joy. Its “disillusioning” force is certainly an “insistent reminder . . . of heterosexual incompleteness” (Dinshaw, “Chaucer’s Queer Touches,” 92), but it is also something bigger: the discomfiting limit of any circumscriptive system (of space, of time, of identity) that parcels the world into discrete phenomena and impossibly immobile categories. In the words of Karma Lochrie, queering is a “project of contestation” that disrupts the “heterosexual paradigms of scholarship”; deconstructs the supposed separateness of gender, sex, class; produces analyses of medieval artifacts that “trouble our assumptions about medieval culture and textual practices” (“Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies,” 180). Scholarship by Claire Sponsler, Robert Clark, and Steven Kruger brilliantly queers medieval race, while Kruger and Lochrie have done the same to medieval religion.5 The queer, in my understanding, intimately involves sexuality without being reducible to it.6 Affirmative and refreshingly utopian, queer theory would seem to be the logical place from which to launch any inquiry into the limits of the human body. David M. Halperin’s Saint Foucault is a profoundly influential book in the field that sanctifies a founding father of queer studies in order to (among other things) advance queer theory against academic “complacency” and “monolithic, homogenizing discourse” (113). Just as Jean-Paul Sartre once transformed a criminal-artist into Saint Genet, into existentialism made flesh, Halperin attempts to embody an activist notion of “queer” in the life and writings of Michel Foucault—an admirably perverse project, considering how much of Foucault’s scholarly energy was given over to demolishing Sartre’s brand of humanism. “Queer,” Halperin writes, is “identity without essence,” “positionality” rather than “positivity.” The queer is therefore “by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. . . . [It is] not restricted to lesbians and gay men” but is “available to anyone who is or feels marginalized because of her or his sexual practices” (62). Mobile, subversive, and predicated upon alliance rather than ontology, queerness challenges any hegemonic identity formation and therefore has vast political utility. But, Halperin argues, queer politics, if it is to remain queer, needs to be able to perform the function of emptying queerness of its referentiality or

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positivity, guarding against its tendency to concrete embodiment, and thereby preserving queerness as a resistant relation rather than as an oppositional substance (113). The danger is that “queer” has already solidified into a predictable and limited noun, has begun to function as an institutionalized and therefore inherently normative category. The queer would thereby forfeit its power to challenge, resist, and unsettle, becoming “an unproblematic, substantive designation for a determinate subfield of academic practice . . . signifying little more than what used to be signified by ‘gay and lesbian studies’” (113). Halperin insists that the queerness—the alterity, the irreducibility to some other thing—has to be returned to queer theory so that it functions again as an effective catalyst to desubstantiation. Surprisingly, then, Halperin’s vision of the queer is haunted by that very “tendency to concrete embodiment” that he so strongly condemns. In discussing the transformative ascesis of bodybuilding, he argues that “queer muscles are not the same as straight muscles” (116), for they “produce a physique” that destabilizes heteronormative masculinities. A page later, he writes that because they activate desire and are not produced “by hard physical labor” (that is, because they originate in the gym, and are not an occupational byproduct) “gay muscles do not signify power” (117). There are numerous problems with the two formulations of this statement (an astonishing class bias, an un-Foucauldian insistence that an object of desire somehow cannot “signify power”), but what I find most remarkable is the slippage of “queer muscles” (116) to “gay [homosexual male] muscles” (117) via the materiality of the human body. It is as if queer as a resistant, anti-ontological category can hypothetically exist (that’s why it’s called queer theory), but when the queer manifests itself in the flesh, the stability of those categories it was supposedly undermining returns, concretely embodied—and usually enfleshed in an overtly, if not excessively, male form.7 The human body and the queer of theory seem to be radically at odds, like the flesh and the spirit of some medieval theology. Queer theory is undoubtedly the most radical challenge yet posed to the immutability of sexual identities, but it seems strange that a critical movement predicated upon the smashing of boundary should limit itself to the small contours of human form, as if the whole of the body could be contained within the porous embrace of its skin. Perhaps the

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reason Halperin’s articulation of queerness falls back into the essentializing materiality that it professes to discard is simply because the queer theory that he advances jettisons the notion of an atemporal, inherently natural sexuality without taking the next logical step (a step Foucault himself took, in distinction to Sartre): abandoning the humanism upon which such a claim is founded. The body is not human (or at least, it is not only human); nor, as Frantzen’s narrative has already suggested, is it inhabited by an identity or sexuality that is unique to or even contained fully within its flesh.

Two Deleuzoguattarian Horses When he read his case history, he told me, the whole of it came to him as something unknown; he did not recognize himself. —Sigmund Freud, “Postscript” to A Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy How could the body and its sexuality be thought outside of anthropomorphic, humanistic terms? Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as yet unsanctified compatriots and friends to Saint Foucault, have offered in their diverse writings a toolbox full of instruments useful for constructing the posthuman body. In both their individual and collaborative writing, Deleuze and Guattari are singularly uninterested in essences, insisting repeatedly that we know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy the body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body.8 When Deleuze and Guattari discuss the famous case of Little Hans, the five-year-old whom Freud memorably described as a “positive paragon of all the vices,” they argue that the Viennese psychoanalyst went wrong when he tried to interpret the boy’s fascination with a horse being whipped by importing into a multiplicitous child’s world a constrictive master

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narrative of familial identification and rigidly discrete subjectivities.9 Alan of Lille described every animal as liber, pictura, and speculum— book, image, and mirror.10 Animals, in other words, function as reference and reflection, insubstantial allegories in which we discover ourselves. Yet such a transformation of animal bodies into merely human semblance ignores what might occur between animals and humans, what processes, desires, identities might circulate in the interspace where animal and human differences come together or come apart. Psychoanalysis, according to Deleuze and Guattari, has always erred in interpreting beasts like Alan of Lille does, as anthropomorphic symbols rather than as points of movement and connection within a larger possible assemblage (agencement) of identity. Freud declared that the beaten horse simply represented Hans’s father, so that each attribute of the equine body was mapped against a paternal analogue: the blinders are the father’s eyeglasses, the dark coloration around the horse’s mouth a transfigured human moustache. The decontextualizing reductiveness of Freud’s symbolic reading, based upon an economy of simple equivalence, provokes Deleuze and Guattari to complain that the psychoanalyst says nothing about the larger world within which the boy and the horse are passionately interconnected: “not one word about Hans’s relation to the street, on how the street was forbidden to him, on what it is for a child to see the spectacle” (ATP, 259). The desire of Hans toward the horse has nothing to do with representation, imitation, or fantasy, but is instead an affective “becoming-horse” that draws the boy out of his constrictive selfhood, offering an escape from the blockages of forced, familial identifications: [Freud] takes no account of the assemblage (building-streetnextdoor-warehouse-omnibus-horse-a-horse-falls-a-horse-iswhipped!); he takes no account of the situation (the child has been forbidden to go into the street, etc.); he takes no account of Little Hans’s endeavor (horse-becoming, because every other way has been blocked up . . . the line of flight or the movement of deterritorialization). The only important thing for Freud is that the horse be the father—and that’s the end of it.11 Whereas psychoanalysis insists that Little Hans’s problem of animal fixation can be solved simply by reference to the timeless narrative of the oedipal triangle, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the identity that Hans

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constructs exceeds the suffocating confines of domestic space. He connects in expansive alliance everything upon which his enjoyment alights: “his mother’s bed, the paternal element, the house, the café across the street, the nearby warehouse, the street, the right to go into the street” (ATP, 258). Like the adolescent Frantzen exuberantly conveyed from himself via the nocturnal swing, Hans moves within un agencement machinique (a “machinic assemblage” or identity machine) in which affects and materialities circulate and are transformed (MP, 314, ATP, 257).12 The movements of desire through which Hans encounters and in a sense becomes his horse are not predicated on identification, analogy, and preset forms but on experimentation, hybridization, and “unnatural participation.” The body ceases to offer a circumscriptive home, becoming instead a volatile site of possibility and encounter.13 According to Deleuze and Guattari, children, poets, and sexual nonconformists have always viewed bodies in such energetic, Spinozist terms. In A Thousand Plateaus they describe a masochist who, like Little Hans, loses himself in irruptions of equine ardor. Transforming his merely human flesh via bridle, whip, spurs, and a rider-dominatrix, he creates a circuit of intensities (circuit d’intensités) that “constitutes a nonhuman sexuality” (MP, 285; ATP, 233). The genesis of this inhuman form is sober, deliberate, methodical: PROGRAM . . . At night, put on the bridle and attach my hands more tightly, either to the bit with the chain, or to the big belt right after returning from the bath. Put on the entire harness right away also, the reins and thumbscrews, and attach the thumbscrews to the harness. My penis should be in a metal sheath. Ride the reins for two hours during the day, and in the evening as the master wishes. Confinement for three or four days, hands still tied, the reins alternately tightened and loosened. The master will never approach her horse without the crop, and without using it. If the animal should display impatience or rebelliousness, the reins will be drawn tighter, the master will grab them and give the beast a good thrashing. (MP, 192–93, ATP, 155–56) Through a participation contre nature a series of animal and human affects are brought into deliberate, explosive contact, contaminating suppos-

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edly integral bodies with particles of otherness, so that each henceforth resists the placid rigidity of totalized form. Body and subjectivity are not resident in any single point within this circuit of forces, itself constituted only through those movements that harness corporealities to a flux of mutual transformations. This strange and open assemblage entangles the desires of fragmentable human bodies (each organ of which could have its own desires), the desires of an animal body (the horse that the masochist is intent on becoming, an animal that “transmits” its forces to tame and “overcode” the human body), even the desires of the sharp whip, the constricting bridle, the cold spurs, the binding contract. “Little by little,” the masochist writes, “all opposition is replaced by a fusion of my person with yours . . . you will give me the imprint of your body as I have never had it before and would never have it otherwise” (ATP, 156), une sexualité non humaine.14 Mapping new permutations for the flesh, connecting and scattering the masochist, horse, dominatrix, and equestrian accoutrements, this identity machine pulses with what Elizabeth Grosz calls “virtualities and divergent resonances,” novel flows of differential forces. Within the circuit d’intensités that Deleuze and Guattari describe, there is no possibility of what Halperin called “concrete embodiment.” Where within this dispersive assemblage are those predictable bodies that every child learns from a first dictionary are to be separately labeled the horse, the woman, the man? Because such an inhuman circuit disregards completely the corporeal contours of species as well as sex, the best analysis can only map the movements and becomings it makes possible. If our desire is simply to classify the assemblage by breaking it back down into those forms that it has itself abandoned, then to our anxious question “What is it?” will come in response inadequate categorizations: “It is perversity” or “It is pornography” or “It is a man (quite literally) making an ass of himself.” What happens, however, when we approach with wider eyes and a sense of wonder? What happens when we ask What can this assemblage do? Perhaps then in its restless movement toward connection we see the transformation of at least three bodies. Emitting its pulses and particles without a teleology, this identity machine constructed as much of forces as of flesh never folds its constituent pieces back into some impervious whole, never insists upon anything but the combinatory possibilities of the body and of the plural autonomy of desire.

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The Chivalric Circuit The knight can do chivalry [faire chevalerie] just as he can make love: it has this dimension as a physical process. —Richard W. Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence The equus eroticus envisioned by Deleuze and Guattari probably seems rather far removed from the Middle Ages. Yet it would be difficult to argue that premodern societies never dreamt identity-assemblages as wonderful as that constructed by Little Hans. Nor is it the case that the medieval imagination was incapable of envisioning bodies as joyfully perverse as that assembled by Deleuze and Guattari’s masochist of equine desires. A widely disseminated medieval icon of Aristotle depicted a woman named Phyllis mounted upon the back of the naked philosopher. To his obvious pleasure, she rides him like a horse.15 Henri d’Andeli captured a similar moment vividly in his Lai d’Aristote, in which the tutor to Alexander the Great is transformed into a frisky pony by the Persian princess Roxana: The smartest clerk who ever was Put on a saddle for a horse And pranced and cantered on all fours Over the grass like a skittish sorrel . . . He trotted up and let her mount Upon his back.16 A quatre piez, his body submitted a loi de beste (or, in John DuVal’s inspired translation, “ridden, driven, pasture fed”), the philosopher becomes under the sway of the sensual and exotic easterner comme roncin (451, 476, 450). Roxana and Phyllis with their whips, Aristotle lost in the blissful domination of saddle, rider, and bit hint at a transhistorical alliance between passionately submissive human bodies and domesticated animal forms, among which the horse seems to hold an especially privileged place.17 As Euripides in ancient Greece knew when he composed a drama about a young man whose desire is as asocial as the animals after which he is named (Hippolytus), as Peter Shaffer realized when he composed a

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play in which naked humans perform the roles of the erotically charged beasts who likewise figure a male youth’s nonnormative passions (Equus), as Pablo Picasso demonstrated as his brush traced the sensual contours of Boy with Horse (c. 1905), and as Marie de France implied when she named one of her lais after a king whose intricated love of hunting and excesses of carnality align him with the animal world (Equitan), the horse’s intimacy to the human involves more than the utilitarian functions of labor and transportation.18 Because of its corporeal adaptability and consequent long history of having been bred for a proliferation of specialized functions, all the peoples of medieval Europe, regardless of social class, had a close relationship to the horse. Yet the animal functioned as an especially revered body for knights. “No animal is more noble than the horse,” wrote Jordanus Rufus in the thirteenth century, “since it is by horses that princes, magnates and knights are separated from lesser people and because a lord cannot fittingly be seen among private citizens except through the mediation of a horse.”19 Nowhere does the inhuman circuit of the Deleuzoguattarian horse have more immediate medieval relevance than for the rigorous training of subjectivity and body that is chivalry, the code of idealized masculinity at the heart of knighthood. Like the masochist’s program described by Deleuze and Guattari, this medieval technology of the self relies upon a complex assemblage capable of catching up human, animal, objects, and intensities into what also might be called a nonhuman body. Its origins murky and its history filled with complex semantic peregrinations, chivalry is admittedly a vexed term.20 According to its own mythology, chevalerie (Latin militia) was both transtemporal and transcultural. The classical world could be retroactively posited as chivalric, as Boccaccio and Chaucer knew well in transforming Theseus from an Athenian warlord to a medieval chevalier. The Nine Worthies, the ultimate exemplars of knighthood, included three biblical warriors. Chivalry in England, France, Germany, Spain, Italy was supposedly everywhere the same, a unifying set of shared aristocratic values. Virtuous Saracens were even supposed to have an innate awareness of its rules of conduct. Yet despite the insistence of medieval writers that it constituted an international brotherhood of unchanging ethos, in reality chivalry was composed of heterogeneous sets of practices with disparate local ambitions, and should therefore more accurately be spoken of in the plural.21 In my own use, the word denotes both a powerful cultural fan-

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tasy and a catalyst to the formation of a specific kind of European Christian aristocratic male subject. Chivalry aroused and then shaped the desires of an elite fighting class, delineating the contours of socially acceptable expressions of force and passion.22 Intimately connected in its genesis to the necessity of producing a sufficient supply of men capable of keeping the nation safe from attack and of furthering imperial interests abroad, chivalry aimed to create a body at once deadly in its sanctioned violence and docile in its comportment at home. The chivalric code was therefore enmeshed within essentialist and socially normative ambitions for the body, the opposite of those disruptive somatic possibilities envalued by the queer theory of Halperin, Dinshaw, Burger. Yet, like any overarching ideology, chivalry promised a perfection that it could never in fact bestow. The accession to knighthood was continually represented as a straightforward (in Frantzen’s sense) bildungsroman in which a male body functioning as an overinvested site for communal suture moved quickly from the messy ambiguities of youth to a wellordered adulthood. In fact, however, chivalry depended upon a series of potentially open-ended becomings that did not necessarily fold ineluctably into predetermined contours. Because the trajectory of chivalric identification tended to scatter knightly identity across a proliferating array of objects, events, and fleshly forms, knighthood never precisely resided within the stable and timeless social body that chivalric myth obsessively envisioned. A tension between restrictive delineation and a multiplicity of possibility formed chivalry’s conflicted heart. The impossible perfection of knighthood was limned by nightmares of its own selfdissolution, nightmares intimating that the chivalric exemplar was in fact a creature composed of flux rather than essence, a centaur sustained through malleable alliance, a fantastic becoming-horse. Many readers of this book will happily acknowledge the visceral bond that connects them to a companion animal. Christened with a proper name, this domesticated dog or cat (or reptile, rabbit, hamster, fish, bird) will likely be considered a family member, and will inevitably possess a remarkable personality—as anyone who inquires will be told at great length, with all manner of amusing stories that illustrate the creature’s winning humanity. As the lapdogs of Chaucer’s Prioress and the monk’s trusty feline Pangur Ban in the Irish poem of the same name indicate, medieval people loved these same animals with an ardor equal to that which today has encouraged the development of gourmet dog biscuits

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and Tiffany cat collars. Canines, felines, numerous species of birds, and domesticated squirrels were all cherished in the Middle Ages as pets. Even oxen, pigs, sheep, and cows could be on terms familiar enough with their human caretakers to bear distinguishing names and often, especially in peasant households, to live under the same roof.23 Yet as a source of transportation, labor, and martial strength, the horse retained a privileged relation to humans. That is why, for example, Albertus Magnus considers horses and their ailments at such extraordinary length in his treatise De animalibus, explicating everything from how to recognize a specimen of high quality to how to concoct an oil for equine scabies (102–40). Long cultural pressure had been necessary to transform the horse from a beast that could be eaten, like cattle or sheep, into a specially revered animal set apart from such use. Consumption of horse flesh was popular among most Germanic peoples, but Christian missionaries to Mercia were already inveighing against the act by the 790s, and were eventually successful in prohibiting horse meat except under extenuating circumstances such as long siege.24 Horses’s names survive in a variety of texts, from sagas and the edda (Hrafnkel’s beloved stallion is Freyfaxi; in the body of a mare Loki is impregnated with Sleipnir) to chansons de geste and romances (Ogier le Danois owns Broiefort; Gawain’s horse is Gringolet) to historical registers (we know the Black Prince possessed destriers named Grisel de Cologne, Morel de Burghersh, Bayard de Brucell, and Bayard Dieu).25 Bede recounts the love of horses that animated young Anglo-Saxon clerics, a scene unimaginable as part of ecclesiastical identity later in the history of the Church.26 According to Bede, a stallion helped to bring about the Christianization of Northumbria. The Ecclesiastical History deploys three strategies to represent the conversion of the kingdom as desirable and inevitable: divine revelation, reasoned acceptance, and the remasculation of a cleric via a horse.27 Coifi, the high priest who complains that his gods have never sufficiently rewarded him for his labors on their behalf, accepts Christianity and is immediately transformed. Previously forbidden to wield a sword or to mount any horse but a mare, the converted cleric is granted arms and a stallion by King Edwin. Full of the vigor that he lacked as a mare-riding pagan, Coifi thunders to the shrines where he once worshipped and— on horseback—profanes and incinerates the idols. The royal horse energetically embodies on Coifi’s behalf a newly transformed masculinity, Christianity as phallicization. Such equine joy for clerics did not last

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into the later Middle Ages, however. Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne insists that “horssys, haukes, and houndes” are “not graunted” to priests and monks, but only to the aristocracy for hunting, to ensure that their desires do not fall prey to the dangerous languor of “ydelnesse” (3085– 96). These noble households ordinarily possessed numerous types of horses: hunters, chargers, palfreys, and a variety of workhorses. None of these animals, however, gained the numinous aura of the aristocratic warhorse (destrier, magnus equus, grant chival), the knight’s beloved companion and the sine qua non of chivalric identity. By the eleventh century, clerics and women rode mares, but—as the anatomically correct equines of the Bayeux tapestry make amply evident—knights rode ungelded stallions, creatures that conjoined in their own chivalric bodies flows of violence (kicking, rearing, hurling, biting) to a responsive docility.28 A well-trained cavalry was an essential component of successful European armies, especially from the eighth century onwards. The martial necessity of mounted warriors coincided with a widespread dissemination of the stirrup, a device that allowed equestrians to channel downward some of the horizontal momentum of the charge, absorbing and somewhat dissipating the uneven gallop of the horse, the centrifugal effect of sudden shifts in trajectory, and the impetus of enemy blows.29 Through this reconfigured trigonometry of force, mounted combatants were seated with far greater stability in their saddles, allowing more complicated battlefield maneuvers. At the same time, this enlargement of somatic possibility affected the horse, enabling it to become more responsive to its rider within an augmented tactile syntax between equine and human flesh.30 Both bodies were changed in this encounter mediated by a strap of leather fastened to some metal. Traditional methods of keeping bodies discrete do not work well in explicating this equine assemblage, for it is not as if the horse is a passive vehicle and the knight its all-controlling driver (another version of the tedious body/mind split, with the human as pure intentionality and the animal as passive materiality). As catalyst, conduit, and participant, the supposedly inanimate stirrup is “neither object nor subject” but a “thing that possesses body and soul indissolubly”: The object, the real thing, the thing that acts, exists only provided that it holds humans and nonhumans together, continuously. . . . What we are looking at is not a human thing, nor is it an

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inhuman thing. It offers, rather, a continuous passage, a commerce, an interchange, between what humans inscribe in it and what it prescribes to humans. It translates the one into the other.31 Such objectal “translations” (as Bruno Latour calls them) vitalize the inorganic, intermingling the human and the nonhuman as fluidities that require ever more minute disciplining if they are to retain socially determinate forms. Just as the equine body learns a new type of control through changes mediated by the technological, the human body likewise must submit to a new regimen of training and corporeal response, a reconfigured experience of embodiment. Without the instantiation of an intersubjective discipline, horse and rider are not going anywhere in the cavalry charge except to a quick death. Steed and warrior and accoutrements become simultaneously active and receptive points within a transformative assemblage. Agency, potentiality, and identity are mobile, the product of relations of movement rather than a static residuum contained in discrete bodies (horse, man) and inanimate objects (saddle, stirrups, spurs, armor, sword). This alteration in the distribution of forces between mount and man enabled the advent in the eleventh century of the shock charge, the cavalry maneuver in which a long spear was couched under the rider’s shoulder while the horse bounded toward deadly collision with the enemy. The tactic proved so lethal because the crushing power of the knight’s weight and velocity, stabilized by the downward vector enabled via the stirrup, could effectively be discharged into the body of the foe.32 Maurice Keen describes this innovation as the gathering of “horse, rider, and lance . . . into what has been called a ‘human projectile’” (Chivalry, 24), a transformation into pure, destructive momentum. The horse-knightspear-stirrup assemblage catalyzed further changes to the materiality of social and somatic reality. A saddlebow had to be added to assist in the prevention of the unseating of the knight at contact. Since lances so easily punctured flesh, heavy shirts of mail became necessary for knights in order to survive battle, and armor became essential to the preservation of their mounts. Men’s bodies had to adapt to this increase in armaments through a more rigorous development of the thighs, chest, shoulders.33 Warhorses were bred to have a sturdier musculature to support

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the growing weight of their armor, their rider’s armor, and perhaps their rider’s increased average body mass.34 The necessity of a good magnus equus, baggage and transport horses, a squire to assist in the long process of arming, a horse and equipment for the squire, and large amounts of grain for the animals pushed knighthood farther along the path of aristocratic privilege that it had long been tracing, for few men outside the upper class could afford this proliferating equipment.35 As repeated references in romance and historical texts make clear, a warhorse alone was so precious a commodity that knights were routinely killed for them. The dependence of chivalric identity upon equine mastery, upon what the German romances call ritterschaft, demanded the learning of complicated and proliferating sets of skills.36 Human and equine bodies had to be trained extensively to foster endurance and coordination, to implant in both animal and human flesh the corporeal knowledge of how to embody the charge. An aristocratic boy was presented his first horse early in life. Henry, son of Edward I, received a white palfrey at the age of seven, while Henry IV purchased a steed for his ten-year-old son John.37 The hard work of disciplining youthful flesh into knightly form included the “hardening” of the squire’s body via a grueling regime of exercise and military simulation. Bodily strength had to be developed just so that the squire could bear the weight of his chain mail, and then began the long training that would eventually enable a fully armed leap from ground to saddle without the use of the stirrup. Each weapon required the intricate somatic knowledge of how best to balance its weight, manage its momentum, and make deadliest use of its force.38 Ramon Lull called for the establishment of schools of chivalry that would emphasize training in the proper use of weapons and horsemanship, and numerous manuscript illustrations depict young men hard at work, learning the proper somatic contours of knighthood. In one especially amusing illustration (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264, fol. 82v) a youth is seated atop a plank of wood attached to four beams, a rough quadrupedal form. In place of hooves these legs are attached to four wheels. Employing an overly lengthy stick as a spear, the young man threatens a target attached to a post. Two servants or friends use long ropes to set the horse-machine into motion, simulating an equine charge. A bird with a long beak looks on disdainfully. For youths and knights

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Figure 2. Boy with horse-machine. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodl. 264, fol. 82v. Used by permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

alike, mechanical simulations like the quintain were essential pedagogical components that taught the squire how to function within a play of forces in which his own body was but a single participant.39 Whereas contemporary biographies are apt to mark the entrance into adult identity through an epiphanal narration of the “awakening to sexuality” (it goes without saying that Frantzen rehearses a familiar script in the passage from Before the Closet discussed earlier), the chivalric movement from youth (squiredom) to maturity (knighthood) is more likely to involve a lesson about horses. The life of the twelfth-century knight William the Marshal is unusually well recorded, and includes just such a moment. During his first military encounter, William’s warhorse was killed, and he found himself in the humiliating position of being unable to afford a new one.40 The chamberlain of the lord of Tancarville chose not to provide the young knight with a new steed in order to teach him a lesson: in battle a disciplined warrior captures the horses of other knights in order to force them into the position William was now enduring. By selling the symbolically charged mantle that he had worn when recently dubbed a knight, William was able to secure a baggage horse to transport his equipment, but he was made to suffer the indignities of horselessness until the advent of an important regional tournament, when the chamberlain relented and provided a new mount.

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William’s first tournament was a resounding success. Not only did he spectacularly demonstrate his horsemanship and strength, he defeated three knights and seized their equipment (arms, armor, and four kinds of horses). William always remembered this lesson in chivalric dependence upon equine possession: “never again did he neglect to capture good horses when he had the opportunity” (Painter, William Marshal, 23). As the Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal makes clear in its detailed accounts of William’s adventures as knight errant, once the requisite man-animal alliance had been learned by both bodies, tournaments were a popular means for its maintenance, for they provided a large and relatively efficient forum for frequent practice and training.41 By encouraging groups of heavily armed men to aggressive acts, however, tournaments were also dangerous events. The promulgation of a code of chivalry that valorized control and subordination thus became an increasingly important way of altering embodied masculinity, of producing a male body as docile at court as it was useful on the battlefield.42 In his Livre de chevalerie (Book of Chivalry), a kind of recipe book for producing proper chivalric subjects, the renowned knight Geoffroi de Charny describes how the “most perfect” form of knighthood comes to be embodied. As soon as they reach the “age of understanding” (des lors que cognoissance se commence), Geoffroi says that certain boys with a natural instinct (code for “select aristocratic youth”) enjoy listening to men describe deeds of arms. They admire knights in armor and gaze with longing upon “fine mounts and chargers [beaux chevaux et beaux coursiers]” (Book of Chivalry, 100, 101). The fervor (tres grant volenté) triggered by these auditory and visual stimuli increases as the youths approach adulthood, so that as adolescents they passionately desire “to ride horses and bear arms” (100, 101).43 The magnetic power of this catalytic volenté for horsemanship is acknowledged once more in Charny’s description of the knighting ceremony, where the first symbolic gift conferred on a new knight is two gilded spurs (168, 169). Contrast these passionate young knights whose chivalric trajectory is so forceful with Charny’s description of the cowardly chevaliers who disgrace knighthood with their lack of prowess. Not surprisingly, such reprehensible knights are betrayed by their inept relation to their horses: “When these feeble wretches are on horseback, they do not dare to use their spurs lest their horses should start to gallop, so afraid are they lest their horses should stumble and they should fall to the ground with them” (128, 129). The Catalan crusader and polymath

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Ramon Lull in his Libre del Ordre de Cauayleria (translated into French by Christine de Pizan, and thence into English by William Caxton as The Book of the Ordre of Chyvalry) provides a foundation myth for chivalry that stresses that the reason why knights ride horses is simple equivalence. Known for their courage, loyalty, strength, and obedience, the “Hors was the moost noble” of beasts, and therefore the animal most like knights themselves, the “moost loyal, most stronge and of most noble courage” among men (Book of the Ordre of Chyvalry, 15). “Election,” “hors,” and “armes” make the knight superior and beloved; they also, significantly, place him over woman, since she (unlike the horse) lacks the same “strengthe of nature” (17). Lull stresses that the care of the horse is so central to chivalric identity that it cannot be fully entrusted to subordinates: “to take hede of his hors is thoffyce of a knyght.” So interdependent are the well-maintained mount and the proper aristocratic fighting man that, in Lull’s succinct formulation, “a knyght without harnoys may not be ne ought to be named a knyght” (54).44 Although treatises on knighthood like those by Charny and Lull are important documents for the study of western European aristocratic male identity, narrative was the primary technology for the implantation and shaping of medieval chivalric desire. In a scene from the romance Bevis of Hampton, the hero chides an opponent during battle for slaying his steed: “O,” queþ Beues, “so god me spede, þow hauest don gret vileinie, When þow sparde me bodi And for me gilt min hors aqueld!”45 “Oh!” said Bevis, “You committed great villainy when you spared my body, and on my account killed my horse!” Bevis’s assertion that he values his own life less than that of his mount may seem puzzling to modern readers, but medieval knights were nothing without these animals, as the etymology of both the French and German words for knight (chevalier, Ritter) attests.46 In a foundational text for the study of chivalric romance, Robert W. Hanning wrote of his desire to connect the genesis of the genre to what he called “the contemporaneous development of the concept of the individual in European culture” (The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance, 1). Building upon

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the work of Norman Cantor (The Meaning of the Middle Ages), R. W. Southern (The Making of the Middle Ages) and especially Colin Morris (The Discovery of the Individual, 1050–1200), Hanning argued that the twelfth century witnessed the “efflorescence of the concept of the individual,” with all its attendant emphasis upon autonomy and self-determination. More recent scholars tend to be skeptical of any attempt to emplace the eruption of modernity within a given span of years, since such arguments inevitably reduce the complexity of preceding centuries to an unnuanced anteriority awaiting their own supersession. Bevis, his mount, and their numerous analogues in the romances allow us to add that, even if the genre offers a powerful vision of individuality, such coherence of form ultimately rests on a blending of species, on a body that in its movements is in fact no longer human. When Guigemar, the eponymous knight in a lai of Marie de France, returns from exile to his native land, a squire immediately presents him with a destrier, the public signal that the man’s identity has been fully restored (Guigemar, 634–40). When in another lai by the same author the knight Lanval is excluded from King Arthur’s court, he wanders into the countryside and abandons his mount. The scene stages a profound reduction from which only the mysterious passion of an enchanted lady can rescue the knight, catalyzing his desires into mobility again through a private love that contrasts with the public sexualities of the court (Lanval, 43–50, 77–78). In Chrétien de Troyes’s romance Le Chevalier au lion, the protagonist Yvain and the fearsome Storm Knight are said to fight honorably because they refuse to strike each other’s mounts (855–58), while in the Merlin Continuation Gawain is reminded by his enemy that, if he allows his horse to be killed, he will “be completely humiliated.” Later in the same work Gawain chastises the knight who has unhorsed him: “‘Morholt, if you don’t dismount, you’ll make me kill your horse, for which the blame will be mine and the shame yours.’”47 The portraits in Chaucer’s General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales often describe the type of mount a pilgrim rides to convey essential aspects of personality, just as a contemporary writer might indicate a model of car in order to embody in external form a character’s interiority. In the Ellesmere portraits the Knight and Squire ride combat-ready destriers rather than the palfreys that they would actually have used for transportation, indicating that the bond uniting knight to warhorse was more intense than a desire for quotidian fact. Linguistically, culturally, physically, there could be no

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chivalry without a disciplinary relationship of mutual desire between men and their horses.48 The Chanson de Roland stages a corporeal rebuke to the pagan knight Chernubles that involves the Saracen’s horse as much as it does the enemy’s abjected form. Roland first slices through helm, scalp, face, hauberk, and crotch of the knight. The disaggregation culminates as the sword passes through the saddle and the destrier is sliced in half: “His sword comes to rest in the horse itself. / He slices through its spine, seeking no joint, / And flinging them both dead in the meadow on the lush grass” (1326–34). In Aliscans, Guillaume d’Orange likewise refutes Saracen possibility by cutting pagan warriors and their horses to senseless pieces. Guillaume is quick to acknowledge the passionate bond that ties him to his own charger, Baucent. Overwhelmed by Saracens, he worries not that he will die or be captured, but that his horse will be seized, a misfortune he says he cannot endure: “‘Si en Espaigne es des paiens menez, / Si m’aist Dex, moult en serair irez’” (“‘If Paynims took you back to Spain with them / I’d die of grief, so help me God above!’” 523–24).49 Baucent listens like a man (“ausi l’entent com s’il fust hom senez”) as his master promises that he will feed him richly, bathe him, and have him nobly clothed in blankets if he can gather his courage and carry them both to Orange. The horse, needless to say, joyfully obliges. Vivien, too, possesses a horse that understands intimately his master’s language (Aliscans, 35). The eponymous hero of Raimbert de Paris’s Ogier le Danois meanwhile finds himself happily ensconced in a strange domesticity with his beloved steed, Broiefort. Besieged by the French while immured at Castelfort, Ogier tends his oven, bakes bread, cares for his animal companion. In an inspired moment he snips hair from Broiefort and fabricates bearded mannequins who frighten away his attackers. As Sandra Hindman has observed, Ogier inhabits a world without women: “simultaneously brutish and clever, with only a horse for his companion, . . . [he] moves in an exclusively male world of epic adventure” (Sealed in Parchment, 154). That male world within which he is so at home originates literally for Ogier in the body of his horse. The chivalric circuit could spread a knight’s desire into an intersubjective embrace that included a “courtly love” for a woman and a piety for the Church and its cultic objects; but sometimes the same assemblage was also content to leave a man to his horse.50

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Theorists of chivalry like Joachim Bumke, Richard Kaeuper, Maurice Keen, and Lee Patterson find in chivalric literature not just an idealized reflection of contemporary history but “an active social force” that attempted to restructure social reality, absorbing dangerous knightly violence into a hierarchized and predictable public order.51 As both code of courtesy and mode of martial training, chivalry was a technology both of subjectivity and of the flesh. For the true chevalier, minute regulation applied simultaneously to bodies both human and equine, since both might “throw off the accustomed yoke of subservience and demonstrate wild and ‘uncivilized’ behavior.”52 The early-thirteenth-century romance Perlesvaus, for example, attempts to immunize knightly identity against its tendency toward fragmentation and chaotic force, a textual obsession precisely congruent with the anxieties articulated by historians like Orderic Vitalis, Suger of Saint-Denis, and Galbert of Bruges. Menacing knights in black armor who ride dark horses appear frequently in Perlesvaus, figuring the dangers that “unchivalricized” bodies pose to social stability. Haunting the fringes of the civilized, these fearsome warriors are typically encountered as they hack each other to pieces: “Many wielded swords as red as flame, and were attacking one another and hewing off hands and feet and noses and heads and faces.”53 In a particularly memorable episode, Arthur’s squire encounters a maiden gathering the bloody remnants of these battles, “bearing on her shoulders half a dead man.” These collected fragments of a knighthood that does not cohere are stored in a crumbling manor house, an architectural condensation of the ruin of masculinity in the absence of chivalry’s ordering principle. Lancelot, Gawain, and Arthur unite to teach these demonic knights a spectacular lesson about the proper contours of violence, a pedagogy of the sword that transforms them out of their humanity: “both they and their horses turned to filth and ashes, and black demons rose from their bodies in the form of crows” (Perlesvaus, 274–78). Bodies in pieces, identities dispersed into dirt, and pestilent birds serve as the ocular reproof to the unregulated force that historically so sorely tempted medieval knights. The rebuked forms of the black knights vanish in Perlesvaus, but so do their equipment and horses, a tacit acknowledgement that a knight is more than the flesh that he inhabits. An analogue to this romance episode exists in the Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, where knights who live outside chivalry during life are punished in

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death by forced nocturnal wandering. Having failed to recognize that their martial and equestrian equipment was during life an essential part of their selfhood, the wicked milites in Orderic’s narrative find when dead that these misemployed pieces return to torture their bearers. Mounted upon coal-black horses, the ghost-knights bear arms of “intolerable weight” that burn with hellish fire and exude a suffocating stench. They are cursed in the afterlife to acknowledge perpetually the gravitas of their calling and its identity-giving objects.54 Books of chivalry like Ramon Lull’s routinely invested knightly arms and mounts with a religious aura. The saddle, for example, “sygnefyeth surete of courage, the charge and the grete burthen of chyualry” (Book of the Ordre of Chyualry, 83). The horse bodies forth “noblesse of corage”; its bridle symbolizes restraint; the reins are service and largesse; the testier on the horse’s head is reason; equine armor signifies those “goodes temporal” without which the knight will not be able to maintain the honor of chivalry (84–86). Knightly possessions are so central to chivalric identity in the chansons de geste that these objects take on agency and personal names: Roland’s sword is Durendaal, his horse Veillantif (Valiant). The proper training of the body that is chivalry is conveyed in romance with a reverence that solicits the passion of the young men who compose the genre’s object of address, teaching them how to desire what the properly formed knightly subject must desire. Because, as Georges Duby famously argued, armed warriors who could not look forward to inheriting ancestral lands and who lacked a permanent position at court (juvenes) were always a potential source of danger, chivalry aimed to provide the circumscriptive contours within which their sexuality and aggression could safely circulate. To inculcate this self-control, chivalric romance pays special attention to the affectionate relationships that young knights must form with their horses and, to a lesser extent, their greyhounds and hawks, animal bodies that are something more than pets. Ramon Lull conjured a powerful vision of a knight’s perfect union with his mount: To an horse is gyuen a brydel & the raynes of the brydel ben gyuen in the hondes of the knyght by cause that the knyght may at his wille holde his hors and refrayne hym. And thys sygnefyeth that a knyghte oughte to refrayne his tongue and

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holde that he speke no fowle wordes false. And it also sygnefyeth that he ought to refrayne his hondes that he gyuve not soo moche that he be suffratous and nedy. . . but that in his hardynesse he haue reason and attempuraunce. (Book of the Ordre of Chyualry, 84–85) A horse under the complete control of its rider was the public signifier of a knight’s internalized discipline, of his self-mastery. When Chrétien de Troyes wanted to suggest that the knight Guivret’s prowess is, in Robert Hanning’s words, “running away with him,” he describes a small man precariously conveyed by un grant destrier.55 The horse ideally functions like the boy described by Foucault in The Use of Pleasure, as a body with which a man forms an alliance as a means to self-transformation, as part of an “art of existence” or “technique of the self”: What I mean by the phrase are those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria.56 Chivalric romance esteems nothing higher than the life transformed into the work of art, than the extraordinary vita that calls for its own impossible reiteration by those suddenly possessed of a passion to change their own selfhood by likewise transfiguring their desires. Just as in the actual training of squires detailed earlier, chivalric narratives often enacted the process of becoming a knight through a youth’s domesticating relation to his horse. The dominion that he learned to exert over his animal companion paralleled the controlled responsiveness that he taught his own flesh. A pivotal moment in Chrétien de Troyes’s Li Contes del Graal occurs when Perceval, a young man who has been raised in rural Wales and denied knowledge of his knightly heritage, trades his rustic chaceor (hunting horse) for the slain Vermillion Knight’s destrier. Rather naïve (nice) because of his unfamiliarity with the chivalric world, Perceval is slowly indoctrinated into proper masculine comportment as the narrative unwinds.57 Mentored by the accomplished knight Gornemant de Gohort, Perceval learns quickly that his relation to animals is going to have to change dramatically from the utilitarian value system learned

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in distant, agrarian Wales. The difference between chivalric and laborbased views of the horse is expressed in Gornemant’s first question to Perceval and the boy’s revealing reply: Et li prudom li redemande Qu’il set fere de cheval. “Jel cor bien amont et aval Tot autresi con je coroie Le chaceor, quant je l’avoie.” (1364–68) Then the gentleman asked him how skilled he was with his horse. “I can make it run up hills and down, just as I could run my hunter, when I had it.” The prudom immediately realizes that Perceval’s first lesson must inculcate not just skill at riding, but proper reverence for the horse itself. He is shown comportment atop his mount, how to spur and check and guide (poindre, retenir, mener) the animal (1416, 1438). The horse’s great worth, he is made to realize, derives from its tractability combined with its strength (“que nus plus volantiers n’aloit / plus tost ne de graignor vertu,” 1424–25), words that exactly describe the body of young Perceval. Like the cheval with which he forms his alliance, Perceval is a site of possibility rather than of simple utility. Having transformed his flesh and his horse’s flesh, he is finally given his knightly spur and armed with a sword symbolic of culturally sanctioned chivalry, “the highest order that God had set forth and ordained” (1615–16). The discipline of children in the Middle Ages was at times analogized to the domestication of animals. Young Peter Carew, having decided to skip a day of school to play pranks upon the Exeter city wall, was bound by his father’s command and led like a hound to his home, where—in the culmination of this humiliating punishment—he was chained to a real dog.58 In the romance bearing his name, Sir Gowther is forced to live among canines in order to learn the proper regulation of his proto-chivalric body. Another romance hero, William of Palerne, learns adult comportment through a series of adventures instigated when he and his beloved don the skins of bears and deer. While they live as woodland animals, they are protected all the while by a “witty” and

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“semli” werewolf yearning for the stability of human form.59 This inculcated somatic discipline extends equally to man and animal. William of Palerne features a warhorse that serves both father and heroic son. Having recognized William, the mount genuflects to his young master and with pride conveys him into battle (3282–95). Arondel, the destrier of Bevis of Hampton, proves his loyalty to his master when the knight’s archenemy Yvor arrogantly mounts him. The horse conveys the Saracen king on a wild ride through woods and wilderness, eventually pitching him to the ground (“all to-brak þe kinges kroun,” Bevis of Hampton, 1522). Later, having fled long imprisonment by a man antipathetic to his burgeoning chivalric trajectory, Bevis class cross-dresses in the ragged garb of a palmer to rescue his beloved Josian from Yvor. The moment his beloved steed Arondel hears his master’s name spoken, the horse breaks his confining chains, rushes to Bevis, and restores the knight to his true chivalric self. When Bevis mounts Arondel, the princess recognizes her lover and they are joyfully reunited (2147–2208), completing that triangle of mutual dependency whose trigonometry ensures that the dilatory narrative will always eventually contract at these three points. Demonstrating as much moral as horse sense, Arondel later kills a thieving prince, but is sentenced in consequence to slaughter.60 Bevis decides to go into exile with his horse rather than see him perish: “Nai,” queþ Beues, “for no catele Nel ich lese min hors Arondele, Ac min hors for to were Ingelonde ich wile for-swere.” (3575–78) “Nay,” declared Bevis. “I would not lose my horse for anything. To keep him I’ll lose England!” In renouncing England for the sake of his Arondel, Bevis in consequence abandons his wife Josian, pregnant with twin sons. His choice demonstrates that knightly identity depends more on animal bodies than upon mere heterosexual desire or quotidian social structures like family. Much later in this wide-ranging romance, after Bevis and Josian have again been reunited, Arondel is stolen. Bevis’s foster father Saber dreams that Bevis has been badly wounded, exactly the same dream that he experienced when Bevis once lost his wife. The romance finally ends when

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Bevis discovers Arondel dead in his stable. He returns home to Josian, embraces her, and husband and wife expire together, the horse’s demise signaling their own self loss (4539–4620).61 Bevis of Hampton is a romance built upon a double structure: its heroic trajectory keeps expanding (across Eastern geographies, across genders, religions, species, eroticisms), dispersing itself across differences but ultimately recentering and assimilating them. For Chrétien’s Yvain, the self-regulation that produces the proper chivalric subject is synonymous with maintaining a whole series of intersubjective relationships: with his cohort, with a wild lion, with monsters like the giant Harpin, with his wife Laudine. Le Chevalier au lion is a romance of heterosexuality. The narrative envalues domesticity over errantry, so that when Yvain is repudiated by his spouse for continuing after marriage to inhabit his prematrimonial, homosocial world, the knight loses his identity completely. After wandering the woods as a wild man, Yvain slowly returns to his humanity through the agency of his animal companion, a lion in which he perceives an innate nobility. Taming the exotic beast enacts the process of domesticating his own selfhood, of transforming his identity from the individuations of heroism to a more relational mode of being. Le Chevalier au lion promulgates the figure of the husband-knight, an identity inhabitable only through what might be called the matrimonial circuit, an identity machine that includes not just the “invention” of the heterosexual, monogamous couple, but the enabling of the couple’s coming-into-being through an animal whose passion for Yvain teaches the knight to become a man. Just as Shakespeare mocked the Dauphin of France for the inordinateness of his equine exuberance in Henry V (“When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk, he trots the air, the earth sings when he touches it!” III.vii.15–16), medieval writers likewise often criticized knights for the excess of their horse-directed desires. The chivalry-obsessed Milun, protagonist of Marie de France’s lai of the same name, quickly reconciles himself to a life lived away from his beloved lady but remains inseparable throughout the narrative from his mount. The fabliau Des Tresses tells the story of a knight who loves his horse so much that he builds a stable next to his bedroom. His wife, not surprisingly, is forced to seek sexual pleasure elsewhere. When the knight discovers her infidelity, she bribes a bourgeois woman to take her place in the bedroom. He straps spurs to his feet and rides this woman he takes to be his spouse as if she

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were a rebellious horse in need of breaking. His violence culminates as he cuts the woman’s tresses from her head and expels her from the house. When his wife returns, she secretly cuts the animal with a dagger to simulate spur marks and chops away his entire tail, deceiving the knight into believing that he was actually riding and abusing his beloved horse. “You should have seen the teardrops trail / In rivers down his cheeks and chin,” the narrator observes dryly. The moral of the cruel story is that the knight fully merits this rebuke sent to him across equine flesh.62 Written at about the same time as Geoffroi de Charny’s Livre de chevalerie, the Middle English romance Octavian (c. 1350) illustrates well the complex circulation of desires that in chivalry conjoined human and animal bodies. The narrative produces the “final” solidity of full knightly identity via a series of alliances with lions, apes, hawks, horses, breast milk, coins, social classes, Saracens, monsters—a diverse world of phenomena that hint that the romance hero’s idealized stability is rather more precarious than romance mythology acknowledges. The openended flux upon which the chivalric identity circuit depends is ultimately disavowed for an adult singularity, but Octavian offers numerous opportunities for reading romance against its own destiny, for seeing in the body expansive potentiality rather than culminating constraint. The narrative opens with a spectacular failure of the structure of family precipitated by the uncertainties innate to sexuality, a failure that leads to a bodily and psychical blending of human and beast. After seven years of failing to produce an heir to the Roman throne, the empress gives birth to twin sons, only to be wrongfully accused of adultery by her mother-inlaw. When Octavian announces his faith in the fidelity of his spouse, his infuriated mother offers a serving boy “a thowsande pownde and mare” to climb into the “chylde-bedd” with the slumbering empress (126– 28).63 The purchase of the body of the “cokys knave” for so large a sum is the first instance of the text’s recurring fascination with capital, class mutability, and the possibility of absolute value. The wicked mother-inlaw (is there any other kind in romance?) arranges for her son to enter the bedchamber and witness the tableau vivant that she has carefully staged. We as the audience know that we are beholding only a new mother sleeping tenderly with her newborns, and see that the naked serving boy at her side is so terrified of the alien richness of the bedchamber that he has drawn himself as far from the empress as possible

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to cower miserably (“sore he was adredd,” 144). Octavian, on the other hand, thinks that he gazes upon his wife in flagrante delicto. He executes the boy immediately, soaking the bedsheets with innocent blood (“the ryche clothys were all bebledd / of that gyltles blode,” 155–56). He awakens his wife by hurling the boy’s severed head at her slumbering form. Provided only with some gold coins (“forty pownde / of fflorens,” 277–78), the empress and the twins are ordered into exile. Expelled from those structures of human belonging that were supposed to have ensured their safety, mother and children find themselves in a wilderness “full of wylde bestys” (290). They are immediately set upon by animals whose bodies are at once convenient figures for the decidedly unchivalric world of Octavian’s Rome (where human law and reason have together failed), as well as sites of possibility and change (beasts and men are destined in this narrative to hybridize). One baby is snatched by a lioness to feed to her whelps, the other abducted by a ravenous ape.64 After an unexpected battle against a griffin, the exhausted lioness naps before carrying the child to her den. On awakening, however, she discovers the contented infant suckling at her “lyenas pappe.” Just as in The Story of Merlin the infant Kay’s being nursed by a peasant ensures that the future seneschal will mature into an obnoxious and unchivalric adult (214), here the flow of lion’s milk into the human baby catalyzes the formation of a knight of supreme valor.65 Nourishing the child awakens in the lioness that maternal tenderness that was so alien to the emperor’s mother, and she decides to raise the boy with her own cubs, a medieval Mowgli. Wandering over land and sea, the empress eventually comes upon her lost child. Beholding how deeply his adoptive mother loves the boy, the empress takes both with her to Jerusalem, where the threesome settle into a quiet if rather strange domesticity. Human body nurtured with leonine breast milk, the boy is christened Octavian and grows quickly into his destined chivalric manhood (511–16). Despite these fantastic comminglings of the human and the animal in young Octavian, the narrative energy of the romance is reserved for the infant abducted by the ape, whose slow realization of his possible identity provides an exemplary study of how knights come to know who they are by desires that draw them out of themselves and into passionate encounters with the nonhuman world. A knight rescues the tiny boy from simian captivity, only to be waylaid in turn by a band of outlaws,

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who then abduct the child themselves (this is, indeed, a romance). The bandits decide to sell the “swete” baby for “floryns brode and bryght” (576) in nearby Jerusalem. They find both a willing purchaser and an inveterate haggler in a Parisian merchant named Clement. To the asking price of “fowrty pownde” Clement responds with a firm counteroffer of twenty (577–86). A caricature of the capital-obsessed middle class, Clement cannot see the difference between monetary value, which is fungible, and innate worth, which exists outside his mercantile system of exchange. Clement mints the boy with the name Florent, after the gold coin that he so obviously adores, the very coinage given to Florent’s mother as she hastened into exile (“forty pownde” of such coins, to be exact). Accompanied by his new son as well as a conveniently available wet nurse, Clement returns from his pilgrimage to his native France. He announces to his wife that the boy is his own, born in Jerusalem. A bodily connection to Florent (even if a specious one) is essential to his adoptive father. By promulgating this myth of his biological fatherhood, Clement is disavowing the possibility that filial identity might glide along nonsomatic connections, might escape the closed linearity of familial descent. His wife replies by declaring the this child shall be her own, too, and “kyssyd hyt many a sythe” (612). Richard Kaeuper has argued that the chivalric enfances is a process of maturation punctuated by violence. The Chanson d’Aspremont celebrates young Roland’s decision to beat a porter and steal some horses in order to join a battle forbidden him by an overprotective Charlemagne. The youthful Rainouart in Aliscans is struck by his tutor and kills the man in revenge. As a boy Lancelot was able to endure patiently a slap from his tutor, but when the man then buffeted his new pet greyhound (a gift from an elderly vavasour who recognized the knightly potential in the lad), Lancelot beat his teacher severely.66 Florent’s youth, on the other hand, is marked by a touching sweetness on his part, even in the face of similarly “pedagogical” violence. He matures into a boy so beautiful that his fame spreads across France. In romance, inner goodness is inevitably visible in the flesh and finds a particularly powerful inscription in the face. This radiant physicality is again a conventional attribute of the male chivalric body, a masculine form so saturated with desire that its every limb is offered lovingly up for visual consumption. Film theorists have argued that the gaze traditionally constructs the female body as object of desire, but the chivalric body genders that optics very differently.

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The intense purity of little Florent’s visage indicates that he is not suited to the “dirty” work of the middle class, but his father has great difficulty accepting his son’s legible difference. Clement’s repeated attempts to indoctrinate Florent into a mercantile identity fail as the boy proves incapable of assigning anything but absolute values to the animals that for his father are the negotiable commodities of the marketplace.67 When Clement decides that his boy will be apprenticed as a money changer (an appropriate enough trade for someone named after currency), Florent is sent into town with the family’s oxen as payment. Wide-eyed with desire when he sees a squire holding a falcon “wyth ffedurs folden bryght” (654), Florent offers both beasts of burden in exchange for the aristocratic bird. He returns home full of pride in the animal’s splendor. Clement, unamused, beats the boy severely. The stunned Florent first sets his falcon’s ruffled feathers in order, then softly but firmly rebukes his father, declaring that he does not understand how anyone can do violence in the awe-inspiring presence of the falcon: “Wolde ye stonde now and beholde How feyre he can hys fedurs folde And how lovely they lye, Ye wolde pray God wyth all your mode That ye had solde halfe your gode Soche anodur to bye.” (691–96) Florent’s rhetoric of wonder depicts the hawk as a version of the biblical pearl of great price—not exactly worth selling everything one owns to obtain, but meriting at least half one’s possessions. Astounded at the intensity of Florent’s reverence for the bird, his parents decide to send another son to the money changer instead. Some time later, Clement places “fowrty pownde” in a purse and asks Florent to carry it to his newly apprenticed brother. Wandering the busy streets of Paris, Florent comes upon a horse “stronge in eche were” whose iridescent coat (“whyte as any mylke”) and richly adorned equipment immediately activate his ardor. In a scene that replays his father’s purchase of his own infant body from the bandits, the young man approaches the horse’s owner and asks if he might sell him the spectacular mount. The merchant declares the value of the warhorse to be precisely “thyrty pownde, / eche peny hole and sownde” (727–28), a statement

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of exaggerated firmness that betrays the expectation of a counteroffer. Whereas Clement immediately bargained down the asking price of the infant Florent from forty pounds to twenty, Florent announces that thirty pounds is too mean a sum for so noble an animal. He insists that the man accept a full “fowrty pownde” (732), setting up a symbolic equivalence between the horse and its new owner, between the two bodies in their mutual potentiality. Forty pounds, by no coincidence, was also repeatedly declared to be the statutory threshold of English knighthood, so that Florent’s seemingly impulsive purchase actually enfolds and attenuates the economic, the social, the aristocratic, the animal, the chivalric.68 The circuit of Florent’s identity here glides along two temporarily overlapping trajectories. The first, potentially open circuit disperses his being by catalyzing his becoming-knight via a passion for animals that rivals the becoming-horse of Little Hans. This movement out of his bourgeois Parisian existence decomposes the subjectivity that he has inherited from Clement. As his body emits those particles of chivalric force that rapidly traverse the gulf separating him from the falcon and destrier, a middle space springs into existence where the dilating passions of the boy mingle with and are transformed by the affects, intensities, and possibilities transmitted from avine and equine flesh. A vitalistic cosmos saturated with desire, this open space is similar to that created and sustained by Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale, a narrative whose teller refuses to abandon multiple pleasures for a diminished knightly stability. A second, circumscriptive circuit activates simultaneously, attempting what Deleuze and Guattari would call a reterritorialization, striving to articulate into socially useful form this dangerous and potentially nonhuman flux of identity. The second movement works through equivalence: a warhorse, an aristrocratic boy, and a knight are all given the same absolute value (forty pounds), because it is necessary that they all in the end become the same predictable, discernable, deployable thing. Unlike Octavian, The Squire’s Tale fails—as the Franklin’s unctuous interruption makes clear—because it refuses this reduction, contentedly wandering within an endlessly proliferating world of objects possessed of inhuman agency (brass horses, enchanted ring), nonnormative sexualities (Canacee and the possibility of incest; a fascination with the love lives of birds), a proliferation of stories that resist the finality of closure. Florent welcomes his newly acquired horse into the family living quarters (740), grooms and feeds it with love, and teaches his parents to

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treat the effulgent mount with similar awe. His mother immediately realizes that their son’s blood is of a different “kynde” than their own. Clement eventually agrees that nobility is exerting itself in the child, bestows armor on his adopted son, and allows the newly purchased horse to pull Florent out of his bourgeois enchainment and into a chivalric world of exorbitant enemies and absolute values. When a Saracen army invades shortly thereafter, the dispersive dilations of Florent’s becoming-knight come to an abrupt halt. Henceforth the identity that he will inhabit will be delimited via abjection and disidentification. Florent’s next chivalric lessons are in killing enemies whose monstrously embodied racial alterity mark them as intolerable to a chivalric subjectivity that is now rapidly circumscribed behind inviolable demarcations of difference. The slaying of the requisite giant (990) precipitates the formation of a warrior Florent whose special skill on the battlefield is to lop heads from shoulders and set them rolling like balls (1330–32). His desires now precipitate out of their dispersed mobility to alight upon a single body, a virtuous Saracen princess, and he begins to derive his identity from his normative relation to her as arbiter of his masculinity and spur to further battlefield heroics. Yet before Florent is completely absorbed into this machinery of social regulation and predictable outcomes, Clement himself is infected by those desires that formerly transmuted his son. In a spectacular episode he even raids the Sultan’s camp and steals a warhorse (1501–48), a stunning becoming-knight that, when suddenly embarked upon by a seemingly irredeemable mercantilist, does undermine some of the aristocratic myth in which the romance is so fiercely invested. Florent is eventually reunited with his true father, mother, brother: “To Rome went the emperour, / Hys wyfe and his sonys be hys syde” (1787–88). Octavian ends like all chivalric romances, with the reinscription of family, the valorization of social hierarchy, and the reassertion of a world that, even if it has progressed in time, nevertheless has not significantly changed. Yet the romance in its energetic middle spaces entertains other possibilities for bodies than those that, at the narrative’s end, are presented as having been inevitable. Lion’s milk coursing through a boy’s young flesh, mingling with the humors already in ceaseless circulation there; Florent in the hands of an ape, a knight, bandits, a merchant, realizing that the identity that he has for many years inhabited is alien, and finding in the regal bearing of a falcon and the hypnotic glimmer of a horse’s coat other possibilities for what had seemed his natural

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Figure 3. Geoffrey Luttrell on horseback. British Library ADD. MS 42130, fol. 202v. Used by permission of the British Library.

and ineluctable self: these dynamic and promiscuous bodies at the threshold of the humanly possible are the precondition for the embodied chivalric subject. Only by acknowledging, however tacitly, how exorbitantly inhuman bodies must become can the chivalric circuit operate. No wonder, then, that the history of chivalry cannot be expressed as some triumphantalist narrative, no matter how intoxicating its seemingly definitive teleology was to medieval knights and has continued to be for some scholars. To the contrary, medieval chivalry was always embattled, compromised, dispersed, and as a result was also forever nostalgic for an immutability it never in fact possessed. The necessary failure of chivalry’s grandiose promise to transcend time and body (and the defensive fantasy of a perfect past that it produced as a result) is nowhere clearer than in the most familiar medieval illustration of a knight astride his destrier. Geoffrey Luttrell famously commissioned a spectacular self-portrait as part of a psalter (London, British Library, Add. MS 42130) in which he becomes “the quintessential

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image of the medieval knighthood . . . mounted on a great warhorse and depicted as the ideal representative of this warrior class” (Camille, Mirror in Parchment, 49).69 The imposing image of the horse grandly swathed in the family coat of arms combines the statuesque formality of the welltrained mount with a characteristically equine whinny. Luttrell’s wife Agnes offers her husband his helm, but she is all but lost against the visually massive destrier. Even if in the actual practice of war engagements were won by employing tactics like dismounted raids, combat on foot, and the utilization of siege engines rather than through mounted charges, knights nonetheless insistently constructed their identity via reference to their horses. Even when no longer central to military campaigns, the “great horse” remained essential to ceremony and representation. The iconic representation of knight mounted upon warhorse was by the time of the assembly of the Luttrell Psalter hopelessly nostalgic, since the wars against the Scots in which Geoffrey Luttrell had participated had taught the English the severe limitations of excessive reliance upon heavy cavalry in the face of guerilla tactics and rugged terrain. The early fourteenth century saw a series of humiliating military defeats for the English cavalry, most notably at Bannockburn in 1314. Andrew Ayton has documented how mounted combat centered upon a chivalric class therefore had to be abandoned for new tactics in which archers and dismounted combatants combined their forces.70 Because of their sheer bulk warhorses were not easily transported by boat to the new fields of engagement in France. Their size also rendered them a hindrance for mounted tactics like the devastating chevauchée, a lightningstrike raid essential to the English campaign across the channel demanding mounts capable of moving swiftly over rough country. Records indicate that by the middle of the fourteenth century valuable warhorses were often sent back to England, if they were brought on campaign at all (Ayton, Knights and Warhorses, 22–23). Yet the knight’s close relation to his destrier was so integral to chivalric identity that on the level of representation and self-articulation it functioned impervious to both a changed historical context and the hard facts of a particular life. Not only was the golden age of the cavalry essentially over, Geoffrey Luttrell himself was probably approaching sixty years of age and had not seen martial action for many years. By the time the portrait was painted, he likely had not ridden a warhorse for some time. The manuscript illustration of an idealized knight astride his mount recuperates for the present

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a past that threatens to become lost. Such restorative representations, motivated by a fantasy of eternal chivalric vigor, do not promulgate empty, theatrical images or cynically adoptable masks but offer (as Camille has demonstrated) a potent and real identity, “fixed through powerful signs to a body.”71

The Limits of the Body It may seem that in counterposing David Halperin’s erotically charged “queer muscle” with this examination of the chivalric assemblage I am valorizing what is ultimately an apparatus of normalization. That is not my intent at all. First, such an assemblage—simply because it normalizes—cries out to be queered in the traditional way. Chivalry offers the armor of an impossibly complete identity, what Jeremy Citrome labels “the perfectly-sealed chivalric body,” but chivalry always ultimately falters.72 The necessary failure of identities that present themselves as natural, seamless, and ahistorical is exactly what the queer is about. Chivalry’s destiny is a transmutation into a desire-soaked, chimerical body cut adrift from its genesis as a warrior ethos. Felicity Riddy aptly compares the late medieval knight to the cowboy, a larger-than-life figure who powerfully stimulates fantasies about a lost time when the body did not feel constraint and prohibition: “Separated from the mundane business of landholding, office, or even army, he floats glamorously and alluringly free. . . . The knight’s horse and his social status are emblematic of mobility and freedom . . . a uniquely accessible and adaptable locus of fantasy and desire” (“Middle English Romance,” 238–39). A trigger to what must be described as homoerotic passion, the knight sutures late medieval masculinities by offering them in mythic form everything that they cannot have: freedom of movement, freedom of desire, freedom from the constraints of history and time. Why should the queer stop at the boundaries of the human? Why can’t it, in the Middle Ages, include the horses, hawks, greyhounds that are integral to knightly and aristocratic identity? A Breton law provided that, should a noble be found guilty of rape, his horse would be castrated and its tail clipped, his hawk debeaked and declawed—a punishment as intersubjective as the sexuality that it reprimands.73 Isn’t there an erotic charge between man and horse, and doesn’t the knight encounter the

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horse only within what would have to be called an affectionate, corporeal, same-sex relationship? Isn’t that why the horse, following the practice of Alexander the Great and his beloved Bucephalus, often bears a distinctively male name, and always a hypermasculine personality? The Similitudo militis describes the horse as a knight’s “most faithful friend,” finding in the union of equine and rider a figure for bodiliness itself.74 Albertus Magnus describes the relationship of the warhorse to his beloved knight by invoking an intense emotional bond between the two bodies which renders them inseparable: War horses [dextrarii] should not be gelded, for they become timorous and fainthearted after castration. They respond to the sound of martial music, become excited by the clash of parried weapons. . . . They are noted for the affection they display for their masters and squires, such that, having lost them, they will refuse food and grieve to the point of death. Sometimes they shed tears in their grief. (De animalibus, 105) When in the Bayeux Tapestry William is depicted leading his favorite stallion, the horse bows his head toward his master respectfully and sports an enormous erection, leading Joyce Salisbury to remark that the line separating horse from man in this representation that conflates sexuality and power is “very thin indeed” (Beast Within, 41). What can we say about Bevis’s pleasure in Arondel? That a chivalric ardor for horses could disrupt the safely domestic relationship between the knight and his beloved lady is suggested when Bevis does not hesitate to leave his wife to go into exile with his horse, and Arondel’s death later in the narrative leads inevitably but perversely to the demise of Bevis and Josian upon their marital bed. Isn’t the relationship that Yvain enters with his lion also a queer one? When the lion believes that his master is dead, he attempts suicide by throwing himself at a sword—just like Pyramus and Thisbe, the mythic paradigm of tragic heterosexual love. What kind of threesome is created by the corporeal triangle of the mentor William, his eager-for-discipline student Rainoart, and the horse that the page so ineptly rides?75 What kind of inhuman becomings has Marie de France imagined in her lai Yonec, which describes a noble knight named Muldumarec who spends much of his life within the beautifully feathered body of a hawk? In a transsexual moment offered as perverse proof of

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his orthodoxy, Muldumarec even transforms his handsome male body into that of the woman he loves in order to fool a priest into giving him the corpus domini. In another of Marie’s lais, Bisclavret, the expressiveness of lupine flesh allows a knight to become something that he could never have imagined while trapped in the body of a mere husband. Transfigured permanently into a wolf, Bisclavret is freed from a constricting domestic identity to explore new possibilities of desire: well fed, well watered, and well loved in the king’s castle, he becomes with that submissive joy particular to canines the monarch’s beloved bed companion.76 In the wake of important studies by Carolyn Dinshaw and David Lorenzo Boyd that have convincingly detailed the homoerotics of the text, it would seem that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has been more than adequately queered.77 Possibilities of forbidden conjoinings in the form of sodominical relations are, in Dinshaw’s estimation, rendered possible but incoherent. Yet the romance commingles human and animal bodies in ways that have been only partially accounted for. Critics have long observed that the episodes in which Lady Bertilak offers her body in the private space of the bedroom are embedded within vigorous scenes of the hunt, thereby paralleling the events of the human world with dramas involving a herd of terrified deer, a belligerent boar determined not to yield the life demanded from him, and a fox in his cunning strategies against capture. As Dinshaw has made clear, the minutely rendered dismemberment of the animal bodies that culminate the outdoor episodes resonates ominously with menace to Gawain’s own selfidentity, for he is daily threatened with the undoing of his chivalric integrity by the repeated temptations of the lady and the unthinkable exchange that will be mandated should he accept her invitation to pleasure. During the bedroom encounters Gawain’s subjectivity is conveyed gesturally, through his own timid flesh: peeking gingerly through the bed’s curtains, pretending to be asleep, an entire bodily poetics of cautious comportment as he lies naked beneath the bedclothes. The interlaced structure of the scenes, however, has the jarring effect of dispersing this selfhood across a conjunctive rush of baying hounds, eager horsemen, imperiled animals.78 The deer driven from the woods react to their pursuers with an anthropomorphic emotional intensity. Startled from the safety of the thickets, they are “doted for drede” (“dazed with dread,” 1151), then “brayen and bleden” (“bray and bleed,” 1163) as a

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multitude of arrows whistles through the air to pierce their fleshy hides.79 The boar hunt of the second day builds to a moment of climactic desperation only to switch to a bedroom scene in which Gawain becomes the “tough-brawned” but endangered body. The wily fox who so carefully plots his stratagems is christened “Reynard,” a personification that, even if predictable, immediately invokes a copious medieval mythology of the beast in which Reynard is always ultimately a person who happens to inhabit an animal body. Even the hounds central to each day of the hunt are capable of eagerness, anger, and sorrow. Wounded by the boar, for example, they “ful
omerly
aule and
elle” (“most dolefully yowl and yell,” 1453). More than simple instances of the pathetic fallacy, the artfully entwined hunt scenes are integral to the tone and function of the bedroom temptations. The atmosphere would not be so heavy with danger and expectation if the poet had not created through vivid intercutting an affective alliance between the knight and the desperate animals, if chivalric subjectivity did not spread out from the small space of the curtained bed and cling in uneven pieces to the deer, boar, and fox as they rush anxiously through an inimical world. Such scenes of strange contiguity between the human and the animal occur throughout the text as the identity of Gawain—“chevalier exemplaire, the paragon against which manhood is measured”—is bodied forth in the natural world that surrounds him.80 Despondent after long seeking the Chapel of the Green Knight without success, cold and “ner slayn” by the perpetual sleet (729), Gawain’s unvoiced misery finds avine expression as he rides through a dark forest “With mony bryddez vnblyþe vpon bare twyges, / þat pitosly þer piped for pyne of þe colde” (“with many birds unblithe upon bare twigs / that peeped most piteously for pain of the cold,” 746– 47). Eager to end a year of agonized waiting and meet the Green Knight for the return stroke of the axe, Gawain finds his own readiness well embodied in his knightly but impatient horse: Thenne watz Gryngolet grayþe, þat gret watz and huge, And hade ben soiourned sauerly and in siker wyse, Hym lyst prik for poynt, þat proude hors þenne. þe wy
e wynnez hym to and wytez on his lyre. Then was Gringolet girt, that was great and huge, And had sojourned safe and sound, and savored his fare;

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He pawed the earth in his pride, that princely steed. The good knight draws near him and notes well his look. (2047–50). Gringolet has throughout the narrative been Gawain’s only constant companion, his beloved “fere” (695). Gringolet is in a way Gawain. In a poem about the sad variability of all sublunary things, he is as well Gawain’s only immutable love. Medieval medical theory substantially agrees with the bodily possibility inherent in the chivalric circuit, at least as far as the circuit blurs the boundary between the human and the animal while insisting upon the materiality of both. The bodies that existed in tension with the idealizing, disciplinary force of chivalry were, after all, literally fluid. In the Middle Ages as well as the early modern period, whenever an injunction was formulated to regulate or discipline the body “for the sake of [what Norbert Elias has called] the civilizing process,” then “the bodies to be mastered were humoral bodies” (Paster, The Body Embarrassed, 7). The flesh, in other words, was a “semipermeable, irrigated container” animated by the movements of hot and cold, dark and light fluids in changing distributions; blood, semen, tears, sweat, breast milk, bile, and urine were all versions of this same living materiality and were constantly changing from one form to another (8–9). Because different organs and limbs had varying amounts of these vitalisitic fluids, each were “imbued with their own affective capacity” (11). Miri Rubin has invoked humoral theory to enable a humanistic moment of cultural unity. “Humours inflected a single humanity, fluid and open to variation,” she writes, providing an “explanation for the dizzying variety of imaginable and observable human forms” (“The Person in the Form,” 106). Yet the universality of the humors could be just as validly seen as anti-humanistic. Whereas Augustine saw the line between animal and human as inviolable, as far as this Galenic body is concerned there is no difference between human and animal flesh.81 Both are animated by the flow of various fluids at variable temperatures, and both are susceptible to that mutual influence, overlap, and boundary-breaking transformation that Deleuze and Guattari label becoming.82 This dynamic intermezzo created by what Paster calls the “corporeal fluidity, opennness and porous boundaries” of the humoral body (The Body Embarrassed, 8), shared by humans and animals, is close to the

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“provisional, tenuous, mobile” and fluid sexuality that Elizabeth Grosz suggests can resist restrictive corporealizations and take up the challenge that queer once posed.83 If a normalizing apparatus can be broken, if its “hierarchical and systematic whole” can be “realigned in different networks and linkages,” then the subject’s body ceases to be a body, to become a site of provocations and reactions, the site of intensive disruptions. The subject ceases to be a subject, giving way to pulsations, gyrations, flux, secretions, swellings, processes. . . . Its borders blur, seep, so that, for a while at least, it is no longer clear where one organ, body, or subject stops and another begins.84 The horse, its rider, the bridle and saddle and armor together form the Deleuzian circuit or assemblage, a network of meaning that decomposes human bodies and intercuts them with the inanimate, the inhuman. No single object or body has meaning within this assemblage without reference to the other forces, intensities, affects, and directions to which it is conjoined and within which it is always in the process of becoming something other, something new. The Deleuzian assemblage indicates the limits of the human as a conceptual category and demarcates a new terrain for the queer, a wide expanse where identity, sexuality, and desire are no longer constrained by ontology, “muscle,” or lonely residence in a singular and merely human body. The chivalric assemblage—problematic, masculinist, too violent, too medieval—nonetheless offers this line of flight: it necessarily acknowledges that a body is not a singular, essential thing but an inhuman circuit full of unrealized possibility for rethinking identity. The knight and horse united in the charge are the consummate figures of war, the expression of a “will to destruction, a judgment of God that turns destruction into something ‘just.’” Yet the knight and the horse as a potentially open, potentially explosive circuit is what Deleuze calls a combat-between: “a combat against judgment” in which “it is the combatant himself who is the combat,” a disaggregation and conjoining of human and nonhuman forces that erupt into “a becoming”: The dominant force is tranformed into the dominated forces, and the dominated by passing into the dominant—a center of

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metamorphosis. This is what Lawrence calls a symbol: an intensive compound that vibrates and expands. . . . It resolves the combat without suppressing or ending it. (“To Have Done with Judgment,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, 132, 134) Deleuze suggests “the horse, the apocalyptic beast” as a particularly good symbol of combat-between, of amalgamating force to surpass the destitution of singular subjectivities, of apprehending “what is new in an existing being” as well as sensing “the creation of a new mode of existence” (134–35). In this way even chivalry, an apparently irredeemable form of embodiment, can become an important catalyst for the Foucauldian project of bringing about the “Death of Man,” that monolithic figure of normalcy, the true locus of violence, oppression, and contempt for the body— the true enemy of queer. In The Order of Things Foucault famously argued that Man is a concept on the verge of obsolescence, about to crumble under the force of “some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility—without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises” (The Order of Things, 387). The inhuman circuit is perhaps that very event that promises to erase the humanist conception of man, “like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”85

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3 Masoch/Lancelotism

T Noi leggevamo un giorno per diletto Di Lancelotto, come l’amor lo strinse. [One day for our delight we read of Lancelot, how love enthralled him.] —Dante, Inferno, V.125–26 The past few years have seen a widespread fascination with male masochism and a consequent multiplication of scholarly studies devoted to its analysis, prompting Michael Uebel to argue that “masochism constitutes the deep grammar of modern cultural manhood.”1 Uebel finds in cyberporn the ultimate figuration of masochism in modern man, arguing that it “offers nothing less than a fantasy scene for self-flagellation, wherein men, having internalized, however partially or imperfectly, feminist modes of recognition, try to defeat their own aggressive impulses” (“Toward a Symptomatology,” 11). When networked subjectivities meet the pornucopia of the World Wide Web, it seems, the nonmajoritarian sexualities delineated by the sexologists of a bygone era find their natural culminations and begin to proliferate. In this chapter I examine how a sexual perversion invented in the nineteenth century and of special cultural prominence today might inform the analysis of a time and place far removed from its initial formulation and continued vitality. The story of Lancelot’s passionate submission to Guenevere as told by Chrétien de Troyes is no doubt visible as a historical trace within that critical discourse that reified male masochism and attached its painful pleasures to a specific sexuality, and I am certainly interested in exploring how Chrétien’s well-known narrative es-

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tablished a trajectory for masochisms to come.2 I would also like to ask, however, what might be gained by reversing time’s arrow and exploring whether, even if masochism cannot mark an unchanging or transtemporal category of identity, nonetheless there may exist a recurring cluster of affects and potentialities that have circulated around human sexuality for a very long time, pushing and pulling desire into familiar and repeating relations with power.3 I will not argue like the nineteenthcentury sexologists that the so-called perversions are discrete and ahistorical identities, possessed of unique and determinative psychopathologies.4 Rather, what I want to explore here is the possibility of an enduring but historically specific masochistic assemblage, an intersubjective sexuality that almost always involves a transposition of institutionalized dominance and submission into unexpected arenas of performance; a subsequent estranging or queering of that structure through magnification, exaggeration, and sexualization, rendering visible normally unseen operations of power; the production of some surplus, usually a narrative surplus; and a desire that escapes the constrictions of the human body to trouble with its dangerous ardor the stability of the world.

The Moloch Fantasy In producing an ontology for the sexual perversion that he christened masochism, Richard von Krafft-Ebing catalogued the erotic transformation of men into slaves, nobles, dogs, horses, inert containers for bodily fluids, floors.5 Despite Krafft-Ebing’s seemingly definitive enumeration of its possible permutations, masochism for Sigmund Freud contained something more. In his profoundly influential essay “A Child Is Being Beaten,” Freud analyzed a tripartite fantasy of parental punishment, only the first and third part of which were actually articulated by his patient.6 Remarkably, the explanatory second phase is “never remembered, it has never succeeded in becoming conscious. It is a construction of analysis, but it is no less of a necessity on that account.”7 This interpretive middle exists both outside and within, integral and extraneous, a necessary fiction that institutes a historical origin for a contemporary symptom. Masochism in Freud perversely entangles suffering with pleasure, present with past via a compulsion to narrative. And so for Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the rhythm of childhood spanking becomes the

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rhythm of enjambed verse: “A Child Is Being Beaten” becomes “A Poem Is Being Written” (Tendencies, 177–214). This interlacing of temporality, textuality, analytical performance, and surplus narratives is even more pronounced in Theodor Reik’s classic work. Masochism in Modern Man describes a thirty-seven-year-old father of three whose sexual performance depended upon the rehearsal of “varied and different phantasies,” the most repeated of which involved what Reik describes as a “barbaric idol, somewhat like the Phoenician Moloch” (41). During an imagined ritual of human sacrifice, “vigorous” young men submitted to the stern priests of the primeval god. The meticulously visualized rite included the careful judgment of each “athletic” body by the high priest, who approves only the most perfect. There follows the spectacular castration and display of those chosen worthy of the god, and the dangling of the sacrificial victims on a grate below which roar the flames destined to engulf them.8 Although Moloch was historically a god to whom children were sacrificed, the patron deity of this fantasy embodies something more than a reaction to some personalizable childhood trauma. Kaja Silverman agrees with Reik that the Moloch fantasy is not ultimately explicable by reference to its author’s biography, but instead contains a wide truth about the contemporary social order. She explains that the fantasist acts out in an insistent and exaggerated way the basic conditions of cultural subjectivity, conditions that are normally disavowed; he loudly proclaims that meaning comes to him from the Other, prostrates himself before the gaze even as he solicits it, exhibits his castration for all to see, and revels in the sacrificial basis of the social contract.9 The castration is for Silverman the literalization of the Lacanian dictum that a “pound of flesh” is the universal price paid for the entry into language (Male Subjectivity, 207). In grandly theatrical form, the fantasist stages a foundational cultural moment, performing in exaggerated terms the mundane entry of the speaking subject into culture’s symbolic order. The fantasy is at once wholly orthodox (it reverently narrates an essential truth about identity, and indeed consists of an elaborate staging of submission to that truth) and radical (by rendering insistently visible the “losses and divisions upon which cultural identity is based,” by refusing

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reintegration or redemption, the male masochist radiates what Silverman describes as “a negativity inimical to the social order,” 206). No wonder Reik found a revolutionary fervor in masochistic passion, for narratives like the Moloch fantasy contain a “heterocosmic impulse,” a desire to remake the world.10 Reik and Silverman read the fantasy strictly in terms of the fantasist’s (and their own) cultural moment; neither makes anything of the fact that this present-day truth has been transposed into a distant temporal frame.11 Foucault may have written a History of Sexuality, but for the Moloch fantasist history is sexuality. Reik’s masochist participates in the rites of a forgotten deity of the Hebrew Bible to whom were offered those human sacrifices that Yahweh forbade, a rival god whose cult was periodically resurrected by wayward Israelites: even Solomon built a temple to Moloch during a time of apostasy (1 Kings 11:7). In restaging, rewriting, and sexualizing biblical history—in performing the rites of a god supposedly consigned to the rubbish heap of the ancient—the fantasist eroticizes the past to reveal the severe truth of what the present remains. Performing his submission to the law in the distance of history enables him to estrange that law, so that even while demonstrating an absolute compliance with its inflexible demands, he exposes their utter contingency, their disavowed structural foundation in a moment at which they might have been configured otherwise. Through his literal enactment of a symbolic process, he reinscribes a foundational violence and debasement, but he performs history with such an excess of desire, such voluntary and boundary-smashing surplus, that his masochistic reverence introduces the possibility of revolution. The Moloch fantasy is dangerous not because it would destroy the order of the world by a return to its forgotten anterior, but because the very past that is (literally) the fantasist’s passion is also a figuration of the present in all its noninevitability, in its unacknowledged unnaturalness. The dangerous knowledge of the masochist: it is not so much that history repeats, but that history seldom changes enough to allow a truly meaningful repetition to occur. By holding the world too close, by transposing a supposedly timeless distribution of power into an alienating frame where its arbitrary origin is lovingly fantasized and repeatedly, exorbitantly performed, the masochist might engender the pause, the hesitation, necessary for true difference to enter the world.

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The Lancelot Fantasy Perhaps it seems strange to preface an essay on Lancelot (Le Chevalier de la charrete), Chrétien de Troyes’s refined but playful narrative of the love between Lancelot and Guenevere, with such accounts of bodies in pain indistinguishable from bodies in pleasure.12 Yet Chrétien’s text likewise conjoins historical fantasy, passion (desire/suffering), surplus narrative, enjoyment in self-abnegation, even eroticized social critique. Like the Moloch fantasy, Lancelot stages an absolute surrender to the Law while transposing its identity-giving force into an unexpected, illicit arena of performance. Lancelot could well be described as a crisis text: inventing its own genre as it unfolds, the romance intervenes in a world that was preoccupied with rethinking the allowable parameters of gender. Early in the twelfth century, western Christian sexuality was reconfigured through far-reaching juridical interventions. The mandating and implementation of universal clerical celibacy had precipitated an ecclesiastical reinvention of marriage, as well as an enduring struggle to enforce sexual conformity that was to last well beyond Chrétien’s lifetime. Against the church’s claims enforced via canon law for the patent and eternal naturalness of newly circumscribed, newly compelled sexualities, especially between husband and wife, Lancelot performs the canonists’s “mutualized” construction of gender identities in a distant time and forbidden permutation to estrange them, demonstrating their contingency, their masochistic underpinnings, their ultimate fungibility. Not surprisingly, no medieval romance has caused more discomfort among its interpreters, an uneasiness for the most part displaced onto its author and exorcised through a fanciful reconstruction of his biography. In 1883 Gaston Paris argued that Le Chevalier de la charrete records the first instance of a new sexuality, amour courtois (courtly love), conjoining passionate submission to an elaborate behavioral code.13 Few scholars initially disagreed with Paris’s discovery, but the received wisdom quickly came to be that Chrétien “lacked enthusiasm” for his project because he harbored “understandable” moral reservations about the adultery that his patroness, Marie de Champagne, commanded him to celebrate.14 That he allowed the work to be finished by another author, Godefroi de Leigni, is taken as evidence that he approached his subject (matière) with distaste, abandoning the narrative at the first opportunity. Lancelot’s passion for the queen of Logres is adulterous, idolatrous,

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treasonous: the story is morally questionable, and therefore must have been—had to be—to Chrétien’s disliking. Life imitates art as a secondary romance begins to circulate among the text’s critics, according to which Chrétien is oppressed, like his protagonist, by a “superior, even capricious lady who requires unquestioning obedience from her lover/ servant.”15 This “historical” explanation imagines that unlike Lancelot, Chrétien successfully resisted his imperious lady’s demand for absolute subordination. He writes a tale undermined by irony and humor, and leaves it for someone else to complete.16 This supplemental narrative offers the chronicle of masculine triumph that Lancelot mysteriously fails to provide. The critical fantasy of Chrétien’s submissive resistance to his patroness is, as Freud would say, “a construction of analysis but . . . no less of a necessity on that account.” Like the middle phase of Freud’s analysis in “A Child Is Being Beaten,” it is pure surplus, yet essential all the same if the romance is to be acceptably domesticated. Perhaps, though, Lancelot has historically been so disquieting, so fantasy-provoking, because it functions rather like those masochisms that intrigued KrafftEbing, Freud, Reik, and Silverman. Set in the meticulously imagined yesteryear of King Arthur’s court, Lancelot performs history to sexualize the social and reconfigure the somatic in ways both dangerous and pleasurable. By relentlessly performing as erotic scripts written to be enacted in religious and political theatres of power, by transposing into an adulterous frame a consensuality of gender presupposed by the ecclesiastical construction of marriage, Lancelot explores the paradoxical but joyous gains of contingency. Enacting and hybridizing the discourses of power inherent to the social structure of the court of Champagne, if not to much of late-twelfth-century Europe, Lancelot asks what it is like to take the place simultaneously of servant, lover, ruler, and artist with an enthusiasm that not only erodes the distinction among these roles, but also through an unwavering submission to an authoritarian Other threatens, at last, to topple whatever architecture such prostration undergirds. Imbrication is too clean a term to describe the interrelation of the categories that Chrétien interrogates throughout the romance: masculinity, femininity, matrimony, sexuality, chivalry, the sacramental, the public, the private. The domains adulterate in that they not only overlap but intermingle in a forbidden joining of what is supposed to remain selfcontained. These conjoined disciplines align human bodies and behaviors

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under hierarchical schemata that create, support, and naturalize mechanisms of social dominance. All simultaneously depend upon a variation of what might be called the masochistic contract. And all, ultimately, are undone by Lancelot’s (Lancelot’s) radical, self-negating conjointure.

From Consensual Compulsion to Compulsory Consent The speaking subject, if he seems to be thus a slave of language, is all the more so of a discourse in the universal moment of which he finds himself at birth, even if only by virtue of his proper name [nom propre]. —Jacques Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious,” in Écrits Ill at ease with the adultery and submissive masculinity celebrated in the text, numerous critics have written sexuality out of the Lancelot narrative by glossing its appearance as a promiscuous interjection by his patroness Marie, artfully negated by a sly Chrétien who either wholly undercut his hero through irony, or simply refused to finish the tale. What happens, though, when we begin to take seriously the remarkable lack of condemnation in the narrative, the constant bracketing of critical voices through stylistic devices, the narratorial silences of an otherwise gregarious narrator? Is it possible to suspend quick judgment, to embrace the text within the terms of its own experimental identity machines? Lancelot ought not be rendered a saint; Malory will accomplish that well enough a few centuries later, when the knight dies to the benedictive accompaniment of the odor of sanctity. Neither, however, ought he be condemned in advance to the second bolgia of the Inferno with Dante’s carnal before he is even dead. To take Lancelot seriously, a resexualization must be performed. In a series of classroom lectures destined to alter the course of both linguistics and continental philosophy, the Swiss philologist Ferdinand de Saussure argued that language is social and therefore “outside the individual who can never create nor modify it by himself; it exists only by virtue of a sort of contract signed by the members of a community.”17

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Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Jonathan Dollimore, and Judith Butler (among many others) have insisted that Saussure’s linguistic insight applies just as well to sexual identity. If gender and sex are nominative rather than ontological categories, then as terms “masculinity” and “femininity” gain their intelligibility through their location within a matrix of social relations.18 Like linguistic value, gender is “outside the individual,” determined relationally and “by virtue of a sort of contract”: male and female cannot stand alone conceptually, for they are at once openended and mutually constitutive terms made meaningful through cultural ordering processes. Chrétien usually negotiates the difficult relationality between what is gendered male and what is segregated as feminine through his participation in an ongoing cultural project to produce new mythologies for marriage, an institution destined quickly to become (in the words of James Brundage) the very “connective tissue of late medieval society” (Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 497). As a recurringly privileged social institution, marriage has no doubt always been in the midst of an identity crisis as competing forces strive to determine its meaning. Yet Chrétien composed his romances at a time of especially pronounced ideological flux. Latin Christendom was still reeling from what Jo Ann McNamara has called the Herrenfrage, a crisis in masculinity attendant upon the radical restructuring of the gender system through the imposition of clerical celibacy in the 1070s.19 Barring a large and highly visible group of men from marriage instigated an extended battle over the signification and control of the institution: The struggle to separate men from women caused reformers to rave against married priests and, by implication, the whole sexual act. Sermons, pastoral letters, public statements of all sorts depicted women as dangerous and aggressive, poisonous and polluting. Yet the logic of clerical celibacy required a complementary lay society whose members were paired in heterosexual union. (McNamara, “The Herrenfrage,” 8) Laymen were under increasing pressure to marry, not only as a structural effect of the reorganization of sexuality, but also because an emphasis on primogeniture was creating a “surplus of younger sons” who did not stand to inherit family wealth or social position, and either could not or would not undertake clerical orders. The ubiquity of warfare throughout

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the period had meanwhile resulted in a “proliferation of heiresses” (McNamara, “The Herrenfrage,” 8). Conjugality, it would be fair to say, obsessed the twelfth-century Christian mind, and Chrétien de Troyes was participating in the profound alteration to the intersubjective relations of men and women then occurring across Latin Europe. George Duby famously described the aristocratic and ecclesiastical models of marriage current in twelfth-century northern France, their struggle for dominance, and the alignments of secular and church interests that motivated each.20 Among the French nobility, marriage had long been used to establish strategic alliances between families and was therefore viewed as a political affair to be presided over by the male heads of houses. In 1194, for example, Arnulf of Guînes was married in his home, and although the cleric Lambert of Ardres was present to record the event (he even brought along his two sons, also priests), it was Arnulf’s father who sprinkled the matrimonial bed with holy water and blessed the couple.21 The example is doubly illustrative. Since Lambert has children, his clerical status clearly does not exclude the possibility of concubinage; clerical masculinity in its relation to the performance of sexuality is obviously still very much in flux in the late twelfth century. Moreover, it was exactly Arnulf’s secular version of matrimony that the Church was attempting to colonize through sacralization, so that “the essential elements of a ritual which had hitherto been domestic and secular were [being] transferred to the door of the church and inside it” (Duby, Love and Marriage, 17). Rather than an exchange-based device for alliance, mandated and controlled by families, marriage was being transformed into an elective, “private” sacrament administered by and forbidden to priests.22 Central to the church’s reformulation of matrimony’s ideal structure was the necessity of nuptial consensus. Marriage now required and issued from the mutual consent of two free individuals, formally sealed by what Hugh of St. Victor and Peter Lombard called the obligatio verborum, the verbal pledge.23 Basing marriage upon consensus deprived the institution of its familial and aristocratic determination, at once privileging matrimony as the sanctioned social structure for the performance of lay (that is, majority) sexuality and saturating its construction with ecclesiastical power. As a result of these transformations, the redelineated contours of the identities “husband,” “wife” and “matrimonial couple” were made more publicly visible, while power

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relationships and gender were consequently opened to realignment, innovation, reinterpretation.24 Because of the ecclesiastical training of many of its authors, courtly literature tended to embrace the new vision of marriage disseminated by the Church, and often transformed the double consent that was its necessary precondition into a permanent mutuality. Chrétien was no exception. In Erec et Enide and Le Chevalier au lion, two incomplete beings are joined in a socially sanctioned relationship of wholeness that ultimately results in a stable balance between masculine and feminine, social and sexual, public and domestic identities. This conjoining leads to a kind of yin-yang concordance in which both halves of the matrimonial whole balance the wielding of power with proper deference. Erec and Enide discover (that is, construct and promulgate) this truth of conjugal totality through a series of adventures that they share as husband and wife, so that their romance is a connubial bildungsroman. When they achieve their proper equipoise, they are rewarded with the public validation of the Joie de la Cort. The story ends with an elaborate coronation that installs them in their permanent social position: king and queen, husband and wife, as if the political and the matrimonial were two versions of the same thing. Yvain, on the other hand, learns the identitygiving function of marriage through loss. Rejected by his wife when, in violation of a promise, he lingers in the exclusively male milieu of the tournament circuit, the knight immediately devolves into a state of wildness (animality, the zero-state of manhood) from which he must reattain his former acme of control (chivalry, masculinity perfected). His reward for learning that his very selfhood is contingent upon circumscribing his energy within a heterosexual, socially approved coupling governed by mutual responsibility is the restoration both of his happy castle in the suburbs and of his lost names: chevalier, seigneur, and “Yvain”—again, as if these were seamlessly concentric identities. The Knight of the Lion’s story does not end until he and his nom propre coincide, until Yvain gives up wandering and settles into his predestined domesticity. In these, Chrétien’s matrimonial romances, the couples live happily ever after through a mutuality that ultimately reconciles and renders mute questions of domination and submission. Could the poet who has so frequently been called the “apologist for love in marriage” (Bruckner, “Le Chevalier de la Charrete (Lancelot),” 137)

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have envisioned a disruptive repetition of such idealized identities, one in which their articulation does not obscure the domination and submission masked by a matrimonial mythology, but rather renders its sacrificial and contractual basis exorbitantly visible? Is it possible for Lancelot’s passion for Guenevere to be seen as an act transgressive not because it violates the sacred dicta of the Bible and its exegetes, but because it faithfully performs ecclesiastical constructions of conjugal sexuality and, even while transposing them outside their licit circuit, nonetheless loves them, fetishizes them, for their authoritarian excess? Is it possible, in the end, to embrace the machinery of power in order to fashion a potent critique of those very cogs and gears in action?

Molt Bele Conjointure [The rituals of sadism and masochism are] the counterpart of the medieval courts where strict rules of proprietary courtship were defined. —Michel Foucault, “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act” The canonical twelfth-century model of marriage predicated upon consensus implies that gender is not only relational, but consensual. Le Chevalier au lion and Erec et Enide imagine conjugal gender as arising within a structure of reciprocal agreement and desire, rather than as the effect of paternal or familial compulsion. Could a sex and gender system built upon relationality and precipitated by consensuality be formalized through an explicit social script, so that it begins to function selfconsciously, visibly, rather than in silence and imperceptibility?25 Such a reworking of gender through a technology of visibility could be labeled contractual. Contractual gender would not necessarily radically reconfigure the relational and consensual model of gender, but when an identity is based upon a putatively reconfigurable contract, it denaturalizes “sex,” “gender,” and the power relationships of all kinds invested in imbuing these terms with their cultural meanings. Contractual gender would, ultimately, historicize desire while simultaneously “sexualizing the entire history of humanity.”26

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The phrase “contractual gender” can hardly be spoken without suggesting the sensational love contracts associated with masochism as a simultaneously erotic and social art. But I do not (yet) wish to conjure visions of leather and whips. Further, I wish to exclude from the start the nebulous and not very useful concept of “sadomasochism.” That masochism and sadism do not form a dialectical totality has been well argued by Gilles Deleuze, whose “Coldness and Cruelty” is a brilliant prelude to the revolutionary work on sexuality that he and Félix Guatarri accomplished in the Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus.27 “The genius of Sade and that of Masoch,” writes Deleuze, “are poles apart; their worlds do not communicate” (“Coldness and Cruelty,” 133). Whereas sadism is enamored of compulsion, masochism is an erotic geography mapped by a desiring victim in search of a torturer to convince, educate, and “conclude an alliance with” (20). The consensual basis of masochism becomes formalized through a series of agreements, or contracts, that underscores the disjunction between sadism as an art of force and masochism as an act of persuasion: This is why advertisements are part of the language of masochism while they have no place in true sadism, and why the masochist draws up contracts while the sadist abominates and destroys them. The sadist is in need of institutions, the masochist of contractual relations.28 We might say that the sadist believes in the unfettered power of religious and political bodies to impose their authority, in the absolute and capricious right of church and state to mandate Law, but the masochist’s fervor is invested inside the particular system of disciplinary relations that regulates power’s flow. Or, to put a spin on these discriminations that is a little more medieval, the sadist’s commerce with the devil amounts to “institutionalized possession,” in which the body of the demoniac is taken without consent, while the masochist’s diabolical relationships are founded upon a “pact of alliance” in which the devil and his conjurer enter into a relationship where the terms and limits have been specified ahead of time (“Coldness and Cruelty,” 20). Sadism is an authoritarian performance that never ponders consent or contracts, while masochism belongs to a willing victim whose identity is bound and dispersed by both.

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The masochistic contract might be glossed as a fabulous conjointure that exorbitantly maps gender roles across a matrix of possible social relations, the extent and composition of which have been agreed to in advance.29 It writes visibly in a private and intersubjective sphere—across two bodies—the operation of a power that proceeds unseen in public realms; it transposes those power relations, now saturated with erotic charge, into new arenas of performance (including history), rendering those relations at once familiar and strange. The masochistic contract clearly concerns more than a bedroom drama, even if the circulation of desire forms its structural heart. Indeed, for masochism to be useful in philosophical inquiry it must be depathologized, stripped of the stigma of perversion and rewritten as a phenomenon simultaneously social, epistemological, and sexual. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the literary darling of France in the 1880s, was horrified to learn that Krafft-Ebing had named a perversion after him in the Psychopathia Sexualis, wholly missing the point of the “folklore, history, politics, mysticism, eroticism, nationalism” condensed around the scenes of flagellation in his narratives.30 When Severin abandons his life as a privileged aristocrat to become Wanda’s servant in Venus in Furs, this class cross-dressing carries a potent eroticism, but the desires it performs are also economic, nationalistic, and historical. It may well be that, as Leo Bersani has argued, “sexuality is ontologically grounded in masochism,” but the affects, intentions, narratives, and sensations now clustered under the term “masochism” are not simply reducible to sex.31 As an inherently boundary-smashing phenomenon, masochism sexualizes and potentially undoes the world. The possibility for a contractual relation based upon true equality exists in theory, but has seldom been manifested in history. Most systems of power are sustained through domination within subordination, upon a structuration that elevates some to positions of control and denigrates the majority to a substructure over which control is implemented. A Marxist, angered with this disparity that mystifies its own origins in force and proclaims itself “natural” or “inevitable,” might advocate revolution to overthrow the whole apparatus sustaining it. The masochist, who perhaps comes to the same realization, embraces this order of power so tightly that it starts to choke in a too powerful grasp. The members of those flagellant movements that began in Perugia in the mid-thirteenth century and swept northwards to Rome, Germany, and France publicly

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scourged their bodies for the sins that they had committed against the very moral system within which they had been subjectivated. At the same time as they enthusiastically administered the proper punishments for their crimes, in their zeal to bring the logic of a system whose Law they upheld to its fullest conclusion, they transformed themselves through their disciplina into bands of radicals and millenarians, led by what Norman Cohn has called “an elite of self-immolating Redeemers” (The Pursuit of the Millennium, 127). These “revolutionary flagellants” terrified the ecclesiastical authorities. Writing a severe and negational law across their own bruised bodies, they transformed into public spectacle the psychological and somatic repressions through which they had become obedient members of the church militant. Desiring this disciplinary system to excess, they threatened the very power that had made their appearance logical, inevitable, and necessary to suppress. The flagellants believed they were living in a time near the return of their infinitely suffering, infinitely loving Messiah. Their communal imitatio Christi was aimed at hastening that Apocalypse, at demolishing the present in which they dwelled. As far as the clerics whose authority they were undermining through their performative surplus were concerned, they very nearly succeeded.

Guenevere in Furs N’ot sus bliaut ne cote mise, mes un cort mantel ot desus d’escarlate et de cisemus. [“She had no tunic or coat over it, only a short mantle of rich cloth and marmot fur.”] —Chrétien de Troyes, Lancelot “I mean that I can think of nothing more extravagantly flattering to your white skin than these dark furs.” —Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

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Lancelot enters Le Chevalier de la charrete as an absent presence, a cryptic allusion seeking a specific identity. Names and motives are withheld from the start. A mysterious foreigner has burst into Arthur’s court as it celebrates Ascension Day, the day Christ’s body vanished from the earth. The discourteous intruder announces that his distant realm is replete with knights, ladies, and maidens from Logres whom he holds en servitume et an essil.32 He has no intention of allowing them to return home unless someone battles him for Queen Guenevere. The obnoxious seneschal Kay (qui avoec les sergenz manjoit, 83) tricks Arthur into entrusting the queen to his guardianship, then challenges the foreign knight, later named as the otherworldy prince Meleagant. As Guenevere is mounting her horse, about to be led to certain capture, she sighs “under her breath”: “Ha! Amis, se le seüssiez ja ce croi ne l’otroiesiez que Kex me menast un seul pas.” (209–11) “Ah! My friend, if you knew, I think you would never permit Kay to lead me even a single step away.” As the audience, we do not know who this amis (“friend” or “beloved”) might be. Chrétien is the first author to mention (and probably the first to invent) the adulterous love of Lancelot and Guenevere. Prior to this romance, Lancelot appears only briefly in Erec et Enide, and was also perhaps the subject of a lost German poem. He has no pre-narrative history, other than his status as a respected but otherwise undistinguished knight of Logres. Even Chrétien’s title for the story, Le Chevalier de la charrete, provides no clue that Guenevere’s amis is Lancelot. Indeed, the audience has no idea which of the Arthurian knights the romance is about until the protagonist is finally named halfway through the narrative. “Who is the Knight of the Cart?” becomes the central riddle of the poem, to be resolved as much by Lancelot himself as by the audience who must await the name’s revelation. The very existence of the mysterious amis is discovered “by accident,” as it were, for Count Guinable happens to be close enough to catch the queen’s whispered exclamation. Her words are private, meant to contrast with her husband’s ineffective public utterances. Arthur’s pronouncements are alternately weak (his admission to a taunting

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Meleagant that he must “endure what cannot be remedied”) and foolish (his rash promise to Kay that he can have whatever he next requests). We suspect that the seneschal will be unable to prevent Guenevere from being kidnapped; that we are so fortunately placed by Guinable’s ear indicates to us that her separation from the king will not be the narrative’s concern and that we will be more deeply plunged into mystery before we can expect any kind of certainty. The story of Lancelot and Guenevere commences with a tangle of disappearances and suppressed identities that will not be resolved until the narrative can somehow unite the queen with her amis, and the amis with the proper name for which it substitutes. The enigmatic web of suppressions thickens when a knight whom no one recognizes appears shortly after the queen’s departure. The man borrows a horse and speeds after Guenevere; his own mount promptly falls dead, over-ridden. Gawain follows this hyperactive stranger, comes across the remnants of a battle, and finds that his newest horse has likewise expired. As the previous chapter has argued, a knight (chevalier) without a horse (cheval) is no knight at all: the series of dead horses suggests that Lancelot is pushing knightly identity to its extreme, to that limit at which it begins to discohere. Gawain comes across the man, “tot seul a pié, / tot armé” (“alone on foot, though still fully armed,” 317–18), as he is about to enter a cart. Gawain’s eyes become the audience’s, just as we previously found ourselves borrowing the count’s ear. The perspective we have on Lancelot is fully from the outside, so that his decision to mount the vehicle is evaluated within the normative framework of masculinity that obtains at Logres, among whose knights Gawain is so far the greatest. This evaluative structure embodied in Gawain is emphatically not identical with Lancelot’s own subjectivity, although when confronted with the cart Lancelot finds himself warring against the parts of it he has internalized. The cart is described as a space wholly outside of chivalric identity. To enter its ignoble confines is to become a mere subject of the law rather than its agent. Chrétien’s description of the ignominious charrete proceeds from the perspective of the juridical court of proper knighthood, a frame within which Lancelot’s actions in mounting are incomprehensible: et cele estoit a ces comune, ausi con li pilori sont, qui traïson ou murtre font. . . .

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Qui a forfet estoit repris s’estoit sor la charrete mis et menez par totes les rues; s’avoit totes enors perdues, ne puis n’estoit a cort oïz ne enorez ne conjoïz. (325–27, 333–38) Like our pillories, it was for all criminals alike, for all traitors and murderers. . . . The guilty person was taken and made to mount in the cart, and led through every street; he thus lost his feudal rights and was never again heard at court, nor invited nor honored there. The cart is the place where, under the spectacle of supplice, the condemned loses all rights and personal agency to become the object of a lesson addressed to those who crowd the streets to watch.33 For a knight whose identity depends upon the code of performance/action/movement that is chivalry, the objectification of being displayed in the cart is a reductio ad nihilum (passivity/arrest/stasis). Lancelot hesitates for two steps before he enters, as Reisons (Reason) warns him of the shame he will suffer within the knightly definitional system for which Gawain stands, and Amors (Love) reminds him that, with Guenevere as his object of pursuit, he is not operating within that system’s boundaries of aggressively public masculinity anyway. This internal struggle is not so much a psychomachia as somamachia, a battle of the body against itself: the lips (ose, the locus of the speech-act, of individualizing articulation and command) versus the heart (cuer, the place dominated by desire, the locus amoenus never fully by one body owned). The heart wins this struggle for bodily rule, but the narrative is not yet ready to elaborate what that submission implies. The point of view quickly switches from Lancelot’s evaluative frame to that of Gawain, whom the audience knows from Le Chavalier de la charrete’s simultext Le Chevalier au lion as a knight’s knight, wholly dedicated to the performance of chivalric masculinity in its traditional forums.34 A rude dwarf drives the cart, his disabled flesh a signifier of his essential difference from knightly possibility. He offers Gawain the opportunity to climb inside with Lancelot, but for him the possibility of entering is unthinkable. Gawain’s judgment on the scene is swift and stern:

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“Le tint a molt grant folie” (“He thought it madness,” 389). The epistemological shifts in the narrative (Gawain-Lancelot-Gawain, or exteriorinterior-exterior) prevent Lancelot’s actions from becoming understandable. By mounting the charrete Lancelot is debased beyond the possibility of recognition. The event of the shameful entry becomes the semantic doppelgänger for his public identity, the meaning (nom) that suppresses into secondariness any other social signification his body could have. At this moment he loses even his equipment, becoming the reduced “chevaliers a pié, sanz lance” (345): no horse, no weapons, no honor.35 Lacking the visual markers of identity, he becomes and will remain le chevalier de la charrete until Guenevere bestows his missing nom propre. The infamy adhering to the cart is so obsessively repeated by the text that the possibility of Lancelot’s ever being anything other is wholly blocked, at least until the queen intervenes.36 Everyone he meets recognizes Lancelot at once as the Knight of the Cart; even Guenevere knows that he entered, although she views the episode through a different interpretative structure. How all the world beholds this one definitional gesture is left unexplained. The panoptic regime that records his actions and registers its disapproval is ultimately the ghostly trace left by the author as he forms a temporary subjectivity for the audience. As onlookers (auditors or readers), we see the cart episode through these condemning eyes; what we do not yet realize is that we silent witnesses have interpreted the scene wrongly. We have been reading the romance like Gawain, for whom Guenevere’s later command au noauz will indicate simply “Onward to [the tournament at] Noauz!” Is it possible to read the narrative like Lancelot, for whom the very same language activates a wholly different meaning (au noauz, “Do your worst!”)?37 Whereas the first signification of the phrase is embedded in matrimonial desires (the tournament is organized by women who hope to marry successful knights), the second might best be translated as “Perform your identity to that limit at which it comes undone!” Needless to say, because of Lancelot’s performance noauz is ultimately voided of nuptial possibility: the ladies reject marriage and desire impossible Lancelot instead, frustrating the tournament’s foundational goal. Yet even if the bond between the knight and the queen seems actively antimatrimonial, nonetheless their passion establishes a marriage-like mutuality between them, so much so that their identities become not just relational but radically contingent. The removal of one body from

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the pairing precipitates the complete loss of the other’s selfhood. When Yvain lost his wife he became a senseless wildman, oblivious to the chivalric identity that he once inhabited. Likewise, as Lancelot wanders in search of his absent love he dissolves into a dreamlike state of negation, structured linguistically through a narcotic anaphora of ne: . . . ses pansers est de tel guise que lui meïsmes en oubllie; ne set s’il est, ou s’il n’est mie; ne li manbre de son non; ne set s’il est armez ou non, ne set ou va, ne set don vient. (714–19) His meditation was so deep that he forgot his own identity; he was uncertain whether he truly existed or not; he was unable to recall his own name; he did not know if he were armed or not, nor where he went or whence he came. The rime riche of the noun (non, “name”) and the negative particle (non, “not”) verbally equates being and nothing. Alone, “Lancelot” is empty of meaning. Like Lacan after him, Chrétien was fascinated by this double aural signification for non, and plays upon it again when Lancelot’s messianic destiny is revealed. Wandering through a cemetery full of empty tombs in which the great knights of the day (Gawain, Louis, Yvain) will someday be interred, Lancelot comes across an ornate structure, “the largest stone tomb ever constructed.” The knight immediately lifts the monument’s immense cover, a stone slab on which these words have been carved: Cil qui levera cele lanme seus par son cors gitera ces et celes fors qui sont an la terre an prison. (1900–03) He who will lift this slab by his unaided strength will free all the men and women who are imprisoned in the land. Raising the stone is supposed to proclaim the arrival of that liberator, but Lancelot will refuse the powerful status that his accomplishment should confer. Two seemingly disjunctive narratives here appear in what

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Chrétien would call a beautiful conjoinment, a molt bele conjointure (where OF conjointure carries the sense of a poem’s formal structure, of its specific embodiment as a narrative). First, Lancelot’s meaning has been determined in advance by the authoritarian voice recorded on the stone slab and mouthed by the monk as ecclesiastical spokesman. Inscribed in stone, unalterable, this text declares Lancelot’s unchosen messianic future. Written quite literally in the language of power and death, this cemetery discourse is a language from which Lancelot seeks no knowledge. As the voice of authority, moreover, it is also allied with the domination of the author (auctor) over his narrative materials. Conjoined to this apparently irresistible force is a secondary, supplemental narrative that Lancelot seemingly writes for himself from inside that authoritarian discourse by denying his own power as author/authority/agent (the medieval meanings of auctor), employing instead a language that finds meaning in gestures of enjoyment-provoking submission rather than of compelled signification. This masochistic voice is Chrétien’s second pose: his denial of authorial power and responsibility, his hypersemantic embrace of Marie’s matière et san. This secondary text exists wholly within the first, in a secret interior where voice disappears so violently beneath a dominant discourse that it must (like a water drop breaking the surface tension of water, or like the murdered Christ in a borrowed tomb) rise again, as the primary and monolithic discourse momentarily weakens into something dialogic, multivocal. Lancelot, anointed but uncomprehending Savior, loves the discourse of power so relentlessly that he, from its very inside, is destined both to fulfill power’s every salvific dream and to disrupt momentarily its hold. The monk who witnesses the revelatory act of opening the empty sepulchre demands the accomplisher’s name, and Lancelot turns “name” to “nothing” and equates it with himself: [Li moinnes] dit: “Sire, or ai grant envie que je seüsse vostre non; direiez le me vos?”—“Je, non,” fet li chevaliers, “par ma foi.” (1920–23) [The monk] said, “Sir, now I am most anxious to know your name. Will you tell me?” “I will not,” answered the knight, “upon my word.”

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“Je, non”: one thinks here of Richard’s wonderful pun in Shakespeare’s Richard II: “Ay, no, no ay” (“I know no I,” IV.i.201). For Richard, as for Lancelot, abjection from a public name (king or liberator) signifies loss of ego (I/je) even as it forcefully reinscribes identity within that definitional system. His name (non) finds its meaning most fully when on the verge of negation (non), not when being celebrated in some exterior theatre of knowledge; paradoxically, this very abnegation is a powerful form of self-inscription. The more Lancelot denies his self-importance, the more relentlessly public his identity becomes. Lancelot is so passionately devoted to the private relationship he maintains with the queen that other identity-giving gestures matter little to him, and yet that private relationship is insistently constructed within parameters familiar because they cite public discourse over consent, submission to the law, and mutuality in marriage. It is as if Lancelot has taken the church’s new construction of conjugality (the consensual union of two individuals that precipitates a lifelong compulsion to relational identities within heterosexual coupledom) and embraced to perverse excess every aspect of its structure, except for its necessary preconditions. Like the Moloch fantasist who performs the post-Christian symbolic order in a pagan prehistory to enact reverently the truth of that contemporary order, Lancelot transports and performs consensus outside of matrimonial sexuality. Consensus is presented by the canonists as “mutual consent,” but they do not mean that two willing consenters can precipitate a licit relationship themselves. Consensus in fact requires the severest of submissions: to the impersonal and inflexible dictatorship of a Big Other who imposes from the outside a life-ordering structure, the price of entry to which is the permanent loss of one’s selfhood. Enthralled by a meditation on his own lack, the Knight of the Cart proceeds oblivious to the external world, by the straight and narrow path (726–27) to a ford, where another knight promptly immerses him in cold water. With typical humor, Chrétien asks in the submergence scene if a knightly identity that embraces self-negation can possibly survive in a chivalric milieu predicated on the constant proving of masculinity through public action: Et cil de la charrete panse con cil qui force ne desfanse n’a vers Amors qui le justise;

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et ses pansers est de tel guise que lui meïsmes en oublie; ne set s’il est, ou s’il n’est mie; ne ne li manbre de son non; ne set s’il est armez ou non, ne set ou va, ne set don vient. (711–19) The Knight of the Cart was lost in thought, a man with no strength or defense against love, who torments him. His meditation was so deep that he forgot his own identity. He was uncertain whether he truly existed or not. He was unable to recall his own name. He did not know if he was armed or not, nor where he went nor whence he came. Encased in his reverie of future reunion with Guenevere, Lancelot is knocked from his horse and once again loses his lance. This rebuke from the guardian of the ford makes us wonder at the ridiculous spectacle that Lancelot is on the verge of becoming, but then he awakens “ausi come cil qui s’esvoille” (“like a dreamer from his sleep,” 769). He fights the guardian honorably, on horseback, and by the end of the encounter his enemy has been flung from his saddle into the cold river. Lancelot effectively switches subject positions with his adversary. He places the vanquished knight under the power of the maiden who was accompanying him, so that the knight becomes more like him, an object of power rather than its agent. Paradoxically, this process of subjectivization transforms Lancelot into an active, aggressive opponent—in fact, into his own would-be oppressor. The shift elevates Lancelot socially (or “heroically,” because his defeat of the other unnamed knight grants him the superior position on the ascending scale of masculine honor) even as he proves in battle his absolute right to self-abasement in the service of love (in the service of an Other who will always be above him, because he places her there, insistently).38 Lancelot’s abjuration of agency for the pleasures of dependency transpires because he is bound to the missing queen through the masochistic contract, a consensual agreement that delimits gender boundaries within a predetermined relationship of activity and submission. For the Knight of the Cart, body and identity are not his to construct, but this lack of choice is predicated upon a radical consent anterior to the system’s

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coming-into-being: Lancelot gave his heart to Guenevere in a more than metaphorical evisceration, and it is at that lost, originary point that to somehow gain it back became unthinkable. In the narrative present, Lancelot is described as never fully owning his body. During the encounter with the maiden that follows the aventure by the ford, Lancelot agrees to sleep with the woman, but through a constant refusal of contiguity in bed manages nonetheless to reject her. His solving of the puzzle of the rape tableau underscores his refusal to link male sexuality to feminine subjugation, rejecting utterly the overaggressive performance of heterosexuality that underwrites it. The rape is staged to the point at which the maiden cries “He will shame me before your eyes!” Lancelot comedically intervenes, kills the male actor, then literally sleeps with the maiden as he promised. By not having sex with her—by refusing the other, less literal meaning of se coucher—Lancelot retains his integrity. Or, rather, Lancelot retains his identity within a system constructed around his having surrendered his integrity, bodily and otherwise. This feat he accomplishes by an abstention from language, which is an abstention from intercourse of another sort: in bed with the lady, Lancelot is as silent and unmoving as “uns convert / cui li parlers est desfanduz” (“a lay brother to whom speech was forbidden,” 1218–19). Lancelot’s nonperformance of masculinity in the bedroom aligns him temporarily with celibacy, the queer and proliferating sexuality with which the contemporary gender system was having so much trouble. Ultimately, however, for Lancelot sexuality consists of enjoyment to be delectably postponed rather than forthrightly rejected. In that bed of testing Lancelot undergoes a rhetorical heart transplant: Li chevaliers n’a cuer que un, et cil n’est mie ancor a lui; einz est comandez a autrui si qu’il nel puet aillors prester. (1228–31) The knight had but one heart, and it no longer belonged to him. Rather, it was promised to another, so he could not bestow it elsewhere. We will find out later that it is the queen herself who possesses this organ that is the seat of human emotion, and so it is her body and her identity upon which Lancelot’s depends, for whom Lancelot bleeds. The

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knight’s reward for his unquestioning submission to the strictures of his love-as-religion is a sight of his religion-as-love’s Holy Grail. On the road the next day Lancelot discovers Guenevere’s abandoned comb, in which are entangled some glistening strands of her hair. Both he and the narrative make a fetish of these locks. Fifteen lines of description linger over their golden purity before the knight, in a moment of rapture, places them between his chemise and his breast, close to that heart that is not his. The hairs are simultaneously saint’s relic, metonymy for Guenevere, and substitute trigger for the mystical feelings of completeness that overwhelm Lancelot in the queen’s presence. Removing one identity from this masochistic relation imperils the other, because meaning is predicated upon definition against and therefore upon presence (if even simply a search for presence). Lancelot yearns for the joyful plenitude he expects as reward for having located the abducted queen. Yet, as Lacan has argued, the drive that constitutes desire never really seeks gratification, only continual postponement; disaster attends obtainment, so that “a goal once reached always retreats anew.”39 Guenevere’s coldness and cruelty at their reunion, though necessary and eventually pleasurable, take Lancelot quite by surprise. She rejects her amis for not having been passionate enough in his subordination to her, for having hesitated for two steps before entering the cart of shame. The two lovers are quickly separated, so that the spiral of negation begins anew. Lancelot revels in a fantasy of death, which is imaged as a woman over whom he has complete control (“she will do my bidding,” 4281). He slips a noose around his neck and lets himself fall from his horse; his attempt at self-annihilation is defeated, however, when his companions simply cut the rope. (The masochist might desire the destruction of his individuality, but not of his existence: because the masochist is paradoxically a kind of narcissist, insisting upon the absolute value and centrality of his own identity-circuit, suicide is not ordinarily a masochistic option.) When Death forsakes him, he labels her a whore (4318). Finally he reasons himself to enact again the ritual supplice of victimhood, the full embrace of fully deserved pain: que je me deüsse estre ocis des que ma dame la reïne me mostra sanblant de haïne, ne ne le fist pas sanz reison,

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einz i ot molt boene acheson, mes je ne sai quex ele fu. (4336–41) For I should have killed myself as soon as my lady the queen made known her hatred. She did not show it without reason— there certainly was a good cause, though I do not yet know what it was. Lancelot never loses faith in the power/knowledge that he constructs around the queen. Her reasoning is impeccable, even if wholly opaque. Guenevere, meanwhile, enacts the masochistic script she has learned from Lancelot, subjecting herself to the punishments of their relational system by entering into it as if she were him. Suddenly possessed of an interiority that makes its previous absence all the more troubling, she labels her actions in rejecting Lancelot a sin (pechié). Only victims (those who have experienced loss, those who suffer in order to signify) possess subjectivity in Lancelot; Guenevere gains hers through the banishment of a lover who, when present, constituted her as object of desire rather than desiring subject. As Deleuze observes, “It is essential to the masochist that he should fashion the woman into a despot, that he should persuade her to cooperate and get her to ‘sign.’ . . . The masochistic hero appears to be educated and fashioned by the authoritarian woman whereas basically it is he who forms her, dresses her for the part and prompts the harsh words she addresses to him. It is the victim who speaks through the mouth of his torturer, without sparing himself” (Coldness and Cruelty, 21–22). Only when Guenevere is not playing the role Lancelot has assigned to her does she, briefly, have a subjectivity of her own.40 Nostalgia for a lost moment of union is projected as a fantasy of sexual conjoining (conjointure, that which creates les conjoints): she should have held him in her arms, she thinks, tot nu a nu, to enjoy him “as fully as possible” (4229–30). She considers suicide when false news is brought that Lancelot is dead, but decides to take long pleasure instead in the suffering his permanent absence will cause. Self-erasure is never as attractive to Guenevere as it is to her amis. “It pleases me,” she says deliciously, “to mourn him for a long while” (“il m’est molt pleisant / que j’en aille lonc due feisant,” 4241–42). At this moment she reverts to the script that the masochistic hero has assigned her, the role of the woman of cold pleasure who enjoys the negation of her lover rather than of her

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self. This restructuration restores her to the role of domna/dominatrix whose distant delectation Lancelot’s own suffering is predicated upon. Venus im Pelz. The masochist suffers the penalty of the Law in order to enjoy, thereafter, its breach. The punishment precedes the crime, enabling its guiltless commission. After Lancelot pursues Guenevere through the otherworldy geography of Gorre and engages Meleagant in battle to win her back, the queen rewards him by publicly restoring his name: “Lancelot del Lac a a non” (3660). The narrative is more than halfway finished when the audience finally learns the protagonist’s nom propre. We do not come to our knowledge through any act of assertion on Lancelot’s part. He has steadfastly resisted any such identity-speaking, to the frustration of those whom he encounters in his aventures.41 Lancelot’s name is a gift granted by Guenevere, an articulation of the truth of his identity that effaces forever the taint of the cart. That it comes solely from the mouth of the queen illustrates that his meaning in gender is coincipient with his relationship to her body. This relationship, structured as it is around an ascesis of excess, an embrace of “limit” and “category” and of a law that commands “No,” will culminate in an embrace that cracks the walls that segregate being into meaning. For enjoyment itself is predicated upon surplus value, even if a surplus of negation: “The very gesture of renouncing enjoyment produces inevitably a surplus of enjoyment,” the Lacanian objet petit a, so that the ascetic can never be sure that “he does not repudiate all worldly goods because of the ostentatious and
i
zek, Enjoy Your vain satisfaction procured by this very act of sacrifice” (Z Symptom, 22). Hence the overwhelming “sense of fulfillment” in submission to certain totalitarian appeals: This dialectic of enjoyment and surplus enjoyment—i.e., the fact that there is no “substantial” enjoyment preceding the excess of surplus enjoyment, that enjoyment itself is a kind of surplus produced by renunciation—is perhaps what gives a clue to
i
zek, Enjoy Your Symptom, 22) so-called “primal masochism.” (Z The relationship between Lancelot and Guenevere is one that should logically culminate in the surplus (surplus 42) enjoyment figured through the sex act, that dangerous identity loss “in which the sexual emerges as the jouissance of exploded limits, as the ecstatic suffering into which the

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human organism momentarily plunges when it is ‘pressed’ beyond a certain threshold of endurance.”43 Masochism is always adulterous: it always, by its very nature, ruptures the demarcations that keep categories of knowledge/power/pleasure discrete. When, after a long suffering that serves as preparation and absolution for their assignation, Lancelot and Guenevere share her bed, we are met with one of the most astounding scenes of category confusion in all of medieval romance. In entering the sanctum sanctorum of the bedchamber Lancelot cuts his fingers on the metal window bars, but fails to notice his wounds. He bows and worships Guenevere as if she were a saint of radiant aspect, come to earth with the Word of God: Et puis vint au lit la reïne, si l’aore et se li ancline, car an nul cors saint ne croit tant. (4651–53) He came next to the bed of the queen. Lancelot bowed and worshiped before her, for he did not have this much faith in any saint. Lancelot’s reverence translates the sexual into the spiritual (two discourses that, as Georges Bataille reminds in Erotism, are never far apart), rendering the one indistinguishable from the other. The lingering description of their lovemaking recalls the voyeurism in Chrétien’s description of Enide’s loss of her virginity on her wedding night, even if the narrative gaze here turns away at the last moment (at the attainment of that joy “la plus eslite” and “la plus delitable”). Just as the romance as a whole could be called a reworking of the matrimonial obsessions of its simultext Le Chevalier au lion, this particular episode seems to function as a transposition of the postnuptial deflowering scene from Erec et Enide, but with an important difference. Whereas the new bride Enide “endured pain” (2052) and presumably bled, here Lancelot suffers and bleeds, his martyrdom for love (car il I suefre grant martire, 4691).44 Lancelot says that he would rather have been dismembered than not have had the tryst (4731–33), but in a way that is exactly what has happened. His body departs while his heart is left behind (“li cors s’anvet, li cuers sejorne”), a metaphorical evisceration; but also literally, physically some part of him remains (“mes de son cors tant i remaint”). The final, shocking revelation: Lancelot leaves, notices that he has been

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wounded (that he has lost something during intercourse), and is informed the next day that the queen has been discovered sleeping among white sheets (“molt blanc”) stained red with blood (“tachié de sanc”). These bloody sheets are the wedding night topos, the display that announces consummation through feminine loss (the virgin’s hymen), but here the male body has stained the sheets, and itself.45 Or, rather, the masculine body has become feminine.46 Or else masculine and feminine (along with lover/beloved, master/servant, vassal/lord, public/private) have temporarily lost their relational signifying power, each bifurcation blurring to the point at which it is no longer possible to contain them. Lancelot and Guenevere sleep together, and Lancelot bleeds like a wedding night bride, like a saint in imitatione Christi blessed with the stigmata. Faced with such confusions of bodies, Robert Hanning—who had been using Lancelot to culminate his discussion of the discovery of the individual in chivalric romance—admits that he understands why Chrétien abandons the narrative, since individualism cannot possibly triumph within the world that Lancelot and Guenevere share (The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance, 232). Hanning is correct, of course, but he may have misplaced Chrétien’s sympathies. This sliding, this “jouissance of exploded limits” is the ultimate masochistic act, Lancelot’s (Lancelot’s) triumph. No sooner is the moment of bliss attained, however, than desire is reactivated by a removal from grasp. “A goal once reached always retreats anew”: Lancelot loses Guenevere at the moment he gains her. If he did not, the power system in which the text is embedded would discohere for too long. The threat is of permanent breakdown.

The Domination of the Body Amis, il i covendroit painne. “My friend, you will have to suffer” —Chrétien de Troyes, Lancelot Lancelot did not have to be about heterosexuality. The romance denaturalizes the conjugal gender identities then being ecclesiastically promulgated by performing them elsewhere, by demonstrating their contractual basis and ultimate mutability, but same-sex desire is never admitted as a possible component to such a performance. In the thirteenth century,

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however, the Prose Lancelot will rework Chrétien’s story and introduce Galehaut, a prince who loves Lancelot with a self-effacing ardor equaling the knight’s own. “Et que ferai jou,” Galehaut asks his cruelly oblivious amis, “qui tout ai mis en vous mon cuer et mon cors?” (“And what shall I do, who have surrendered wholly to you my heart and my body?”)47 Unlike Lancelot, however, this fin amant will embrace his masochistic trajectory to the point of obliteration. Galehaut’s passion culminates in his own death as he becomes a revered martyr for love. I make this point only to emphasize what was already clear to the writers of the Prose Lancelot: Chrétien’s romance does not simply queer a newly dominant formulation of heterosexuality, but through its transpositions and conjointure attempts to reconfigure the world. Categories that seemed pure and discrete are constantly hybridized, sexualized, transformed. Lancelot begins as a typical Celtic aithed (abduction tale), then quickly adopts a resonant religious undertone by quietly invoking salvation history.48 Two mysterious geographies overlap here: the uncertain terrain of the Celtic Otherworld, with its alien allure; and the Christian mysteries of the Passion and the Harrowing of Hell, set in their distant time and inhuman place. The Christian narrative eventually becomes a suggestive palimpsest for the whole Lancelot story: “Tell us,” [the Jewish authorities] said, “are you the Messiah? . . . You are the Son of God, then?” they all said, and he replied, “It is you who say that I am.” . . . Pilate asked him, “Are you the king of the Jews?” He replied, “The words are yours.” (Mark 22:67–71, 23:3–4) Like the scourged Christ who refused to assert his identity to a power whose punishments he embraced as an act of supreme defiance, Lancelot avoids at every turn revealing his name, multiplying the contempt showered upon him and the trials he is required to overcome. The shameful cart into which Lancelot steps because of his love of Guenevere is a kind of mobile pillory (320–21), linked to the Passion narrative by reference to scourging and progression through crowded streets (335), and then by verbal analogy to the bearing of the cross (343). Lancelot’s voyage to Gorre parallels the apocryphal story of Christ’s descent into hell after the crucifixion as told in the Gospel of Nicodemus.49 Both messiahs free hostage

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bodies from a foreign land where they have, en servitume et an essil (2091), been awaiting the advent of an infinitely suffering, self-negating liberator. A playful mystification surrounds references to God, as when Chrétien toys with the idea of the divinity committing incest (another forbidden category violation, and another twelfth-century matrimonial obsession as the Church mandated proper degrees of consanguinity): Mes je vos pri que vos aiez de moi merci por ce Deu qui est filz et pere, et qui de celi fist sa mere qui estoit sa fille et s’ancele. (2819–23) Rather, I pray you, have mercy on me, by this God who is both Father and Son, and who made His daughter and handmaiden to be His mother. This same paradoxical language surrounds Lancelot as he attempts the Pont de l’Espee (Sword Bridge), a feat from which he will emerge with bloody palms and feet, crucifixion wounds.50 It is no more likely that a man could cross the gorge on the sword blade, his young companion argues, than that a man could enter his mother’s womb and be born again (3056–57). The remark reformulates Nicodemus’s naïve query to Jesus, who proved that such a thing was possible within a discourse different from the physicalizing one in which it is posed. Lancelot is Christlike in that he also suffers for a captive people and liberates them by his masochistic embrace of a discourse of power that, having subordinated him completely, trips over his prostrated body and stumbles to the ground. Both messiahs resist power by submitting to the fullness of its force, the dominating power of its discourse. Christ declares that there is liberation in long suffering and transformative death; Lancelot finds deliverance in a suffering that is eternal desire. From masochistic hero to Christ figure: the category adulteration condensed in the assignation scene figures everywhere in the Lancelot narrative. Gender is a category inscribed as private, but meant to be read as public. Hence the sliding from sexuality to religion. Hence the reinscription figured in the masochistic conjointure, the scandalous performance of contemporary marital myths (consent, happy submission) outside the officially sanctioned

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structure that is supposed to be the sole possibility of their coherence. Hence the sexualization of the social, the sacred, the textual. Lancelot’s self-abnegation asserts all the more strongly his ineffaceable agency; his absolute submission is the key to his indomitability. If Lancelot is providing the script that assigns the queen her role as dominatrix, it is a text already inscribed within other, dominating cultural narratives.51 Lancelot’s desire, moreover, is to some extent socially useful, replicating the existing structure of the court of Champagne. “Disciplined by courtly love” (as Duby phrases it), male desire circulates in adulterous fantasies that ultimately reinforce both the “morality of marriage” and “the rules of ethics of vassalage” (Love and Marriage, 63). The (nameless) ridiculous son who attempts to take the (nameless) dameisel from Lancelot as he travels in search of Guenevere calls the woman his “chose lige” (1719). As Kibler points out in his edition of the romance, lige is a feudal term that signifies “principally a vassal who has sworn unreserved fidelity to an overlord . . . a type of one-sided possessiveness rather than a reciprocal arrangement” (302). Better, lige indicates a relationship based upon absolute submission to a structuration of power that demands a Lancelot-like unhesitating compliance. Vassal to king, amis to domna, auctor to liber, san and matière to painne and antancïon, chevalier to senior, man to God are merely different manifestations of the same arrangement of power. In this reading, Lancelot’s abasement before the queen is a gesture to be situated within feudal relations first, so that his domination by her encodes and transplants his embrace of her husband: Lancelot is a political and ideological narrative as much as it is a sexual one.52 In other words, sex is not separable from culture, and desire expands to fill the contours of preexistent social structures, reproducing and solidifying them. The gesture of abasement must also be read within the relationship of patronage that connects Chrétien to Marie de Champagne. The script that Chrétien creates for Marie is uncannily familiar. She is his imperious Guenevere, his dominatrix to whom he cannot say no. Hence the romance that Gaston Paris circulated and to which (mostly male) critics have obsessively submitted, in which Chrétien sabotages the whole endeavor of writing Lancelot to exact his revenge. It is impossible to know if we can see anything of the historical Marie in the rather perverse figure that Chrétien constructs and then submits himself to in his famously problematic prologue:

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Puis que ma dame de Chanpaigne vialt que romans a feire anpraigne je l’anprendrai molt voluntiers, come cil qui est suens antiers de quanqu’il puet el monde feire . . . mes tant dirai ge que mialz oevre ses comandemanz an ceste oevre que sans ne painne que g’i mete. Del Chevalier de la Charrete comance Crestïens son livre; matiere et san li done et livre la contesse, et il s’antremet de panser si que rien n’i met fors sa painne et s’antancïon. (1–5, 21–29) Since my lady of Champagne wishes me to begin a romance, I shall do so most willingly, as one who is entirely at her service in anything he can undertake in this world. . . . I will say, however, that her command has more importance in this work than any thought or effort I might put into it. Chrétien begins his book about the Knight of the Cart; the source and meaning are furnished and given him by the countess, and he strives carefully to add nothing but his effort and diligence. Chrétien transforms the relationship between author and patron to that between domna and amis: “come cil qui est suens antiers” (‘as one who is completely hers,” 4), a formulation that will be repeated later in the narrative by Lancelot to Guenevere (5656).53 No wonder Gaston Paris’s imaginative romance proved so irresistible for later critics, for here Chrétien himself is offering its précis. A medieval illustrator of the romance even inscribed Marie’s commanding body into the circle of an enormous P (from the PUIS with which the narrative begins), an initial that visually dominates the first thirteen lines of the poem (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS fonds français, 794, fol. 27). Marie dictates to her servant-poet the story he must write (matière) and determines the signification of the narrative (san) ahead of time for him. The poet is an empty vessel, a gesture that keeps repeating (hand across the page, hand across the page), living within a discourse that frames and contains him

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rather than within a language whose semantic value he himself controls (27–29). Such is the essence of the patron-artist contract that orders literary production, interchangeable here with the masochistic contract that orders gender. From this viewpoint, Chrétien vanishes, replaced by the powerful Marie, who constructs both the romance and the romance’s bodies (for the page itself that holds the story is body: vellum, sheep’s skin, but also Chrétien’s poetic corpus). To inscribe the story is to articulate bodies, genders, identities across bodies, genders, identities. Lancelot derives his signification in gender from his subjugation under (subjectivation by) Guenevere. She orders his life, which he elaborates through angoisse and painne. Chrétien derives his matiere et san from Marie, and adds to it only his painne. Writing romance and living romance become interlaced masochistic practices. Chrétien is actively engaging in myth building here, and it has been assumed by critics that this manufacture of powerful new significations for women very much pleased Marie—in fact, that she forced them upon the male writers she and her husband patronized. Any depiction of a medieval woman that falls outside the Mary/Eve dichotomy is a refreshing one, especially in the twelfth century, and I certainly do not want to argue that Guenevere and Marie—even if they are Chrétien’s literary creations—cannot be “heard to speak against . . . dominant discourses, to resist and dissent, turning their borrowed speech into something else” (Burns, Bodytalk, 17). Burns has brilliantly argued for the recoverability of women’s dissenting voices in the most misogynistic of maleauthored texts. Even in those infamous fabliaux where the woman is reduced to a speaking vagina, for example, Burns demonstrates that a potential counterdiscourse nonetheless arises to challenge masculinist orderings of the world. Sarah Kay describes the gender of the Provençal domna and the courtly lady as occupying a mixed, third position not subsumable into preexistent binaries.54 Likewise, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath cannot be dismissed as simply a straightforward embodiment of the monstrous femininity constructed by those popular antimatrimonial and misogynist tracts that he knew so well (Epistola Valerii ad Rufinum de non ducenda uxore, Theophrastus’s Liber Aureolus de Nuptiiis, Jerome’s Epistola adversus Jovinianum, Lamentations de Matheolus, Roman de la Rose). Rather, Chaucer is able to achieve a measure of vitality for his creation by performing Chrétien’s Lancelotism from the feminine side: the Wife of Bath, whose copious energy is devoted exclusively to mar-

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riage, manages to undermine the institution through her unwavering devotion to its structure. Alisoun brings the clerical stereotypes of women vividly to life, but she inhabits these inherited roles in order to deterritorialize them from the inside. Derek Pearsall has written that she demonstrates the traits of “a conformist petite bourgeoise, and her determination to pursue her predatory career within the traditional bounds of marriage is a quite touching confirmation of the values that her [textual] predecessors shamelessly repudiated” (The Canterbury Tales, 75). The Wife of Bath is, like Lancelot, granted a subjectivity that renders both her domination (of men) and submission (to the institution of marriage) comprehensible. Even if she is authored by a male writer, she is not necessarily obedient to the male fantasies that catalyzed her literary genesis. At the same time, however, I do think it is essential to analyze the cultural work that masculine fantasies of blissful domination by powerful women perform. A biographer of Marie’s mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, imagines that the two women were able to construct a feminine utopia by combining the influences of their courts at Poitiers and Troyes: [Marie and Eleanor] saw themselves as innovators of a rational new world, a prototype for the future perhaps, in which women might reign as goddesses. . . . Eleanor’s ideas went far beyond what we today would call feminism, in the sense that equality of the sexes was not precisely her goal. Rather, she believed in the superiority of women. What was needed, in her opinion, was a code of civility to embody and publicize these ideas. . . . From her court at Troyes Marie had brought along a chaplain, Andreas Capellanus, who was called upon to assist in writing a manual for the medieval male. . . . It is amusing that Marie should have been compelled to commission a male cleric as her ghostwriter in this attempt to dethrone masculine dominance. (Meade, Eleanor of Aquitaine, 251–52) That Andreas or Chrétien should script the Marie who desires a “manifesto for some Amazon culture” (Meade, Eleanor of Aquitaine, 253) is not amusing at all. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, enthralled by the primal matriarchies envisioned by Jacob Bachofen, likewise imagined a feminine desire to recreate a lost Amazonian utopia where his male protagonists could languish in dominated bliss. Bachofen’s Das Mutterrecht

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(1861) is a masochistic fantasy of the same order as Sacher-Masoch’s, only written as history rather than fiction. When sexual difference is articulated within a mythic frame founded upon the satisfaction of male desires, the proper voices of women like Marie become difficult to hear. The temptation that must be resisted is to believe Chrétien, to think that Marie is directly knowable through his imperious representation. The masochist—he who submits molt voluntiers to a body whose influence (he vigorously insists) is far greater than any he could himself possess— lives a narrative that empowers him at the very moment he pleads impotence. The dominator here is never a person in his or her own right, but a voice that mouths lines written by “a victim in search of a torturer. . . who needs to educate, persuade, and conclude an alliance with the torturer in order to realize the strangest of schemes.” Author, patron, domna, amis blur as they overlap: a fiction of gender coherence that necessitates, in the end, a liberatory collapse. That Lancelot is not a teleological work (one whose “final” meaning is readable back from its ending) should come as no surprise, but it is a point that has often eluded the romance’s interpreters. We should not expect a narrative so bent on prying loose what culture has immured to provide a definitive ending. Further, if we are waiting to see how the story concludes in order to determine what it signifies, we have already missed its point, and perhaps the point of the genre of romance. Chrétien commits the ultimate act of authorial adultery in Lancelot. Having literally immured (anmurez) his hero Lancelot in a doorless tower on an island at the edge of Gorre, he gives the book to someone else to finish: Godefroiz de Leigni, li clers, a parfinee la Charrete; mes nus hom blasme ne l’an mete se sor Crestïen a ovré, car ç’a il fet par le boen gré Crestïen, qui le comança. Tant en a fet des lors an ça ou Lanceloz fu anmurez, tant con li contes est durez. Tant en a fet. N’i vialt plus metre ne moins, por le conte malmetre. (7102–112)

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The clerk Godefroy de Leigni has put the final touches on the Knight of the Cart. Let no one blame him for completing the work of Chrétien, since he did it with the approval of Chrétien, who began it. He worked on the story from the point at which Lancelot was walled into the tower and finished it. This much only has he done. He wishes to add nothing further, nor omit anything, for this would harm the story. Chrétien, we learn far after the fact, abandoned the story when Lancelot was at his most helpless, his most feminine: trapped in a tower and awaiting liberation, like the imperiled heroine of a romance rather than its invincible hero. Godefroi, we discover in retrospect, described Lancelot’s odd rescue by Meleagant’s sister, who searched the countryside on her little donkey until she came across the emaciated, much dwindled knight. Traditionally Chrétien is seen as having given up on his conte because the theme Marie commanded has led him to this ridiculous impasse. Could it be, however, that he absented himself from the narrative in order to pervade it all the more deeply? The revelation of the second writer’s identity is startling, placed at the very end of the work.55 The moment is rather like Guenevere’s bestowal of the knight of the Cart’s nom propre. Godefroi suddenly takes the place of Chrétien, who now inhabits the role of Marie as bestower of sen et matière. The drama enacted in the prologue repeats, after a substitution of bodies and functions, in the epilogue: Godefroi submits molt voluntiers to the dominating power of Chrétien, providing an even queerer version of the masochistic contract or bele conjointure that has structured the text through its changing iterations. The adulterous events inside the poem occur simultaneously in the outside world of Marie’s court that the poem itself constructs for us and is constructed by, leading to another category violation. Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner acutely observes that “where the issue of marriage (and adultery) appears, Lancelot vanishes” (Shaping Romance, 70), but we have seen repeatedly how that very vanishing is really a saturation within a transposition (Lancelot is obsessed with marriage, but in an adulterous permutation that spreads it everywhere at the moment it disappears). Likewise, when Chrétien surrenders his power as author so that another author can surrender his power to him, we know that he seeks invincible strength through disappearance,

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self-assertion through self-abnegation, an excess of visibility through a technology of vanishing. Perhaps Reik said it best when at the end of composing Masochism in Modern Man he sought a formula to contain the “essence and aim” of masochism: “Victory Through Defeat” (429).

Discipline and Publish My own masochistic theoretical inclination is to revel in my bondage to images, to celebrate the spectatorial condition of metaphysical alienation and ideological delusion, rather than strive to rectify it. But I can’t escape the fatality that heightens selfconsciousness whenever one seeks to abolish it, and that turns every gesture of ecstatic, “sacrificial mutilation” into yet another instance of self-assertion and self-validation. —Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body Just as Leopold von Sacher-Masoch unwillingly became masochism, so Lancelot du Lac unwittingly becomes Lancelot. Onomastic substitutions figure bodily and cultural adulterations, breakdowns, boundary collapses without end. Matrimonial mythology, masochistic assemblages, literature, history, and impassioned fantasy flow together and invigorate the past in all its impurity. Urban T. Holmes long ago suggested that Chrétien de Troyes was a converted Jew, thus accounting for his rather strange name (“Christian”)—a name that would then gesture toward an entire disciplina that must be learned, incorporated, rather than toward an individual identity.56 Rita Copeland has well documented how in the use of the church fathers the Latin word disciplina, “body of knowledge,” took on a more corporal meaning: The punitive connotation of disciplina is associated with an educative function. . . . Here the term disciplina becomes linked with verberare, “to flog,” and with vapulare, “to get a beating.” . . . Out of its association with flogging and beating it also takes on

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the specialised meaning of flagellation, both in the sense of punishment under law and of self-inflicted scourging. (“The Pardoner’s Body,” 143) Submission to an intellectual and religious discipline is therefore always a disciplina corporis. Could his writing of Lancelot have performed Chrétien’s own defiant bodily and intellectual submission to the dreams of his new faith? Nor do I wish to leave myself innocent of this chapter’s educative perversities, especially because its contours also trace the history of my own training (at once long and ongoing) as a medievalist and theorist. In coming to and composing this argument I have submitted myself, with a masochist’s enthusiasm, to three delightfully difficult disciplines: ancien francais, a language far from my native tongue; a nested series of discourses of power in late-twelfth-century France (a geography distant from me, spatially and temporally); and continental philosophy, a resistant and amorphous body of knowledge that challenges one to speak and think differently—if, after its constant challenges to self, subjectivity, and coherence, one has a voice left with which to speak at all. I allow these discourses to envelop me because I want to hold them close, make them mine, enact them at that limit where they align into new comprehensibilities. I began this essay with a Freudian dream that masochistically enacted a substitution of bodies, a doubled act of adultery that mingled what is supposed to be singular and discrete and produced a surplus that is narrative. I traced with a particular fascination the joyful supplice of Lancelot (Lancelot). I conclude, after a long process, substituting Lancelot’s masochistic desires, which are Chretien’s masochistic desires, for their origin, for my own. Or, as Chrétien himself probably said, d’amor ne sai nule issue, “From desire I know no exit.”57

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4 The Solitude of Guthlac

T Is þes middangeard dalum gedæled. [This world is sundered into parts.] —Guthlac A, 53–54 The rhizome is the liberation of sexuality not only from reproduction but also from genitality. —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus In “I, Pierre Rivière . . .” Michel Foucault analyzed the vita of an avowed murderer who aspired to be a saint. This chapter explores a Mercian saint who was from another point of view a murderer, excavating a possible body that came into being on an island of dispersed identity, an island that would not yet allow its southern and eastern expanses a harmonization into “England.” In detailing the battles of a militant recluse against a troop of demons, the Latin and Old English lives of Saint Guthlac promote an ascesis of sacred individuation. These legends construct a singular body with both religious and colonialist utility for eighth-century Mercia, an Anglo-Saxon kingdom that likewise struggled to imagine itself in less conflicted, more homogeneous terms. Foucault may never have read of the heroic battle of Guthlac against a swarm of ethereal demons, and the long-dead composers of the Vita sancti Guthlaci and Guthlac A would no doubt have found puzzling the French philosopher’s analysis

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of how desire exceeds the limits of merely human flesh. Yet each of these authors, as exuberant as he was austere, shared a fascination with the disjointed multiplicity of identity. Momentarily allying dissimilar epistemological worlds suggests that the process of masculine sexuation in eighth-century Mercia was under severe cultural stress as conflicting corporealities struggled for dominance. Likewise, although the insights of Foucault and Deleuze mark a foundational moment for continental philosophy, the social production and potential transmutability of identity was realized long ago via a body imagined within a vastly different cognitive frame. Through a close reading of the Latin Vita sancti Guthlaci and the Old English Guthlac A as Mercian texts, this chapter details an inevitable tension within historical bodies, an irresolvable conflict between social forces that aim to render the flesh obedient, intelligible, useful, and a radically acontextual openness that never ceases to pull the body outside of itself, outside of any organization, no matter how minutely disciplined that body has become. The sacred form of Guthlac shimmers with the radiance of a sublime object, of a suturing point where some disparate peoples are called upon to recognize their community while others are rejected as utterly different in language, in body, in race. Through Guthlac’s body courses a specifically eighth-century formulation of AngloSaxon unity constructed against a British inferiority, a fantasy of corporate integrity with vast colonialist utility for contemporary Mercia. At the same time, however, Guthlac never quite achieves the celibate solitude for which he yearns, for the saint is throughout his life persecuted by a throng of demons who lift him, unwilling, into their own identity machines, into their own perverse becomings.1

The Sacred Body of Guthlac “In the midst of what appears to some as a poem gone berserk . . .” —Daniel G. Calder, “Guthlac A and Guthlac B: Some Discriminations” The earliest known version of Guthlac’s life is the Vita sancti Guthlaci, composed by the obscure monk Felix in the early to mid-eighth century.2 According to the Latin account, Guthlac was descended from the royal

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blood of Mercia and took his name from that of his tribe, the Guthlacingas. For nine years of his youth he so excelled as a warrior that he was able to gather a host of men “from various races and from all directions” to serve under his command. He rejected the martial life at the age of twenty-four to become a monk, accepting the Petrine tonsure at Repton. With a hermit’s passion for solitude, Guthlac eventually relocated to nearby Crowland, a desolate area of the great Fenland. In a landscape as inhospitable as the Egyptian desert of his model Antony, Guthlac led an ascetic life broken by the infrequent visits of friends and relatives as well as the more persistent incursions of wilderness-loving demons. His patron saint was Bartholomew, who appeared to him at his death to escort his soul to heavenly bliss. Some of the historical specificities discernable in the vita suggest its political interests, marking it as a text likely promulgated with both spiritual and ideological intent. It is probably no accident that the narrative stresses Guthlac’s royal lineage or that he becomes a monk at Repton, the double monastery at the heart of Mercia whose church housed the royal crypt.3 Although his own geopolitical origins are unknown, Felix writes that he has composed the Vita Guthlaci at the request of Ælfwald, king of the East Angles. A likely genesis for the text would therefore be in Ælfwald’s desire to please Æthelbald, the powerful Mercian king to whom he apparently owed obedience as a subject ruler. Felix may even have composed the text at Repton, which was likely the center of a royal estate.4 Mercian hegemony south of the Humber—tentative, as any union of the eternally contentious Anglo-Saxon kingdoms necessarily was— had first been established by Wulfhere in the seventh century and, even before reaching its acme under Offa, was being consolidated and strengthened during Æthelbald’s reign. The text speaks of this rex Britanniae, frequent visitor to Guthlac, and fervent promulgator of the saint’s cult only in superlative terms.5 According to Felix, Æthelbald reinterred the saint’s uncorrupted body in an ornate monument that, like most public structures erected by ambitious rulers, likely offered in the materiality of its architecture a powerful suturing point around which community could condense, here in the form of a shared cult. The dead Guthlac even returns to Æthelbald in a benedictory vision in which he declares the rapid expansion of Mercia’s boundaries to be a sign of divine favor (LII). That Felix was writing a saint’s life for Mercia first and for the rest of Britain

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thereafter is made clear as Guthlac’s fame spreads initially through his own country and then throughout the island, the expanding trajectory of Æthelbald’s own regnal power (non solum de proximis Merciorum finisbus, verum etiam de remotis Britanniae partibus, XLV). Guthlac is said to lead a warband “scraped together [Felix’s odd term conrasis, probably from radere, “to shave”] from many peoples from all directions [undique diversarum gentium sociis].” The description also likely reflects the political ambitions of the Mercian ruler, and would have been just as true of his successor Offa, who seized the throne from Æthelbald’s heir in 757. Both kings eventually realized their desire to rule as overlord of the “scraped together” southumbrian Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, an alliance diversarum gentium.6 The formation of an extended insular political unit was aided in the eighth century by walling off a non-British communal space from the strongest concentration of its coclaimants, an ambitious project that culminated in the erection of the monumental earthwork known as Offa’s Dyke.7 Given that a non-British swathe of Britannia was emerging and growing through an ongoing program of displacement and segregation (as well as, more quietly, of intermarriage, absorption, assimilation), it is no surprise that Guthlac’s military glory appears to have been won against the Britons, or that he is said to have been captured by them and to have learned their language.8 Guthlac’s biographical details construct in Felix’s account a pan-insular Mercian superiority that had an ideological utility to its promulgation for quite some time, not least because Offa would soon be so eager to transform Mercia into the singular body of “England”: “All this is summed up by Offa’s decision from 774 onwards to call himself Rex Anglorum, king of the English. . . . He preferred to make southern and eastern England part of Mercia and to rename Mercia England whether their inhabitants liked it or not” (John, Reassessing Anglo-Saxon England, 54). At the same time as the Vita Guthlaci betrays these localizing details, however, the bulk of its subject’s biography has been lifted by Felix from other saints’ lives.9 The reworking of extant texts under a new name is so pervasive that Jane Roberts suggests “we are in danger of wondering if Guthlac ever existed” (The Guthlac Poems of the Exeter Book, 7). A pastiche of borrowed episodes, Guthlac’s life was also partially led by Saints Antony, Cuthbert, and Paul.10 Nor is Felix the only writer to narrate Guthlac’s vita. Guthlac A and Guthlac B are the two most famous Old English

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versions, but a homily in the Vercelli book and an entry in the Old English Martyrology retell his biography with significant variations.11 The Historia of pseudo-Ingulf adds to Felix’s narration of the saint’s death another scene in which Guthlac’s sister and fellow recluse Pege expires in Rome while church bells ring. A poem by Henry of Avranches supplies a demon impersonating Pege to tempt her brother. The Harley Roll provides a series of roundels that illustrate scenes not elsewhere described, such as Saint Bartholomew arming Guthlac with a scourge to employ against his monstrous adversaries. If archival evidence is to be believed, Guthlac appears to have died twice. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle notes that the saint left the earth in 714, while the chronicle ascribed to John of Wallingford asserts that Guthlac passed away in 715.12 An obvious way of accounting for this discrepancy is to argue that some scribe simply got the dates mixed up, but the doubled death is symptomatic of a larger phenomenon that surrounds the promulgation of saints’ cults generally, and Guthlac’s in particular. Although he is revered for having fought his entire life against disconcordant multiplicities in favor of a singular, unitary mode of being-in-the-world, numerous and conflicting Guthlacs appear in a diversity of lives. The life of Guthlac is sundered into parts, discrete fragments that resist totalization into some coherent, historical whole. Identity, the archival trace suggests, is something simultaneously larger, more fragmentary, and more fluid than a reduction into the still and somber vita of a saintly hermit will allow. Against its own best intentions, the eccentric Old English version of Guthlac’s life now known unpoetically as Guthlac A makes this point forcefully. Intervening into its fractured cultural moment with a fantastic vision of a saintly body impervious to demonic attack, the poem envisions profound transformations to contemporary masculinities and enlarged imaginings of community. Although I will ultimately turn to a reading of the poem that disrupts the final alignment of its movements and disperses Guthlac’s identity against the text’s insistence upon concentric unities, Guthlac A originates as a text addressed inward toward the body and outward toward expanded “English” racial and political affinity. Guthlac A is a Foucauldian “verboballistic device,” a textual identity machine that catalyzes new possibilities for the historical moment into which it intervenes. Unlike Rivière’s explosive memoir, however, this poem envisions a corporeal immutability that seems radically at odds

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with the idea of the body as site of possibility. Guthlac A invents with the flesh in order to discipline and regulate, an urgent project of both eighthcentury Christianity and the widening Mercian collectivity. Patrick Connor has argued that the poem was composed “only after the full impact of the Benedictine revolution was felt, that is, in the tenth century,” making the writing of the poem roughly contemporaneous with the compilation of the Exeter Book, the only codex in which it is found (Anglo-Saxon Exeter, 163). Yet the narrator of Guthlac A asserts four times that the saint is ussum tidum, a phrase that perhaps simply signifies that Guthlac’s legends were well known whenever the poem was written, but more literally suggests that the events described took place “in our own time”—that is, in the eighth century. The Guthlac section proper begins with an invocation likewise indicating that the saint’s story is of recent origin (“Magun we nu nemnan þæt us neah gewearð / þurh haligne hád gecyþed,” 93–94), and shortly thereafter the narrator implies that Guthlac’s temptations occurred recently enough for those who first heard of them to still be alive (153–60). Metrical analysis also suggests an early-eighth-century date of composition.13 Even if the poem is later, however, it is marked by its historical origin in a saint whose story is inseparable from the religious communities at Repton and Crowland, and from the political context under which his life was transformed into and disseminated as narrative. F. M. Stenton, the great historian of Anglo-Saxon England, described Felix’s Vita Guthlaci as “the one historical work which has come down to us from the ancient Mercian kingdom” (Anglo-Saxon England, 178), while Kenneth Sisam argued for a specifically East Mercian provenance for Guthlac A (Studies in the History of Old English Literature, 134). I would expand Stenton and Sisam’s claims about origin and argue that the Guthlac legends have been inscribed by their Mercian emergence with a dual trajectory, an inward movement toward self-definition via the envaluation of homogeneity and an outward vector of dilation and assimilation. These consolidating and globalizing impulses within the Guthlac materials are congruent with the colonialist ambitions of the eighth century as the kingdom of Mercia strove to overcome its inner fragmentation to become a larger collective entity within which other peoples, territories, kingdoms could find their place. This ideological thrust may well have been what appealed to the compositor of the Exeter Book in the tenth century, likewise a

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time of expansion and amalgamation, a time that dreamt of a united island. No matter when Guthlac A was written in its present form, however, the poem is shot through with traces of its own past, with the sedimented presence of its source materials and their power to activate readers’ and listeners’ enjoyment and desires.14 In this way I would qualify Patrick Wormald’s reductive formula for the paucity of references to Mercian kings as bretwaldas: The reason why Stenton had to discover “The Supremacy of the Mercian Kings” [the title of a foundational chapter in Stenton’s monumental Anglo-Saxon England] is a basic fact of Anglo-Saxon history. There are Northumbrian and West Saxon sources, with Kentish traditions embodied in both, but only charters are committed to Mercian greatness. (“Bede, the Bretwaldas and the Origins of the Gens Anglorum,” 119) The early Guthlac narratives, while not simply or even straightforwardly “committed to Mercian greatness,” are nonetheless suffused by the geotemporality of their origins, even after being codicologically transformed into Exeter Book poems. This thickness of temporalities is what, besides an ahistorical offer of godly devotion, rendered Guthlac A so appealing over a span of at least two centuries. The diverse Guthlac materials emphasize spectacular engagements with devils as the battleground of saintly singularity. Guthlac A contains the most extended account of the saint’s struggles, so much so that the poem could more descriptively be entitled Guthlac and His Demons. Diabolical encounters occupy the enormous center of the poem, about six hundred of eight hundred lines, and a missing leaf at the poem’s middle likewise seems to have concerned demonic assaults. The work’s bland current descriptor originates in long scholarly confusion over the work’s borders. Copied out with unsystematic line breaks, capitals, and punctuation, the poems of the Exeter Book are a visually irregular flow of words. It is often difficult to know where one piece ends and the next begins.15 This lack of firm boundaries has been especially vexing to the editors of Guthlac A. Despite a line of capitals that suggest a change of text, uncertainty long existed as to whether the first twenty-nine lines belong to the Guthlac poem, since they speak rather generally about souls and

The Solitude of Guthlac

heaven rather than of the saint and his travails.16 The obsession that flourished in the early critical literature with demarcating boundaries for Guthlac A has its parallel in the narrative itself, which explores how the saint withstands repeated attacks to his integrity by demons whose desire is to render him literally as well as figuratively a body in pieces. The opening passage describes how an unnamed soul (“seo eadge sawl”), cleft from the constraining materiality of the body (“hio wiþ þam lice gedæleð”), meets a celestial angel and is welcomed to eternal rest (1–22). The soul is addressed by God’s messenger as “tidfara” (9), an invented word that means something like “time-traveler.” The hapax legomenon aligns the body, the soul, and the angel in a temporal arc that begins in a foundational antinomy (body versus soul) and resolves in a pure, timeless, and wholly disembodied spirituality. The transfiguration into atemporality achieves a frozen moment of enjoyment placed outside of all progress and movement: “geoguþe brucað 7 Godes miltsa” (21). Beowulf concludes with a hero’s body reduced to ambiguous smoke rising from a somber funeral pyre, a moment of teleological uncertainty that, coupled to the forebodings of catastrophe that haunt the close of the poem, leaves the audience with the suspicion that a way of life is coming forever to an end. Guthlac A, in contrast, confidently begins after the obsequies have concluded, after the body has been joyfully abandoned for an eternity of celestial certainties.17 Tidfara suggests a mode of being-out-ofthe-world that stands in stark contrast to the exuberant physicality displayed by the Germanic heroes and their monsters. If Guthlac as Godes miltsa is to repeat his role as the miles Christi whom Felix described, if (as has often been observed) Guthlac A is going to use the vernacular of heroic narrative to inspire to imitation an audience with inadequate exposure to Latin conventions of hagiography, then the first twenty-nine lines suggest that Guthlac’s battles against fantastic foes will nonetheless set him against the Ingelds and Beowulfs of heroic tradition, against those exemplary bodies whose hold over the contemporary performance of masculinity the Guthlac story challenges.18 Although the poem provocatively asserts that many hadas (“ranks”) of men can become saints, this initial widening of sacral possibility is quickly reduced through a long enumeration of why most will fail (30–80).19 Contrasted against this corruptible “monge” (30) are the “sume” (81) who dwell in the wilderness, “þa gecostan cempan þa þam cyninge þeowað” (“proven warriors who

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serve the king,” 91), whom monsters (brogan laðne, brægdwis bona) threaten but whom angels defend. Guthlac is announced as one of these new champions, an inspiration to imitation for all of Britain (“þær he mongum werð / bysen on Brytene,” 174–75). Unlike the heroes of old whose struggles against inhuman adversaries the poem cites even as it transforms, Guthlac’s story is recent (93) and therefore—the text insists—more relevant to the formation of contemporary identities. The saint’s celibate body is introduced as the site of a fierce psychomachia waged for its ownership: “hine twegen ymb / weardas wacedon þa gewin drugon” (“two watchers kept guard around him, where they waged strife” 114–15). The angel of the lord urges him to turn his mind toward the stability of heaven, while an “átela gæst” (“terrible spirit,” “demon,” 116) insists that he should seek a “sceaðena gemot” (127) with whom to form an alliance and pursue earthly wealth: oþer hyne scythe þæt he sceaðena gemot nihtes sohte 7 þurh neþinge wunne æfter worulde swa doð wræcmæcgas þa þe ne bimurnað monnes feore þæs þe him to honda huþe gelædeð butan hy þy reafe rædan motan. (127–32) [The terrible spirit] exhorted him to seek a band of harmers by night and bravely strive for worldly gain as do the exiles who do not mourn for a human life when plunder is brought to hand, provided they can thereby obtain some treasure. An immediate opposition is constructed around the solitary, circumscribed way of living that the angel as determinative voice of Christianitas declares is the only path to a celestial home, and a nomadic but communal life on earth associated with multiplication (of goods, of companions) and dispersal. Guthlac figures the ideal of eighth-century masculinity at a cultural cusp, as if it wavered between established secular modes and the relatively novel possibility of ecclesiastical reconfiguration. The “sceaðena gemot” that tempts Guthlac toward collectivity is richly ambiguous, since “sceaðena” has a negative valence in its application to enemies and monsters, but can also simply signify warrior. “Sceaðena gemot” could indicate, as Jane Roberts suggests, something like “band of outlaws,” but another possible signification is “troop of fighting men”

The Solitude of Guthlac

(recalling Guthlac’s military days) or “assembly of [monstrous] harmdoers” (the demons who figure so prominently throughout the poem). The temptation scene conflates these communal possibilities, then stages a grand rejection of all three for saintly Guthlac’s celibate body.

The Many and the Few Crowland attracted devils as sea-islands attract puffins. —Henry Mayr-Harting, The Coming of Christianity to England A band of outlaws, a comitatus of warriors, and a community of monks have in common the identity-sustaining order of hierarchical structure. Bede realized this shared bond when he narrated how Cedd, bishop of the East Saxons (c. 653/61–64), founded a monastery in Deira. With the king’s permission he chose a site for the monastery amid some steep and remote hills which seemed better fitted for the haunts of robbers and the dens of wild beasts than for human habitation; so that, as Isaiah says, “In the habitations where once dragons lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes,” that is, the fruit of good works shall spring up where once beasts dwelt or where men lived after the manner of beasts. (Ecclesiastical History, III.23) In Bede’s account, the shared and wild space of the robbers is supplanted by a monastic architecture, transforming the ethics of the landscape but retaining a certain continuity of collective social structure, from one kind of masculine belonging to another. Guthlac’s desires are very different from those of Cedd, for the saint’s trajectory is toward utter individuation. The antagonism between the singular and the multiple is the slender pivot upon which the rhetorical architecture of Guthlac A balances. Jesus’ assertion in Matthew 20:16 about the many who are called and the few who are chosen (multi enim sunt vocati, pauci veri electi) is translated into a structuring opposition between fela and fea. Everything that is heavenly and good is also individual and isolated, while all that is

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evil and aligned with the fiends is dangerous because of its multitudinousness, its variety. Filiation, kinship, and inheritance (“his sibbe ryht,” 197), the network of familial and social relations through which a rigidly hierarchical mode of being was maintained in early northern European culture, are rejected for the isolating ascesis of the eremite. The demons urge Guthlac to return to his family, remind him of the grief his absence will cause his kinsmen, force him to encounter once more those communal enjoyments (monna dream) that structure secular, masculine identity in contemporary society (190–99). The saint steadfastly refuses. The individuality (that is, “lack of divisibility”) for which Guthlac and the other solitary saints aim is not the same as selfhood, which still implies an intersubjective component to identity. As Mary Clayton has observed, “In striving to overcome all distractions, they aimed to empty themselves of selfhood, to open themselves to God, and they rejected all society” (“Hermits and the Contemplative Life,” 148). The paradox is that in so doing, they all the more strongly inscribe their singularity. Guthlac A is no doubt indebted to Augustine’s Confessions for its foundational binary, but the poem also owes an immediate debt to Felix’s Vita Guthlaci, which likewise maps a movement in Guthlac’s life from diffusiveness to anchored singularity. Guthlac A begins the narration of the saint’s life in medias res, at that point at which his conversion is about to be complete and his life as a saint truly begins. His early life is invoked only as common knowledge that does not have to be repeated: “Hwæt we hyrdon oft þæt se halga wer / in þa ærestan ældu gelufade / frecnessa fela” (“We have heard often enough that in his earliest youth the holy man loved many dangerous things,” 108–10; cf. 104–05, where as a young man he is said to have loved worulde wynnum, worldly pleasures). These lines imply that the poem is addressed to an audience who knows well some version of the narrative of Guthlac’s geoguð (youth), assumedly that by Felix. Whereas in Guthlac A the frecnessa fela of early days are immediately embodied in the “átela gæst” (“terrible spirit,” 116) to be rapidly exorcised, in Felix’s narrative a heroic life of battlefield vigor gives way more gradually to a religious life of marshland introspection, a passionate movement towards immobility that necessitates a rejection of Benedictine community for Antonine solitude. According to Felix, the young Guthlac’s desire is activated by fantasies of the “valiant deeds of heroes of old” (valida pristinorum heroum facta reminiscens, XVI 80).20 Inspired to perform in the present the feats of his long dead idols, he

The Solitude of Guthlac

gathers a band of followers (satellitum turmis) to attack the cities (urbes) and houses (villas) of his enemies, destroying with fire and sword. The force of his violence draws increasing numbers of men to him, the “scraping together” of “various races from all directions” discussed earlier (XVII).21 Guthlac and his warband arrive as if from the pages of Tacitus’s Germania, a similarly overinvested fantasy of heroic community.22 Yet the Mercian warrior grows slowly weary of this supposedly glorious life. After long and unremitting warfare that perpetually lacks the radiance of heroic endeavor, lacks the sublime glimmer of those valida pristinorum heroum facta that had inspired him to imitation, Guthlac experiences an existential crisis: So when about nine years had passed away during which he had achieved the glorious overthrow of his persecutors, foes, and adversaries by frequent blows and devastations, at last their strength was exhausted after all the pillage, slaughter, and rapine that their arms had wrought, and being worn out, they kept peace. And so the man of blessed memory, Guthlac, was being storm-tossed amid the uncertain events of passing years, amid the gloomy clouds of life’s darkness, and amid the whirling waves of the world. (XVIII) The language of multitude that earlier underwrote Felix’s account of the magnetic power of Guthlac’s heroic masculinity returns here as a storm that condenses in metaphoric form the dangers sociality poses to individuation, threatening Guthlac’s identity with complete disaggregation. The Latin prose grows turgid, compounding synonyms (persecutorum suorum adversantiumque sibi hostium; tot praedas, caedes rapinasque) into a linguistic swell that mimics with its polysyndeton the heaving waves (fluctuantes inter saeculi gurgites) of its psychic tempest. Guthlac thought that he could become a hero like Beowulf, a man for whom violence is sublime exploit rather than mere “pillage, slaughter, and rapine.” The young Guthlac might even have likewise hoped to become a king.23 But like Saul struck by a thunderclap and transformed into Paul, Guthlac after the storm can only reject his turbulent history and convert to the solitary stability of a life discontinuous with its own past. Felix’s Vita Guthlaci insists that, although an aggressive and relentlessly public masculinity appropriate to martial exploit previously determined the proper

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trajectory for becoming male, Guthlac’s example argues for radically different forms of gendered embodiment. Guthlac recalls that the “ancient kings of his race” eventually died both wretchedly and shamefully (nam cum antiquorum regum stirpis suae per transacta retro saecula miserabiles exitus flagitioso vitae termino contemplaretur, XVIII), the divine sign that as role models these men must be outmoded, identities stuck within an unusable history.24 The relentless obedience of the saint to God replaces the domination exerted by the hero as dryhten over his willing subordinates (þegnas), and this private surrender to an abstract dominus becomes a superior assertion of singularity. The language of masculinity does not change, retaining its martial terms as it describes itself, but the source of its signification is radically altered. Whereas it used to be that men knew their proper identity through a hierarchy readable through their interactions with each other in a warband, the Christian masculinity espoused by Guthlac derives its meaning from the positionality of itself to an unearthly Big Other (as psychoanalysis would say), the sole object of its address. It is logical, then, that this formulation of being that rejects the power of a social matrix to give relational meaning to bodies should culminate in the life of a hermit in the wilderness. Clare Lees has observed that “Christianity brings not only a religion of the book but of the body to AngloSaxon England,” and that this body is always “sexually differentiated and gendered” (“Engendering Religious Desire,” 20). At no time was any kingdom of Anglo-Saxon England likely to have had in place a sex and gender system similar to our own, with its keen binarism of hetero- and homosexuality. Evidence of what composed pre-Christian insular sexual practice is scant, but even before the time of the mass conversions of the kingdoms, sexuality was spread across a heterogeneous field of possible genital activity, virginity, continence, marriage, concubinage, serial monogamy, sodomy. Saints like Guthlac map new paths for masculine becoming, promulgating unprecedented individualities and sexuations (the utter strangeness of a minority sexuality like celibacy to dominant eighth-century identities, and especially to martial masculinity, cannot be overemphasized). Felix’s biographical narrative, like Guthlac A after it, scripts what it hopes will be a cultural intervention, and therefore participates in a modest way in the never-complete Christianization of insular flesh. Felix imagines that a heroic age characterized by force, violence, lordship, domination, and multiplicity is giving way to the serene loneliness and

The Solitude of Guthlac

austere self-regulation of the servant of Christ (famulum Christi, XVIII), a celibacy that closes the body off from all other possibility.

Saints and Heroes The anonymous author of the Voyage of Saint Brendan (Navigatio S. Brendani Abbatis) describes in this eighth- or ninth-century text how the seagoing saint managed to navigate the world without really arriving anywhere.25 True, Brendan and his fourteen companions encounter in the course of the narrative a multitude of wonders: the Paradise of Birds and sheep as large as bulls (9); an island that is really a sea monster (10); a land of silent monks who offer “incredibly tasty” roots to eat (12); a battle between ocean dwelling monsters (16); the Isle of the Anchorites, who pass their lives blissfully singing orderly rounds of psalms (17); an inimical gryphon (19); the wasteland of Hell, where sinners are tortured for their earthly failings and vast clouds of demons wheel through the sky (23–25). Yet the maritime journey resolutely lacks a linear trajectory. In the words of a fallen angel now locked in the flesh of a bird, Brendan’s seven-year peregrination is cyclical, so that at the end of each year he and his fellow monks celebrate Easter in exactly the same place (11). There can be no progress for these adventurers, only a movement that keeps circling back to its own origin to begin anew. Brendan’s true journey is toward a perpetual immobility. The arrested temporality of the Paradise that he glimpses at the end of the seven-year cycle and that he attains forever thereafter by his death is described early in the Navigatio by an angel: “From the very beginning of the world it has remained exactly as you see it now. Do you need any food, drink, or clothing? You have been here a whole year without tasting food or drink. You have never felt the need for sleep, for it has been daylight all the time. Here there is no obscuring darkness but only perpetual day, the Lord Jesus Christ being himself our light.” (1) The Navigatio utilizes a topos familiar from old Irish literature, the sea voyage full of adventure, but by rendering the journey repetitively isochronal and culminating its unfolding within the still, disdainful eternity

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of Paradise, the narrative refuses the heroic possibilities upon which such stories are ordinarily founded. Saint Brendan at the end of the voyage is exactly the same Saint Brendan who departed seven years before. The Navigatio is not inimical to Irish heroic narrative, but reveals a deep affection for its inherent possibilities. Anglo-Saxon Christianities were likewise not simply or even fundamentally intolerant of heroic tradition, and they did not necessarily view secular or martial masculinity as wholly exterior to religious self-identity.26 Works like Beowulf survive because of a flourishing monastic culture, not despite it, so that the stories of Ingeld enjoyed by the monks of Lindisfarne no more represent the possibility of unmediated heroic culture than Bede or Ælfric do a pure form of Christianity untouched by secular interests. If evidence like Alcuin’s rebuke to the Lindisfarne monks over their dinnertime reading is to be taken seriously, the two vectors (one secular and heroic, the other missionary and Christian) must be read as entwined within each other, visible at multiple sites of contestation.27 This animated struggle no doubt conjoined the textualization of culture (i.e., the writing of Beowulf ) to the regulation of bodies and sexualities demonstrated by the enforcement of Benedictine discipline in the monasteries, the promulgation of penitentials, even the varied inscriptions of Guthlac’s body.28 Caedmon preserved the structure of secular alliterative poetry but filled its verses with new content, thereby preserving an anterior structure of communal enjoyment (the gebeorscipe, the beer drinking fellowship with harp and song, permeated now with sacred meaning). Christianity colonized native identities and social structures in order to render its own strangeness familiar. Clare Lees writes of Gregory’s instructions to Augustine in the Libellus Responsionum (transcribed by Bede into the first book of the Historia Ecclesiastica) that they “urge restraint, tolerance and flexibility about the implementation of Christianity, paving the way for the distinctly syncretic model of English Christianity that is the hallmark of Anglo-Saxon culture” (“Engendering Religious Desire,” 21). Through an application of the same strategy the mild Christ of the Gospel becomes the impressive warrior of the Dream of the Rood, while the morally ambiguous Satan of the Book of Job becomes the inimical warlord of the cannibal races in Andreas. The God of the Old English Genesis is typical of such cultural hybridity in that both he and Beowulf swell with anger (gebolgen) and fight enemies with their hand-grip. A deeply Christian poem like Andreas harnesses the magnetic power of the hero’s

The Solitude of Guthlac

body by writing the apostles as þegnas in lines that also uncannily echo the opening of Beowulf: Hwaet! We gefrunan on fyrndagum twelfe under tunglum tireadige hæleð, þeodnes þegnas. (Andreas 1–3a) Listen! We have heard of the twelve glorious heroes of olden days, under the stars, thegns of the lord.29 Like the pagan temples filled with Christian ritual objects allowed by Pope Gregory in his letter to Augustine, Andreas is content to change the object of masculine desire without changing the structure of its articulation. Guthlac A adopts a slightly different approach, utilizing the language and sometimes the form of secular heroic tradition but radically altering their trajectory. Like heroic poetry, Guthlac A constructs an inspirational male body and calls for its reiteration. Guthlac, we are informed, served as a role model for all of Britain (“þær he mongum wearð / bysen on Brytene,” 174–75), a description that gestures toward a unified island while perhaps setting the “local” Guthlac against the cosmopolitan heroes like Beowulf, whose exploits unfold in distant lands.30 The poem translates into the vernacular Felix’s sortie into the battle for the determination of proper masculinity, a conversion that renders the Latin hagiography more like contemporary heroic poetry, both written and (presumably) oral, at the same time as it demarcates a space of performance in which traditional modes of heroism are suddenly no longer viable. Heroes exist because the hypermasculinity that they embody fulfills a social function: “ordinary men are to measure themselves against the impossible standard that the hero embodies, and from this conditioned inadequacy strive to fight harder and control themselves better.”31 At the same time as it is desirable, the heroic body is also (as Clare Lees has shown) “a conflicted locus of violence, division, and male homosocial bonding.”32 Guthlac A refuses to represent heroic modalities of being as anything but such a self-divided nexus of competing and irresolvable determinations, as anything but identities impossible to inhabit long. Unlike the martial sanctity of Andreas, eremitic monasticism had ideals incompatible with dominant Anglo-Saxon masculinities, abandoning communal systems of identity and the celebration of homosociality for the tranquil, celibate encounter of one soul alone with God.33 Temptation

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to return to collective, relational forms of living therefore always presents itself in Guthlac A as the swarm, the legion. All the dangers of dependency within community are figured through the harassing fiends, who lack personal names or individuated identities. Guthlac’s models for a solitary life were undoubtedly Antony and Paul, desert-dwelling hermits who exerted a particular fascination over early insular hagiography: the meeting of these two ascetics is even depicted on the Ruthwell Cross. The demons whom all three saints battle most often figure uncomplex, universal evils like gluttony and sexual incontinence. A devil cross-dresses as a seductive woman to tempt Antony, for example, only to be venomously dismissed. The saint repeatedly refuses to allow his body to rebel against him, even as other devils impersonating wild beasts attempt to put him to flight.34 According to Athanasius, Antony’s demons also could condense in fleshly form the past that he had rejected in order to become an eremite. The first temptations that the devil sends against the recluse are reminders of his abandoned sister and kin, raising a storm of conflicting emotions in his mind (II). In the solitude of distant tombs, Antony is scourged by a throng of demons whose multitude figure the communal village life that he has just left behind. Their assaults only strengthen his resolve to live among the houses of the dead, even as they batter any tomb in which he sleeps (III). When he moves at last to a desert cave, the demons intensify their attacks and accuse him of seizing their domain (IV). In Guthlac A, the monsters are likewise shards of the saint’s own past, a history that returns to be rebuked and rendered uninhabitable for all time. The Old English poem adopts Felix’s tempestuously fluid rendition of heroic masculinity but performs a further transformation, creating the bodies of the demons from the swarming and fragmentary variousness with which Felix characterized both Guthlac’s martial life and his self-division as he struggled to move into an ecclesiastical realm of signification. The demons face Guthlac with his former life in the community of the monastery when they lift him into the air, demonstrating the shortcomings of the monks whose community he has abandoned in an unsuccessful attempt to make the saint despair. Guthlac’s reply is typical of his quiet trust in the inevitability of discontinuous futures. The lax monks are merely young, he insists, and will in time outgrow their failings, just as he escaped a vexed past and youthful sins (412–20).35

The Solitude of Guthlac

The host of fiends incarnates Guthlac’s renounced life as the successful leader of a warband when, as Felix declared, “a noble desire for command [egregius dominandi amor] burned in his young breast” (XVI). The language of the demons is always, therefore, martial. They threaten the hermit as if they were a mounted battalion, an overwhelming wave of foot soldiers, or a crushing press of undifferentiated bodies whose only identity derives from their bellicose community, the folc. When Guthlac decides to dwell upon their favorite wilderness hill, the fiends menace with a verbal torrent redolent of siege and battle: We þas wic magun fotum afyllan: folc inðriceð meara þreatum 7 monfarum. Beoð þa gebolgne þa þec breodwiað, tredað þec 7 tergað 7 hyra torn wrecað, toberað þec blodgum lastum. (284–89) “We can batter down this dwelling with our feet: the troop will force its way inside with cavalry and moving hosts. Then those who strike you down will be enraged! They will trample you and torment you and press their anger, carrying you away with bloody tracks.” Guthlac, who once with a troop of men burnt to the ground cities and houses, is faced now by a gemot arrayed against his fenland dwelling, threatening him in a language with parallels in Beowulf and “The Fight at Finnsburgh.”36 The former dryhten becomes the warband’s target in order to undercut the value of those identities constructed through communal modalities of gender formation. The demons represent everything Guthlac once was in order to affirm the sanctity of what he has become as well as the impossibility of return. Grendel embodies in his monstrous flesh disavowed components of masculine martial identity, abjected but not eradicated, rendering him queerly similar to Beowulf rather than radically divergent. Guthlac’s demons, on the other hand, possessing no bodies but only insubstantial forms, figure Guthlac’s own self-heterogeneity across time, arguing for the validity of conversion narratives, seeming to foreclose the possibility that “the past is in us, our identities being perhaps as temporally unstable

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as they are in other ways.”37 Beowulf defeats and dismembers his meredwelling foes to demarcate publicly a difference between monstrous violence and proper masculinity, a demarcation both necessary and insufficient because monstrous and heroic bodies have so much in common.38 Guthlac defeats the awyrgde in a gesture that excludes a haunting history by marking a point of absolute temporal rupture. Once the press of demons is overcome, Guthlac is like the transfigured soul of the poem’s prologue, rejoicing to have escaped that time-bound body that no longer serves as receptacle of its identity. Guthlac transcends corpus, textus, and tempus at the moment he assumes the eternal stability of sanctus. Beowulf too strongly resembles Grendel, but Guthlac, it seems, could never be mistaken for his demons, for his utterly rejected and seemingly discontinuous past. Guthlac is paradoxically a “folctoga” (“leader of a host,” as Guthlac B calls him, 902) who rejects utterly the folc. Against the homosocial comitatus or Männerbund of demons who invite him to join their ethereal wandering, Guthlac repeatedly insists upon his abstemious groundedness as “feara sum” (“one man alone,” 173).39 Despite their whirling conjuration of fierce armies and charging horsemen, despite their insistently bellicose “word-deeds” (Bjork, Old English Verse Saints’ Lives, 28), he will not engage them as an earthly warrior: “No ic eow sweord ongean / mid gebolgne hond oðberan þence” (“‘I will not bear a sword against you with angry hand,’” 302–04). Clare Lees succinctly articulates the AngloSaxon gender system as “women have sex and rank; men have rank and weapons, as the common terms for male and female indicate: wæpned and wif “ (“Engendering Religious Desire,” 21). Although resolutely wæpned, Guthlac refuses to wield a “worulde wæpen” (“worldly weapon”) in his occupation of the fen, choosing “gæstlicum wæpnum” (“spiritual weapons”) instead, a gesture that does not reject the dominant figuration of maleness so much as desubstantiate its materiality (a movement that further solidifies the alignment of women with a sexed corporeality by disassociating masculinity from bodiliness). Olsen argues that Guthlac also thereby recodes the word lac, usually utilized of swordplay, to describe his Christian activity: “He has rejected the warrior’s ‘lac’ for that of Christian sacrifice” (Guthlac of Crowland, 47). Guthlac’s essential maleness is never in doubt even as he reinvents what masculinity should signify. The saint awaits a heavenly home (“ham in heofonum,” 98), and this celestial certainty allows him to stand immobile against the fiends’

The Solitude of Guthlac

tumultuous attacks. The demons, on the other hand, are wræcmæcgas, “exiles.” Their doom is to fly the air eternally, never pausing in their pointless navigations except to rest upon that lonely beorg where Guthlac has decided to establish his hermitage. Now that their place of communal repose has been taken from them, the “ealdfeondas” (“ancient fiends,” 218) cannot on eorþan eardes brucan ne hy lyft swefeð in leoma ræstum ac hy hleolease hama þoliað, in cearum cwiþað, cwealmes wiscað, willen þæt him dryhten þurh deaðes cwealm to hyra earfeða ende geryme. (220–25) on earth enjoy a dwelling, nor does the air allow them sleep, rest of body, but shelterless they lack a home, they speak their grief, they wish for stillness, desiring that the Lord through the calm of death provide an end to their sufferings. Whirled across the earth in a closed circle of a motion that has become their self-definition, the demons can do nothing but speak their grief and plead for an end to their dispersed existence. The stability of Guthlac’s home contrasts with the nomadic impermanence of the demons, whose only consistency is their defining insubstantiality as folc and their unchanging desire for death. The collective subject-position of the demons is uncannily similar to that of the lonely narrator of another Exeter Book poem, “The Wanderer.” This elegy is spoken by an exile (anhaga) who treks through a bleak winterscape, voicing his sorrow at the loss of lord and hall. The Wanderer abhors his solitary life, returning in dreams to the communal happiness of living as þegn among þegnas. These joyful memories are condensed in a series of gestures that bodily stage his submission to the identity-giving power of his lord: his “gold-friend” (gold-winne) kisses and clasps him, he lays his head to rest on his protector’s lap “swa he hwilum ær / on gear-dagum gief-stoles breac” (“as he did once in days now lost, when he enjoyed the gift-stool,” 43–44). The Wanderer has no identity outside of the social structure that his hall once made material, outside of the “duguð,” the masculine community that Allen Frantzen has well described as “centered around a lord and his hall, an all-male world that is as strongly same-sexed as the monastery”

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(Before the Closet, 92). Bereft of home, he lacks his very mode of being; he is lost to unremitting motion and plagued by unceasing storms.40 A similar despondency is voiced by the so-called Last Survivor, the unnamed exile in Beowulf who buries the treasure of a forgotten nation and speaks his grief at the loss of that sociality that once protected him from the catastrophes of the world (Beowulf, 2244–70). Both these figures share something in turn with Grendel, who in a kind of exile is likewise defined against an architecture of belonging from which he is excluded, at least until he seizes Hrothgar’s hall. Elegies like The Wanderer, The Ruin, and “The Lay of the Last Survivor” invoke an absent community in order to perform its loss as irrecoverable. As cultural acts of mourning, these poems construct heroic community as pastness and write the present as a time of necessary but somber solitude. Old English elegy is animated by the consummately Christian gesture of acknowledging the power of prior modes of identity while distancing them as irremediably vanished. That the elegiac mode is predicated upon mourning over some lost temporality has often been remarked, but less frequently observed is the necessary corollary to the act: successful mourning disentangles the subject from connection to the past and—even while acknowledging grief’s weight—ultimately achieves a resignation to the loss via a movement forward into some desired futurity. Guthlac A participates in this enduring cultural fascination with the dissolution of community and the reduction to solitary life, but without the performance of mourning, joyfully inverting the elegiac formula by refusing to valorize any mode of being predicated upon intersubjective relations, any existence other than that of the feara sum.41 The demons are the exiles, the unhappy beings who are dispossessed via Guthlac’s marauding of the one home where they could be at peace. The deprivation of the literal ground of their identity as group is in the poem’s logic both necessary and good. Unlike the Wanderer or Last Survivor, the devils cannot speak moving elegies that attempt to reclaim that lost past through words, but groan and threaten ineffectual violence, underscoring that their collectivity ought to have been dissolved. Rosemary Woolf has shown that the devil in Old English texts is frequently constructed as a hlafordleas exile, miserably walking radan wraeclastas (“The Devil in Old English Poetry”). The recurrent Anglo-Saxon representation of Satan and God in terms of heroic þegnscipe is a pre-

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dictable outcome of the process of cultural translation through which alien ideas were made recognizable by expression within the dominant cultural idiom. Woolf’s argument about Old English devils could be pressed even farther, in that the Satan of Genesis B does not simply transpose warband masculinities into a religious arena to make Christian mythology comprehensible; this Satan acts the part of a rebellious subregulus who aspires to be greater than the king to whom he owes obedience, rendering the transposition good ideology as well as theology. Yet an important difference separates Guthlac’s demons from the devils who populate Solomon and Saturn, Elene, Juliana, Christ and Satan, Genesis B, with their allegiance to Satan and hierarchical structure of monstrous belonging. So far does the self-emptying impulse extend in Guthlac A that its monsters can exist only as a nonindivuated collectivity, never as identifiable personages like the freondleas Satan. Whereas these other texts participate in heroic modes of being by inhabiting native identity structures (even if critiquing them), Guthlac A intervenes in its cultural moment not by making the demons familiar, but rendering them utterly monstrous, unthinkable. The Wanderer is homeless because of inimical fate. Like the elite sume of the poem’s prologue, however, Guthlac chooses his exclusion, chooses his isolation within a landscape animated by its own malevolent intentions: Sume þa wuniað on westennum secað 7 gesittað sylfra willum hamas on heolstrum, hy ðæs heofoncundan boldes bidað. (81–84a) Some dwell in the wild places and of their own will seek and inhabit homes in the dark regions. They await heavenly dwellings. The marshes of Crowland are what Bede called a locus certaminis, a “place of [spiritual] struggle” in the Antonine tradition.42 The Old English passage hearkens back to Felix’s extravagant description of the fens as a vast wilderness awaiting saintly settlement. The Vita sancti Guthlaci described the area as “a most dismal fen of immense size . . . now consisting of marshes, now of bogs, sometimes of black waters overhung by fog.” Guthlac’s desire is activated by a description of “the wild places of

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this vast desert,” so that he seeks alone a “remote and hidden” island from which previous settlers had been driven “on account of the unknown portents of the desert and the terrors of various shapes” (XXIV– XXV). As Penelope Audrey Shore has demonstrated, Felix’s highly literary representation differs substantially from other extant depictions of the area. The fen island of Ramsey is described by a twelfth-century chronicler as a place of shady groves, rich meadows, and natural beauty; William of Malmesbury praised Thorney, five miles from Crowland, as “a haven of fertility” replete with apples and grapes; Peterborough was held to be “an earthly paradise” (“The Cultural Context of the Old English Guthlac Poems,” 229–30). These word portraits postdate Felix by four hundred years, but the fens had likely changed little during that span, since drainage and reclamation was a phenomenon of the late twelfth through fourteenth centuries. Despite its translation into Felix’s Latin, the fen (vastissimi heremi inculta loca) is being willfully represented as the kind of dangerous westen (wasteland) described in other Old English texts with horror. The “dygel lond” (“secret land”) where Grendel and his mother stalk “wræclastas træd” (“the paths of exile,” Beowulf, 1357, 1352; see also 1422–32) have their counterpart in the “dygle stow” (“secret place,” 215) of Guthlac A, and such monstrous habitations have a longrecognized analogue in the similarly described dwelling of the she-troll of Saundhaugar (Grettis saga Ásmundarson), and therefore, perhaps, in northern European heroic myth generally.43 No hoarfrost or winter icicles (The Wanderer) long abide in Guthlac’s fen, however; no dark meres swarm with strange water-beasts or bubble with blood (Beowulf).44 What begins as a feral landscape populated only by demons is transformed in response to Guthlac’s impressive sanctity into a locus amoenus, a verdant expanse locked in eternal spring: Smolt wæs se sigewong 7 sele niwe fæger fugla reord, folde geblowen; geacas gear budon; Guþlac moste, eadig and onmod, eardes brucan. (742–45) The victory-plain was pleasant and the dwelling [literally, hall] new, the song of birds fair, the earth full of flowers; cuckoos proclaimed the season. Guthlac, happy and steadfast, could enjoy his dwelling.

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Guthlac chooses to abstract his identity wholly from any relational system, and in response his habitation becomes, like heaven, removed from the seasonal progression of time. The saint depends upon no group ethic, no comitatus or Männerbund in order to know who he is, but wanders from dependence upon human signification to place his trust in the celibate, the solitary, the inhuman, the divine. Rather than lose his meaning, his home, and his name as the Wanderer and the horde of demons do, Guthlac through his refusal of contiguity all the more strongly inscribes his sanctity. The fiends meanwhile are scattered, rendered a mengu, an ambiguous multitude: “Ge sind forscadene!” Guthlac proclaims, “You are dispersed!” (478). Despite their best efforts, even at the gates of hell, to make Guthlac despair of his sinful past and newly chosen life—despite their best efforts to entice Guthlac to abandon his celibate ascesis and join their promiscuous throng—the monsters are indeed dispersed. The Book of Mark describes how Jesus forces a multitude of demons named Legion to leave the body of the man that they inhabit against his will. Dispossessed of their dwelling by the word of Christ, they alight within a herd of two thousand swine and hurl themselves from a cliff to utter destruction (Mark 5:1–20). Guthlac’s numerous fiends are likewise dispossessed, fragmented beyond recomposition by his imperviousness and the power of his saintly words. The devils become the discarded image of heroic or secular masculinity, displaced by an eremitic integritas that chooses extreme individuation over intersubjectivity, the isolation of abstinence over the corporeal touch of sexuality, an abjecting and exclusive totality over heterogeneous multiplicity. If sanctity is synonymous in Guthlac A with immobile singularity, then becoming a saint is a reductive process. The fractured plenitude of past, of sociality, of self are abandoned for the simple steadfastness of an existence that looks always to a future beyond death to confer its present meaning. When Guthlac ascends into heaven, he is presumably met there by Bartholomew, who had rescued the monk earlier in the poem from “þæt atule hús, / niþer under næssas neole grundas” (“that terrible house, deep underground abyss,” 562–63) to which the fiends had abducted him. Guthlac’s patron saint is famous for having been flayed alive. His skinless figure, the musculature and viscera visible in their obscene materiality, is sufficient emblem of the irrelevance to sainthood of any identity based upon recognition of somatic or sartorial surfaces. Bartholomew is the antisocial logic of eremitical

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sanctity materialized in its bodily extreme. His flesh peeled away, no longer recognizable as a human among other humans, the martyr becomes most fully himself.

The Nation, the Body, and the Possible This whole chain and web of power is immersed in a world of mutant flows that eludes them. It is precisely its impotence that makes power so dangerous. —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Excavating from within the early Guthlac texts a body not yet fully delineated and wholly foreclosed, a body that remains open to becoming, will depend upon a reading of the saint’s life against its own rhetorical and cultural intentions, against its attempts to construct an ascetic form that can transfigure and circumscribe contemporary masculinities. The expansive trajectories of Deleuzoguattarian bodies always exist in tension with what they called an “apparatus of capture,” some dominating social structure that creates obedient subjects by diminishing identity into well-regulated forms. Deleuze and Guattari describe this persistent antagonism as the struggle between the Socius and the Body without Organs. The former is synonymous with the disciplinary mechanisms of culture as they implant themselves in the flesh, producing predictability and conformity (“To code desire—and the fear, the anguish of uncoded flows—is the business of the socius”).45 The Body without Organs (“BwO”), on the other hand, is perhaps best described as the body without organization, without social imprinting: the body as site of force, energy, intensity, emission.46 Immanent potentiality, radically inhuman, always on the verge of mutation and propulsive alliance, the BwO exists alongside the Socius—“There is desiring production from the moment there is social production” (Anti-Oedipus, 139). Before attempting to describe the saintly BwO that Guthlac A enacts, it is therefore necessary to explore at greater length the cultural matrix of power that attempts to delineate that body’s contours, its discursive as well as material limits.

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In this penultimate section I briefly read the identity machine erected by Guthlac A within one of its probable historical contexts to emphasize that even if the saint and his demons arrive from eighth-century Mercia to bear a possible Truth about the limits of the human, nonetheless such a truth (diminished, necessarily partial) can be articulated only inside and against a specific matrix of intelligibility. Possible bodies never exist in a pure state, can never escape the markings of history even as they struggle against historical constraint. Only through concrete relations with time and with the material world do bodies of any kind ever become solid. Saints in Anglo-Saxon England did not need the formal, institutional sanction mandated once the process of canonization was codified in the thirteenth century. Because sanctity was not verified through a centralized judicial process, the cults of individual saints tended to be regional phenomena, no matter how ambitiously transnational the idiom of hagiography.47 Saintly bodies were therefore always marked by local histories, and the body of Guthlac is no exception. According to Felix, Guthlac was careful to obtain the approval of his superiors at Repton before leaving for Crowland, an indication that his fenland desires are perhaps less solitary and more social than they at first seem (XX). Writing in 1868, Charles Kingsley envisioned in Guthlac a progenitor of the “fenmen sailing from Boston deeps” who “colonized and Christianized [the New World] 800 years after St. Guthlac’s death.” Just as the crowning achievement of the saint’s descendants in England was, according to Kingsley, the founding of Cambridge University, their latter-day feat of heroism was the erection of Harvard University on converted barbarian shores (The Hermits, 308–12). Kingsley’s colonialist fantasy of continuity between the settling of the Fenlands and the colonization of North America is in some ways a logical extension of the medieval trajectory of the Guthlac legends.48 The demons detest Guthlac, after all, not for his holiness but because he has seized their dwelling place, their long-held territory (Guthlac A, 205–13). Both Felix’s Vita Guthlaci and Guthlac A are texts obsessed by the annexation of new land and its conversion into secure possession. Laurence K. Shook argued in 1960 that the hill for which Guthlac battles represents “all that is significant in the spiritual life of the good Christian. . . . [The poet’s] use of the barrow removes it from the category of a mere geographical appendage to a religious theme.”49 Like the formalistic analysis to which Guthlac A has been frequently

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subjected, theological interpretation has its indubitable value, but (as Karl P. Wentersdorf has observed) the poem “is more than an AngloSaxon Pilgrim’s Progress.”50 Despite its potential abstraction into universalizing Christian allegory, the promontory that Guthlac settles also remains a “geographical appendage” that is marked—like Guthlac himself—by a particularly Mercian history. Guthlac’s settlement is described in deliberately multivalent terms: Stod seo dygle stow dryhtne in gemyndum idel 7 æmen, eþelriehte feor, bád bisæce betran hyrdes. (215–17) The undiscovered place stood known to the Lord, [but] empty and uninhabited, far from ancestral domain, awaited the claim of better guardians. In language of impending, fortunate discovery and subsequent legal possession, the passage envisions a promised land that lies fallow (idel), awaiting new masters to transform its empty wildness into inheritable domain (eþelriehte [ancestral land] is used in the Old English Exodus to describe the Promised Land).51 Guthlac’s struggles unfold in the Fenlands, the vast expanse of peat, silt, uplands, and islands that formed a crescent of wilderness around the Wash.52 Guthlac’s colonization of the demons’ cherished home (the tumulus or beorg specifically, but the Fens more generally) reenacts in miniature the dispossession of that very territory by the numerous northern tribes who, beginning in the fifth century, sailed from Scandinavia to settle the region. Bordering important Mercian settlements, the fens had been occupied centuries before the arrival of the northerners by Celtic peoples, many of whom had ancient histories of resistance against attempts at displacement. About a hundred miles from Crowland, for example, an area not far from Norwich had been christened by the invading Romans Venta Icenorum, “marketplace of the Iceni.” As is the case with all too many of the tribes whose names are mentioned (and Latinized) by Caesar and Tacitus, very little is known about these people, but famously among their number was Boudica (Boadicea), the rebel queen who led an alliance against the Roman annexation of Britain, reducing the colonia of Colchester and the trading town of London to ashes. Boudica and her followers were slaughtered at a disastrous engagement against the governor Seutonius and his legions.

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Venta Icenorum marked a failed attempt to Romanize the survivors by resettling them within an imperial architecture. Never fully occupied, this would-be city with its orderly streets, forum, baths, and high walls was abandoned shortly after the withdrawal of the legions from Britain. What became of the Iceni who escaped is unknown, but it has been suggested that they either mixed with or are related to peoples who may have lived for centuries thereafter at the boggy margins of Norfolk.53 Romans and Romanized Britons had successfully settled much of the fens, draining marshy expanses for agriculture, industry, and habitation. With the withdrawal of the legions, however, the area became once again swampy and sparsely inhabited. In the Fenlands of the eighth century, East Anglia rubbed against Mercia and formed a borderland that may have harbored an as yet unassimilated British population.54 Yet even if the entire population of native Britons had been displaced or (more likely) absorbed long before Guthlac’s arrival, his battles against the demons enacts in the Fens a struggle taking place on the other side of the kingdom, a martial engagement in which he himself had been involved as a young warrior. The eighth-century Mercian hegemony was marked by its great battles over land, with Mercia finding the limits of its westward push at that border where Offa erected his dyke. Felix clearly had the ongoing wars against the Britons in mind as he composed the Vita Guthlaci. In describing the Brittones as “the implacable enemies of the Saxon race [infesti hostes Saxonici generis], troubling the nation of the English [Anglorum gentem] with their attacks, their pillaging and their devastations of the people” (XXXIV), Felix was able to construct a flattened, pan-racial “Anglo-Saxon” identity for the island (Saxonici and Anglorum appear to be synonyms here). In providing a common enemy, that is, Felix’s Britons also construct a shared sense of “English” race subsumable under the Mercian body of Guthlac, who at first as warrior and later as saint battles this threat to the cohesion of gens, natio, þeod.55 In a particularly striking episode of what Alfred P. Smyth describes as ethnic hatred, just as the Welsh are invading Mercia from the west during the reign of King Coenred, a crowd (tumultuantis turbae) of demons impersonates a band of British marauders and sets fire to Guthlac’s dwelling, attacking him with spears.56 Guthlac chants a psalm and the demon-Britons vanish velut fumus, like smoke (XXXIV). Two points are central here. Language rather than dress or bodily appearance characterizes

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these Britons; Felix says that Guthlac knows these marauders by their “sibilant speech,” and the Old English translation of the Vita sancti Guthlaci goes so far as to label the chapter Hu þa deofla on brytisc spræcon, “How the devils spoke in Brittonic.”57 Second, Guthlac recognizes this linguistic difference immediately because it is also a part of him, the forced learning of a time spent in captivity among the Britons during his days as a warrior. That Mercia might ingest formerly British lands while their inhabitants simply vanish velut fumus would have been a powerful and attractive group fantasy. Yet Guthlac’s implicit recognition is that brytisc is an unassimilated remainder within his “pure” body. An otherness that can return to haunt, it reminds of a history of violence, gestures toward troubling fragmentations and internal differences. British peoples within and at the edge of Anglo-Saxon collectivity offered a pointed challenge to Mercia’s imagining itself as a homogeneous community, to declaring the island an unambiguous eþelrieht. Like the Briton episode from the Vita Guthlaci, Guthlac A is suffused with colonial desires, displacing into religious history a version of the engagement that was then occurring as martial history. The vastness of the fen was once wholly occupied by the demons (“þær ær fela / setla gesæton,” 143–44), and the mound upon which the saint settles may, as in Felix’s account, be a topography marked by multiple colonizations.58 After Guthlac removes the demons from their last remaining dwelling, the land belongs to Mercia. His settlement enacts a fantasy of manifest destiny, displacing the ethnic violence at Mercia’s border to an internal space where a triumph can be spectacularly staged over external and internal difference simultaneously. Representing the Britons as banished demons and Guthlac as a man singularly in possession of himself offers a culturally useful fantasy of a male body whose identity is uncomplex, internally imperturbable. Guthlac’s stabilitas—his immobile, granite-like, and unconflicted subjectivity—embodies everything Anglo-Saxon England in general and eighth-century Mercia in particular as potentially corporate identities were not. Bede reduced into “Angles,” “Saxons,” and “Jutes” diverse northern peoples, generalizing terms that had probably been ethnically specific designators in order to create a commonality where none had previously existed.59 If scholars now tend to put terms like “Anglo-Saxon” and “England” into scare quotes, it is because such words likewise impose a homogeneous and transcendent concept of nation onto a time and geog-

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raphy where a widely shared sense of collectivity is not likely to have obtained. Terms like “Old English poetry” project the same specious but comfortable unity into the ambiguous past, and so I have been reading the Vita Guthlaci and Guthlac A as potentially Mercian rather than as generically Old English or Anglo-Saxon texts to disrupt that congruity a bit. Just as tribal and provincial kings had been absorbed into increasingly larger structures of sovereignty, the scattered insular kingdoms were repeatedly conjoined beneath especially strong overlords. Such unions were inevitably temporary and subject to an innate dynamic of fragmentation.60 Kings were itinerant, ranging through their territory in a circuit of perpetual movement that not only policed the interior but often expanded the borders.61 Successive colonizations ensured that kingdoms had shifting contours and ethnically varied populations.62 The tribute list known as the Tribal Hidage, for example, depicts Mercia as a land amalgamated from much smaller units (regiones, kingdoms, tribes), some consisting of several thousand households, like Hwicce, and others containing only a few hundred.63 Difficult and never final was the work of suturing these scattered entities into a larger unity, then enlarging this identity structure into something “at once southumbrian and pan-British,” something capable of including racially and linguistically diverse peoples and communities.64 Cohesion was attempted coercively, juridically, apostolically, ideologically. Mercian kings obliged subject rulers to provide labor, materializing a sense of corporateness and shared territory via a call to defense against outsiders. The building of fortifications like Offa’s Dyke can therefore be seen as instrumental to the project of building an ambitious ethnic and political collectivity.65 Although Æthelbald eventually freed monks from compulsory work on royal buildings (Sawyer, From Roman Britain to Norman England, 109), the church could through its monopoly on technologies of the word be charged with other kinds of community-making labor. Repton was both an administrative and religious center (Rollason, Saints and Relics in AngloSaxon England, 118). Its double monastery, perhaps originally a British foundation and later a center for the promulgation of Guthlac’s cult, should no doubt be understood as engaged in the contemporary Mercian project of catalyzing wider political integrations, this time through a shared cult.66 Guthlac’s struggles against the demons of the fens exactly replays struggles not only against the scattered Celtic peoples who, like their diabolical analogues, were none too pleased to be forced to

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cede their dwelling places to colonizers, but also Mercia’s endeavor to overcome its own internal heterogeneity and to justify pan-insular ambitions of expansion.67 Mercia, in other words, was striving to become something like Guthlac’s body: internally harmonious while externally unassailable, coherent, and united. Perversely, then, while setting itself explicitly against the heroic desires that motivate contemporary secular masculinity, Guthlac A can be read as participating in exactly the same hard work of imagining community, of disseminating and sustaining a collective identity that, if not exactly a nation in the contemporary sense of the word, nonetheless constituted that unity of peoples that the Romans and their inheritors called a natio. Such an imagined community might not be the same as the modern “nation-state” (with its triumphant ascendancy of bureaucracy and unremittingly capitalistic focus) and was not exactly a kingdom (with its early modern associations of inevitable inheritance and numinous regnality), but was like both these political structures at once collectivizing and colonizing. The religious desires that circulate through the text are exactly congruent with the colonialist desires that circulate through the Mercian kingdom. Guthlac is doubly among “þa gecostan cempan þa þam cyninge þeowað,” a proven warrior who serves both God and country, a servant to kings earthly and divine. His body, it would seem, is a superbly constricted site for the inscription of the socius.

Guthlac’s Possible Body Woruld is onhrered. [The world is troubled.] —Guthlac A, 37 After fifteen years of such a life, in fever, ague, and starvation, no wonder if St. Guthlac died. —Charles Kingsley, The Hermits An Anglo-Saxon counterpart to Foucault’s calibene, that “murder/memoir” that captures in a lethal circuit of power its creator, its cultural moment, and its own interpretation in and as history, can be found in Guth-

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lac’s demons, with their challenges to the boundedness and integrity of human identity, with their “projectile concealed . . . in the engine of a discourse” or what Robert E. Bjork labels their “verbal deeds.” In Bjork’s analysis, the poem is about the “efficacy of language,” conjuring a “cosmos where speech is action” (Old English Verse Saints’ Lives, 28, 31). It is impossible to disagree. Yet Bjork analyzes the work as if it were Guthlac’s own impossibly sealed and unified body, as if it were the very flesh discovered after the saint’s demise to remain forever incorruptible (“They opened the sepulchre on the anniversary of his death and found his body whole as if it were alive, and the joints of his limbs flexible and much more like those of a sleeping than a dead man,” LI). What happens when in a Deleuzian spirit Guthlac’s life is examined as a series of dynamic middles rather than read back from a determinative ending as some placid totality? In Manuel De Landa’s succinct formulation, for Deleuze “important philosophical insights can be grasped only during the process of morphogenesis, that is, before the final form is actualized, before the difference disappears” (“Deleuze, Diagrams, and the Open-Ended Becoming,” 32). What happens when we attempt more than the exhumation of an immutable hagiographic or historical truth in Guthlac and ask, What does this saintly body do? Into what relations does it enter, upon what other bodies does it depend, what new possibilities does it engender? How is this corpus sanctum like the body as dynamically imagined within chivalry, or like the disruptive masochisms dreamt by Chrétien? To answer these questions, saintly Guthlac is going to have to touch again his demons, this time not to dispel their multiplicity but to dissolve himself in their embrace. Given Guthlac’s resolute celibacy, such a promiscuous reading might seem difficult to advance. Yet even Guthlac’s sexuality is not quite as impervious to touch as it first appears. Taking as their point of departure a mysterious observation by Karl Marx, a theorist who has almost nothing to say on the subject of sexuality, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the true difference is not between the sexes, but between the human and the nonhuman sex (Anti-Oedipus, 294). By this they mean that whereas human sexuality is always being organized into “molar aggregates,” finite and normalizing social forms (e.g., the twelfth-century valorization of the matrimonialized couple), desire is in fact a volatile, “molecular” phenomenon that can never fully be caught into anthropomorphic representation. Desiring-machines, Deleuze and Guattari declare, “are the

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nonhuman sex, the molecular machinic elements” (Anti-Oedipus, 295). Or, as they write in A Thousand Plateaus: If we consider the great binary aggregates, such as the sexes or classes, it is evident that they also cross over into molecular assemblages of a different nature, and that there is a double reciprocal dependency between them. For the two sexes imply a multiplicity of molecular combinations bringing into play not only the man in the woman and the woman in the man, but the relation of each to the animal, the plant, etc.: a thousand tiny sexes. (213) A thousand tiny sexes: if desire is nonbinary, a perpetual motion of shifting contiguities, then it undoes the organization of the body by pulling the self out of itself in fragmenting pieces, as particles that “constantly construct and dismantle themselves in the course of their communications, as they cross over into each other at, beyond, or before a certain threshold” (33). The Stoic philosopher Lucretius, the Christian apologist Boethius, the mythographer Ovid imagined similarly animate worlds replete with unexpected combination. Identity machines or assemblages work at this vitalistic, molecular level, since they are heterogeneous, disparate, discontinuous alignments or linkages brought together in conjunctions (x plus y plus z) or severed through disjunctions and breaks . . . a conjunction of different elements on the same level. . . . Assemblages are the provisional linkages of elements, fragments, flows of disparate status and substance: ideas, things,—human, animate, inanimate—all have the same ontological status. (Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 167) Celibacy mandates the closing off of the body from both the influx and efflux of human sexuality, but that segregation cannot stop a molecular flow of inhuman desiring-movements. Steven Shaviro describes the Deleuzoguattarian thousand tiny sexes as the “multiple potentialities of the body, so many puissances or affects that have not yet been subordinated to the constraints of the organism and its organic, hierarchical organization” (The Cinematic Body, 79). Shaviro’s nouns and adjectives in

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pluralized combination are the very terms I have used throughout this chapter to describe Guthlac’s demons, the passionate and multiplicitous limners of his immobile solitariness. Shape-changers defined by their alien corporeality, swarming “molecules” of alterity that refuse organization into molar wholes, the demons persecute Guthlac with an ardor that equals the saint’s own, an intensity of desire that ties them forever to his self-definition despite the distance and difference that his celibacy seeks to sustain. Felix describes the hermit’s monstrous adversaries at length in a chapter narrating their siege of his cell. Intent on torturing the saint and dragging his protesting body to the gates of hell, a throng of devils so numerous that they darken the sky attacks Guthlac in prayer. Exploding through every opening of his poor dwelling, springing through the roof and the walls and even up through the ground, the crush of demons overwhelms the recluse with their somatic possibility. They were ferocious in appearance, terrible in shape with great heads, long necks, thin faces, yellow complexions, filthy beards, shaggy ears, wild foreheads, fierce eyes, foul mouths, horses’ teeth, throats vomiting flames, twisted jaws, thick lips, strident voices, singed hair, fat cheeks, pigeon breasts, scabby thighs, knotty knees, crooked legs, swollen ankles, splay feet, spreading mouths, raucous cries. (XXXI) Felix supplies an astoundingly visual account of demonic bodies in which, because the narratival gaze is simultaneously fragmented and dilatory, coherent images fail to coalesce. A breathless barrage of deformed limbs, animal fragments, regurgitated flame, and glimpses of diabolical visages, membra disjecta, the turgid Latin flow of words and images never pauses long enough to cohere into some stable bodily form. The passage takes on an increased power when it is recalled that Saint Guthlac himself is composed of just such a collection of identity fragments. In the monastery at Repton, Felix writes, Guthlac observed his fellow monks and drew from each some piece of his being that he found worthy: “the obedience of one, the humility of another, the patience of this one, the longsuffering of that one; the abstinence of some, the sincerity of others, and the temperance and agreeableness of all and sundry” (XXIII). Unlike the demonic multitude who will not solidify

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into a definitive corporeality, however, Guthlac’s body seamlessly incorporates each affect to produce a tranquil whole. Guthlac, in other words, may once again be functioning as a national or at least collective corpus for Mercia, a synthesis at Repton of the best the realm has to offer, a social body that can proclaim its superiority to the incoherent Britishness of the demons, whose corps morcelés figure a racialized corporeal otherness not amenable to “Anglo-Saxon” subsumption. The demonic invasion of Guthlac’s cell stages an encounter between a saint who, although an amalgam of disparate pieces himself, has unified these fragments into a totality, and a swarm of demons who resist any settled harmony, any figuring of the body as a stable, hierarchized, homogeneous collectivity. Felix’s description of the episode is obsessed with an optics of the face, the locus of recognizability and the Western metonymy for individuality. Whereas saints aspire to iconographic status, aspire to be instantly apprehended in stained glass windows and manuscript illustrations via a limited set of defining attributes, these demons are a cacophony of facial fragments, impossible to place. Deleuze and Guattari describe the face as a deeply Christian way of organizing identity by isolating and projecting it onto the head. In their reading the face (or, more properly, visagéité, “faciality”) is not a universal, but a historically particular means for producing dominant and deviant identities, “the computation of normalities”: If the face is in fact Christ, in other words, your average ordinary White Man, then the first deviances, the first divergencetypes, are racial. . . . They must be Christianized, facialized. . . . Racism never detects the particles of the other; it propagates waves of sameness until those who resist identification have been wiped out (A Thousand Plateaus, 178). The face is the primary site for the transformation of the nontotalized body into the visible social aggregate of personhood, and a site of resistance to the coherence of limit.68 At this nexus where sameness seeks to obliterate difference, at this place of suture where a saintly AngloSaxon face is produced, Guthlac temporarily disperses himself across his own demons, for its poetics of disidentification are built upon his capture within a demonic identity machine, within a dangerous becomingmonster.

The Solitude of Guthlac

Felix’s catalogue of deformity inscribes the demons as multiplicity enfleshed, molecular and conjunctive. Carol Pasternack has demonstrated that Old English textuality is inherently polyphonous, offering pluralized subjectivities that react with and against an actively engaged readerconsumer.69 Guthlac’s demons, figures of excess banished to the silence of exile by the saint whom their existence defines, suggest that masculine sexual and social identity in Anglo-Saxon England was likewise neither as simple nor as singular as eighth-century Christianitas and its latterday inheritors have sometimes made it out to be. Eremitic Guthlac might in his sanctity be represented as an unmoving point of solidity able to withstand a world of fragmentation and diffusion, but the vehicle for that representation, Guthlac’s textuality, carries that saint toward dispersive possibility. Even the most circumscribed identities have embedded within them a living and recoverable counterhistory of invention and expansion. Against the celibacy of sacred isolation, Guthlac with his demons calls forth a body with contours and potentialities very different from the incorruptable flesh with which he is ultimately rewarded. A somber poetics of self-emptying accounts for the inward spiral of the narrative trajectory of Guthlac A, which begins with a copious vision of the world and ends as Guthlac rises to heaven, where his gaze is rapturously (wynnum) frozen for all eternity upon the unmoving face of God. Yet before rendering uninhabitable through this empyrean stasis its wide expanses, its monge hadas, the poem creates a dynamic intermezzo where Guthlac becomes his own demons. Guthlac’s sanctity is enabled only through the creation of a middle space in which the saint becomes inextricable from the monsters who persecute him, who as swarming fragments of a faciality that will neither rest nor cohere lift him skyward and against his will make him part of their turbulent throng. This complicated and hellbent middle space, this “interbeing,” amounts to what Deleuze and Guattari describe (without demons in mind) as a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its own banks and picks up speed in the middle. . . . In short, between substantial forms and determined subjects, between the two, there is not only a whole operation of demonic local transports but a natural play of haecceities, degrees, intensities, events, and accidents that compose individuations totally different from

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those of the well-formed subjects that receive them. (A Thousand Plateaus, 25, 253) When Guthlac is read with his fiends rather than against them, when monster, man, fen, beorg, church, nation, text, God, hell are mapped as pieces of an identity machine consisting of “provisional linkages of elements, fragments, flows, of disparate status and substance: ideas, things—human, inhuman, and inanimate,” then Guthlac becomes something other than the saint who ascends to a celestial throne to escape time and change. “Guthlac” is the assemblage formed by a sacred body battling demons who are bound, like him, to an intense and contagious desire for a fenland beorg, who are bound to an audience in turn bound to them. Guthlac begins and ends his narrative as individuated, singular, and solitary, abstracted from earthly relations into the stillness of heaven. Yet Guthlac before his transfiguration is something rather different, a saintly body who knows himself only through a struggle against a multiplicity that is his truest selfhood. “Ge sind forscadene!” Despite the fact that they are ultimately dispersed, the demons are part of an assemblage that forms an AngloSaxon analogue to Foucault’s calibene: keen fragments of the past that intrude on the present (Guthlac’s narrative present, the cultural present of eighth-century Mercia, the tenth-century moment when the poem is inscribed into the Exeter Book, perhaps even the present when scholars read both Foucault and Anglo-Saxon hagiography) to capture like a “verbal deed” or “verboballistic device” a whole field of becomings and possibilities. Guthlac and his demons as figured in the Vita Guthlaci and Guthlac A are, like Rivière’s disinterred instrument tout nouveau, machines capable of catching up bodies and sexualities in order to transform them. Through the restless intensities formed by its demon-saint circuit, the Guthlac texts can instigate an alchemical reaction, transubstantiating a mobile, heroic desire (Felix’s dominandi amor) into the still purity of eremitic celibacy. Such “final” cwealm depends for its achievement upon a possible body very different from this idealized, impossible form, depends upon the identity machine created as Guthlac is borne aloft and propelled three times through the air by demons who support with their hands his limbs (“Hy hine þa hofun on þa hean lyft,” 412; cf. 427, 729–30), granting him a vision of the world far wider than what he can see from his lonely beorg. A saint who returns from the reliquary or

The Solitude of Guthlac

the archive to threaten with murder unified, reductive notions of the continuity of the self, Guthlac with his demons demands all the reverence Foucault once reserved for a “parricide with auburn eyes,” for a dangerous vision in which history seeks to capture, to transform, to touch. The wild fens in which Guthlac battled his demons were eventually drained of their boggy streams and cleared of their tangled vegetation. Matthew Paris wrote in 1256 that the wilderness-loving devils had been victims of gentrification, exiled by the advent of pleasant meadows and farms.70 Well situated to take advantage of the flow of merchandise and people across the North Sea, many of these new settlements became prosperous trading towns. Among these bustling ports was Bishop’s Lynn, where a prominent fifteenth-century citizen knew Paris was wrong about Guthlac’s demons. Rather than vanish or move to more isolated demesnes, the devils had simply lost their obsessive interest in the formation of celibate masculine bodies. By the time Margery Kempe was living in the converted Fens, these same demons were standing guard at the limits of the feminine possible.

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5 The Becoming-Liquid of Margery Kempe

T Women . . . tend to be interpreted as they are represented in plots: what is neglected is their voice, how the voice is depicted, how it is put to work—in the end, how this undefeated voice speaks across the crushing plot. —Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices Is voice, as a catalyst of love, not the medium of hypnotic power par excellence? —Renata Salecl and Slavoj Zˇ i zˇ ek, Gaze and Voice as Love Objects Margery Kempe was born in Bishop’s Lynn, Norfolk, c. 1373, and died around 1440. The daughter of the successful politician John Brunham, she married a man who was not her economic equal (she eventually settled John Kempe’s debts in return for a chaste marriage). She bore fourteen children. Probably composed in the late 1430s, her Book was thought lost until the discovery of the Mount Grace manuscript (now London, British Library, Add. MS 61823) by Colonel William Erdeswick Ignatius Butler-Bowden in 1934. These bare facts about Margery Kempe are some of the few uncontroversial statements that can be made pertaining to the fifteenth-century mystic, who has become an impassioned body

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for medieval studies, attracting intense and copious criticism since the rediscovery of her Book. “Turbulent,” “effusive,” “loud,” “disruptive,” and “excessive” are descriptive terms frequent in the critical lexicon that the analysis of her life and work has generated. Although some of these words have been used by Kempe’s most sympathetic interpreters, at other times they have been employed to condemn, marginalize, or otherwise silence her. Intensity, effusion, and excess are in fact the preoccupation of this chapter, which follows the “boystows” flow of Kempe’s tears and cries in all their exteriorizing force. I start with confidence that the feminist and queer rescue of Kempe from pathologizers, sexists, and skeptics has at last been successful.1 She has had so many eloquent, persuasive defenders over the years that it is now possible to approach her Book not via further defensive historicization of her East Anglian life and the transnational modes of piety that she shared, but through the formation of new alliances with the dilatory possibilities and multiple trajectories that her writing makes possible. In the course of the past seven decades, scholars have well detailed the frustration and persecution that Margery Kempe endured: the enmity of political and ecclesiastical authorities, some of whom desired to burn her as a heretic; taunting and public humiliation at the hands of fellow pilgrims, neighbors, strangers; an uncomprehending husband; physical violence against her social and gender nonconformity. Despite these forces united in their desire for silence from Kempe, her text records a world of “gret sowndys and gret melodiis” (“great sounds and great melodies”), a sonorous life replete with birdsong, thunderstorms, celestial merriment, sacred hymns, impassioned sermons, a cacophony of languages that, even if at times untranslatable, were always well understood.2 Central to the aural plenitude of The Book of Margery Kempe are what she labels her wepyng and roryng. When she feels the propinquity of the divine, Kempe literally dissolves into tears, “sumtyme during in wepyng ii owyres and oftyn lengar. . . wythowtyn sesyng” (“sometimes continuing weeping for two hours and often longer without ceasing,” 7). This energetic sobbing marks her entrance into mystical experience and returns frequently throughout her life. In the wake of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, her tears are conjoined for ten years to screams, so that “oftyntymys schulde sche cryin and roryn as thow sche schule a brostyn” (“she would often cry and roar, as though she would have burst,” 72). Her bodily responses to divinity are so “wondirful,” “ful lowde,” that

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witnesses are inevitably described as “made astoynd”: confounded, stupefied. Although Saint Jerome declares in a vision that her weeping is her “singular and special gift” (41), Kempe’s most celebrated attribute in recent criticism has been her white clothing. Fourteen times a mother, she dared to dress in a color signifying virginity.3 Whereas her clothes visually marked her difference from her fellow citizens in the Norfolk port of Bishop’s Lynn, spectacularly setting her apart, Kempe’s sobs and screams carried her outside of herself, into the bodies of her auditors and into the wideness of the world. This chapter follows Kempe’s voice as it escapes constricted social and architectural spaces, as it transforms her surroundings through a kind of sonic embrace. Most previous studies have examined vox mystica as a phenomenon both verbal (composed of individually signifying words) and textual (inscribed within a certain discourse of authority), but The Book of Margery Kempe urges a consideration of voice as a physical, nonlinguistic force so powerful in its outward movement that any subjectivity that clings to its radiating flow becomes liquid itself. By identifying with the sound of her voice in its exteriority, by forming a dispersive alliance with her own sonority, Kempe was able to silence criticism, to transform into an instantly comprehensible aural purity any threatened unintelligibility, to precipitate community even as language failed.

Words Because she was illiterate, Kempe relied upon men to transform her impermanent speech into lasting text. Made possible only through scribal intermediaries whom she had to persuade continuously in the very act of unfolding her life, her Book is preoccupied with the power of words. Swearing was a vice she therefore found particularly reprehensible. Like Chaucer’s Pardoner, Kempe imagined oaths as speech-acts, performing their content at the moment of their utterance. To swear by God’s bones or by Christ’s blood was literally to dismember divine flesh. At his residence in Lambeth Palace Kempe scolds Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury, because the men of his household “slen [God] every day be gret othys sweryng” (“slay [God] every day by the swearing of great oaths,” 16). At a Cistercian abbey she reprimands clerics for their swearing (45),

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while at York Minster she likewise chastises an angry priest for his sinful words (50). The men of the archbishop of York, threatening to burn her as a heretic, are warned that they themselves will blaze in hell for their oaths (52); a “great lord’s men” are likewise told that they will be damned (55). In most of these cases, Kempe’s censure is delivered just as her authority to speak is under challenge. Before Kempe’s conversation with Arundel, for example, a townswoman in the archbishop’s hall announces that she would like to “‘beryn a fagot to bren the wyth; it is pety that thow levyst’” (“‘bring a bundle of sticks to burn you—it is a pity that you are alive,’” 16). The priest at York Minster seizes her by the collar of her white gown and demands “‘Thu wolf, what is this cloth that thu hast on?’” (“‘You wolf, what is this cloth that you have on?’”). Kempe answers meekly that it is wool, a nonexplanation that betrays her suspicion that she will not convince her antagonist through any exposition of the clothing’s spiritual signification. Infuriated, the cleric curses her with “many gret othis.” His invective immediately opens a space for Kempe to reply authoritatively: “Than sche gan to spekyn for Goddys cawse; sche was not aferd. Sche seyd: ‘Ser, ye schulde kepe the comawndmentys of God and not sweryn so necgligently as ye do’” (“Then she began to speak for God’s cause—she was not afraid. She said, ‘Sir, you should keep the commandments of God, and not swear as negligently as you do,’” 50). Danielle Régnier-Bohler has written of the impossible bind of the medieval woman seeking a voice in which to be heard.4 If unlike Echo in the myth of Narcissus she attempts more than the empty repetition of male discourse, then like Actaeon she will likely find such language inadequate to her self-expression: Actaeon, having surprised Artemis in her bath, is turned into a stag in order to prevent him from glimpsing the goddess in the nude. Like Narcissus, he catches sight of his new appearance in the water. “He moaned: that was the extent of his language” (Ovid, Metamorphoses). Henceforth he is not permitted to state his identity. An aphasia that renders identity inaccessible: that is what male discourse wants to inflict on woman. Her speech is limited to such a degree that her being is maimed. (RégnierBohler, “Literary and Mystical Voices,” 431)

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Attempting to account for her white clothing and irregular “manner of living” to uncomprehending ears must have made Kempe feel like transformed Actaeon, unable to explain a nonnormative identity within a language that leaves no licit position from which difference can speak.5 Kempe encounters enormous difficulty in making herself understood by those who—like the archbishops of Canterbury and York, the mayor of Leicester—insist that she make her actions legible to them. After all, her dress and weeping are so troubling to her inquisitors because they place her outside dominant meaning systems, rendering her in some ways fundamentally incomprehensible. At least in her condemnation of swearing she could temporarily inhabit a space within that discourse to make use of its potency. These same men could not disagree with her orthodox assertion that words have power over bodies, that the church forbids the invocations of divine flesh that they or their households have been making. Kempe’s reproach enables her to master authority in its own arena of performance, catching up those who were supposed to represent the Law by invoking its strictures against them. Her denunciation is potent self-assertion, the inevitable result of which is a public acknowledgement that she speaks truth at a time when the authority of her speech is imperiled. To those who interrogated, judged, and strove to silence her, Margery Kempe answered back.6 Censuring oaths, deploying counteraccusations (abuse of authority, sexual heterodoxy), and, more positively, praying for her antagonists composed her main verbal strategies when faced by the “apparatus of persecution.”7 Yet Kempe was acutely aware of how her words might betray her even as they left her mouth. Kempe’s Book records her constant struggle against the distorting proverbs into which her detractors transform her, proverbs that take on a life of their own in their widening dissemination.8 Necessarily marked by her gender and social status, her regionally inflected English could be turned against her by those whose university training had given them access to a language supposedly transcending the local and the temporal. The “men of lawe” she encounters in Lincoln who announce “We han gon to scole many yerys, and yet arn we not sufficient to answeryn as thu dost” (“We have gone to school many years, and yet we are not sufficient to answer as you do,” 55) condense a recurrent anxiety in The Book of Margery Kempe: if she fails to make herself understood by men whose shared discourse

The Becoming-Liquid of Margery Kempe

can label her as deviant, she risks not just a dismissive categorization but an ultimate silencing. The Steward of Leicester, for example, uses his fluency in Latin to construct a community of comprehending men around an excluded Kempe: The Styward anon, as he sey hir, spak Latyn unto hir, many prestys stondyng abowtyn to here what sche schulde say, and other pepyl also. Sche seyd to the Stywarde: “Spekyth Englysch, yf yow lyketh, for I undyrstonde not what ye sey.” (47) The Steward spoke Latin to her, many priests standing about to hear what he would say, and other people too. She said to the Steward, “Speak English, if you please, for I do not understand what you are saying.” His public, verbal overpowering is immediately conjoined to a physical one as he attempts in the privacy of his chamber to rape her. She succeeds in freeing herself by declaring that her “speche and dalyawns” come into her body through the Holy Spirit. This radical divorce of speech from personhood and agency so “astoyned” him that he simply returns her to jail (47). She answers the men of law in a similar way, asserting that her knowledge comes directly from the Holy Spirit and quoting Jesus on the importance of immediate inspiration over accumulated learning (55). Roland Barthes argued that state institutions extend their power over their subjects by promulgating the myth that language is universal and transparent. In fact, Barthes asserts, even in a juridical forum where the stakes are a human life, discourses are so marked by class, gender, education, and location that language perpetually betrays its own speaker. Barthes gives the example of Gaston Dominici, an elderly farmer accused of murder whose provincial French and lack of university study leave him unable to reply “coherently” to the bourgeois, excessively literary discourse of his interrogators, who therefore feel compelled to speak for him.9 “We are all potential Dominicis,” Barthes asserts, “deprived of language, or worse, rigged out in that of our accusers, humiliated and condemned by it” (Mythologies, 46). Margery Kempe was likewise forced to enter potentially alienating discourse whenever she was called upon to profess her beliefs to those seeking some error within that

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recitation to construe as heresy. When a malevolent cleric asks Kempe to gloss a line from Genesis held by some heretics to be an injunction to free love (Crescite et multiplicamini, “Be fruitful and multiply”), he clearly hopes that she will divulge not only a punishable antinomianism but a condemnable sexuality. She replies instead with a standard, allegorical interpretation of the passage (51). Kempe’s unhesitating responses to questions of biblical interpretation make clear that when necessary she could speak well enough in authoritative registers to prove her orthodoxy. Her verbal parrying with the archbishop of York skillfully deploys biblical citation and parable to back her arguments, amounting to a tour de force demonstration of her ability to subvert authority’s discourse in its own arena of performance. Throughout the encounter, however, beneath her concealing robes “hir flesch tremelyd and whakyd wondirly” (“her flesh trembled and quaked amazingly,” 52), revealing her embodied awareness of the lethal consequences of failure. Kempe’s difficulty is that, even in talking back to authority, she lacked a permanent, licit place from which to speak. The moment Kempe asserts “Me thynkyth that the Gospel yevyth me leve to spekyn of God,” a cleric venomously counters that only demoniacs make such claims, since Saint Paul decreed “no woman schulde prechyn” (52). Kempe had somehow to defend and persuade but not “preche”—that is, although called to account for herself by and in power’s language, she could not safely inhabit that discourse from the inside.10 In this case she tells a scatological parable with no biblical precedent, to which the cleric can reply only that her words have a bodily effect (“this tale smytyth me to the hert”).11 Yet success in such perilous language games yields no lasting vindication. Even though Kempe eventually obtains letters of approval from both York and Canterbury—an astonishing achievement—the unabated persecutions she suffers in England as well as abroad demonstrate the insufficiency of such victories to maintaining a lasting safety.12 Kempe’s skill in marshalling discursive auctoritas can be seen as well in her textual self presentation. Possessing an excellent memory for how previous mystical experience had been rendered, and aided perhaps by her priestly amanuensis, she often describes her visions in figures drawn from previous writers, thereby making herself legible as an inspired, authoritative source of God’s word.13 Citationality gives a solidity to Kempe’s discourse by inscribing it within an established, au-

The Becoming-Liquid of Margery Kempe

thoritative textual corpus. Following Richard Rolle in the Meditations on the Passion, she compares the riven body of Christ to a “duffehows” (“dovecote,” 28).14 After reading that the mystic Marie d’Oignies cried tears as impassioned and unwilled as Kempe’s, her scribe is able to resolve a crisis of his faith. Vocalizations that had perturbed him with their exorbitance are suddenly orthodox signals of divine inspiration when they have textual precedent. His anxiety that Kempe’s mystical experience might be eccentric and particular vanishes once translated into an international tradition and system of figuration (62).15 Yet Kempe’s supposedly transcendent Christ warns her that she will be “etyn and knawyn of the pepul of the world as any raton knawyth the stokfysch” (“eaten and gnawed by the people of the world as any rat gnaws a dried cod,” 5), an image redolent of private and feminine spaces, of quotidian kitchens in seaside towns. He announces in similarly domestic terms that she should “clevyst as sore onto me as the skyn of stokfysche clevyth to a mannys handys whan it is sothyn” (“cleave as fast to me as the skin of the stockfish sticks to man’s hand when it is boiled,” 37). Culinary analogy resurfaces when, in trying to envision a fate worse than simple death, Kempe imagines being “hewyn as small as flesch to the potte” (“chopped up small as meat for the [stew] pot,” 57).16 In an affectingly maternal scene, Kempe attempts to console the grieving Mary with “a good cawdel” (i.e., gruel mixed with spiced wine, 81); needless to say, cawdel does not constitute attested biblical aliment. Her Jesus is personal, provincial, rather than universal and abstract. A discussion with him about ascetic discipline reverberates with, in Caroline Walker Bynum’s words, “the tone of two housewives gossiping about how to manage a difficult and childish husband” (Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 221). The Holy Ghost meanwhile is transmuted from the transnational, inherently allegorical dove into a very English robin redbreast (36). Even her prophecies are relentlessly parochial. She predicts that the prior of Lynn will not go overseas, oblivious to the larger event that precipitates his staying at home (“And in the meantime the King died,” 71).17 Figuring the divine in terms familiar to a fifteenth-century, bourgeois wife from Norfolk would have exposed her to potential ridicule by authorities trained in universal Latin, with its frozen store of classical, biblical, and patristic rhetorics.18 She partly forestalls such criticism through her insistence that Christ spoke to her in “homly” (domestic and familiar) terms. But

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Kempe is often accused of impersonating a holy woman, a charge that has at it its base the implicit assumption that the community of the sacred does not have particularities, but is instead transcendent, transnational, transtemporal. Because she could not escape the localizing inflections of her discourse, words were necessarily perilous for Margery Kempe. Her sobbing and screaming should be read in relation to these linguistic anxieties, especially as she struggled to make comprehensible certain aspects of her life that could not be adequately expressed in the discourses available to her. Kempe’s vocalizations might be understood as a bodily response to the inadequacies of language, communicating on her behalf what words might or could not. Those demanding a strict accounting for her identity are ultimately confounded by her ability through her “manner of living,” clothes, and body to demonstrate “something disjunctive within unities that are presumed unproblematic, even natural”—by what Carolyn Dinshaw aptly terms her queer touch, a simultaneously salvific and disruptive tactility connected to her discomfiting effect on those with whom she came into contact (Getting Medieval, 151). Kempe’s haptic power is inextricable from both her corporeality and her aurality. Like the hands and lips with which she lovingly embraces lepers, Kempe’s voice touches bodies, “paving the way for a fusion where both are mingled, attaining at length the same degree of dissolution” (Bataille, Erotism, 17). Like her dispersive, subversive laughter, the sheer phonic energy of her vocalizations threatens “the very boundaries of social and institutional bodies” that, as Karma Lochrie has so convincingly argued in her important analysis of Kempe, “rely on the repression of the grotesque female body.”19 More powerful than mere words, Kempe’s weeping and crying are nonlinguistic utterances that have a visceral effect on her auditors, including herself.

Voice (“Why wepist thu?”) All of these writings display a passion for . . . the thing itself (das Ding). . . . They are beaches offered to the swelling sea; their goal is to disappear in what they disclose, like a Turner landscape dissolved in air and light. . . . But what name or identity can be

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attached to this “thing,” independent of the always localized labor of letting it come? —Michel de Certeau, “Mystic Speech” Michel de Certeau influentially argued that the mystic’s voice hybridizes subjective interiority with a commanding, exteriorizing otherness. Even when broken by human emotion, this voice resounds with divine alterity, “I and thou seeking one another in the thickness of the same language.”20 Certeau’s model for l’énonciation mystique owes an obvious debt to Lacan, whose graph of desire (the infamous “can opener” diagram) represents voice as a disembodied remainder, the leftover of the subject’s movement (glissement) along the signifying chain.21 The graph illustrates that, psychoanalytically speaking, voice is “positive,” substantial, objectal. Unlike words, the signification of voice is not strictly reducible to the structure of language, even if it is always enmeshed within that meaning-producing structure. “This dimension of the voice,” Mladen Dolar writes, “is difficult to cope with,” for voice “presents precisely a nonsignifying remainder, something resistant to the signifying operations, a leftover heterogeneous in relation to the structural logic which includes it” (“Object Voice,” 10). Objects for Lacan are associated with the Real, with that which is excluded by a symbolic system but which through that foundational expulsion lurks at its heart.22 Voice is therefore extimate to the speaking subject, simultaneously outside and within: The moment we enter the symbolic order, an unbridgeable gap separates forever a human body from “its” voice. The voice acquires a spectral autonomy, it never quite belongs to the body we see. . . . Voice is that which, in the signifier, resists meaning, it stands for the opaque inertia that cannot be recuperated by meaning. . . . [Voice] threatens the established order and . . . has to be brought under control, subordinated to the rational artic
i
zek, ulation of spoken and written word, fixed into writing (Z “‘I Hear You with My Eyes,’” 92, 103) Like the estranging image assumed by the infant in what Lacan called the Mirror Stage, identification with the sound of one’s voice (s’entendre parler) precipitates self-consciousness, but also constitutes a misrecognition. The moment voice returns to the ear it demonstrates its autonomy

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and “enters the dimension of the Other.” Voice, therefore, has two aspects. As an anchor for an otherwise frangible selfhood, it lodges deep in the body and becomes the point around which subjectivization occurs. As a liminal object, however, the voice remains disturbingly alien. Errant and anxiety-provoking, voice can hover within “some indefinite interspace,” a “free-floating presence” full of menace to the subject’s solidity.23 Neither imaginary nor symbolic, this voice is real. Implacable and inhuman, the objectal voice—la voix acousmatique, as Michel Chion has christened it—is the “astonishing” sound of Kempe’s sobs, screams, roars, cries, weeping, a voice in her but more than her, a voice partly her own (as mystic and as woman) and partly God’s, a voice that propels her out of herself to perturb with its fearful otherness an astounded world. Silenced by her confessor before she can speak a sin weighing heavily upon her conscience, Margery Kempe finds herself bereft of the power of speech. She suffers attacks by fantastic devils who, like the demons assailing Guthlac centuries before, condense in bodily form fears of separation from an identity-sustaining community. Kempe’s madness, writes David Aers, combines “a terrifying isolation . . . with immense aggression against her husband, her community, and the self formed by conflicting tendencies within it” (Community, Gender, and Individual Identity, 85). Estranged from any structure of belonging, she turns in hatred against her own selfhood, “biting her hand ‘so vyolently’ that the scar remained all her life” as a fleshly reminder of this intolerable singularity (86). A vision of Christ restores her to health, but she lapses quickly into her previous role as an economically ambitious resident of mercantile Lynn. Kempe is not fully transformed until, some time later, an unearthly sound intrudes upon her troubled marriage bed: On a nygth, as this creatur lay in hir bedde wyth hir husbond, sche herd a sownd of a melodye so swet and delectable, hir thowt, as sche had been in paradise. And therwyth sche styrt owt of hir bedde and seyd: “Alas, that evyr I dede synne, it is ful mery in hevyn!” Thys melody was so swete that it passyd alle the melodye that evyr might be herd in this world wythowtyn ony comparison, and caused this creatur, whan sche herd ony myrth or melodye aftyrward, for to have ful plentyvows and habundawnt teerys of hy devocyon, wyth greet sobbyngys and syhyngys aftyr the blysse of heven, not dredyng the schamys

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and spytys of the wretchyd world. And evyr aftyr this drawt, sche had in hir mende the myrth and the melodye that was in heven, so mech that sche cowd not wyl restreyn hyrself fro the speking therof. For, wher sche was in ony cumpanye, sche wold sey oftyntyme: “It is ful mery in hevyn!” (3) One night, as this creature lay in bed with her husband, she heard a melodious sound so sweet and delectable that she thought she had been in paradise. And immediately she jumped out of bed and said, “Alas that ever I sinned! It is full merry in heaven.” This melody was so sweet that it surpassed all the melody that might be heard in this world, without any comparison, and it caused this creature when she afterwards heard any mirth of melody to shed very plentiful and abundant tears of high devotion, with great sobbings and sighings for the bliss of heaven, not fearing the shames and contempt of this wretched world. And ever after her being drawn towards God in this way, she kept in mind the joy and melody that there was in heaven, so much that she could not very well restrain herself from speaking of it. For when she was in company with any people she would often say, “It is full merry in heaven!” The scene is an unusual depiction of mystical experience in its embodied emphasis of the aural over the visual. Bruce Holsinger has repeatedly documented the medieval relation between music and bodily discipline, transport, transformation.24 Clarissa Atkinson has observed that, even if “music and sound were familiar accompaniments of medieval mystical experience . . . it is surprising that melody alone, without words or reassurance or splendid scenes, precipitated [Kempe’s] conversion” (Mystic and Pilgrim, 42). “Sowndys and melodiis” echo continuously in her ears thenceforth, sometimes so loudly that they drown human voices. She analogizes these noises as the rumble of a bellows, the song of a dove, and the merry voice of a robin (35, 36): wordless sounds that reverberate through her body, sometimes frightening her, sometimes consoling, always carrying a meaning exterior to human language. The interjection “It is ful mery in hevyn!” holds incantatory power for Kempe. She repeats these words so frequently that she is eventually rebuked for speaking of a place she has never been. Each repetition,

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however, seems to yield some small measure of the enjoyment signified by the expression—an enjoyment inextricable not from what the words stricto sensu signify, but from celestial melody, from pure and nonverbal sound. Like Richard Rolle, Kempe associates numinous experience with music.25 Yet for Kempe this synesthesiac (“swet and delectable”) jouissance is always conjoined to a responsorial flow of “plentyvows and habundawnt teerys . . . wyth greet sobbyngys and syhyngys.” Such weeping might signal her full bodily participation in events from the life of Christ; her engagement in “homly” conversations with God, Mary, and the saints; or her rapture as the liturgy is transformed into living biblical history and the priest’s words transubstantiated into the events they commemorate. Kempe does not simply imitate Christ (imitatio Christi) but fully inhabits his world.26 Meditating on the Virgin Mother, for example, evokes a vision in which she performs consecutively the roles of Gabriel at the Annunciation (she declares to Mary “‘My lady, you shall be the mother of God,’” 6), Joseph (“the creature went forth with our Lady to Bethlehem and procured lodgings for her every night”) and—in a novel interjection into the nativity story—a midwife, swaddling the newborn Jesus in borrowed cloth (6). In a culminating mutation of these shifting identifications, she accompanies mother and child into Egypt (7). Performing Christ’s life as a participant elicits in Kempe a true compassion, a literal “suffering-with.” Such visions are typically accompanied by hours of ceaseless weeping, provoked by her realization that, having traveled backwards through time to live the Gospel narrative, Christ’s death will also have to be experienced “freschly.” Such visions induce her to weep for the “blys of hevyn” (54), longing to be removed from time in its painful recursiveness and find an immutable, eternal joy. During a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Kempe’s participatory weeping is joined by a new and even more inordinate affect: “krying” and “roryng” so intense that she believes she will perish from its force.27 At Calvary she beholds “verily and freschly” the crucifixion of Jesus (28). Sharing Christ’s agony on the very ground where it was once endured so transforms her relation to his embodied humanity that for ten years she is seized by sudden cries whenever reminded of the Passion, cries so loud that “it made the pepyl astoynd” (28). Her “maner of crying” is so powerfully connected to her corporeality that at its onset her flesh is transformed: “wex sche al blew as it had been leed and swet ful sor” (“she

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turned all grey like lead and sweated dreadfully,” 57). A component of what Sarah Beckwith labels Kempe’s “hyperbolically labile identification with Christ” (Christ’s Body, 91), these screams render even more exorbitant the exteriorizing force of her sobs and tears, conjoining to the flow of weeping a similarly fluid, intensely sonic vibration that “astonishes” any body touched by its irradiating force. A crucifix, a man or animal with a wound, a child or horse being beaten could all trigger an efflux of screams as ancient suffering is performed anew (28). Just as Kempe’s Book itself structurally resists harmonization into linear chronology (“Thys boke is not wretyn in ordyr. . .”), so throughout its narrative objects, animals, and bodies of many kinds interject the past into the present, short-circuiting the difference between temporalities and altering the experience of both.28 Kempe’s vocalizations figure prominently in her encounters with those men of authority who compel her to a self-accounting. Tears mark her attempt to reconcile with the mayor of Leicester (48), and “ravish” her shortly thereafter in an immediately understood communication with the sympathetic abbot of Leicester (49). The archbishop of York’s inquisition is composed of two sequences, the turning point of which is Kempe’s dissolution into tears. Entering suddenly with his retinue, the archbishop demands why she wears white clothing. Unhappy with her partial answer, he declares she will be imprisoned as a heretic and departs. Returning with more clerics and a doctor to question her more closely, he seats himself across the room from her. In preparation for the imminent hostility of the interrogation, Kempe prays so fervently that “sche meltyd al into teerys,” sobbing so loudly that the clerics “had gret wondyr of hir, for thei had not herd swech crying before” (“were astonished at her, for they had not heard such crying before,” 52). These perturbing sounds provoke the archbishop to demand testily “Why wepist thu so, woman?” She answers back, simply and calmly, “Syr, ye schal welyn sum day that ye had wept as sor as I” (“Sir, you will wish some day that you had wept as sorely as I,” 52). Her confidence restored through the power of her voice over the bodies of her auditors, she then recites her articles of faith to prove her orthodoxy; engages in a triumphant verbal duel with the archbishop, who opposes his books (“Ley thin hand on the bok her beforn me!”) to her heart-smiting “tale”; and inspires every young man in the audience to volunteer to accompany her as she leaves.

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In Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff’s words, Kempe’s tears are an “insistent and inarticulate voice” that functions as a transformative, nonverbal supplement to these fraught dialogues (Body and Soul, 152).29 Kempe’s tears for the failings and wretchedness of the world have well attested analogues throughout Christian tradition. Weeping for one’s sins is to be expected of any penitent, so that her frequent sorrow at past transgressions is ordinary Christian contrition. Tears for “sowlys in purgatory” are likewise simple Christian duty, as is her weeping for outcasts, those “in myschefe, in poverte, er in any disese” as well as “Jewys, Sarazinys, and alle fals heretikys” (57). But her “wondirful” tears and cries are most prevalent at those moments when she is moving away from socially legible categories like mother, brewer, miller, pilgrim and becoming something other, something difficult to articulate in advance.30 After the birth of one of her fourteen children, Kempe struggled to map some line of flight away from her long-held and stultifying identity of “wife.” She approached Richard of Caister, the vicar of St. Stephen’s in Norwich, relating the story of her life from childhood, presumably including her unsuccessful attempts to adopt that series of identities that failed to contain her desires. Kempe’s words to the vicar culminate in an account of her transformative experience of the Passion. In speaking this episode “so hedows a melodye” (“so terrible a melody”) resounds in her ears that she loses control of her body (17). To narrate the past is for Kempe to live it again, “truly and freschly,” corporeally. She falls to the floor, experiencing the wash of bliss that the celestial melody always bears, an extralinguistic moment that gives her the strength to share with the vicar those parts of her story most dangerous to reveal. Risking rejection as a heretic, she announces that she and God have had frequent, friendly conversations in which he has pledged his special love. The polyphony of her mind cannot be reduced to a single, authoritative voice with which to identify: she tells the vicar that she has also conversed with the three persons of the Trinity, Mary, Saint Peter, Saint Paul, Saint Katherine “or whatever saint in heaven she was devoted to.”31 These interchanges were so “swet, so holy and so devowt” that she fel down and wrestyd wyth hir body, and mad wondyrful cher and contenawns, wyth boystows sobbyngys and gret plente of terys, sumtyme seyng, “Jhesu, mercy,” sumtyme, “I dey!” (17)

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fell down and twisted and wrenched her body about, and made remarkable faces and gestures, with vehement sobbings and great abundance of tears, sometimes saying “Jesus, mercy,” and sometimes, “I die.” Many people, she admits, have beheld her passionate bodily expressions and concluded that she must be either sick or a demoniac. Kempe’s confession makes anxiously explicit an interpretation of her actions to which she must persuade the vicar not to subscribe. That he immediately becomes her steadfast ally signals the triumph of the communicative power of her tears over the potential failings of her words. Kempe declares to the vicar of St. Stephen’s that she has seen nothing like her intimate dialogues with God and other celestial beings in the writings of the mystics (Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, Saint Bridget’s Revelations, pseudo-Bonaventure’s Stimulus Amoris, Richard Rolle’s Incendium Amoris). This acknowledgement locates her ecstatic selfhood within an established textual tradition at the same time as it particularizes her against her predecessors. However eloquently and influentially these canonical texts have made acceptable—readable—a certain nondominant relation to the divine, thereby setting the parameters within which future mystical devotion will be judged, Kempe’s own experience of God’s love is different, she insists, “yf sche cowd or ellys mygth a schewyd as sche felt” (“if only she could have communicated what she felt,” 17). Again, in placing herself outside of a preexistent identity Kempe risks being unable to make herself comprehensible to her auditor, and words fail. Kempe’s dilemma is not just that the ecclesiastical and secular worlds through which she moves have made no subject-position available to her in which she can with authority express her desires, no language in which to convey the force of her transportive becomings—especially because her experiences have already brought her to the margins of socially acceptable identity. Even within the matrix of possibilities textually generated by late medieval mysticism, Kempe fears that she will not be able to find her voice.32 With the exception of Julian of Norwich, Kempe knew these other mystics only through their writings. Because she probably could not read, she undoubtedly felt herself at some remove from these texts whose signs required an interpreter just so that she could know what they contained. Despite her disavowals, Kempe’s self-

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inscription was surely guided by the maps implicit in Hilton, Bridget, and Rolle. Yet her insistence that she is opening her body to new possibilities and potentialities that she does not see in these texts should also be taken seriously. Critics have amply demonstrated that Kempe absorbed the basic structures for the expression of her mystical experience from these books, but dismissing her as unoriginal misses the point she makes to the vicar of St. Stephen’s. She feels in her body that what she undergoes is not capable of adequate expression in language. Knowing very well that every mystic makes some version of this claim, she asserts that even the corpus of writing that might be brought to bear on her own actions to make them legible is ultimately inadequate to the task, because she does not recognize her unmediated, corporealized experience there. Kempe’s cries and sobs are inextricably linked to her attempts to communicate across blockages of language, to make her difference understood and thereby incorporate it into some form of community. As in the interchange with the vicar of St. Stephen’s, episodes of crying are often encapsulated in a narrative of critical voices striving to dismiss the power of her voice to signify. In Lynn, for example, Kempe is reproached for her loud meditation upon the Passion: “And many said there was never saint in heaven that cried as she did, and from that concluded that she had a devil within her which caused that crying” (44). She represents these accusatory voices as Jewish by comparing them to the persecutors of Christ, thus associating them with a race supposed by Christians to be locked blindly in their own literalism, in their mere words. She then gives a full account of just how deeply transformative is her somatic experience of the divine, and how grossly it has been misinterpreted: Sum seyde that sche had the fallyng evyl, for sche, wyth the crying, wrestyd hir body, turnyng fro the o syde into the other, and wex al blo, as it had ben colowr of leed. And than folke spitted at hir for horrowr of the sekenes, and sum scornyd hir and seyd that sche howlyd as it [had] been a dogge, and bannyd hir, and cursyd hir, and seyd sche dede meche harm among the pepyl. And than thei that beforntyme had yovyn hir bothyn mete and drynke for Goddys lofe, now thei put hir awey and bodyn hir that sche schulde not come in her placys. (44) Some said she had epilepsy, for while she cried she wrested her body about, turning from one side to the other, and turned all

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blue and grey, like the colour of lead. Then people spat at her in horror at the illness, and some scorned her and said she howled like a dog, and cursed her, and said that she did a lot of harm among the people. And then those who before had given her food and drink for God’s love now spurned her, and ordered her not to come to their places. Here as elsewhere, tears and roars anxiously mark the narrative foregrounding of comprehensibility in its relation to the formation of community, but this episode is one of her few failures to precipitate in the face of rejection some secondary structure of belonging via her vocalizations. Condemned and ostracized, Kempe for once cannot seem to make herself heard above her own cries. Because possibilities of illegibility and untranslatability limn the multiple inscriptions of The Book of Margery Kempe, at such moments the text’s own authoritative voice is under interrogation. The onset of Kempe’s crying as a “fresch” and infinitely repeating experience of the agony of Christ at Calvary, for example, is embedded within a secondary narrative of critical voices intent on dismissing both her vocalizations and her ability to self-signify: “for summe seyd it was a wikkyd spiryt vexid hir; sum seyd it was a sekenes; sum seyd sche had dronkyn to mech wyn” (28). These disparate attempts to explain her vocal excess within theological, medical, or social discourses share a common aim, striving to discipline Kempe through a diagnostic labeling that would produce her as a familiar medieval type: the demoniac, the physiologically imbalanced, the drunkard/glutton. Like those whose malevolent desire is that Kempe be “in the se in a bottumles boyt” (“in the sea in a bottomless boat,” 28), these containment strategies attempt a silence through expulsion. Just what is at stake in this struggle to self-signify is well illustrated in Kempe’s ministrations to a woman who has lost her mind after the birth of a child, an episode that exactly repeats what Kempe narrated about her own life in the opening chapter of her Book. Bound in chains, screaming, unrecognizable, this woman has been exiled to the fringe of the community because of her exorbitant voice: Sche roryd and cryid so, bothe nyth and day for the most part, that men wolde not suffyr hir to dwellyn amongys hem, sche

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was so tediows to hem. Than was sche had to the forthest ende of the town, in a chambyr, that the pepil schulde not heryn hir cryin. (75) She roared and cried so, for the most part of both day and night, that people would not let her live amongst them, she was so tiresome to them. Then she was taken to a room at the furthest end of town, so that people should not hear her crying. This madwoman is, in fact, Margery Kempe’s doppelgänger, a semblance of what she once was and might have remained. Kempe visits every day, engaging her in the conversations that her husband and the townspeople had said were impossible. She prays for her recovery, “wepyng and sorwyng,” and Kempe’s tears bring the two roaring and crying women into community. The woman is with Kempe’s aid reintegrated into the town that banished her, a return punctuated by a purification at the parish church. The Book’s scribe labels the event “a ryth gret myrakyl” (“a very great miracle”) and bears witness in his own person to its validity, a rare moment of self-interpolation. Susan Dickman stresses Kempe’s “singularity, isolation and individuality” (“Margery Kempe and the Continental Tradition of the Pious Woman,” 166), while Carolyn Dinshaw persuasively describes her as “queer, as singular. . . separated from others and disjunct” (Getting Medieval, 286 n.). Caroline Walker Bynum sees in Kempe’s white clothes, continence, and abundant tears “the lay equivalent of the vows, veils, and convent walls that set nuns apart from society” (Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 280). Dhira B. Mahoney argues that Kempe’s tears and screams “perform the same function as enclosure,” segregating her from society.33 Gayle Margherita states that “tears isolate her from her fellow Christians, and from men in particular, more effectively than an anchoress’s cell” (Romance of Origins, 41). Despite Kempe’s self-acknowledged separateness, however, she is no anchoress, actual or metaphorical. The monk at Canterbury may wish her to be “closyd in an hows of ston, that ther schuld no man speke wyth the” (13), but her voice ensures the impossibility of claustration.34 As Margherita has also argued, Kempe’s Book is structured toward “re-appropriation and re-integration” after the initial loss that sets its narrative in motion.35 The dissolution of collective structures is inevitably answered by the instantiation of new kinds

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of belonging, of heterogeneous communities based on loose affiliation and sympathy rather than on rigid hierarchy, linguistic homogeneity, or distinctions of class, gender, and estate.36 Typically, the “astonishment” that her vocalizations catalyze yields both rejection (by those who, like her fellow pilgrims, find her incomprehensible) and integration (by others who, like the parishioners in Rome or the wives of Beverly, feel themselves touched by her uncanny voice, no matter how loudly it resounds). Although her detractors passionately desire her silence, Kempe’s cries are ordinarily forceful enough to drown out even those “gret clerkys” who “knewyn ful lytyl what sche felt,” clamorous enough to be heard by “gostly” (spiritually inclined) men who “lovyd hir and favowrd hir [esteemed her] the mor” (28). By translating her passion into a wordless howl that escapes her mouth and fills with its reverberations the surrounding world, Kempe undergoes an ecstasy of release, harrowing her flesh and unnerving her auditors. Emptying herself from her own body, transported by her cries outside of fleshly limits to assail the vastness of church and cathedral, she is transformed: Whan sche knew that sche schulde cryen, sche kept it in as long as sche mygth and dede al that sche cowde to withstond it or ellys to put it awey, til sche wex as blo as any leed, and evyr it schuld labowryn in hir mende mor and mor into the tyme that it broke owte. And whan the body myth no lengar enduryn the gostly labowr, but was ovyrcome wyth the unspekabyl lofe that wrowt so fervently in the sowle, than fel sche down and cryed wondyr lowde. (28) When she knew that she was going to cry, she held it in as long as she could, and did all that she could to withstand or else suppress it, until she turned the colour of lead, and all the time she would be seething more and more in her mind until such time as it burst out. And when the body might no longer endure the spiritual effort, but she was overcome with the unspeakable love that worked so fervently in her soul, then she fell down and cried astonishingly loud. Her screams and sobs deterritorialize speech, evacuating language of words while saturating propulsions of sound with meaning.37 Like a refrain (ritournelle), this uncanny voice resounds through her Book, its

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redoubled vector pushing some auditors bodily away while drawing others closer to its song. At such moments Kempe experiences true ecstasy, true communion, true communication. Abandoned by her compatriots in Rome and unable to speak Italian, Kempe makes her way to the church of St. John Lateran. Attempting to communicate with the sympathetic priest Wenslawe, she discovers to her immense frustration that he knows only Latin and German. Through an interpreter she urges him to pray for inspiration, and after thirteen days “he undirstod what sche seyd in Englysch to hym, and sche undirstod what that he seyd” (33). Her first communication to her new confessor includes an account of her divinely inspired weeping (“sche wept bittyrly, sche sobbyd boistowsly, and cryed ful lowde and horybly, that the pepil was oftyntymes aferd and gretly astoyned,” 33), a revelation again limned by critical voices attempting to pathologize and silence her. People claim, she admits, that she is motivated by “sum evyl spiryt, er a sodeyn sekenes, er ellys symulacyon and ypocrisy, falsly feyned of hir owyn self” (“some evil spirit, or a sudden illness, or else pretense and hypocrisy, something she put on deceitfully herself,” 33). Once Kempe and the priest’s languages no longer require an interpreter to be mutually understood, she has confidence that her “boistows” cries will likewise instantly self-signify, and the critical voices are themselves silenced. The scene exactly rewrites, moreover, the earlier episode of linguistic failure that haunts the inscription of her Book, when her first scribe rendered her narrative into an illegible (“evel wretyn”) text that was “neithyr good Englysch ne Dewch [German]” (Proem). At the church of St. John, questions of good English and good German are spectacularly beside the point, since like the apostles at Pentecost Kempe and the priest can converse across linguistic difference instantaneously, without translation. This transparency of signification is not exactly precipitated through her weeping and cries, but her vocalizations form the central matter of the newly enabled communication, becoming Wenslawe’s primary means for interacting with Kempe. The remainder of the chapter details the German priest’s doubts about her crying, the scorn she suffers among those who abandoned her because of her roaring, his secret testing of Kempe to ensure that her cries were not “hir owyn feynyng by ypocrisy, as the pepyl seyd” (“hypocritical pretence, as people said,” 33), and his consequent steadfast support, even to the point of suffering detraction with her. Her voice may have alienated her from the community of her

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countrymen, but it also brings her into happy communion with those who understand its astonishing sound: “And meche pepyl in Rome . . . oftyntymes preyed hir to mete and madyn hir ryth cher, preyng hir to prey for hem” (“Many people in Rome . . . often invited her to meals and made her very welcome, asking her to pray for them,” 33). The final, official validation of her triumphant power to signify comes shortly thereafter, when in a “quadri-lingual environment” of Italian, German, English, and Latin “truth and transparency intervene again” (Beckwith, “Problems of Authority,” 190). An English priest demands that Kempe’s German confessor translate into Latin her supposedly incomprehensible speech, and he immediately does so (41). The episode validates not so much the authority of her words, but the efficacy of her voice, even across the ecclesiastical Latin that excludes her. Kempe often records her vocalizations as occurring during sermons, where they function as her own visceral gloss on those biblical texts about which she is prohibited from speaking directly. Chapter 68 describes two typical episodes. A doctor of divinity delivers a sermon on the Assumption, and Kempe “brast owte wyth a lowed voys and cryid ful lowed and wept ful sor.” The doctor waits patiently for her to finish, then calmly resumes his words. Later he invites her to a private audience and becomes her steadfast defender against detractors. A visiting friar triggers a similar episode of weeping while preaching the Passion. When Kempe falls writhing and sobbing to the ground, her fellow auditors are quick to condemn. The friar announces “Frendys, beth stille, ye wote ful lityl what sche felyth” (“friends, be quiet—you know very little what she is feeling”). Kempe’s vocalizations leave her body not simply to respond to the sermons, but to interact with them, transforming them into a composite of official word and mystical voice.38 In both cases this moment of hybridity is given a public vindication by a preacher who refuses to dismiss Kempe, who allows her to be heard. Kempe’s vocalizations acoustically radiate her presence even as her dilatory travels likewise place her body in almost perpetual motion: Norwich, York, Canterbury, London, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Venice, Rome, Assisi, Compostela, Norway, Dover, Calais, Gdansk, Aachen. As Maureen Fries has observed, her “constant journeying, whether on pilgrimage or more minor errand” set Kempe apart from a late medieval English ideal of enclaustrated sanctity, such as that embodied by the anchoress Julian of Norwich (Fries, “Margery Kempe,” 229–30). These itineraries are,

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moreover, consistently marked by her “boystows” weeping. Difficulties of translation are repeatedly linked to Kempe’s tears and cries throughout her wanderings. Having been abandoned by traveling companions in Venice, Kempe encounters on the road two friars and a lady, and “non of hem cowde undirstand hir langage” (“none of them could understand her language,” 30). Cross-dressed again in the virginal white clothes that have made her an object of ridicule and led by a reluctant guide, the Irish hunchback Richard, Kempe is at her most visually spectacular.39 At Richard’s urging she joins the three pilgrims, but she cannot communicate with them, cannot make her strangeness comprehensible. Beholding a holy image that the women carry to “sett in worshepful wyfys lappys” (“set in the laps of respectable wives”), Kempe is seized with “gret sobbyng and lowde crying” (30). She is at once welcomed into a circle of sympathetic women who offer her comfort and “a good soft bed.” Kempe’s vocalizations precipitate the community born of mutual understanding that her words could not achieve. In Rome, her loud weeping at mass brings about a similar moment of integration, an instantly intelligible exchange of touch that overcomes the blocked exchange of linguistic meaning. Attending sermons preached by Germans and other foreign men whose language she does not speak, Kempe bewails her “lak of undirstondyng” (41). Christ declares that he will instruct her himself. Filled with his “swet dalyawns,” she lurches like a drunkard, writhing “with gret wepyng and gret sobbyng.” Many people are amazed (“wonderyd”) at these sights and sounds, and the good women, havyng compassyon of hir sorwe and gretly mervelyng of hir wepyng and of hir crying, meche the mor thei lovyd hir. And therfor thei, desiryng to make hir solas and comfort aftyr hir gostly labowr—be syngnys and tokenys, for sche undirstod not her speche—preyid hir, and in a maner compellyd hir, to comyn hom to hem, willyng that sche schulde not gon fro hem. (41) the good women, feeling sorry for her sorrows and astonished at her weeping and crying, loved her much the more as a result. And therefore they, wanting to cheer her up after her spiritual labour, through signs and tokens—for she did not understand their language—prayed her, and in a way compelled her, to come home with them, not wanting her to leave them.40

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This transparent, corporeal communication gains the benediction of no less a figure than Saint Jerome, who appears in her soul and announces “Blissid art thow, dowtyr, in the wepyng that thu wepyst” (41). Saint Jerome is famous for rendering the Hebrew Bible into Latin, and was therefore the supreme figure of translation for the Middle Ages. Lest this point be missed, Kempe even adds the detail that Jerome’s body was “myraculosly translatyd” at his death from Bethlehem to the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, where she has her vision, emphasizing that translatio is a movement as somatic as linguistic. Kempe’s vocalizations move her through and across language, a radiance that does not so much touch the ears as transform the hearts of her auditors. Crying and weeping also allow her to speak across class. Summoned by a “worschepful lady that had meche meny abowten hir” (“worthy lady who had a large retinue,” 72), Kempe is awed by the reverence shown her. When the lady’s priest condemns her crying (“‘What devyl eylith the?’”), she is stilled until the lady takes her alone into a garden. There the two women converse about weeping, and the lady is so impressed that she asks Kempe to join her household. Kempe seizes this moment of authorization to condemn the aristocratic dress and behavior of the place, and departs. Kempe’s tears can also carry across the seemingly insurmountable barrier of silence. When the sympathetic White Friar Master Aleyn is forbidden by his order to speak to Kempe, she longs for his conversation and instruction. They meet long afterward on the street, “and non spak o word to other” (“and neither of them spoke one word to the other,” 69). This empty, aching space is immediately filled by her tears (“sche had a gret cry wyth many teerys”). Christ appears and promises her divine conversation, a future meeting with Master Aleyn, and a new confessor. Some time later she is indeed reunited with Aleyn, but cannot speak “for wepyng and for joy” (70). Her sobs convey what words cannot, however, bridging the silence that had separated them and precipitating a lasting union. Even when her words cannot be heard or her body seen, Margery Kempe’s voice brings her out of segregation and into public space. Unnerved by her vocalizations, the priests in Lynn exile her “owt of chirche” to a private chapel where she will receive communion “fro the peplys audiens” (“out of people’s hearing,” 56).41 There she cries “as yyf hir sowle and hir body schulde a partyd asundyr” (“as if her soul and body were going to be parted”). Two men must enter, presumably from the

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disrupted congregation, and hold her tightly until her crying stops. That her vocalizations are inextricable from her desire for community is underscored when Christ then declares “Dowtyr, I wil not han my grace hyd that I yeve the, for the mor besy that the pepil is to hyndryn it and lette it, the mor schal I spredyn it abrood and makyn it knowyn to alle the worlde” (“Daughter, I will not have my grace hidden that I give you, for the busier people are to hinder and prevent it, the more I shall spread it abroad and make it known to all the world,” 56). “Knowyn to alle the worlde,” indeed, but importantly in this example known first and foremost to her fellow churchgoers at Lynn, who can remove her from their presence but cannot stop her from mingling among them, from permeating their exclusionary community by filling that distance supposed to silence her with sound that spreads her “abrood.” Forbidden shortly thereafter from the chapel by an inimical monk, she returns to church, where she cries “so lowed” that her voice not only saturates sacred space but carries her outside the ecclesiastical structure and into the wider world (“sche cryed so lowed that it myth ben herd al abowte the chirche and owte of the chirche, as sche schulde a deyid therwyth,” 57).42 Kempe’s tears are, as Saint Jerome says, “a synguler and a special yyft,” her point of individuation.43 Wepyng and sobbyng are so integral to her identity that, rather than cease to weep, she tells Jesus that she would rather be taken from the world, “hewyn as small as flesch for the potte” (57). When “bareyn” of her tears, even for half a day, the world loses its “savowr” and “swetnesse,” and she pines unremittingly for a restored “habundawnce of teerys” (82).44 Yet even as her vocalizations become the generative center of her identity, Kempe consistently links her cries to her death. Her favorite metaphor for their sound is that her sonic flow carries the passion of mortal agony, of a body at the last limit of life (“as thow sche schule a brostyn,” “as sche schulde a deyid”). She would “cryin, wepyn, and sobbyn ful wonderfully” at deathbeds, yearning for her own dissolution (72).45 Kempe’s tears and ejaculations mark not just potential linguistic failure, but the ultimate inability of her flesh to contain its inhabiting subjectivity. They empty her self from herself. Kempe draws power from her body, but contra the medieval stereotype of woman, she transcends mere corporeality. Wepyng and sobbyng anchor her in the somatic while providing an anagogic line of flight to transport her beyond the limits of personhood and individuality. Tears and screams make

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Kempe known to the world in her singularity, but they are also in their amplifying and dispersive plenitude the instrument of her self-dissolution.

Great Storms and Tempests (What the Thunder Said) One ventures from home on the thread of a tune. Along sonorous, gestural motor lines that mark the customary path of a child and graft themselves onto or begin to bud “lines of drift” with different loops, knots, speeds, movements, gestures, and sonorities. —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Margery Kempe had much to fear as she traveled: robbery, abandonment, poverty, sexual assault. She also records a recurrent anxiety about storms. In a book that provides little detail about her everyday life— when she goes on pilgrimage, for example, she seems to arrive at her destination without crossing any intervening space—the text’s frequent recording of meteorological phenomena is noteworthy.46 Some storms are metaphorical, like the “wykked wyndys of hir invyows enmyis” (“wicked storms of her envious enemies,” 42), but most are vividly narrated disturbances in the weather that imperil human lives. Lingering in a field in Middelburg (Zeeland) on her way back to England, she is warned by Christ of impending “gret wedering and perlyows.” She flees, terrified: “And many tymes, as sche went be the wey and in the feldys, ther fel gret levenys wyth hedows thunderys, gresely and grevows, that sche feryd hir that it schulde a smet hir to deth, and many gret reynes, which cawsyd in hir gret drede and hevynes” (“And many times, as she went by the way and in the fields, there were great flashes of lightning with terrifying thunder, such that she feared she would be killed, and very heavy storms of rain which caused her great fear and grief,” 42). Earlier in Rome she is grateful when Christ tells her that she must not leave her lodging due to imminent “gret tempestys of levenys [lightning] and thunderys” (39). Indeed, her long stay is marked by “gret tempestys,” “gret

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reynes and dyvers wederyngys” unparalleled in the city’s history.47 These magnificent storms are introduced just after the narrative recounts both her continued rejection by her former maidservant and her inability to understand the words of Saint Bridget’s maidservant without a translator. Tempests hurl themselves at Roman houses, the citizens implore Kempe to intervene, and Christ dissipates the sky’s fury, “preserving the pepyl” and instantiating a grateful community around her. The storms, it seems, function similarly to her vocalizations, reverberating across an anxious world that is transformed in the stillness of their wake. The “hedows melodye” that echoes in Kempe’s ears as she speaks to Richard of Caister for the first time (17) perhaps resounds in the “hedows thunderys” of the Zeeland storm (42), especially because that adjective is so infrequently used in the text. Storms, it would seem, are “boistows,” even in the effects they have upon human bodies. On Kempe’s return to England after her peregrinations in the secondus liber, rough seas during the crossing of the Channel cause her ship to resound “ful boistowsly” with the “voydyng” of seasick travelers. God spares Kempe the “unclene” flow of these tempest-inspired effusions so that she may comfort those who are most severely afflicted, thus allowing her to cross a class barrier that had previously impeded her (II 8).48 Other storms are communications from God, a sonic materialization of his will. Kempe is visiting the chamber in which Saint Bridget died when she witnesses an eruption of wind, rain, and thunder so fearsome that workers in the fields outside Rome must flee to shelter to avoid injury. The atmospheric perturbations, she says, are a divine decree that Bridget’s feast days must henceforth be held in greater reverence. “Gret levyn,” “gret thundyr,” and “gret reyn” in England are the celestial signal that she must wear white clothing again; they also apparently token the coming disparagement and bouts of crying that she will endure as a result of her becoming-white (44). When Kempe is imprisoned by the Steward of Leicester, the townspeople interpret the consequent perturbations of the weather as a portent of heavenly displeasure. Once she is freed by the mayor, the tempests subside (47). When St. Margaret’s, the parish church of Bishop’s Lynn, is threatened by fire, the very townspeople who had been demanding Kempe’s silence beg her to cry and weep. Her “grete plente of terys” triggers a celestial answer in kind, a sudden snowstorm that quenches the flames (67).49 People learn quickly

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to associate the eruption of storms with Kempe. Before boarding a ship to Santiago, she is warned that any tempests encountered on the way will be accounted to her presence and will therefore result in her being tossed overboard (45). The citizens of Leicester blame a second wave of storms (“gret thunderys and levenys and many reynes”) on Kempe’s continued presence and act to remove her quickly from the district (49). The thunderous eruptions of storms are intimately tied to the similarly clamorous flow of Kempe’s vocalizations. When her “wonderful cryis” first appear, Kempe begs Christ to prevent their effusion into public spaces, especially during sermons, and reserve them for private meditations (“be myself alone”) so that she will not face exclusion from communal prayer. Christ replies by speaking of thunderclaps, lightning bolts, and the fury of sudden gales: “Dowtir, thu seist how the planetys ar buxom to my wil, that sumtyme ther cum gret thundir-krakkys and makyn the pepil ful sor afeerd. And sumtyme, dowtyr, thu seest how I sende gret levynys that brennyn chirchys and howsys. Also sumtyme thu seest that I sende gret wyndys that blowyn down stepelys, howsys, and trees owt of the erde.” (77) “Daughter, you see how the planets are obedient to my will, and that sometimes there come many great thunderclaps and make people terribly afraid. And sometimes, daughter, you see how I send great flashes of lightning that burn churches and houses. You may also sometimes see that I send great winds that blow steeples and houses down, and trees out of the earth.” Storms, Christ explains, figure both the movement of divine power through the world (“And ryth so, dowtyr, I fare wyth the myth of my Godheed”) and the inhabiting of her body with divine presence (“as sodeynly as the levyn comith fro hevyn, so sodeynly come I into thy sowle”). Although Kempe does not mention it, this association between storms and divine voice has venerable biblical precedent. God speaks to disconsolate Job from a tempest. In Exodus, only Moses can understand the divine words delivered at Sinai, words that the Israelites experience nonlinguistically as flashes of light, trumpet blasts, and reverberations of thunder (19:16, 20:18). As Mladen Dolar points out, this astounding

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noise endows the Law received by Moses with its very authority, transforming its words from simple signification to a reality-reconfiguring Act (passage à l’acte).50 Perhaps a preponderance of storms in a life that Kempe’s contemporary editor and translator has described succinctly as “turbulent” is no surprise.51 The same thunder that in the Bible figures the unbridgeable gap between the human and the divine is linked repeatedly to Kempe’s self-dissolution in tears and shouts. Just as God sometimes sends “gret reynys and scharp schowerys” into the world, he likewise sends “gret cryis and roryngys” into Kempe (77). Like the storms with which they are analogically allied, like the sonic blasts that brought down Jericho, her cries and weeping disrupt or destroy social architectures and “makyn the pepil ful sor afeerd,” rendering them “astoynd” (astonen, etymologically from Latin “tonare,” to thunder). They also open in their aftermath spaces for the emergence of new kinds of community. Lynn Staley has perceptively observed that Kempe’s final peregrination (the subject of the frequently ignored secondus liber of her narrative) traces “the story of England’s own recent history of involvement in foreign conflict and trade, of its effort to create and maintain an image of community, and of its attempt to erect figures and foundations that embody that image” (Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions, 169). Kempe’s Book critiques the terms foundational to a new, cohesive sense of Englishness—translation, authority, language, conformity—demonstrating alternative communal formations deeply challenging to this ideology of nation. For both communities, the nation and Kempe’s spiritual alliance, English is (according to Staley) the bond that unites “otherwise unlike people” (170). But what the thunder says is something rather different. Nations might imagine themselves communities by unifying their differences via a supposedly transparent language. Kempe, however, knows that language excludes the moment it demarcates. She has as her powerful ally the roaring of thunder and the thunder of roars, needing no words to touch bodies, to bring into being communities of understanding and affiliation rather than of homogeneous language and race. The resonant affinity between Kempe’s vocalizations and these noisy tempests constitutes what Deleuze and Guattari call an “unnatural participation,” an assemblage that catches up two or more unlike bodies, intermingling their otherness and propelling them as newly hybrid forms toward uncertain futures.52 Such strange alliances transmute their par-

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ticipants through a process of contagion that does not respect differences between sexes, species, kingdoms of nature, even material vs. immaterial bodies—a “fearsome involution” pulling its participants “toward unheard-of becomings”: Unnatural participations or nuptials are the true Nature spanning the kingdoms of nature. . . . The difference is that contagion, epidemic, involves terms that are entirely heterogeneous: for example, a human being, an animal, and a bacterium, a virus, a molecule, a microorganism. Or in the case of the truffle, a tree, a fly, and a pig. These combinations are neither genetic nor structural; they are interkingdoms, unnatural participations. That is the only way Nature operates—against itself. (A Thousand Plateaus, 241–42) Just as sound seeks no permission before entering the body and resonating through the flesh, a transportive becoming moves and gathers without regard to subjective integrity: “People do not consciously submit to identity becomings,” Bryan Reynolds observes, “they are infected by them.”53 The ecstatic, transportive, contagious nature of Kempe’s vocalizations is best seen in the storms with which they form just such an alliance. Her tears and cries began a process of exteriorization, a movement out of unified and normative subjectivity in a dispersive embrace of surrounding milieu. Kempe’s becoming-tempest propels her forcefully along that trajectory, a thunderous intensification of sonic flow. Storms ranging through the world, filling city and ocean with the ringing of thunder and the liquid purity of rain, are the ultimate exteriorization of Kempe as her voice, a sonorous abolition intricated in her selfinscription. While engaged in narrating the Book, Kempe is often told by Christ, Mary, and the saints that they are pleased with its inscription. But in addition to these divine words of approval, Kempe “herd many tymys a voys of a swet brydde syngyn in hir ere, and oftyntymys sche herd swet sowndys and melodiis that passyd hir witte for to tellyn hem” (“heard many times a voice of a sweet bird singing in her ear, and often she heard sweet sounds and melodies that surpassed her wit to tell of them,” 89). Karma Lochrie has described the mystical work as “a dual text, oral and written, which asserts divine dialogue with the soul as the only true

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discourse, yet settles for a written discourse powerless to engage its reader in this true discourse” (Translations of the Flesh, 69). Yet Kempe’s Book is not content with its supposed powerlessness to affect readers. In its surfeit of “sowndys and melodiis,” the text seeks constant escape from its own bindings via a boundary-violating process very much connected to Kempe’s ever-expanding refrains of deterritorialized voice. The Book of Margery Kempe is of a triple nature: oral, written, and liquid—that is, possessed of a fluidity that I have been associating with both tears and the privileging of the aural over the verbal. Sobs and roars mark Kempe’s line of flight from those literal and metaphorical constricted spaces where she would not be heard. Luce Irigaray associates tears with the impasse to self-expression women find when engaged in writing their own experience within phallocratic language.54 Eluned Bremner writes of Kempe’s weeping that, even if it figures what Irigaray would call a feminine sound deeply troubling to masculinist language, nonetheless the tears are “by their nature absent from the text,” mere “symbols” interpreted and made knowable through “male consciousness.”55 Kempe’s text, however, counteracts the physical removedness and linguistic distancing such a model describes. Weeping escapes Kempe’s body and Kempe’s narrative to infect her amanuensis in the very act of inscribing the Book: “Also, whil the forseyd creatur was ocupiid abowte the writing of this tretys, sche had many holy teerys and wepyngs . . . and also he that was hir writer cowed not sumtyme kepyn himself fro wepyng” (“Also, while the said creature was occupied with the writing of this treatise, she had many holy tears and much weeping . . . and also he that was writing for her could sometimes not keep himself from weeping,” 89).56 The words of Kempe’s narrative leave her body propelled by tears, and these tears implant themselves in the listening scribe. Weeping as he transforms Kempe’s spoken words into handwritten characters, the scribe infects the act of writing itself with tears. The Book of Margery Kempe in turn becomes hybrid, partly verbal and partly nonlinguistic, partly words and partly tears, stillness of letters and restless vector of sound. This contagion “involving terms that are entirely heterogeneous”—this unnatural participation through which tears seep from Kempe’s history to her body to her narrative to her scribe to her Book, catching up pages and words and sounds and bodies in its unsettling flow—also instantiates an affective model for receiving (rather than simply reading) the text. Even if Kempe’s tears and cries sometimes failed to precipitate commu-

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nity and understanding during her life, her Book will serve not as the recorder but the promulgator of her wepyng, the catalyst for intersubjective assemblages that will implant her affect anew and trigger “unheardof becomings.”

Was Margery Kempe Jewish? [Moses] is not now before me, but if he were, I would clasp him and ask him and through you beg him to explain to me the creation. I would concentrate my bodily ears to hear the sounds breaking forth from his mouth. If he spoke Hebrew, he would in vain make an impact on my sense of hearing, for the sounds would not touch my mind at all. If he spoke Latin, I would know what he meant. —Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, XI.iii As Carolyn Dinshaw has so persuasively argued, Margery Kempe is queer, with all the suggestions of perturbing sexual alterity that cling to that term. This line of reasoning ought to be brought even further: isn’t it true that Kempe is possessed of what might be called a nonbiological sexuality, a spirituality that is her sexuality? The adjective “queer,” moreover, fits Kempe’s “wondirful,” astonishing, unnatural voice better than her body, for it likewise “knocks signifiers loose,” touches bodies, “making them strange.”57 Eve Sedgwick answers the question “What’s queer?” by comparing institutionalized heterosexuality to Christmas. Both “events,” it should be noted, leave someone out: the queer, the Jew.58 These two familiar strangers have often been conflated, perhaps because they stand in extimate relation to the dominant. Both are disruptive, perhaps intolerable others integral to the construction of homogeneity within the community that excludes them. Could Kempe’s queer voice also be called Jewish? Kempe is clearly not a Jew. Her devotion to Christ’s Passion is proof enough of her Christian orthodoxy. The Jewish population of her native Lynn had been exterminated in 1190, when a riot against them ended in massacre and conflagration.59 If any individual Jews returned thereafter,

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they were expelled from England a century before Kempe was born. She does, however, frequently speak of Jews. She codes condemning voices as Jewish, a semiotic maneuver that allows her the historical position of the persecuted Jesus (44). Her frequent prayers are directed toward the conversion of “Jewys, Sarazinys, and alle fals heretikys” (57), expressing the Christian desire for a universality that would do away with the “errant” differences of Judaism, Islam, and nondominant Christianities. Her vision of the Passion includes Jews who treat Jesus “so fowle and so ven[ym]owslych” that she weeps (79). Jews even replace Romans at the crucifixion, rending his garments and nailing Christ’s body to the cross. The adjectives “cruel” and “cursyd” are the most frequent modifiers of the noun “Jewys” in Kempe’s Book. During her vision of the crucifixion, for example, both the Virgin and Kempe curse the Jews for their wickedness with just those adjectives. When the Jews reply to the grieving Mary, their voices are described by a familiar adverb: “And than hir thowt the Jewys spokyn ageyn boystowsly to owr Lady and put hir away fro hir sone” (80). When the Jews answer back, their voice echoes “boystowsly,” without reported verbal content; their voice, rather than their hands, seems to be the agent that moves Mary from her dying son. “Boystows” is, of course, the very adjective that Kempe deploys repeatedly to describe her own voice as a disruptive, astounding sonic flow capable of moving bodies and perturbing communities. Could Kempe’s voice be “boystows” in the same way as the voice of the Jews is “boystows”? The thunderstorms with which Kempe forms her sonorous alliance suggest this possibility, bearing with them as they do suggestions of the biblical voice of thunder that echoes throughout the books of Exodus and Job as the God of the Jews speaks to his chosen people. Oddly enough, Kempe is even accused of being a Jew at one particularly fraught moment in the text. In the city of York, a place where she has experienced “gret wepyng, boistows sobbyng, and lowde crying” (51), Kempe is asked during the archbishop’s interrogation “whedyr sche wer a Cristen woman er a Jewe?” (52). Used loosely, “Jewe” of course means something like “heretic.” Yet at the same time, underneath its metaphorization, “Jewe” always also uniquely signifies a racialized, traumatic body for English Christendom. Kempe’s exorbitant voice structurally places her not only in a queer relation to dominant meanings and institutions, but also in a disjunctive position similar to (though certainly not identical with) the inassimilable Jew: an intractable outsider in the midst of medieval community,

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an inexcluded Other whose recalcitrant, “untranslatable” Hebrew likewise figures the limits of linguistic universality and limns the Christian possible.60 Sylvia Tomasch has argued that the Jew was “central not only to medieval English Christian devotion but to the construction of Englishness itself,” especially after the Expulsion.61 Yet unlike this “virtual” or “spectral” Jew who figures so prominently in Kempe’s own rhetorical construction of Christianity, Kempe attains for her voice both authority and power, at least for a brief period in the fifteenth century, and for the past few decades of our own era. Through the force of her “boystows” flow of tears and cries, Kempe moves into the position of the sexual, social outsider, but in precipitating new kinds of community refuses the possibility—the thinkability—of an identity-sustaining alliance with those racial, religious outsiders with whom she is already queerly close. Kempe does not recognize the Jewish timbre of her voice. By closing off further irruptions of alterity, Kempe reterritorializes her Christian selfhood and leaves unquestioned the fantasmatic place of the Jew within it. That Kempe’s becomings could disrupt the borders of sexual and social identity but stop at the barrier of race is not surprising. Medieval Christian identity was sustained by elaborate, seemingly intractable racial fantasies centered upon the supposed absolute otherness of Jews and Saracens. The next chapter explores the relation between skin color, environment, and racial identity; the psychoanalytic mechanisms of racist fantasy, especially in its relation to enjoyment; and the possibility that medievals were cognizant that race is a phenomenon more cultural than biological, and therefore susceptible to gleeful deconstruction. Margery Kempe did not recognize the voice of the racial other echoing within her own, but that does not mean that she could not.

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6 On Saracen Enjoyment

T Living with the other, with the foreigner, confronts us with the possibility or not of being an other. It is not simply—humanistically—a matter of being able to accept the other, but of being in his place, and this means to imagine and make oneself other for oneself. . . . The word foreshadowed the exile, the possibility or necessity to be foreign and to live in a foreign country, thus heralding the art of living of a modern era, the cosmopolitanism of those who have been flayed. —Julia Kristeva, “Toccata and Fugue for the Foreigner” Because she writes in universalizing terms, feminist and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva has been dismissed as an essentializing throwback to her Parisian predecessors, the existentialists led by Jean-Paul Sartre, with their Big Pronouncements on la condition humaine.1 In Strangers to Ourselves (Étrangers à Nous-Mêmes)—the title of which even cites Albert Camus—Kristeva conducts a poetical investigation into the place of the Other, arguing that a painful self-estrangement suffuses all human subjectivity.2 Because in this formulation a foundational otherness is everywhere, the counterargument goes, it is nowhere. I must admit to never having understood the logic of this kind of dismissal, frequent in scholarly circles (e.g., “If queerness is everywhere, it is nowhere”): many things

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are omnipresent—oxygen, altruism, violence—and they do not vanish once confronted with that fact. But the anxiety that provokes such a dismissal of Kristeva’s thesis is understandable, for any universalism would seem to exclude the determinative power of the local, the contingent, the historical, all of which are central to contemporary critical work on ethnicity, race, and culture. This chapter conjoins the grand gestures of psychoanalysis to the temporally circumscribed discourses of medieval and postcolonial studies to excavate some of the identity machines that constructed and sustained race in late medieval France and England. These three modes of analysis find a natural point of overlap in exploring the cultural work of the Saracen, whose dark skin and diabolical physiognomy were the western Middle Ages’ most familiar, most exorbitant embodiment of racial alterity.3 Most previous scholarship has been content to explain the ubiquity of Saracens in medieval texts by reference to their function in crusading propaganda, where their monstrous presence serves as both a call to arms and an uncomplicated antithesis to Christian identity. When a spurious but widely circulated epistle declares that the infidels who have invaded the Holy Land circumcise Christian boys and “spill the blood of circumcision right into the baptismal fonts and compel them to urinate over them,” it is clear that these demonized figures perform their blasphemous acts to unite the text’s auditors in a shared Christendom and mobilize their combined forces against them.4 Such historicizing explanation works admirably well in demonstrating the contextual determination of race, linking the promulgation of a spectacularly embodied otherness to a contemporary program of martial displacement and Christian corporate solidification. More difficult, however, is accounting for why outside of empty nostalgia or mere convention Saracens and Jews continue to inhabit the fantasies of times and places no longer passionately invested in the destruction of Islam or Judaism. My aim in this chapter is therefore threefold: to trace briefly the genealogy of a violent, racializing identity machine rooted in corporeal otherness that spreads the body across environment and objectal world; to argue that medieval constructions of otherness included the knowledge that the biology of race is produced and sustained through repetitive acts of representation, so that this truth could be deterritorialized, disrupted, at the moment of its embodiment; and to suggest that psychoanalysis because of its universalizing tendencies provides a useful means for breaking the power

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of universals, allowing the particularities of the Other to become visible at last. In the end, I would like to consider what Kristeva could possibly mean by the resonant phrase that ends my epigraph. What, exactly, is the “cosmopolitanism of those who have been flayed”?

The Matter of Race The relationship between Christendom and Islam changed abruptly with the First Crusade. This event did not bring knowledge. —R. W. Southern, Western Views of Islam The noun “Saracen” has a long history in the Christian vocabulary for the representation of religious and racial difference, but did not at first necessarily carry pejorative implications.5 One of numerous descriptors in the vocabulary employed by Latin writers to refer to Arabs, Muslims, and easterners more generally (including Arab Christians), the collective Latin noun Saraceni and its vernacular derivatives have a long history, but were disseminated after 1096 with a special vigor throughout the West in support of the Crusades. The Saracen contained within reductive flesh the diversity of the Eastern world. As Amin Maalouf has observed, among the famous “Saracen” resisters of the Christian occu pation were Arabs (Ibn Amm¯ar, Ibn Munqidh), Turks (Zangi, Nur al-Din, Qalawun), Armenians (al-Afdal), and Kurds (Saladin and al-Kamil).6 Their armies incorporated whatever warriors were willing to fight on their behalf, including various peoples from the steppes. A majority spoke Arabic and had in fact been “Arabized,” but many did not, as the frequent use of interpreters in chronicle accounts attests. Although Christians often represented their enemies as a force united by its singlemindedness, most of the alliances among these groups were at best tentative as principalities, families, factions, ethnic and religious communities, independent cities attempted to realize their competing political ambitions. Many Muslims were also at this time involved in a bitter internal conflict about the practice of their faith, pitting the Sunni majority nominally aligned with the caliph of Baghdad against a group with  whom they cohabitated in the largest cities, the Shi is (associated with

On Saracen Enjoyment

the Fatimid caliphate of Cairo, but divided into a number of schisms). Also living among the Muslims and enjoying a fair degree of religious freedom were numerous non-Latin Christians, including Jacobites, Maronites, Melkites, Monophysites, and Nestorians.7 In those areas it called its Holy Land and its East, as well as in proximate Iberia, western Christianity had a long experience of heterogeneous cultures. Some were clearly allied by kinship, affinity, geography, political expedience, religion; others were divided amongst themselves or against their neighbors; all were as ethnically various and politically mutable over time as the inhabitants of those lands that the Latin Christians had left behind in Europe. The Christians often played competing groups off each other through selective alliance, indicating that they were all too well aware of the complexity of this “Saracen” diversity. But just as Christianitas seldom acknowledged its own internal differences, promulgating instead a transnational, transtemporal myth of essential unity and sameness, the non-Christian world was likewise represented as lacking interior variation.8 Peter the Venerable, the abbot of Cluny who spent a lifetime pondering the contiguity of Islam and Christianity, might have hesitated in the title of his Liber contra sectam sive haeresim Saracenorum, indicating a widespread uncertainty whether Islam was a secta (body of belief independent of Christianity) or haeresis (heresy), but he knew that all Saracens shared its errors (hence the unnuanced collective plural Saracenorum), and tautologically that sharing rendered them Saracens.9 In textual and pictoral representation throughout the Middle Ages, Saracens did not necessarily possess identical bodily contours, facial features, or skin color. Indeed, they could be depicted as similar in body and even in soul to Latin Christians. Often, however, real cultural specificities were lost when the inhabitants of Iberia and the East were unified beneath the sign “Saracen,” a figure who could condense everything inimical to the fragile Christian selfsame into monstrous, racialized flesh. That the body of the medieval Other could be a racialized body perhaps needs some elaboration. Robert Bartlett has influentially argued that race in the Middle Ages was closer to what we would today call ethnicity. While observing that the language in which race was expressed (“gens, natio, ‘blood,’ ‘stock,’ etc.”) would seem to be biological, Bartlett nonetheless asserts that “its medieval reality was almost entirely cultural.”10 Bartlett defines medieval race as a compound of language, law,

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power, and blood. Because only the last of these determinants is rooted in the body, Bartlett stresses, race was a category of identity plastic in its deployment. Modern technologies of racial discrimination and containment (special badges and clothing, ghettoization) emerged only after an emphasis on descent and uniformity became prevalent in the late Middle Ages.11 Even then, however, the biological determination of race proceeded from a preoccupation with blood in its relation to lineage and inheritance rather than from a cultural interest in skin color and physiology, making medieval racism different in kind from contemporary versions.12 Dermal and physiological difference, the most familiar markers of embodied race, play no role in Bartlett’s formulation because he overlooks race’s humoral-climatological (that is, medical and scientific) construction. Race for Bartlett is a social identity that ultimately has little to do with bodies. Another scholar, faced with what seems to be just such a “modern” linking of bodily difference and skin color to racial typing, likewise hesitates to invoke the possibility of a premodern bodily discrimination of race. In a footnote to her magisterial work on the scientific construction of sexual difference in the Middle Ages, Joan Cadden puzzles over a reference by Albertus Magnus connecting the color of black women’s skin to their supposed sexual aptness. Since so little scholarship exists on the medieval language of skin color, she writes, it is difficult to evaluate black skin as a possible racial signifier.13 Yet skin color is never a mere fact, but is from the moment a difference in pigmentation is imputed already caught in the imbricated discriminations that make race inextricable from religion, location, class, language, bodily appearance and comportment, anatomy, physiology, and other medical/ scientific discourses of somatic functioning.14 In his recent remarks on the belatedness of discussions of race to medieval studies, Thomas Hahn locates the appearance of Michael Awkward at a Kalamazoo panel in 1995 as an important event that may have caught its audience “unawares or unprepared,” but John Block Friedman argued two decades ago that race (even if monstrous race) is central to medieval identities, and can be read only by reference to geography, theology, and bodily morphology.15 Recent work by Steven Kruger maps medieval race as a somatic phenomenon encompassing the imbricated mutability of gender, sexuality, and religion.16 Suzanne Conklin Akbari stresses the climatological construction of what eventually becomes European whiteness.17 Geraldine Heng underscores the shared work of juridical and textual

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constructions of racial alterity in ameliorating trauma and precipitating national cohesion.18 Bruce Holsinger reads the Latinate “global imagination” behind Bernard of Clairvaux’s fascination with a verse from the Song of Songs (Nigra sum sed formosa, “I am black but beautiful”) as a universalizing, Crusade-inspired attempt to produce homosocial desire and “racialized violence.”19 These medievalists stress that race is a phenomenon of multiple category overlap rather than a distinctly reifiable or measurable “thing” (that is, race is constructed; it has no independent ontology), and that race is therefore always written on and produced through the body (race is nonetheless biological). These conclusions, it is worth noting, are wholly consonant with recent work in contemporary critical race theory, which likewise describes race as at once wholly artificial and insistently somatic.20 An erasure of embodied race in Cadden and Bartlett is perhaps traceable to the fact that both scholars focus their attention silently and almost exclusively on the Christian body, which then functions in their analysis in just the way the medieval corpus Christianum presented itself: as a universal body unmarked by such differentiations. The crusaders, for example, could argue that despite the fact that they were self evidently an ethnically diverse group, they nonetheless constituted the gens Christiana, a “transnational race of people defined by their religion . . . a race and nation of Christian subjects” (Heng, “Cannibalism, the First Crusade, and the Genesis of Medieval Romance,” 107). Strictly speaking, the Christian body did not have a race (just as, ideally, it did not have a gender or a sexuality), because the body of the Other always carried that burden on its behalf. In writing embodied race out of the Middle Ages, a medieval logic is being reenacted. Anatomical appearance, the medical composition of the body, and skin color were in fact essential to the construction of difference throughout much of this period, especially in Christian representation of the Jews who lived in their midst (gens Judaica) and of Iberian and eastern Muslims (Saraceni).21 Geraldine Heng has argued that a multifarious, recognizably modern racial discrimination is fully evident by the time of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), a juridical intervention obsessed with disciplining bodies and making difference immediately visible upon them.22 In Heng’s analysis, the thirteenth century encouraged the proliferation of virulent new racisms, practiced especially against Muslims and Jews. These discourses of racial difference were dependent upon “the intense and searching

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examination” of “religion, color, and bodily difference” (“The Romance of England,” 139). Heng emphasizes the epistemic novelty of such thirteenth-century differentiations, but in constructing a racialized alterity via reference to character, color, and bodily appearance, Christian writers were also citing a tradition far predating encounters with Islam. Greece and Rome both had direct, extended experience of Africa, especially through Egypt and the trading cities of the Mediterranean littoral, but also via contact with diverse peoples from throughout the continent. Through African bodies classical writers fantasized connections among geographical origin, cultural essence, and a biology of race (by which I mean a scientific discourse in which variations in skin color and physiology, in the medicalized body, were placed in a determinative relationship to personal and group identity). In speaking of Ethiopians, classical geographers, historians, mythographers, philosophers, and medical theorists were referring generally to dark-skinned people in all of Africa, whose coloration, it was thought, resulted from a sun so intense that it had long ago overheated and transformed the white skin of their ancestors.23 Greek myth described the Ethiopians as pious and therefore favored by the gods, while Greek medical writing (the so-called Hippocratic corpus) insisted that, like the plants and animals in their countries, the Ethiopians were “drier, hotter, and stronger.”24 In an influential formulation, the Roman naturalist Pliny wrote that the “Ethiopians are burnt by the heat of the heavenly body near them, and are born with a scorched appearance, with curly beard and hair. . . their juice is called away into the upper portions of the body by the nature of heat” (The Natural History, 2.80). Dark skin is a permanent and collective biological fact, an ancient climatological reconfiguring of the body through a compensatory distribution of the humors that enables human survival in an inclement environment. This somatic adaptation makes perfect medical sense. The outward sign of this particular structuration of the body’s materiality is a swarthy complexion—where dark skin is simply the signifier of a solar-induced aridity and a resultant outward movement of the blood.25 Ethiopians differed in corporeality and therefore potentially in character from Romans and Greeks (and Germans and Celts). For some classical writers, the complexion and humoral balance that characterized the races of the world’s hot and cold zones elicited stereotypes about these extreme peoples that could buttress Greek or Roman pride

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in their own well-ordered minds and bodies, a reflection of their inhabiting the desirable temperate or middle regions.26 For others, such an otherwise organized body was simply a geographical accident, so that blackness marked race but did not necessarily entail racism.27 Greek and Latin patristic writings contain few references to skin color, prompting Jean Marie Courtès to observe in a survey of the materials that “blackness was not regarded as a specific racial difference, but simply as the darkest of the various shades of color found among the peoples of the Mediterranean Basin and the East.”28 Origen, for example, hypothesized that damned souls would inhabit black bodies after the Resurrection, since they would be forced to inhabit the darkness; he makes his pronouncement without reference to racial difference in his own world (Courtès, “The Theme of ‘Ethiopia,’” 12). Augustine, on the other hand, declared that unlike plants and animals, which are composed of different species, all humans derive from the same parents and humankind therefore forms a unity that cannot be divided into races. Even the so-called “monstrous races” were therefore eligible for a full humanity.29 Boethius observes that black skin coloration is what philosophy calls an accident, an outward corporeal mark without bearing on inner ontology. An Ethiopian has color, Boethius writes; that does not mean that he is his color.30 Jerome, on the other hand, took his point of departure from a pronouncement from Jeremiah that appears to insist upon the substantiality of race denied by Boethius. In a proverbial formulation, Jeremiah likened the Ethiopian who could change his skin color to the leopard who could change his spots—that is, such a thing does not exist, since skin color and spots are part of their respective natures, even if originally “accidents” (“Si mutare potest Aethiops pellem suam?” Jer. 13:23). Jerome insists that the “nature of being” can in fact be changed, but only “by the One who is its principle of existence and action” (Courtès, “The Theme of ‘Ethiopia,’” 17). In Jerome’s reading, all the peoples of the world were originally Ethiopians, whose blackness is a figure for skin. Whiteness marks the cleansing advent of repentance and baptism.31 In an attempt to summarize the Ethiopian within the admittedly diverse sources that compose the patristic corpus, Courtès writes that they contain no “hierarchical classification of the races” and do not ultimately argue for “the superiority of one to the other,” but that this equality is “only theoretical, metaphysical, notional” (32). It is not necessarily

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the case, in other words, that an abstract ideal that all races merit salvation will enjoin a political practice of equality for embodied persons and nations. Despite the continued importance of figures like Augustine of Hippo, medieval Christianity eventually lost its direct geographic connections to Africa—or, more accurately, Africa began to occupy a more marginal space within the conceptual geographies of the West. Paradoxically, Jean Devisse has observed, it was only once the Occident felt itself cut off from Africa that images of black-skinned peoples became “insistently, intimately, and essentially present.”32 It is important to note, however, that despite the contraction of trade and travel attendant upon the fragmentation of the Roman Empire, African-European connections endured in various forms, as papal letters of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries attest.33 The fact that an early archbishop of England, Theodore, was a Greek from Arab-ruled Tarsus has been noted approvingly as a sign of Anglo-Saxon cosmopolitanism, but less attention has been given to the fact that he was accompanied by the abbot Hadrian, an African who had previously turned down Pope Vitalian’s offer of the same office. Bede describes Hadrian in the Historia Ecclesiastica IV.i as a “man of African race” who was proficient in both Greek and Latin, a rare linguistic accomplishment for the time. The Normans who later managed to establish themselves as the aristocracy throughout much of Europe were in constant contact with Africa and with Arabic culture. Familial ties intimately connected them to the ethnically mixed communities of both Sicily and Iberia, areas known for the flow of people and goods to and from the Barbary coast—a region that in turn was connected in various ways to trade and migration reaching to the sub-Sahara.34 Although Africa has always supported an extremely diverse population, Christian writers tended to think of the continent as that region of the world belonging mainly to pagans with dark skin. Christians were long familiar with classical discourse on the Ethiopians, and incorporated it into new fantasies about generic bodily difference in its relation to geographical origin. The climactic determination of the pigmentation and humoral balance of the black body received its most influential medieval treatment in Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae, which essentially repeats Pliny’s assertions about somatic adaptation and solar proximity.35 In the thirteenth century, Albertus Magnus drew upon, then amplified classical precedent to argue that the heat of Africa was written every-

On Saracen Enjoyment

where across the Ethiopian body: “The earthly members which are inside them, as bones, become very white as is apparent in their teeth. Their flesh is suffused with blood as if they are glowing coals, as is apparent in their tongues and throats when their mouths are open. And they have prominent mouths, thick lips, reddened eyes, veins and eye lids.”36 Since skin color was a bodily signifier of the distribution of passions within individuals and groups, medical writers like Galen had linked corporeal difference to attendant variations in character. Christian writers in turn read the signs of the racialized body as indicating a foundational moral difference among unbelievers. Like Isidore before him, Bartholomaeus Anglicus found in the black body a spiritual deficiency derived from a somatic one, because “the sonne abideth long over the Affers, men of Affrica, and brennen and wasten humours and maken ham short of body, blacke of face, with crispe here. And for here spirites passe oute ate pores that ben open, so they be more cowardes of herte.” In contrast, cold for Bartholomaeus is the “modir of whitnesse,” and the white skin of northerners is the outward marker of their inner valiance.37 Mandeville divided Ethiopia into an eastern portion where the people were black, and a southern portion where they were blacker. As a result of the climate, he wrote, all Ethiopians ate little, were easily intoxicated, and often suffered diarrhea. Not surprisingly, Ethiopia in Mandeville’s Travels is also a place of bodily deformity.38 From an early date Christian allegoresis aligned black skin with the devil, with Ethiopians consequently appearing as diabolical figures in the writings of Jerome, in early saints’ lives, and even in the Voyage of Saint Brendan, where on a lonely island far from Africa the Irish navigator encounters the devil in the Hieronimian guise of an Ethiopian boy (Navigatio S. Brendani Abbatis, 7). In his Moralia in Iob, Gregory the Great (c. 540–604) interpreted Ethiopia as a symbol of the fallen world, its blackness a figure for sin.39 Ælfric contrasted the beautiful whiteness of the boys spotted by Pope Gregory in the slave market with the darkness of devils, a skin color he associates specifically with Ethiopia.40 Paulinus of Nola declared that Ethiopians were burnt by sin rather than sun, while a popular school text glossed “Ethiopians” simply as “sinners,” and stated that “Ethiopians are . . . black men presenting a terrifying appearance to those beholding them.”41 Thomas of Kent’s Roman de Toute Chevalerie describes Ethiopians as a race without moderation (mesure) whose inability to maintain a system of patrilinear descent renders them like beasts of the field (“cum bestes

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en pasture”).42 For Benoît de Sainte-Maure (c. 1150), “in regions where the days are hot and burning . . . [the people] have no law, religion, or reason, justice or discretion; not knowing the difference between right and wrong, they are more felonious than dogs.” Benoît immediately inscribes climatological and physiological difference as an exorbitantly visible somatic difference, describing these “hot” peoples as black, horned, and hairy, with large ears and noses.43 Jacques de Vitry likewise linked torrid climate to the determination of negative racial character: “In the East, especially in hot regions, bestial and wanton people . . . easily embark on the path that leads to death.”44 In theory, the racialized body was no different from, for example, the senescent body: both were a neutral result of a specific balance of humors (bile, blood, choler, phlegm), moisture, and heat.45 Just as the humoral model of the body in its gendered specificities was deployed to denigrate women, however, its racial differences were likewise constantly susceptible to diverse ideological misappropriations.46 Christians had in their historical store some affirmative possibilities for the representation of the black body. Balthazar, one of the three Magi who visited Christ at his nativity, was frequently depicted with dark skin, as were Saint Maurice, Prester John, and the Queen of Sheba. The first non-Jew to receive baptism was an Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:26–40), and Moses even wedded an Ethiopian woman (Numbers 12), an event said to figure the advent of the Gentile-directed church. Yet Thomas Hahn captures the ideological utility of such Christianized blackness precisely when he observes that the inclusion of the African Balthazar in representations of the Epiphany allows Europe to assert “its universalizing dynamic, appropriating otherness as a means of expanding its own horizons” (“The Difference the Middle Ages Makes,” 3). As Benoît and Jacques make clear with their references to “bestial,” “wanton,” and “lawless” people, Africa, the intemperate South, provided a handy palimpsest for the racialized and moralized representation of Islam, and especially of the Muslim East.47 By the time the Cursor Mundi was composed in the early fourteenth century, Saracens “blac and blu als led” (black and blue as lead), with large eyes and “unfreli” (repulsive) faces, could be confidently said to maintain their home in “Ethiopi” (8072–8122). In the Saracen, a shared alterity was written across a collective body, and this somatic difference, grounded in contemporary scientific discourse (astrology, humoral theory, and climatology) was a racial difference potentially en-

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compassing religion, skin color, anatomy, sexuality. Benoît’s conjoining of monstrous corporeality with a similarly monstrous lack of reason to describe in crusading idiom the horned, black “felonious dogs” of the intemperate regions of the earth demonstrates how easily the classical vocabulary of race was transferred and amplified.

Black Skin, Black Masks The world is white no longer, and it will never be white again. —James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son Despite the ambitions of some polemicists, “Saracen” never quite became a monolithic category, but remained throughout the Middle Ages a figure with generic, historical, contextual specificities. Saracens in manuscript illustrations are often not dissimilar to Christians, except perhaps for exotic clothing or alien heraldic devices. The same lack of interest in corporeal distinguishability can hold true in historical and literary texts. I would therefore not want to exaggerate my claim and insist that the Saracen was always and everywhere a monstrous Other, a racialized figure eternally abject and intolerable. Positive, neutral, and negative representational possibilities coexisted for the Muslim, often in a structure of mutual support, just as they did for the medieval Jew.48 Christians were well aware of the wide diversity in dermal pigmentation among the various ethnic groups who practiced Islam; indeed, black skin could denote in the Islamic world the same racial inferiority with which the Christians would associate it. “Passing” episodes enabled solely through the deployment of linguistic and sartorial disguise, or through the shaving or donning of hair, occur with regularity in both historical and literary accounts of the Crusades. When such narratives do not concern themselves with skin color, it is obvious that “Franks” and “Saracens” are being acknowledged as possessing the same hue. Yet Christian fantasy found a repeated delight in the imagining of the flesh of Saracens (and Tartars, and other conflatable Others) as being as dark as the classical Ethiopian, so that the Ethiopian quickly became inextricable from the Saracen. Although not every Saracen was imagined as having black skin, Ethiopian complexion was established as a signifier

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for the Saracen body, and a sun-influenced balance of the humors a scientific explanation for the aberrance of the Saracen personality. Most Saracen armies were therefore represented as having at least some members distinguished by their skin color and physiognomy, and this viciously racialized version of the Muslim exerted a strong fascination over Christian writers.49 To infernal skin color, moreover, were conjoined other marks of corporeal otherness. The Borgia mappamundi depicts a dog-headed rex Sarracenus Ethipicus (Saracen Ethiopian king) in Africa, who with his similarly disfigured subjects is naked propter solis calorem (because of the heat of the sun).50 Crusade propaganda figured Islam as an inassimilable body exorbitantly marked by racial difference and threatening the corporate integrity of Latin Christendom.51 The Saracen was visualized in the act of eviscerating, impaling, or forcefully circumcising Christian bodies, even though the Christians themselves were fully committed to just such a program of inordinate corporeal violence.52 When Matthew Paris illustrates the retaking of Jerusalem by Saladin, the battlefield on which mounted Christians and Saracens engage is littered with severed heads and arms. Horses trample limbs while blood flows copiously, a visual inscription of the threat to international Christian identity that the trauma of Jerusalem’s loss posed. Mohammed in the same manuscript of the Chronica Majora (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 26) is depicted with a banner reading Poligamus esto, “I proclaim polygamy.” Like Embrico of Mainz, Gauthier de Compiègne, Guibert of Nogent, Giraldus Cambrensis, and countless other medieval writers, Matthew Paris envisioned a degrading biography for “Mahomet” in which a pig consumes the corpse of the inebriated prophet, the ultimate insult to a holy man who declared pork unclean and forbade the consumption of wine.53 Saracen bodies carry two significations for Paris, as they do for the post-Crusade medieval period more generally: they are too sensual (luxuriosus) and too aggressive (bellicosus). Thus in his Contra paganos, Alan de Lille declared Islam an “abominable sect, one suitable for fleshly indulgences” whose founder was, in a word, “monstrous” (Uebel, “Unthinking the Monster,” 274). Like all monsters, racist representations inevitably conjoin desire and disgust. The Saracens were no exception. The extended visualizations of “lusty, black-skinned people” in the Chanson de Roland, for example, brought “the darkness of Africa” queerly close to Christianity, a temptation within a threat.54 The poem describes both Margariz, whose

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beautiful body attracts the lingering eyes of Saracen ladies and Christian men, and Abisme, a Saracen neirs cume peiz ki est demise (black as molten pitch) whose skin color and character are inseparable (he enjoys perfidy, murder, and heresy, 1474–75). Another Saracen leader, Marganice, rules over Africa (Ethiopia, Carthage, Alfrere, Garmalie), where he holds “the black race [la neire gent] under his command; / their noses are big and their ears broad” (1917–18; cf. 1933–34: “[they] are blacker than ink / and have nothing white but their teeth”). During battle scenes groups of warriors are described according to the physical difference that sets apart their race: the Milceni, with their large heads and pig-like bristles on their spines (3221–23); the Canaanites, who are simply ugly (3238); the fiery desert dwellers of Occian, whose skin is so hard they do not wear armor (3246–51), and who bray and whinny in battle (3526); giants from Malprose (3253); the Argoille, who bark like dogs (3527). These racialized fixations are all the more startling when it is recalled that, according to Einhard, Charlemagne’s rearguard was attacked not by Saracens but by Basques (Wascones). In the Roman de la Rose, Guillaume de Lorris embodied Dangier as a Saracen with red eyes, a blunted nose, and black, bristly skin.55 In Aliscans, a chanson de geste describing the exploits of Guillaume d’Orange, a pagan king named Agrapars embodies racialized Saracen alterity well. His hair is curly and unkempt, his nose hooked, his body deformed and corpulent, his nails leonine, his eyes like fiery coals. Agrapars’s teeth are canine and he attacks in battle by clawing and biting. His adversary taunts him by declaring “‘You are low born and wild! / You look to me to be a monkey’s child!’ [‘Moult es pute racine; / Très bien resembles de lignage de singe.’]”56 That the otherness of the Saracen is racially marked seems obvious enough, but it is also worth noting that this alterity is constructed through social class and gender as well. Medieval peasants, Saracens, and Jews shared darkened skin as a signifier of their inferiority and proximity to the bestial.57 Most Saracens were imaged as male, even if the Saracen’s masculinity often deviated from Christian norms. Although historically women on both sides participated in the Crusades, the textual world constructed by crusader texts (histories as well as romances) is a relentlessly homosocial one. Nonetheless, Islamic women were not completely ignored by the Christian representation machine. Laws were frequently enacted to stop sexual unions between Christian men and Jewish and Muslim women; such miscegenation was associated with bestiality

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and sodomy, and was likewise punishable by death.58 While the desire to touch the alienated body was prohibited in life, however, textually this caress was enacted repeatedly. Saracen women, rich in both material wealth and talents, provide beautiful wives for heroes like Bevis of Hampton (who marries Josian) and Guillaume d’Orange (whose wife Orable was previously married to the African Tiébaut).59 Such women convert eagerly to Christianity, and their embrace of their new religion is more a declaration of what they always already were (white—that is, Christian—before the fact) than a true conversion from one state to another.60 Although the chansons depict some male conversions to Christianity (Otuel, Fierabras), for the most part the masculine Saracen body is obdurately Other: typically a Saracen chooses death over a newly Christian life. In a striking example of the inextricable bodily link between Saracen race and Saracen masculinity, when the King of Tars becomes a Christian at the urging of his Christian bride, his skin is transformed at baptism from black to white.61 Nor were all Saracen women depicted in positive (that is, assimilationist) terms. Just as the male Muslim body might be depicted as softly effeminate, Muslim women could be demonized or masculinized, like the scythe-wielding giantess Amiete in Fierabras, the cannibalistic hunchback Guinehart of Aliscans, or the diabolical sultaness in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale. De Weever finds in the vituperative figure of the black female Saracen a hybridization of misogyny and racism through a triple confluence of representations: the wild woman, personified vice, and “death itself, la mort, feminized through grammatical gender.”62 Michael Uebel has argued that because Islam was an alien presence at the heart of those lands from which the West traced its religious history, the Saracen “like the monstrous race of Cynocephali (dog-headed men) with whom they were often identified . . . symbolized the blurring of ideal boundaries, such as those separating rational man from animal” (“Unthinking the Monster,” 268). The Saracen is a monster, an abject and phantasmatic body produced through category violation in order to demarcate the limits of the Christian possible. As such, there were no real Saracens in the Middle Ages. And yet Saracens could uncannily take on a life of their own. In at least one text they seem to have attained a certain amount of self-consciousness about their status as distorting representational project. In an episode from the fourteenth-century composite history of France known as the Grandes chroniques, the Saracen

On Saracen Enjoyment

army of Cordova employs a tactical mimesis to defeat the seemingly indefatigable cavalry of Charlemagne: At the point that our first contingent was about to join battle with the first contingent of the Saracens, a great crowd of their foot-soldiers placed themselves in front of the horses of our fighters; each one had a horned mask, black and frightening, on his head, that made him look like a devil [et avoit chascuns en sa teste une barboire cornue, noire et horrible, resemblant à deable]. In his hands, each held two drums together, making a terrible noise, so loud and frightening that the horses of our soldiers were terrified, and fled madly to the rear, in spite of the efforts of their riders.63 In order to frighten horses and men, the Saracens don black masks with racialized physiognomies, a curious case of “passing” in which Saracens disguise their faces in order to resemble themselves, in order to become the demonized figures that they are often represented as being already. The scene is magnificently illustrated in a manuscript of the Chroniques now at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (MS FR. 2813). Uncertain French knights swathed in fleurs-de-lis retreat from blackskinned enemies with excessively racialized visages: huge noses, ears, and mouths; inhuman grins; demonic eyes; bestial horns. Without reference to the surrounding text, a medieval observer of the minutely rendered scene might not guess that the Saracens are wearing masks, for their caricatured corporeality is wholly consonant with other textual and pictorial representations of Muslims.64 The Saracens of Cordova participate in the same program of abjecting representation as the verbal descriptions of Agrapars and Marganice, but by inhabiting such stereotypes through an act of will, they expose the constructedness of this promulgated otherness. The immense Grandes chroniques de France (ten volumes in their modern edition) synthesized and condensed into a harmonious narrative the diverse Latin chronicles relating to French history. By translating this past into the vernacular and making it readily accessible, they sutured together a disparate reading public (clerics, kings, nobles, merchants, and other members of the thriving middle class) and allowed these varied groups to imagine themselves a community. The Grandes

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Figure 4. Masked Saracens in Grandes chroniques de France. Bibliothèque Nationale, MS FR. 2813, fol. 119. Used by permission of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

chroniques were a textual machine that projected into the “contested past of French history” the unified nation and timeless collective identity that it was in fact actively engaged in precipitating, so perhaps it is no surprise to find an acknowledgement that racial identity resides in process more than essence.65 Yet the strategic mimicry of the Cordovan Saracens stands out all the more clearly for the unhesitating reductiveness of the episode that precedes it in the Grandes chroniques. Before Charlemagne’s assault on Cordova, Roland battles the Saracen giant Fernaguz, “descended from Goliath” (uns geanz du lignage Golie), a monster whose gross body is meant to encode everything dangerously excessive about the Muslim world (VII 240, 108).66 The encounter between the two foes is both an explication of proper chivalric comportment (when Roland sees that the giant is weary, he allows him to take a nap, even placing a stone under his head to allow him to rest more comfortably) and, more importantly,

On Saracen Enjoyment

of the imperviousness of Christian identity. Martial combat quickly gives way to an extended catechism in which the giant asks naïve, Nicodemuslike questions about Roland’s faith (“Who is this Christ in whom you believe?” “Explain to me how three things can be one.” “Why must one believe in the resurrection?”). His adversary replies with patient explication of ecclesiastical doctrine. At the point at which the giant seems too reasonable, when it seems through his questions and interest that the difference that Fernaguz enfleshes is coming too near the Christian singularity for which Roland stands, a familiar ritual of disidentification is staged: “I shall fight you,” said the giant; “if what you say is true, may I be vanquished.” . . . Then Fernaguz leaped forward and seized Roland with his fists, bent him to the ground, and easily pinned him. When Roland saw that there was no way at all for him to escape, he piously began to call upon the Son of the Virgin for help, and he helped his champion leap up and pin the giant beneath him. Roland caught his sword and pressed it into the navel of the giant, who began to shout in a loud voice, calling upon his god: “Mahomet! Mahomet! My god, help me, I’m dying.” [“Mahomet! Mahomet! Mes diex secor moi, car je muir.”] Roland then left the field, hale and hearty, to the army of Christians. (VIII 249, 114) When pagan and Christian subjectivities seem close enough almost to touch, violence erupts to redraw the faltering self/other boundary, this time in blood. A pure realm of Christian signification where even nonsense (Fil de la Virge, “Son of the Virgin”) makes perfect sense, where prayer is an efficacious speech-act, is contrasted to a Saracen language in which those same prayers in the mouth of the Other are revealed as nonsignifying—as if “Mahomet” could ever serve as a designation for god. Fernaguz dies when he is literally and figuratively stuck in place, pinned down within a signifying system that codes his dark body as wholly monstrous. Fernaguz destabilizes Christian certainty by beginning to seem too similar. This ambivalence is quickly vanquished by having Roland kill the monster and perform the ritual of “I am not that.” The black skin and devilish features that the Cordovan Saracens adopt elicit a similar

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identity panic in their foes, a momentary “ungrounding” of bodies, “making them strange,” silently acknowledging the artificiality of the devil-Saracen construct.67 The diabolical masks of the Grandes chroniques are in this way the equivalent of the blackface employed in an early episode from Aliscans, during which a Saracen prince who does not adequately embody his alterity is smeared with charcoal in order to align his fair flesh with the dominant representation of Islamic racial otherness.68 In both narratives, the artificiality of the identity “Saracen” is tacitly admitted, even if quickly disavowed.69 Nor are instances of blackface dismissable as simply literary fantasies. During the Cheapside tournament in 1331, sixteen knights rode through London larvati ad similitudinem Tartorum, masked to resemble Tartars.70 Michael Camille argues that just such a scene of racial impersonation is illustrated in the Luttrell Psalter, where a knight with couched lance charges an adversary with dark skin, a hooked nose, and exaggerated lips.71 That race can be performed, that dominant representations and the bodies grouped beneath them do not necessarily coincide, is dangerous knowledge that can topple whole epistemological systems. And so in the Grandes chroniques de France, Charlemagne destroys his Cordovan foe utterly: “the announcement was made throughout the army that everyone should cover his horse’s head with cloth or sheets, so that they might not see the masks, and to stop up their ears, so that they could not hear the shouts of the Saracens, or the sounds of their drums” (IX 252, 115). Veiled eyes, earplugs, and a violence that is consequently both blind and deaf seem to be the only reply that the Christians can give to this message offered by the very Other it has itself constructed.

Joie in the Other The reader cannot help posing the question of Shylock: Hath not a sultan eyes? hath not a sultan hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? If you wrong him, shall he not revenge? —Dorothee Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby

On Saracen Enjoyment

“When, beneath the black mask, a human being begins to make himself felt,” wrote James Baldwin, “one cannot escape a certain awful wonder as to what kind of human being it is.”72 As suggested by both Baldwin and by the book by Frantz Fanon upon which the last section’s title played (Peau Noire, Masques Blancs), the mask has frequently been taken in modern criticism as a figure for the cultural work of race in fabricating identities that do not necessarily coincide with the subjects that they obscure. The masked performance of corporal difference by the blackened Saracens of Cordova likewise underscores the complexity of racialized medieval representations. Jacqueline de Weever sees the Christian representational project as fundamentally a masking of the other, and quotes the anthropologist A. David Napier to good effect: “the presence of masks in situations relating to transition is so commonly the rule that exceptions to it are hard to find.”73 Napier identifies some of these possible “transitions” as rites of passage, exorcisms, and the incipient altering of rules and laws. How is it, then, that the masked Saracens intimate the constructedness of racial stereotypes and yet fail to bring about any cultural change? Why do racialized representations remain tenacious even after they are literally unmasked, vigorously enduring in times and places far removed from their originary moment? How did Saracens exert a power of fascination so long after the specific religious and colonialist ambitions through which they had been actively promulgated lost their urgency? In this next section I would like to suggest that fantasies of racial difference are always constructed through a structure of enjoyment that, even if historical in its genesis, may—once absorbed into the deep structure of identity—function immune to subsequent transformations of cultural context. Unless the collective jouissance that saturates racializing images and narratives is somehow disentangled, altered, emptied of its mesmerizing power, then the fantasies that this enjoyment supports remain impervious to historical change. It is not enough simply to reveal the artificiality of race (or any other identity) in a specific case: the fantasy that structures enjoyment and produces race (or any other identity) must likewise be ungrounded in order for change to enter the world. This may all sound too Lacanian, too abstract, or too postmodern, but late medieval England performed a version of this psychoanalytic insight through The Sultan of Babylon, a popular romance obsessed with Saracen enjoyment.

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Fantasies of Saracen bodily difference have always been inextricable from fantasies of the pleasures of Saracen bodies. The superabundant wealth, plentiful luxuries, and hedonism of the Saracens were medieval commonplaces. Norman Daniel, for example, observed that even though the prohibition of alcohol was “one of the best known facts of Islamic life and faith” (probably because it seemed so extraordinary to medieval observers), wine nonetheless flowed copiously at the lavish banquets in which Christian writers imagined Saracens indulged.74 In a typical scene from a chanson de geste, Guillaume d’Orange discovers in an enemy tower a cornucopia of wealth and pleasures: armor, weapons, women, bread, meat, spiced wine (both piment and claré).75 The imagined excesses of Saracen enjoyment were insistently connected to the supposed inordinateness of their sexuality. Here the importance of astrological theory on the determination of race can be seen: because they supposedly originated in the distant south, where the planet Venus was thought to be ascendant, Saracens were said to be bodily predisposed toward licentiousness. Jacques de Vitry, who had been both a crusader and a bishop of Acre, asserted that those considered most religious among the Saracens were those who had impregnated the most women.76 Anti-Islamic polemic and literary texts alike agreed that the Saracens permitted polygamy, adultery, concubinage, and sodomy.77 Hutcheson and Blackmore aptly label erotic excess the “unique mode” for the conveyance of Muslim cultural and racial alterity.78 John Boswell documented the obsessively imagined sexual indulgence of the Saracens, stressing a Christian preoccupation with their sodomy (Guibert of Nogent declared that Saracens not only had many wives, but enjoyed themselves with other men as well) and polymorphous perversity (Jacques de Vitry identified Muhammad as a proselytizer for indiscriminate sex with men, women, and animals).79 This “paradise of supreme enjoyment” centered upon a “boundless jouissance” is strikingly similar to Mladen Dolar’s psychoanalytic vision of the cultural work performed by later occidental fantasies of the luxurious Orient.80 What motivates such fantasies, Dolar argues, is that they provide a “subject supposed to enjoy,” a figure who consumes and hoards the enjoyment that “we” as westerners have renounced in order to be westerners.81 Orientalist dreams of distant, extravagant indulgence provide a necessary support for the West’s sacrificial systems of nationhood and identity in that they maintain the fantasy that a potentially re-

On Saracen Enjoyment

coverable full enjoyment is in fact located somewhere, even if it is not possessed by “us.” Nowhere does the enjoyment of the Saracen Other exert more textual fascination and receive a more complex treatment than in The Sultan of Babylon (c. 1400).82 In this unparalleled narrative, the textual location of “joie” (the Middle English word that best corresponds to “enjoyment”) at first seems to reinforce Christian unity at the expense of a dehumanized foe, but the narrative ultimately inhabits the subject position of that foe to unground the fantasies sustaining his alterity. Like the masked Cordovans with their dismaying mimicry, the Saracens of this romance expose the contingency of race, its historical fragility, but the obliteration of these racialized bodies does not yield the same satisfaction—the same obscene enjoyment—as the destruction of their brethren in the Grandes chroniques. The Sultan of Babylon does not reveal what Saracens are “really” like, nor does it argue that race is as artificial (and therefore as easily discardable) as a mask, but instead demonstrates that only when a fantasy of otherness is inhabited from the inside will it begin to lose its obstinate grip. The Sultan of Babylon (Cairo/Africa) is Laban, enemy of all things Christian, including theocratic empires. The Saracens whom he leads against Rome are typical of the demonized Muslims encountered in crusading polemic and chansons de geste. Monstrous in their sexual and aggressive excess, they slay ten thousand Christian maidens at a time, leading the Sultan to declare bluntly, “I wole distroie over all / The sede over alle Cristianté!” (234–35). Embodying an alien, racialized physicality, these Saracens are typically described only in terms of their skin color (“soom bloo, some yolowe, some blake as More,” 1005).83 Unintelligible in their customs, language, and vice, they worship senseless idols, torture prisoners, ride strange beasts, murder innocents. During the prolonged battle scenes that form the narrative heart of this as well as most other Charlemagne texts, the majority of Saracen bodies exist to menace Christian integrity and as a consequence be spectacularly destroyed. The giant Estragote, a foot soldier in the Sultan’s army, embodies in excess these familiar alterities. Like most Saracen names, and like the culture for which they stand, “Estragote” is untranslatable, incomprehensible.84 His hybrid body is barely human with its dark skin, boar’s head, and monstrous strength:

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And Estragot with him he mette With bores hede, blake and donne. For as a bore an hede hadde And grete mace stronge as stele. (346–49) Like all giants, Estragote is a “grete gloton” (427), a body that ingests the certainties upon which secure identities are built and makes them unintelligible by transforming them into inassimilable difference. When in typically extravagant terms the Sultan decrees exuberantly that all Roman citizens shall be utterly destroyed (“Beest ner man, childe nere wife, / Brenne, slo, and distroye alle!” 417–18), Estragote immediately strides to the gates of the city and shatters their protective iron with a single blow from his mace. Just as the giant enters helpless Rome, the citizens drop the portcullis and slice him in half, through the “herete, lyver, and galle” (434). The visualization of Estragote’s opened body, its viscera impossibly visible, is followed by a lingering narrative stare at the dying Saracen’s body. The scene conjoins anxiety at the monster’s excess to a deflationary amusement at the spectacle that it has engineered: He lai cryande at the grounde Like a develle of helle; Through the cité wente the sowne, So loude than gan he yelle. Gladd were all the Romaynes, That he was take in the trappe, And sorye were al the Sarsyns. . . . Thai lefte him ligginge there. Mahounde toke his soule to him And brought it to his blis. (435–48) Estragote’s ironic “blis” is to be transported to hell by Mahounde (Muhammad), where the suffering engendered at the breaking open of his body will continue into eternity. The reader’s “blis,” meanwhile, is the delectation of conjoined visual exorbitance, a body in pain, and linguistic cleverness. The somatic rebuke to the giant’s identity is staged as laughable (at least for the Christians), and in order to work depends upon a perverse

On Saracen Enjoyment

enjoyment being located in the smashing of the Saracen’s flesh. So far nothing unusual: battles against Muslims, written from a Christian viewpoint, always invest their enjoyment in this way, so that readers are never permitted to identify with or humanize the enemy.85 Indeed, long series of ritualized dismemberments are the structuring principle of martial combat for most Charlemagne texts. In the Chanson de Roland, a poem obsessed with the flow of blood as a racializing demarcation of nation (estrange regnet vs. lurs païs, Espaigne vs. France), Roland’s evisceration of the pagan Chernubles may lack the dark humor propelling the death of Estragote, but the text invests its sadistic pleasure within a similar poetics of disidentification written as bodily disaggregation: [Roland] smashes [Chernubles’s] helmet with its gleaming carbuncles, He hacks [trenchet] through the body and scalp, He hacked through his eyes and face, Through the shiny hauberk and close-meshed mail Through his entire body right down to his crotch, And right through his saddle, wrought of gold; The sword has come to rest in the horse itself. He slices through its spine, he never sought out a joint, He throws him dead in the meadow on the thick grass.86 The violent, slow-motion destruction of this Saracen takes on a special force when it is remembered that his body was originally presented as a site for spectacular disidentification because of its origin in a diabolic elsewhere (975–84); just as Chernubles yielded a perverse enjoyment at its monstrous construction, his flesh perversely yields a similar pleasure at its impossibly prolonged dismemberment.87 Saracens and their successors in racialized otherness, the Tartars who traumatized Christians and Muslims alike with their unexpected appearance in the midthirteenth century, were often imagined as cannibals whose great pleasure was to consume the bodies of their enemies.88 The Margariz episode indicates one register in which Christian cannibalism worked. Indeed, the spectacle of the Saracen’s broken form was so much the center of narrative consumption for crusader romances that in Richard Coer de Lion, the English king is depicted as an enthusiastic cannibal of such bodies

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in pieces, recommending that all Englishmen ingest Saracen flesh to stay vigorous. Richard’s gastronomy merely renders a long-established site of textual enjoyment more visible by writing it in corporeal terms.89 If The Sultan of Babylon located its joy only in such straightforward scenes of Christian triumph and violent bodily rebuke, there would be little to differentiate it from the Chanson de Roland, written three hundred years earlier, with its much remarked reductive sloganeering (Paien unt tort e chrestïens unt dreit, “The pagans are wrong and the Christians are right!” 1015).90 The Chanson de Roland envisions a nearly womanless world. The pagan queen Bramimonde and Roland’s would-be wife Aude never advance the action, and seem to exist only to convert (and vanish) or die (and vanish); the woman who is at once Charlemagne’s sister, Roland’s mother, and Ganelon’s wife is never present in the text, nor even named.91 Charlemagne’s victory in The Sultan of Babylon, on the other hand, would not be possible without the active participation of both Laban’s children, his son Fierabras and his daughter Floripas. When the imprisoned Twelve Peers are on the verge of starvation, Floripas provides them with a magic girdle that makes them feel as satisfied as if they had just attended a feast. Ingestion, the body of the other, and enjoyment are complexly conjoined throughout the romance. Thus the girdle is lost when Roland discards a Saracen body wearing it; revenge is taken upon the pagans as they are massacred at a feast; a long battle scene involves a skirmish over a Saracen food delivery; the prison that Floripas maintains for Roland and company is as well stocked with maidens as victuals (“Thai were ful mery in that dongeon,” 1661). Likewise, having at last captured Rome the victorious Saracens celebrate as follows: Thai brente frankensense That smoked up so stronge The fume in her presence, It lasted alle alonge. Thai blewe horns of bras; Thai dronke beestes bloode. Milk and honey ther was, That was roial and goode. Serpentes in oyle were fryed To serve the Sowdan with-alle. (679–87)

On Saracen Enjoyment

All the familiar stereotypes about foreigners, medieval and modern, find their place here: they make too much noise, they smell bad, they eat repulsive foods, their excess is disgusting. Delicacies like serpents fried in oil and “beestes bloode” (later specified as the blood “of tigre, antilope and of camylyon,” 1008) are matter that does not constitute human aliment and that therefore allies the Saracens with the anthropological unclean.92 This culinary alterity suggests that, like Estragote’s name, Saracen culture is untranslatable, nonsensical, asignifying. In his work on the psychoanalytic dynamics of ethnic violence,
i
zek has argued that in order to answer the question “What are Slavoj Z we aiming at, what do we endeavor to annihilate, when we exterminate Jews or beat up foreigners in our cities?” we must first rephrase the query as “What does our ‘intolerance’ towards foreigners feed on?”93
i
zek’s reformulation indiThe language of ingestion that underwrites Z
i
zek cates the oral fixations that characterize discourses of otherness. Z insists that even though constructed through “a series of features” experienced as intolerable, the other is never simply reducible to a finite list of attributes. There is always “‘something in them more than themselves’ that makes them ‘not quite human.’”94 Ethnic and racial vio
i
zek argues, is an attempt to snatch or destroy (“strike a blow lence, Z against”) what might be called the “unbearable surplus-enjoyment” of the other. Powerful fantasies structure the relationship between subjects and their own “lost” enjoyment, which (against all evidence to the contrary) they see as being possessed by this other. Persecution, racism, and genocide are therefore never simply reducible to rational political, religious, or economic causes. Indeed, in a work that might be called the psychoanalytic supplement to Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), Alain Grosrichard has argued that an economy of enjoyment undergirds all Western fantasies of the East. Structure du sérail (1979, trans. The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East) demonstrates that the West as a political system relies on a fantasy of a distant and despotic subject supposed to enjoy in order to conceal its own despotism, its own tyranny over its subjects.95 Enjoyment in the Other saturates The Sultan of Babylon, a text that invokes almost every medieval fantasy about the exorbitance of Islam. The Sultan Laban hoards a wealth beyond measure, and a key scene involves his daughter commanding that the royal treasury be hurled over

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the city walls to confound her own father’s army. Saracen maidens willingly offer their bodies to Christian men. Abundant food, drink, sex, and magic characterize Saracen culture. This Christian fantasy of enjoyment in the other no doubt propels the long narrative gaze upon the Sultan’s feast of fried snakes and animal blood, but it does not adequately capture the full force of how the passage works, since it is one of the few times in the narrative when no “blow is struck” against the Saracens’ jouissance. Once the celebratory meal is described, the text simply states that a communal cry erupts from the reveling pagans: “‘Antrarian, antrarian!’ thai lowde cryed / That signyfied ‘Joye generalle’” (689– 90). These two lines are extraordinary. A nonsense word (“Antrarian!”) is introduced and glossed as if it were Sarrazinois—that is, as if the Saracens possessed a unifying, signifying language.96 Unlike the meaningless difference embedded in names like “Estragote” (a concatenation of sounds that signals its difference by its very nonsense), linguistic alterity is here both admitted and analogized through enjoyment: “antrarian” means “joye generalle” (“communal joy”).97 Placed immediately after the repulsively strange repast, the gloss undercuts the simple logic of “you are what you eat” through its insistence upon verbal equivalence and cultural translatability. The glossing of alterity in The Sultan of Babylon occurs for the most part in passages having no analogue in the romance’s sources, suggesting that the composer of the Middle English romance had a special interest in the possibility of thinking with the Other. As Catherine Brown has eloquently demonstrated, eating (mastication, rumination, ingestion, digestion, even eructation) provided medieval theorists a store of analogies for explicating the process of intellectual consideration, especially of difficult texts: “The text resists; you take it into you, but it is not ‘you’; you break it open, suck it, chew it; you change it, and it will change you” (“In the Middle,” 561). Beatus of Liébana, Petrus Comestor (“Peter the Eater”), Gregory the Great, Bernard, and Augustine used food and digestion to understand the process of encountering otherness. Likewise The Sultan of Babylon is fascinated by Saracen stomachs and the challenge that their enjoyments pose to the limits of the Western tolerable. The “wilde beestes bloode” that the Saracens drink is made comprehensible when we are told that their warriors imbibe it to excite their courage in battle. After the Saracen Mersadage of Barbary is cut off in

On Saracen Enjoyment

the midst of his threats by a Christian hurling a dart through his heart, Laban orders his dead minion carried back to the royal tent: And beryed him by right of Sarsenye With brennynge fire and riche oynemente And songe the Dirige [Office of the Dead] of Alkaron  [the Qur a¯ n], That Bibill is of her laye [faith] And wayled his deth everychon Sefen nyghtis and sefen dayes. (2269–74) This extended visualization of Saracen funeral rites combines with a gloss on their culture as a “people of the book,” thus acknowledging difference in the Other but relativizing rather than rebuking. Dismayed that Christians were not more energetically combating the dangers that he perceived in Islam, Peter the Venerable had commissioned a Latin  translation of the Qur a¯ n by Robert of Ketton (Liber Legis Saracenorum quem Alcoran vocant, 1143). Having in theory been made comprehensible to Latin ears, the sacred writings of the Saracens could now in fact be loudly condemned by Christian commentators as the scribblings of a madman, impossibly confused and lacking logical structure.98 Unlike Peter and his followers, however, The Sultan of Babylon takes pains to  demonstrate that the rituals of the Qur a¯ n make culturally specific sense. The author takes every opportunity to display an erudition of foreign customs, filling his interpolations with learned “facts” and nonjudgmental descriptions not found in his source materials. Religious rites repeat and become comfortably familiar. Particularizing names and linguistic diversity are bestowed upon what in the romance’s sources is an undifferentiated Saracen horde.99 The text’s enjoyment in the Other finds its ultimate expression not in the monstrous excesses of the Saracen body, but in the domestic and collective structures of belonging that the Christians resolutely do not allow their enemies to maintain. Early in the romance the Sultan declares that Sire Ferumbras, my sone so dere, Ye muste me comforte in this case:

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My joye is all in the nowe here And in my doghter Dame Floripas. (93–96) Laban’s “joye” is his family, specifically his son and daughter, both of whom he will ultimately lose to religious conversion. The only Christian counterpart to the Saracen “joye generalle” of communal feasting and Laban’s “joye” in his children is Charlemagne’s ever-active sword, “Joye” (850, “Joyeuse” in most other Charlemagne texts). This contrast between Saracen joy in integrative social structures (family, race, and religion) and Christian joy in violence directed against such identity systems is stressed in the odd scene when, after the giant Estragote and his avenging wife Barrok have been slain, Charlemagne’s men find the monstrous couple’s children. Discovered during the plunder of the city of Mantrible, these baby giants are seven months old and fourteen feet tall. They immediately give Charlemagne “grete joye” (3024). He orders both to be christened, naming one Roland and the other Oliver—significantly, the names of two of the Twelve Peers whom the French king has recently lost to the Sultan because of their prickliness and his own paternal inflexibility. Charlemagne envisions raising the children himself, perhaps as more docile versions of the knights they nominally replace. Unfortunately, however, Thay myght not leve; her dam was dede; Thai coude not kepe hem forth. Thai wolde neyther ete butter nere brede, Ner no men was to hem worthe. Here dammes mylke they lakked there; They deyden for defaute of here dam. (3031–36) The triple repetition of the reason for their death makes clear the impossibility of the children’s assimilation into Christian otherness: they die because Charlemagne’s men can never provide a home, never provide a protective structure of “joye” anything like a family; they starve because, once Charlemagne smashes out their mother’s brains (2949– 52), they are deprived of breast milk (in medieval medical discourse, synonymous with the spilled maternal blood). As long as Charlemagne’s “joye” is a sword, a weapon aimed against Saracen domesticity and collectivity, Christian fraternal identity is doomed to inhabit a circumscribed, diminishing world.

On Saracen Enjoyment

This complex trigonometry of enjoyment in The Sultan of Babylon cannot be said to bring about an understanding of Islam, since the text’s Saracens are as imaginary as those in the Chanson de Roland, and its facts about Muslim culture are mainly invented. “Antrarian,” strictly speaking, is as nonsensical as “Estragote.” Yet glossing alterity in The Sultan of Babylon amounts to temporarily inhabiting a Saracen subjectivity (where “Saracen” is a cultural shorthand for the position of the Other), allowing the text to deterritorialize Christian chivalric identity and expose the love of violence upon which its code of masculinity is founded. The text locates its joy in Saracen belonging and envisions a Christianity integration into which is death: Laban, abandoned by his son and daughter who do not—as in the analogues—urge his conversion, spits in the baptismal font and is beheaded. Now the death of any particular Saracen is unlikely to unsettle the racialized hatred that provoked his killing. Having slaughtered King Marsile, Emperor Baligant, and thousands of their compatriots, the triumphant Charlemagne in the Chanson de Roland is told by the angel Gabriel that more Christians await his help against invading Saracens. The response of this twohundred-year-old ruler is a weary exclamation (“‘Deus,’ dist li reis, ‘si penuse est ma vie!’” 4000), suggesting the impossibility of any final victory against an enemy so inextricable from Christian self-definition. To return to psychoanalytic terms, because racial hatred directed against
i
zek explains, limited “to the ‘actual enjoyment in the Other is not, as Z properties’ of its object but targets its real kernel, objet a, what is ‘in the object more than itself,’” the object that draws this hatred is therefore “stricto sensu indestructable: the more we destroy the object in reality, the more powerfully it rises in front of us” (“‘I Hear You with My Eyes,’” 107). Hence the paradox of anti-Semiticism: as the number of exterminated Jews rose during medieval and modern pogroms, and the number of physically present Jewish bodies consequently dwindled, the more obsessed their persecutors became with Jewish presence. It is clearly insufficient to “expose” phantasmatic constructions of alterity as errors of fact. Such fantasies must be traversed, emptied of their power to fascinate, of their ability to elicit and entrap enjoyment.100 Mladen Dolar argues that Lacan’s dictum “One doesn’t interpret the fantasy, one has to ‘go through’ [traverser] the fantasy” can be enacted textually, depriving it of its “natural and self-evident air” and revealing its contingency, its groundlessness.101 Devoid of identity-sustaining force, the fantasy becomes no

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longer sustainable, no longer enjoyable, precipitating something close to the harrowing but potentially productive state that Lacan called subjective destitution. The Sultan of Babylon performs just such an estrangement, leaving the centuries-old “truth” of Saracen racial otherness no longer self-evident, nullifying from the inside the structure of enjoyment that sustains the myth of a Saracen who is racially, culturally, ontologically Other. By intervening in a matrix of historical and literary representations, making exorbitantly visible the cathexes of pleasure through which it is maintained, The Sultan of Babylon traverses the fantasy and renders it insupportable. Western eyes are faced not just with the constructedness of Saracen alterity, but their own passionate complicity in its enduring vitality. Going through the fantasy, exposing its partiality and disrupting its consistency, fractures jouissance and propels the subject into that painful realm where, as Julia Kristeva argues, “Being alienated from myself, as painful as that may be, provides me with that exquisite distance within which perverse pleasure begins, as well as the possibility of my imagining and thinking the impetus of my culture” (Strangers to Ourselves, 14). This universalizing possibility of egress from the pseudo-universals of culture is exactly the opposite of solipsism—is, in fact, the only way to smash solipsism and see with an Other’s eyes. Inhabiting the otherness abjected from the self acknowledges, first, that the self is not personal, but social, not singular, but plural (Kristeva’s “split identity, kaleidoscope of identities”), and, second, that only by estranging (making a foreigner of) the self can “real” others assume their proper place in all their particularities outside of fantastic co-construction. This painful process, this smashing of the self and smashing of fantasy and smashing more than anything of language—of literature—is in the end the “cosmopolitanism of those who have been flayed.”

Coda: Saracen Chaucer and Literary Enjoyment Perhaps The Sultan of Babylon is so textually preoccupied with Saracen bodies because England had recently returned to thoughts of both Africa and Islam. In 1390 a contingent of English nobles participated in a crusade to Tunis, laying siege to al-Mahdiya. Froissart records public

On Saracen Enjoyment

prayers and processions for the departing crusaders, and even if the expedition ultimately made few military gains, it nonetheless “returned crusading against Islam to the agenda of practical politics” for some time to come.102 Yet “Saracen” was also a mobile category that could be made to encompass almost any non-Latin Christian. As Paul Sénac and Matthew Bennett have demonstrated, the undifferentiated gens perfida sarracenorum could as easily refer to Vikings, Vandals, and other unbelieving invaders as to practitioners of Islam (L’image de l’autre, 22–24; “First Crusaders’ Images,” 102). A “song [cantinela] of Roland” was sung to the Norman troops before the Battle of Hastings, metaphorically transmuting the English into Saracens.103 Jews were especially vulnerable to conflation with Muslims under the violent, collective power of the term. The Chanson de Roland boasts that, like historical crusaders, Charlemagne demolishes les sinagoges along with les mahumeries (mosques, 3662), while “every large crusade from the first to the fourth is associated with pogroms.”104 The Luttrell Psalter, composed decades after the Jews had been expelled from England, is nonetheless populated by hook-nosed anti-Semitic caricatures, some of whom have been painted with the black skin elsewhere reserved for Saracens.105 This same manuscript even deploys Saracen bodies to represent the most troubling of contemporary enemies, the Scots (Camille, Mirror in Parchment, 284–90). Through the agency of romance and historical texts, Saracens had long ago invaded English history to mark a nonspecific, instantly rejectable otherness: both King Horn and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britannie fantasize that Saracens once attempted to invade Britain, and in both cases they are allied with or take the place of Saxons in a racializing moment intended to buttress Anglo-Norman claims to superiority and difference.106 “Saracen” could therefore be deployed to encode a wide range of anxieties that tied to race and nation, anxieties that were as frequently domestic as international. Even if an obsession with enjoyment in the Other derives in part from England’s mercantile, religious, and martial encounters with alterity abroad, The Sultan of Babylon also encodes in the Saracen a propinquity of differences at home. Claire Sponsler has observed that late medieval London’s fifty thousand citizens were derived from diverse regions of the country as well as France, Spain, Italy, the Low Countries, and Greece, rendering the city especially susceptible to outbreaks of xenophobic violence.107 In response to this potential volatility, John Lydgate composed two mummings in 1429 that

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featured Oriental merchants and Jewish elders bearing gifts to the citizens of the city, thereby reinventing “native and foreign relations within the charged space of polyglot, ethnically diverse, socially divisive, and economically competitive London” (Sponsler, “Alien Nation,” 230). Like Lydgate’s “festive interventions,” The Sultan of Babylon encourages English citizens to hesitate before projecting fantasies of absolute difference and stolen enjoyment on the alieni who lived among them, catalyzing that cosmopolitanism that Kristeva aligned only with modernity. Because race, language, and the formation of a national literature are inextricably bound, the Saracens of The Sultan of Babylon should also be read as embodying some of the linguistic struggle surrounding contemporary constructions of English identity. In the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, England was preoccupied with the racial purity of its vernacular. French was being systematically demolished as the premier literary language; a nationalistic alliterative revival was arising north of London; Parliament enacted legislation against the colonization of English by Celtic loanwords and proper names. The Sultan of Babylon may well have been written around 1400, the year that Geoffrey Chaucer died, and perhaps just as other writers were beginning the official process of his canonization. Chaucer had intervened into a “fractured vernacularity” to establish English as the unifying language of literature.108 The Sultan of Babylon intervenes into Chaucer’s intervention, colonizing Chaucer from within. Although its exact source does not survive, the romance was clearly based upon a text like London, British Museum, Egerton 3028, an Anglo-Norman narrative that redacts and abridges two related French works, Destruction de Rome and Fierabras.109 Unlike these texts, however, the Middle English romance cites Chaucer unmistakably, repeatedly—and anonymously. This silent citationality establishes Chaucer as a literary authority, as a voice that must be heard within other voices for them to be literary.110 Whereas the audience for most Charlemagne stories is assumed to be loosely conversant with its array of characters and themes, rather than with specific texts, The Sultan of Babylon cites The Canterbury Tales and perhaps Troilus and Criseyde to construct an ideal community of readers with a knowledge of English as a literary language, of what proper English poetry sounds like (it sounds like Chaucer). Chaucer’s authoritative literariness is performed throughout the romance, and almost never has a parallel in the Anglo-Norman ana-

On Saracen Enjoyment

logues.111 More than simple borrowing, these citations always proceed in a Chaucerian spirit, reworking their source material to unexpected and sometimes amusingly ironic effect. Here, for example, is how The Sultan of Babylon stages the reader’s introduction to the Saracen world: Hit bifelle bytwyxte March and Maye, Whan kynde corage begynneth to pryke, Whan frith and felde wexen gaye, And every wight desirith his like, Whan lovers slepen with opyn yye As nyghtngalis on grene tre . . . This worthy Sowdon in this seson Shope him to grene woode to goon, To chase the bore or the veneson, The wolfe, the bere and the bason. (41–52) The passage employs Chaucer’s favorite words, the ones he overused to the point at which their meanings became unstable (“pryke,” “worthy”). Chaucerian images are poached, along with their familiar wording (“Whan lovers slepen with opyn yye”).112 But the author also signals that he comprehends what outside of specific words, phrases, and images constitutes the English literariness of the General Prologue. Whereas Chaucer invoked conventional seasonal images in order to reinvent spring as the time when a young man’s fancy is moved to pilgrimage, The Sultan of Babylon reinvents Chaucer to render spring the season when a wicked Saracen sultan’s thoughts turn first to hunting and then to making war. Both authors deterritorialize the natural as pilgrimage, hunting, and warmongering are shockingly (and amusingly) aligned with the rising of sap, the awakening of sexual desire, and the environmental construction of the human body. The complexities of enjoyment in the Other, made structurally foundational within a language itself exorbitantly invoking (and enjoying) Chaucer’s deployment of English as the language of literary enjoyment, racializes this originary moment even as it deconstructs it. English vernacular literature becomes possible through a metastasis of enjoyment in the Other. English Chaucer, The Sultan of Babylon insists, is only made possible through Saracen Chaucer.

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postscript Possible Futures

T The chapters of this book assumed their final forms by the summer of 2001. Living and working in Washington DC, it is difficult not to feel that the world has suddenly and profoundly changed since that time. My office is only a few blocks from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and I was on campus when the events of September 11 occurred. Upon entering the administrative building where I had an early meeting, I saw the footage on a TV turned to CNN of a plane embedded in the World Trade Center, and thought it a horrible accident. Not long afterwards we were evacuated under a warning that the Pentagon had been hit and that a fourth hijacked plane was en route to the obliteration of the White House, not knowing that heroic measures had already caused its crash in Pennsylvania. When the Air Force fighter jets roared over the city a few minutes later, those of us making our nervous way toward the subway ducked and believed for a moment we might die without seeing loved ones again. David Charlebois, who had once been my neighbor and dogwalking companion, was the copilot of the plane forced to explode into the Pentagon, and attending his funeral will always haunt me. For a week we lost our mail to anthrax contamination. Not long ago my car was stopped and guns pointed at all nearby motorists so that the Vice President could be escorted into his mansion. It used to be that it was impossible to walk from the Metro to the Folger Library without a tourist asking for directions to the Capitol; now I mostly see armed guards and warnings of restricted areas. Knowing that I was leaving early one recent morning to catch a flight, my son stayed awake from the time he went to bed at eight in the evening until 4 a.m. so that he could kiss me goodbye a final time as I left, so fearful was he that the plane I was about to board would not arrive at its destination. Alexander is only four years

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old, but carries with him the anxieties of someone who has seen too much of the world. It breaks my heart. Rereading for a final time the chapters that compose Medieval Identity Machines makes me think, however, that the world has perhaps not been so deeply reconfigured as the trauma of September 11 sometimes makes us feel. Certainly, the magnitude and violence of the attacks cannot be downplayed, nor can the sense of violation that they engendered be dismissed or even explained away. Sadly, however, the hatred that motivates events like the cataclysmic destruction in New York, Washington, Afghanistan has long precedent. A subtext of this book about the Middle Ages has been that human beings have seldom learned mutual respect not only for the differences that distinguish cultures but also for the internal differences within nations and other collectives. Chivalry might have mandated the perfect union of horse and man, but it was also predicated upon causing the violent demise of people who did not share the same faith, the same language, the same class values, or sometimes people who simply owned coveted land. The twelfth-century valorization of marriage dictated mutual consent as the antecedent to coupledom, but was tied to a clerical denigration of women and the dissemination of misogynistic stereotypes that still haunt. Saintly Guthlac apparently killed men simply because they did not speak his Mercian tongue and they dared to be offended when his natio expanded into their land. Margery Kempe struggled against the constraints placed upon her gender for her entire life; she died without knowing that she would one day achieve the iconic status that she so long had sought. Christians have monsterized and murdered dissenters, Jews, Muslims, other non-Christians for centuries while arguing that their compassionate God desires this flow of blood. Too many inheritances of the crusades endure. These are, in fact, pieces of the stories that I told in this book. Yet in reviewing these chapters in the wake of catastrophe I am struck by one thing: how affirmative they are. This bent is in a way required, I think, by their Deleuzian inspiration, for as a philosopher he was insistent upon not abandoning joy, upon not giving in to despair, a value to which he held even as he took his own life. This, then, is the Middle Ages I would like to continue to see: not a time and place imbued with naïve optimism or filled with edenic purity, but an expanse much like this present in which horror and life coexist, and in which we can with a sober mind still choose joy.

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Notes

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Introduction 1. Caroline Bynum makes a related series of observations in a quick browse through contemporary scholarship on the body in her important article “Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective,” 3–5. Whereas Bynum argues that the body tends to be “incommensurate” and “incomprehensible” across the disciplines, however, I am most interested in mapping possible disciplinary points of convergence, and in imagining where the combined momentum of such analyses might lead. 2. “Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin? . . . This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia” (Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 178, 181). 3. In How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, N. Katherine Hayles describes the posthuman not as “antihuman,” but as the dispersed opposite of the unified, autonomous, and privileged “liberal humanist view of the self . . . a conception that may have applied, at best, to that fraction of humanity who had the wealth, power, and leisure to conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice” (286). Although she asserts that “we have always already been” posthuman (279), her book deals exclusively with contemporary science and science fiction. Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston argue that “posthuman bodies do not belong to linear history” because “they are of the past and future lived as present crisis” (“Introduction: Posthuman Bodies,” 4), yet their collection of essays Posthuman Bodies focuses exclusively on the late twentieth century. A more measured analysis is conducted by Diana Fuss in her introduction to Human, All Too Human, where she writes that “the human is a linguistic, cultural, and sociopolitical construct of comparatively recent date” (1). Typically, however, all of the essays in the volume address the recent fate of the human rather than its deep history; even the early modernist Marjorie Garber writes on contemporary dogs (“Heavy Petting” in Human, All Too Human).

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Notes to Introduction 4. This body of possibility is inspired by their reading of Spinoza. Michael Hardt describes it as “a dynamic relationship whose internal structure and external limits are subject to change. What we identify as a body is merely a temporarily stable relationship” (Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, 92). Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin similarly argue that totalized bodies are the products of “a psychic investment” or of an ideology, turning to Deleuze and Guattari for a more multiple and dispersed conception of somaticity; see their “Introduction” to Framing Medieval Bodies, 3. For this “open frame” in action, see Rubin’s essay “The Person in the Form: Medieval Challenges to Bodily ‘Order,’” esp. 100. 5. The body so conceptualized, it should be noted, avoids the impasse of what is known as the constructivism versus essentialism debate by moving beyond both. Manuel De Landa describes this difference well: “Although many constructivists declare themselves ‘antiessentialist,’ they share with essentialism a view of matter as inert, except they do not view the form of material entities as coming from a Platonic heaven or from the mind of God, but from the minds of humans (or from cultural conventions expressed linguistically). The world is amorphous, and we cut it into clear forms using language. Nothing could be further from Deleuzian thought than this linguistic relativism, which does not break with the hylomorphic schema [i.e., the “essentialist model of morphogenesis”]. For Deleuze, the extensive boundaries of individual entities do not exist only in human experience, drawn by the interplay of concepts; rather, they are real, the product of definite, objective processes of differentiation . . . a nonessentialist realism” that stresses the openness of the future, a future “not given in the past” (“Deleuze, Diagrams, and the Open-Ended Becoming of the World,” 32–33). Cf. the following definition of “machine” advanced by Deleuze in Proust and Signs, a work originally published in the same year as the Anti-Oedipus: “To the logos, organ and organon whose meaning must be discovered in the whole to which it belongs, is opposed the antilogos, machine and machinery whose meaning (anything you like) depends solely on its functioning, which, in turn, depends on its separate parts” (146). 6. Carruthers details these figurations in The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200, 81. Cf. her description of the “Plan of St. Gall” as a “meditation machine,” 230. 7. See Stivale, “Apocalypse . . . When?: 1972/1979, One or Several Willards?” in The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari: Intersections and Animations, 27–70. 8. Michael Camille writes eloquently of such illustrations: “The stars were tangible bodies which, floating high above, had direct ‘lines’ to specific parts of one’s anatomy and ruled, as did the moon and tides, the waves of humoral fluids within one’s body” (“The Image and the Self: Unwriting Late Medieval Bodies,” 68). Cf. Michael Uebel on the “wound man” and “oddly jubilant . . . illness man” illustrations in “On Becoming-Male,” 373–76. Although not speaking of medieval bodies, Deleuze and Guattari observe “The error we must guard against is to believe that there is a kind of logical order to this string, these crossings or transformations. . . . Each multiplicity is symbiotic; its becoming ties together animals, plants, microorganisms, mad particles, a whole galaxy. Nor is there a preformed logical order to these heterogeneities” (A Thousand Plateaus, 250). 9. Thirty-three leaves of Villard’s architectural sketchbook survive and are populated with machines as diverse as special crossbows, a water-powered saw, a Tantalus cup, a cata-

Notes to Introduction pult, and a hand warmer. The idea of a perpetual motion machine probably derives from India in the twelfth century and quickly passed in the form of “Bhaskara wheels” (named after a Hindu astronomer) into Arabic treatises, thence to Europe and Villard. See Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 128–32. Gimpel contextualizes this fascination within a greater interest in harnessing natural forces other than the wind, tidal, and hydraulic energies already well known to the medieval West. 10. The illustration is reproduced in Gimpel, The Medieval Machine, 148; I have not been able to ascertain its exact source. 11. The connection between my argument and this specific image was suggested to me by D. Vance Smith, who also gave me the resonant phrase (employed earlier in a similar context) “sidereal desire” to describe the active connection of body and stars. 12. Quotation from Gilles Deleuze, “To Have Done with Judgment,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, 131. On “the body without organs,” see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 149–66. 13. See R. G. Salomon, “A Newly Discovered Manuscript of Opicinus de Canistris,” and Michael Camille’s brilliant essay “The Image and the Self,” 87–95. Camille likewise finds in Opicinus a Deleuzian “fragmenting schizo-body” (94) and argues that the importance of his drawings is “their refusal to be codified or comprehended intellectually as just another sequence of texts in a rational order of history. . . it is precisely because of their incoherence that these images are so significant, both for the history of art and for a consideration of how bodies function in art” (95). 14. This fabliau body in its violent gendering and possibilities of subversion has been well analyzed by E. Jane Burns, Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature, and Miranda Griffin, “Dirty Stories: Abjection in the Fabliaux.” For a related line of argument that finds in the chansons de geste a dispersal of heroic identity into “animals, storms, and marvels,” see Sarah Kay, “The Life of the Dead Body: Death and the Sacred in the chansons de geste,” quotation at 100. 15. Latin from the edition of Stevenson, translation from Keynes and Lapidge, references by chapter numbers. I have relied upon the excellent contextualizing notes of Keynes and Lapidge throughout. 16. Holsinger points out that ficus could signify the vagina, the anus, “a sore resulting from anal penetration,” and (in Priscian’s Grammar) an “association with male-male sexual practices” (“Sodomy and Resurrection: The Homoerotic Subject of the Divine Comedy,” 251). 17. This phrase exactly repeats the description of the thief on the cross next to Christ contained in chapter 89, where it is employed literally. 18. Keynes and Lapidge argue that the text’s ambitions are even grander than this, attempting to incorporate the subjugated Welsh into the new communal consciousness. Thus the Vikings are termed pagans, the English Christians, allowing the Welsh to identify with their coreligionists (“Introduction,” in Alfred the Great, 42). 19. Michael Camille writes of these and other babewyns of the Luttrell Psalter with a wholly appropriate ebullience. Cf., for example, his description of a monster depicted on fol. 182v: “A pug-nosed piggish human face with speckled yellow legs stares in dismay as his own cabbage-tail sprouts up from between his legs with a tentacular, ejaculatory gush.” Other such bodies in the Psalter “rise up, idol-like, with staring eyes and tongue-like penises

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Notes to Chapter 1 (or penis-like tongues) that wiggle obscenely from their toothy gums, their hoods sprouting fantastical fantabeduras of cabbage-costumery” (Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England, 232). 20. For vivid depictions, see the illustrations from Bibliothèque Nationale, MS FR. 146 reproduced by Nancy Freeman Regalado in “Masques réels dans le monde de l’imaginaire. Le rite et l’écrit dans le charivari du Roman de Fauval,” MS. B.N. fr. 146. Cf. Camille, Mirror in Parchment, 252. 21. The supposed antagonism between Deleuze and Guattari and psychoanalysis has also been frequently overplayed, usually by totalizing psychoanalysis into a homogeneous school of thought. It is useful to recall that Félix Guattari was a practicing psychoanalyst, well known for his radical work on group psychology conducted at La Borde. Gilles Deleuze wrote a Lacanian-inspired analysis of Masoch that will feature prominently later in this book. In the words of L. O. Aranye Fradenburg, “Oedipus was never what it used to be” (“We Are Not Alone: Psychoanalytic Medievalism,” 258).

1. Time’s Machines 1. On the medieval affect of wonder in its relation to epistemological dilation, see Caroline Walker Bynum, “Wonder.” 2. On the past see, for example, Brian Stock, Listening for the Text; María Rosa Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage; Gabrielle M. Spiegel, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography; Alan J. Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition. On the future, see the collection edited by J. A. Burrow and Ian P. Wei, Medieval Futures: Attitudes to the Future in the Middle Ages, as well as the vast bibliography on medieval apocalypse. In this chapter, however, I focus not on the past or future as cultural horizons, attempting to discern how the Middle Ages thought about one or the other, but am most interested in contemporary work on time itself as a challenge to how we emplace the Middle Ages as distant or close. Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature, has been inspirational to my thinking throughout. Although it appeared too late for me to analyze here, see also D. Vance Smith’s intriguing contemplation of temporality and instigation in The Book of the Incipit: Beginnings in the Fourteenth Century. 3. Philosophers and physicists, it should be noted, have become increasingly skeptical of ever “getting time right.” In her overview of recent work on temporality in physics, Elizabeth Grosz concludes that what we see is a “rich pluralism” in which the “proliferation of different models of space-time” do not have “universally accepted scope nor domination of the whole field of geometry or physics. Mathematical and scientific formulations of space-time become localized, relevant to the operations of specific types of object (subatomic particles, molecules, objects, etc.) and of specific properties” (Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies, 97). In the pages that follow I will, admittedly, be speaking about time in general—even universalizing—terms. Yet my intention is not to rob temporality of its locality or specificity, but to multiply the possibilities inherent within time, a task that demands some grand gestures and broad theorization.

Notes to Chapter 1 4. Readers familiar with Patterson’s Negotiating the Past will not fail to notice that I cite his work only to omit a discussion of the school of criticism that he puts forward as offering a superior vision of history and temporality, Marxism. Partly this is because Marxism is partially subsumed into the framework of two of the modes of analysis that I do employ (postcolonial theory and the analysis of the body advanced by Michel Foucault). More than this, however, I will follow several feminist theorists of time (especially Rita Felski and Elizabeth Grosz) in arguing that in temporality inheres a resistance to the kinds of totalizations for which Patterson and Marx argue; see Negotiating the Past, 47. 5. See Le Goff, “Merchant’s Time and Church’s Time in the Middle Ages,” in Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, 29–42, as well as A. J. Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, 143–44. 6. For the medieval Christian, temporal order proceeded from the fact of Christ’s incarnation, an event that ensured that the past, now superseded, was worth knowing only to the extent that it typologically prefigured the arrival of Jesus, and that organized the present around anticipation of an apocalyptic, salvific future. As Steven Kruger points out, this “restructuring of time” ensured that non-Christians—especially the Jews—would henceforth inhabit “a past truly past, the past of life before the incarnation, standing outside the framework of a properly Christian history” (“The Spectral Jew,” 9; cf. “To be Jewish after the incarnation is precisely not to be ‘human’ in the ways enabled by Christ, not to participate in the dispensation of the ‘spirit,’ not to have access to the future of salvation,” 12). On this “detemporalization” of the Jew, see also Kathleen Biddick, “The ABC of Ptolemy: Mapping the World with the Alphabet.” 7. In other words, both church time and merchant’s time are cases of what Bede called “the reckoning of time according to authority,” in the first case via human authority and in the second by divine. See The Reckoning of Time, 2. Augustine likewise solves the “riddle” of time by ultimately appealing to celestial eternity, unity, and immutability—i.e., God, who is all these things, transcends the impossibility of a separate past (praeteritum), present (praesens), and future (futurum). Time, that is, is totalized by Augustine by reducing the three tenses into a present experienced subjectively, a present made possible as well as radically insufficient by that eternity (atemporality) that stands outside it (Confessions, XI.xx, xxviii, xxxi). Cf. Jean-Claude Schmitt, “Christian time does of course take place in history, but a holy history, which, like myth, finally has to fold back on itself and disappear in the eternity of God from which it came” (“Appropriating the Future,” 16). 8. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture; cf. the critique of Maurice Bloch, who argues for Balinese temporal multiplicity, “The Past and the Present in the Present.” Akhil Gupta has argued persuasively against characterizing entire cultures as possessed by “linear” or “cyclic” time, observing that almost all human societies make use of multiple and coexisting modes of temporality (“The Reincarnation of Souls and the Rebirth of Commodities: Representations of Time in ‘East’ and ‘West’”). See also Rita Felski, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture, 18–19. 9. On the Hopi and Kachin, see Edward Hall, The Dance of Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983); cited by Robert Levine, A Geography of Time, 94. 10. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 47, 75. Latour makes the same point succinctly in The Pasteurization of France: “‘Time’ arises at the end of this game, a game in

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Notes to Chapter 1 which most lose what they have staked” (165). Cf. this passage from Aramis, or the Love of Technology: “The obsession with calendar time makes historians sprinkle technologies with agricultural metaphors related to maturation, slowness, obsolescence or germination, or else mechanical metaphors having to do with acceleration and braking. In fact, time does not count. Time is what is counted. It is not an explanatory variable; it is a dependent variable that needs to be explained. It doesn’t offer a framework or explanation, since it is an effect that has to be accounted for. . . . Grab calendar time and you’ll find yourself emptyhanded. Grab the actors, and you’ll get periodization and temporalization as a bonus” (88–89). Latour is among the most provocative (and controversial) contemporary theorists of time and identity. 11. “We have transcended the errors of the past, with its naïve belief in history, reality, and the subject . . . a new and subversive [postmodern] aesthetic that will help us to eradicate outmoded forms of thought.” In this quote, Felski is specifically critiquing the articulation of postmodern time by Elizabeth Deeds Ermath in Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time. See Felski, Doing Time, 10–15, quotations at 10, 11. 12. Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, 15–16. De Landa makes the same point later when he compares industrial development to biological evolution, “which not only lacks any progressive direction, it does not even have a consistent drive toward complexification: while some species complexify, others simplify. In both cases, a variety of processes result in accumulations of complexity in some areas, deaccumulations in others, and a coexistence of different types of accumulated complexity” (75). David Wallace gives nonlinear history a medievalist’s gloss in his “General Preface” to The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature: “There is, of course, no end to the backward and forward tracings facilitated by a genuinely diachronic approach, a historicism that considers development over centuries as well as shifting sideways from archival fragment (for example, c. 1381) or parliamentary Act (of 1381) to isolated moments of literary composition.” Wallace ends by desiring that the “things written of in this book” will “carry forward to trouble and delight our own unfolding present,” an articulation of one possibility inherent in the temporal complexities of nonteleogical histories. 13. Paul Strohm “Chaucer’s Troilus as Temporal Archive,” in Theory and the Premodern Text, 80–96, quotations at 81 and 93. Strohm’s volume returns repeatedly to questions of temporality; see especially the two other essays (“‘Lad with Revel to Newegate’: Chaucerian Narrative and Historical Metanarrative” and “Fictions of Time and Origin: Friar Huberd and the Lepers”) in the “Time and Narrative” section, 51–96. 14. “While history writing configures the past, it also narrates towards the future. . . . Historiography thus takes place in a temporal border, ambivalent and bound by temporal conflict” (Warren, History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain, 1100–1300, 14). 15. “If we let ourselves be taught to read by these marvelous medieval readers, if we read them not just de arte—for what they might constatively have to ‘tell’ us about medieval culture, but also performatively, per artem—in the middle of them, from the inside out— something wonderful happens. Our writers and texts are medieval and coeval at once. Time turns around on itself. We have never been modern” (Brown, “In the Middle,” 566). Coevalness (respectful mutuality of time) is the resolution that Johannes Fabian proposes to the anthropological tendency to impute to cultural difference a distance in time (e.g.,

Notes to Chapter 1 the classification system by which some peoples are deemed primitive denies the coeval existence of observer and Other). See Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. 16. Augustine, De doctrina christiana, 2.28.108; Catherine Brown, “In the Middle,” 567 and 573 n. 17. “Deleuze Bartleby; or, The Formula,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, 86. Deleuze describes the “brotherhood of the archipelago” as an American (that is, anti-European) innovation allied with both great novelists (Melville) and philosophical pragmatists in their shared dislike of universals, syntheses, and bounded systems. To the best of my knowledge Benítez-Rojo was unaware of this essay. 18. Benítez-Rojo’s language is explicitly taken from Deleuze and Guattari. In a rather strange move he will later disavow the possibility that the Caribbean machine is Deleuzian, apparently because he wants its dispersed and polyrhythmic structure not to be amenable to totalization (18). I would argue, however, that he has misunderstood Deleuze and Guattari’s explication of the possibilities inherent in such machines. Although an assemblage may sometimes be unified (“territorialized”) by determinative social forces, machinic desire nonetheless resists capture into such predetermined and reifiable delineations. The Caribbean, Benítez-Rojo insists, undermines the supposed antagonism of different kinds of machines (theoretical, poetic, epistemological, teleological; see especially 28); so, in fact, do Deleuze and Guattari. 19. María Rosa Menocal similarly entwines Latin America and the Middle Ages in a reconceptualization of the medieval, arguing that both share an irreducible cultural hybridity not amenable to the “proper grammar” and obsession with purity that characterize modernity; see Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric, esp. 18–32. Indeed, Robert Bartlett has provocatively described Europe as having been engaged in the Middle Ages in an arduous process of Europeanizing itself, of striving in fits and starts toward an elusive homogeneity: The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950–1350. 20. This is a point emphasized in the essay collections Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages (ed. Simon Forde, Lesley Johnson, and Alan Murray) and Strategies of Distinction: The Construction of Ethnic Communities, 300–800 (ed. Walter Pohl and Helmut Reimitz). Another recent edited volume, Alfred P. Smyth’s Medieval Europeans: Studies in Ethnic Identity and National Perspectives in Medieval Europe, is in contrast animated by a collectivizing impulse, especially in Smyth’s introduction with its talk of the “European psyche,” but cf. the excellent review of the book by Florin Curta, The Medieval Review, 99.03.06. 21. I am quoting from Bede’s own poetic title for his Libellus de uolubili ac fluctiuago temporum lapsu (The Reckoning of Time). 22. The seventh-century Life of Saint Columba (d. 597) is one of the few saint’s lives that exists in a near-contemporary manuscript, copied perhaps ten years after the death of its author, Adomnán. Richard Sharpe has published a fine translation with an impressive documentary apparatus—424 footnotes for 131 pages of text. Ultimately, I think, Sharpe tries to render what Deleuze and Guattari would call a “rhizomatic” (anti-systematic) text an “arboreal” or conventionally hierarchical/epistemological book, but the sheer proliferation of footnotes prevents that closure of “final” signification from ever taking place. I have the greatest affection for Sharpe’s text, made splendid (and Adomnán-like) through its utter excess.

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Notes to Chapter 1 23. For a lively analysis of how the shipwrecked bishop Arculf, a Merovingian Gaul, entertained Adomnán with a narration of pilgrimage that the latter wrote down as De locis sanctis, see Mary Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600, 33–45. 24. Adomnán, Life of Saint Columba, III xxiii, Sharpe’s translation 233. Similarly, for a later period, David Wallace has recently demonstrated how “backward and rural” Somerset, a pastoral fringe far from London’s center, was in fact traversed by international currents that brought to a library in Wells a Latin translation of Dante (“Dante in Somerset: Ghosts, Historiography, Periodization”). 25. This decentering achieves something like what Mary Louise Pratt calls unsatisfactorily (for a medievalist) the “transnational” or “postnational,” and more usefully a “contact zone”: “In a contact perspective, borders are placed in effect at the center of concern while homogenous centers move to the margins . . . a contact perspective decenters community to look at how signification works across and through lines of difference and hierarchy” (“Criticism in the Contact Zone: Decentering Community and Nation,” 88). 26. Robert Bartlett connects numerous such stories in the wonderful section of England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075–1225 entitled “Beings Neither Angelic, Human, Nor Animal,” 686–92. 27. Gervase of Tilbury, Otia imperialia, I. 13; Bartlett, England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 688. 28. Anne McClintock distinguishes between the outward movement of “territorial appropriation” (which in this case would mainly be Wales, Scotland, and Ireland) and the inward appropriations that treat “a group as it might a foreign country” (“The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-Colonialism,’” 88). 29. Several of the following paragraphs derive in part from my essay “Introduction: Midcolonial” in the collection The Postcolonial Middle Ages, where I made a first and rather hesitant attempt to think through some of the temporal issues raised in this chapter. 30. The quotations are from Suleri’s excellent analysis of postcolonial time in The Rhetoric of English India, 9. My discussion of time is also informed by the work of McClintock in “The Angel of Progress”; Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest, esp. 10; and “‘No Longer in a Future Heaven’: Gender, Race and Nationalism.” 31. See the thoughtful anthology compiled by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 117. The section on “Postmodernism and Post-Colonialism” (117–47) contains selections from essays by Kwame Anthony Appiah, Simon During, Linda Hutcheon, Diana Brydon, and Kumkum Sangari that explore the imbricated but different temporalities of these two supposed “post-”s. 32. Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, “What is Post(-)Colonialism?” 411; Michelle R. Warren, “Making Contact: Postcolonial Perspectives through Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britannie,” 115. Cf. Warren’s ruminations on the word and its possible hyphen in History on the Edge, x. 33. For Gayatri Spivak on “neocolonialism,” see “Neocolonialism and the Secret Agent of Knowledge: Interview with Robert Young.” Spivak also meditates on the “posts” of “postcolonial” in “Teaching for the Times,” esp. 469.

Notes to Chapter 1 34. Bhabha’s delimitation has so powerfully affected the critical imaginary of the field because it appears in two texts fundamental to the institutionalization of postcolonial studies, especially within literary studies: first in the collection Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn, where Bhabha’s essay is made to speak for all postcolonial criticism; the essay was then republished as “The Postcolonial and the Postmodern” in Bhabha’s widely influential book The Location of Culture, 171–97. I quote from the latter version. 35. For a related argument about histories of colonization, the postcolonial, and United States imperialism, see Amy Kaplan, “‘Left Alone with America’: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture,” 17. 36. The Middle Ages had its own versions of such progress narratives, embodied either as “salvation history” or (borrowing from a classical topos) an evolutionary degeneration of humanity from a primal golden age to the current, sixth epoch, an age of iron. See, for example, Bede, The Reckoning of Time, 66, and Giraldus Cambrensis, Topographia Hiberniae, III.93, which denies the coevalness of the Irish to the invading Normans by arguing that they have failed to progress from pastoral to urban existence. James Dean has treated the subject of epochal succession at length in The World Grown Old in Later Medieval Literature. 37. This useful gloss on “machinic assemblage” (or what he calls “meshwork”) is taken from Manuel De Landa, “Deleuze, Diagrams, and the Open-Ended Becoming of the World,” 36–37. 38. Fabian, Time and the Other, xi; for an analysis of how this distancing has served colonialist interests, see 1–35. 39. On the critical significance of the break performed by the construction of the Renaissance as the other of the medieval, see Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History, 4–8, and “The Horse Latitudes,” in Shards of Love, 3–54; Lee Patterson, “Critical Historicism and Medieval Studies”; Brian Stock, “The Middle Ages as Subject and Object.” James Simpson presents a strong argument against “ageism” (i.e., Geistesgeschichte) in “Ageism: Leland, Bale, and the Laborious Start of English Literary History, 1358–1550.” 40. “The notion of the alterity of the medieval past has all too often become a means of asserting the unapproachability and inviolacy of that past—of constituting it as ideally pure and unchanging object, beseiged by a variety of philosophical, political, and sexual perversions. When this happens, the historicization—we might say, the mortification—of the past, has the effect of preserving the past for the few who know how properly to revere it (Fradenburg, “‘Voice Memorial’: Loss and Reparation in Chaucer’s Poetry,” 173). Cf. the temporal intricacies of Fradenburg and Freccero, “Caxton, Foucault, and the Pleasures of History.” 41. Deleuze observes that judgment supposes an infinite exterior to an order of time: “Judgment . . . implies a prior moral and theological form, according to which a relation was established between existence and the infinite following an order of time: the existing being as having a debt to God.” Fascinated by Antonin Artaud’s idea of being done with the “judgment of God,” Deleuze in his writing constantly envisions a middle space where “existing beings confront each other, and obtain redress by means of finite relations that

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Notes to Chapter 1 merely constitute the course of time” (“To Have Done with Judgment,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, 127). 42. For this specific formulation of what the postcolonial Middle Ages might accomplish, I am grateful to Stephen Slemon’s paper presented at the “Postcolonial Middle Ages” workshop at the University of Alberta, Edmonton (April 1999). Reflecting on some of what I have argued above, Slemon responded that medieval studies is well situated to address the political imperatives of postcolonial theory by undermining contemporary discourses of origin; arguing against the transhistoricity of normative liberal discourses of unified subjectivity; and cautioning against myths of purity and wholeness. 43. The best account of these divergent temporalities remains Lee Patterson, “Perpetual Motion: Alchemy and the Technology of the Self.” 44. Yet, as Phyllis Roberts notes, Becket never did provide the point of stability against time that saints’ bodies are often imagined as offering. Prophecies collected under his name were routinely changed in order to alter both present and future, with various ideological constructions of the saint vying to determine his meaning (“Prophecy, Hagiography, and St Thomas of Canterbury”). 45. Paul Strohm has persuasively argued that the General Prologue is characterized by a “temporal unruliness” in which the characters inhabit what he calls (following Ernst Bloch) “nonsynchronous temporalities”: “Each pilgrim finally inhabits a temporality all his or her own, not like that of any other” (Theory and the Premodern Text, 65–66). 46. Pearsall advances the argument in The Canterbury Tales, 26, describing the sheer impossibility of the four-tale scheme as potentially a “wry protest” against the demand that artistic works be “complete” and bounded (27). 47. See, for example, the paradoxical insistence on “an aesthetic of pleasure, or better, an aesthetic whose desire is nonviolence” and aestheticization of boxing that follows (Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island, 21–22). 48. “When narratives are projected across the Channel and are set in Brittany, Flanders, and Lombardy, the speech and customs are thoroughly anglicized” (John Bowers, “Chaucer after Smithfield: From Postcolonial Writer to Imperialist Author,” 56). Bowers describes this ascendancy of the London dialect as an internal colonialism (59), and notes that the pilgrims who would historically have been bilingual never speak French (55–56). 49. For a persuasive argument that the Jew haunts Chaucer’s work because the figure is central “to the construction of Englishness itself,” see Sylvia Tomasch, “Postcolonial Chaucer and the Virtual Jew,” quotation at 244. 50. Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture, 35–36; cf. 46–48. Le Goff insists on the novelty of such bells that were not, like church bells, linked to widely spaced events but employed to regulate work: “Time was no longer associated with cataclysms [alarm bells] or festivals [church bells] but rather with daily life, a sort of chronological net in which urban life was caught” (48). Handbells had been in use for the regulation of bodies in time among clerics since at least the ninth century. On the difficulties of promulgating this work bell system, see Arno Borst, The Ordering of Time: From the Ancient Computus to the Modern Computer, 42–49. 51. A perhaps related obsession with the embodiment of time underwrites Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, which repeatedly links intolerable differences in the calculation of

Notes to Chapter 1 Easter between the Latin Church and the practice of British and Irish clerics to intolerable differences in tonsure and the rules of fasting. Bede’s expressed desire is to unite these non-English groups under one universal, Roman time—that is, unite them beneath a singular and homogeneous identity capable of transcending local difference. 52. Medievalists generally perform a double analysis, using Foucault to read the medieval and the medieval to reread Foucault. See, for example, Carolyn Dinshaw, “A Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and Its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” “Chaucer’s Queer Touches / A Queer Touches Chaucer,” and Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern; Fradenburg and Freccero, “Caxton, Foucault, and the Pleasures of History”; Laurie Finke, “Mystical Bodies and the Dialogics of Vision”; Allen J. Frantzen, “The Discourse of Sodomy in the Middle English Cleanness”; Robin Kirkpatrick, “Dante and the Body”; Clare A. Lees, “Engendering Religious Desire: Sex, Knowledge, and Christian Identity in Anglo-Saxon England”; Karma Lochrie, “Desiring Foucault” and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: Murderous Plots and Medieval Secrets.” A recent monograph that employs a sophisticated Foucauldian methodology to stress medieval resistance to power is Claire Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England. I would like to emphasize that this footnote only gestures toward Foucault’s deep influence on medieval studies. A more complete account would have to include a bibliography of the copious scholarship that makes use of Judith Butler’s feminist rethinking of Foucault in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” 53. Anthony Aveni has written in Empires of Time: Calendars, Clocks, and Cultures that the timescale tends to be imagined as either continuous (full of process and development) or catastrophic (in the Bible, the flood marks the onset of a new epoch), 143. Foucault ultimately sided with a version of the latter. Carolyn Dinshaw provides a sensitive reading of his rhetoric of temporal rupture in Getting Medieval, 196–98. 54. “Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma soeur et mon frère . . .”: un cas de parricide au XIXe siècle, ed. Michel Foucault, henceforth MPR; translated into English as “I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother. . .”: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century, henceforth IPR. 55. David Macey transcribes the list of seminar participants in The Lives of Michel Foucault, 248. 56. Rivière wrote that he burnt this proto-version so that he would not be discovered before the crime was committed, but that he carried its contents in his head. When the time arrived to script the official confession, he merely committed to paper that which he had composed long in advance. Foucault argues that Rivière is an author in a redoubled sense, of the crime and of the writing of the crime, so that the two are coincipient and not distinguishable; hence Foucault refers to the “murder/memoir” throughout. See IPR, 107, for Rivière’s description of the writing, and 208–09 for Foucault’s analysis. 57. James Miller, in typical fashion, pathologizes this moment in The Passion of Michel Foucault, 225–28. David Macey gives the declaration a more even analysis in The Lives of Michel Foucault, 250. 58. This description owes much to Foucault’s own depiction of his work as nonlinear “effective history” (wirkliche Historie) in the essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” first

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Notes to Chapter 2 published in Hommage à Jean Hyppolite three years before the appearance of “I, Pierre Rivière.” 59. For an English translation see Caroline White, Early Christian Lives. For the Latin translation of Evagrius, see Vita Beati Antonii abbatis auctore Sancto Athanasio, PL 73, 125–70. 60. That Foucault himself knew the Golden Legend is made clear by his admiring reference to the work in “The Life of Infamous Men,” 81. It is worth noting that Rivière stresses at every moment his own copious reading. His two or three years of delivering sermons are triggered by models from unnamed books (“What I had already read inspired me to do this”). His “ideas of glory” are likewise linked to the fact that he “took great pleasure in reading” (IPR, 101). The list he provides of texts that he eagerly devoured includes everything from the Bible, almanacs, clerical calendars, and French and Roman histories to catechisms and even “if I found a scrap of paper to be used to wipe one’s behind I read it” (IPR, 102). 61. Needless to say, Rivière’s intentions are not fulfilled, but he insists that he “displayed singularities” that continued to set him apart even after he determined that he would “be as other men” (IPR, 101). 62. “Even with the mystery of the redemption, I thought that it was easier to understand, I said: our Lord Jesus Christ died on the cross to save mankind, to redeem him from the slavery of the devil, from sin and from eternal damnation, he was God, it was for him to punish the men who had offended him; he could therefore have pardoned them without suffering these things; but as for me, I can deliver my father only by dying for him” (IPR, 106). Rivière believed that his father had been persecuted throughout his life by his wife. 63. An anxiety over a less paranormal but just as unwilled flow likewise gripped medieval clerics as they pondered the relation between nocturnal emission and their gender; see Dyan Elliott, “Pollution, Illusion, and Masculine Disarray: Nocturnal Emissions and the Sexuality of the Clergy.” 64. “I was arrested with one and though I said I had made it to pass for mad, yet it was not exactly that” (IPR, 104). Rivière also made devices to kill animals in ways that mimicked the deaths of the Christian martyrs, and even invented a torture that he called “enceepharating” (attachment to a tree via nails through the belly). 65. “Calibene” is probably related to the noun calibre in its more technical senses, while “albalester” is obviously based upon arbalè[s]te, “crossbow.” Both combine signifying particles with nonsense to produce new words. Rivière explained the purpose of his linguistic inventiveness during an interrogation: “I imagined that word [calibene]; I tried hard to find a name that could not mean any other instrument” (IPR, 37).

2. Chevalerie 1. In Jane Chance’s words, Frantzen “offers medieval and non-medieval opportunities to make what he calls the ‘legitimist’ case for a paradigm of same-sex love (as opposed to same-sex sex). . . . Put another way, the medieval can marry the modern.” In her review of Before the Closet in Arthuriana, Chance aptly describes Frantzen’s project as “nostalgic” and suggests that some of his animus for contemporary theory is a combined Francophobia/

Notes to Chapter 2 Anglophilia that spurs his passion for Anglo-Saxon England: “he yearns for the normalcy of the traditional, to make the queer more philological and phallocentric, more ‘male’ and normative” (127–28). 2. Frantzen writes in the “Prologue” to Speaking Two Languages that “It is difficult to see why oppositional criticism needs to totalize the institutions it seeks to undermine” (1), yet his conclusions about queer theory in Before the Closet are based on little research and much totalization. He reads in a cursory manner a select few essays by medievalists and others, but fails to indicate the extraordinary intellectual breadth of the emerging field at the time Before the Closet was being composed. 3. Glenn Burger, “Queer Chaucer,” 156. For examples of this formulation in action, see Burger’s “Kissing the Pardoner” and “Erotic Discipline . . . or ‘Tee hee, I like My Boys to be Girls’: Inventing with the Body in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale.” 4. Cf. the slightly different version of this formulation provided in Dinshaw’s Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern, with its foregrounding of the haptic: “I feel queerness works by contiguity and displacement; like metonymy as distinct from metaphor, queerness knocks signifiers loose, ungrounding bodies, making them strange, working in this way to provoke perceptual shifts and subsequent corporeal response in those touched” (151). 5. Robert L. A. Clark and Claire Sponsler, “Queer Play: The Cultural Work of Crossdressing in Medieval Drama”; Claire Sponsler, “Outlaw Masculinities: Drag, Blackface, and Late Medieval Laboring-Class Festivities”; Steven F. Kruger, “Racial/Religious and Sexual Queerness in the Middle Ages” and “Conversion and Medieval Sexual, Religious, and Racial Categories”; Karma Lochrie, “Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies.” For a contemporary reading of queer sensitive to its imbrication in race and ethnicity, see Robert McRuer, The Queer Renaissance: Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities. 6. Other queer work by medievalists that I have found useful in framing this investigation includes: Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism; David Lorenzo Boyd, “Sodomy, Misogyny, and Displacement: Occluding Queer Desire in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”; the diverse collection of essays edited by Glenn Burger and Steven Kruger, Queering the Middle Ages; Carolyn Dinshaw, “A Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and Its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” and Getting Medieval; L. O. Aranye Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, “Caxton, Foucault, and the Pleasures of History”; Simon Gaunt, “Straight Minds / ‘Queer’ Wishes in Old French Hagiography”; Bruce Holsinger, “Sodomy and Resurrection: The Homoerotic Subject of the Divine Comedy.” 7. A fundamental problem with Halperin’s Saint Foucault is his neglect of feminism in general, and of the copious feminist scholarship on Foucault in particular. His book often presents as if new insights propounded years earlier in, for example, the writings of Elizabeth Grosz. 8. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux, v. 2 de Capitalisme et Schizophrénie [henceforth MP], 314; trans. Brian Massumi, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia [henceforth ATP], 257. 9. For Freud’s case history of Little Hans, see “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, 10: 5–149, quotation at 15.

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Notes to Chapter 2 10. “Omnis mundi creatura / quasi liber et pictura / nobis est et speculum”: Alan of Lille, De Incarnatione Christi, PL 210, 579A. The passage is quoted approvingly by Nona C. Flores in Animals in the Middle Ages in an introduction that argues for this interpretive focus “not [on animals] as literal living organisms—food, prey, possessions, or companions to man—but as symbols, ideas, or images” (ix). See also Jan Ziolkowski, “Literary Genre and Animal Symbolism,” 7. 11. This is the reading of Little Hans offered by Deleuze and Claire Parnet in a conversation that records some of the salient points of the then-forthcoming ATP: Dialogues, 80. Jean-Pierre Peter and Jeanne Favret point out that Pierre Rivière had a rather similar relationship to horses as bodies with which “to go beyond the possible, to transgress the limits” in their essay “The Animal, the Madman, and Death” in “I, Pierre Rivière . . . ,” 176–77. 12. For a similar reading of this “inbetween moment . . . a rudely impersonal state,” see Elspeth Probyn’s “Becoming-Horse” section of Outside Belongings, 39–62 (quotation at 51). Probyn is especially good at achieving something the materials on chivalry that I will examine resist: a reading of the horse’s possible passionate relation for women. 13. L. O. Aranye Fradenburg offers a similarly productive and affirmative rewriting of a pathologized Freudian child, the tyke with the spool who plays the infamous Fort-Da game, in her “‘Voice Memorial’: Loss and Reparation in Chaucer’s Poetry,” 183. 14. The perverse potential for radical fusion within this circuit and its blending of the organic and the nonorganic, the human and the nonhuman prompt Deleuze and Guattari to observe: “It is the becomings-animal that lead the masochism, not the other way around. There are always apparatuses, tools, engines involved, there are always artifices and constraints in taking Nature to the fullest. That is because it is necessary to annul the organs, to shut them away so that their liberated elements can enter into the new relations from which the becoming-animal, and the circulation of affects within the machinic assemblage, will result” (ATP, 260). 15. Lillian Randall, Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts, figs. 554–57; Susan L. Smith, The Power of Women: A “Topos” in Medieval Art and Literature, 66–103. 16. I quote from the lively translation of John DuVal, “The Lai of Aristotle,” lines 421–28, in Fabliaux Fair and Foul, 95. For the French see Henri d’Andeli, Le Lai d’Aristote, ed. Maurice Delbouille, lines 449–56. 17. For contemporary proof of this statement’s truth, a reader need do no more than enter the words “erotic” and “horse” into any internet search engine to discover a treasure trove of stories covering every possible permutation of human fantasy, from tales of bestiality to narratives of magical transformations into equine bodies—with vividly detailed sexual, domestic, and social consequences. 18. For an examination of hunting as a kind of sexuality that leads to a blocking of heterosexuality, see Anne Rooney, Hunting in Middle English Literature, 50–52. I am in this chapter explicating desire in its relation to multiple objects rather than to a sexuality reducible to genitality, and for that reason do not speak much about bestiality. I would nonetheless like to point out what is in fact obvious in human history: that the connection between humans and horses could and can be precisely that intimate. See, for example, Midas Dekkers, Dearest Pet: On Bestiality, 18.

Notes to Chapter 2 19. The passage is treated in both Davis, The Medieval Warhorse: Origin, Development and Redevelopment, 107–08 and Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages, 28. 20. For recent considerations of the difficulties in explicating chivalry, see Richard W. Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe, and Howell Chickering’s “Introduction” to The Study of Chivalry: Resources and Approaches, 2–5. My discussion also owes much to Richard Barber, The Knight and Chivalry; Maurice Keen, Chivalry; Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 165–79. 21. Marcus Bull, Georges Duby, and Jean Flori emphasize this point by regionalizing chivalry, demonstrating that grand conclusions about chivalry do not necessarily frame local dynamics well (Bull, “The French Aristocracy and the Future, c. 1000–c. 1200,” 86). Peter Coss likewise notes this local diversity and the attendant difficulty for historians in speaking of a singular “chivalry” in England: The Knight in Medieval England, 1000–1400, 6. 22. David Crouch examines the complexities of mobile terms like “nobility” in their relation to social class in The Image of the Aristocracy in Britain, 1000–1300, 2–38. Although chivalric masculinities expanded to include (especially in its most mythic forms) even middle-class men who were not warriors, in this investigation I am most interested in chivalry’s class-bound definition as ideal knighthood and its relation to a specific regimen of bodily training. 23. Robert Bartlett details the “intermingling” of humans and animals in the twelfth century in England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075–1225, 666–86. Joyce Salisbury documents just how far such intimacy could extend in her discussion of medieval animals as human sex partners, Beast Within, 77–101. On literal and figurative breakings of the species barrier and its repercussions on human identity, see Michael Uebel, “The Foreigner Within: The Subject of Abjection in Sir Gowther.” 24. Bartlett provides several examples: England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 667. 25. Kaeuper observes that horses such as Edward’s are named to indicate that they “possess equine prowess,” Chivalry and Violence, 174. 26. For the story of the cleric Herebald’s “splendid horse” and the races in which he rode, see Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, V.6. 27. Edwin’s conversion of his kingdom proceeds through divine healing (Bede, Ecclesiastical History, II.9), angelic vision (II.12), deliberation (the famous “sparrow through a winter hall” story, II.13), and the Coifi episode (also II.13). 28. Warhorses were always stallions throughout the Middle Ages; riding a mare was seen as humiliating for knights. They were trained to fight just like their riders. See Davis, The Medieval Warhorse, 18. María Rosa Menocal figures the Middle Ages themselves as a horse in Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric, 3–54. 29. The classic (if exaggerated) reading of the technological trigger to social reality that the stirrup represents is Lynn White, Jr., “Stirrup, Mounted Shock Combat, Feudalism, and Chivalry,” in Medieval Technology and Social Change, 1–38. White grandly claims that the western Middle Ages as we know them would not have been possible without the catalytic power of the stirrup. Although the straightforward progress narrative that White erects is no longer tenable, his wholistic approach to technology resonates with what would now be called postmodern analyses of culture, especially those by writers like Deleuze,

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Notes to Chapter 2 Foucault, and Bruno Latour. Indeed, Deleuze incorporates White’s work into his reading of the knight-horse circuit (Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, 69, 72, 74–75, 98). See also Robert Bartlett, “Military Technology and Political Power,” in The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 60–84; R. H. C. Davis, The Medieval Warhorse, 11–29; Maurice Keen, Chivalry, 18, 24–26; and Fredric L. Cheyette’s review of White’s book in The Journal of Social Science. 30. In her fine exploration of the history of horse-human relations, the cultural anthropologist and veterinarian Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence observes that the horse’s “extreme sensitivity” and “unusual potentiality for fine-tuned communication with people” have enabled “by means of a shared kinetic process . . . the physical and mental merging of two species” (Hoofbeats and Society: Studies of Human-Horse Interactions, ix). 31. The quotation is from Bruno Latour, Aramis, or the Love of Technology, 212–13, where he is speaking of a failed subway system in France, but the point is relevant to the cultural being of objects more generally. 32. In addition to the works previously cited, see also Rosemary Ascherl, “The Technology of Chivalry in Reality and Romance.” 33. Bartlett notes that the full gear of an armed knight is composed of fifty pounds of iron (The Making of Europe, 61). On the dependency of chivalric identity upon the secondary skin that armor formed, see E. Jane Burns, “Refashioning Courtly Love: Lancelot as Ladies’ Man or Lady/Man?” 118–19. 34. On the increasing size of medieval equines, see Ann Hyland, The Medieval Warhorse: From Byzantium to the Crusades, 57–59; Hyland’s book amounts to a short history of the early Middle Ages as told through the body of the horse. R. H. C. Davis observes that the only horses indigenous to northwest Europe were about the size of a Shetland pony, so that “by the eleventh century, if not before, someone had discovered how to produce large numbers of horses which were bigger” (The Medieval Warhorse, 6). Horse breeding was therefore a major industry, with dealers and breeders desperately attempting to adapt the body of the horse to changing martial demands (11). 35. “Every new development, in the greater defensive protection that armour could be designed to offer and the greater weight that a more expensive war horse had consequently to carry, made such advancement [into the “cavalier’s world”] a little harder” (Keen, Chivalry, 26–27). Judith Green emphasizes that being a member of the cavalry and being numbered among the elite were not necessarily one and the same at (for example) the time of William’s colonization of England; see The Aristocracy of Norman England, 10–11. 36. Andrew Ayton observes that horsemanship was “an essential accomplishment” for aristocratic males during times of both peace and war, mainly because “a great deal of his life was spent in the saddle”: “Some men began their military careers at an early age, yet for most, an association with horses which they had forged as boys would find many outlets before they were called upon to join a chevauchée; and for many, horsemanship remained a largely peacetime activity throughout their lives. A member of the aristocracy was distinguished not simply by the possession of good horses, but also by the way that he handled them” (Andrew Ayton, Knights and Warhorses: Military Service and the English Aristocracy under Edward III, 32).

Notes to Chapter 2 37. Orme, From Childhood to Chivalry: The Education of the English Kings and Aristocracy, 1066–1530, 181, offers a thorough account of these and other equine transactions. 38. The training of the squire’s body is described in vivid detail by Sidney Painter in William Marshal: Knight-Errant, Baron, and Regent of England, 17; “hardening” is his evocative description of the process. Although romances and books of chivalry often make the transition from squire to knight part of an inevitable progress narrative, chivalric masculinity was in reality far more open-ended than such teleological plots make it seem. “Squire” (or “esquire”), for example, could be a perfectly acceptable adult status, attractive in part because of its very vagueness; see David Crouch, Image of the Aristocracy, 164–71. 39. The quintain was a target attached to a bar that would swing around when struck, knocking a rider from his horse if he was not swift enough. For another horse substitute, see the description by Vegetius of the use of wooden horses to teach men how to mount, armed and unarmed, from numerous possible directions: Epitoma rei militaris, 18. It is interesting to note that Vegetius, the Roman author whose book on military strategy was profoundly influential throughout the Middle Ages and who wrote at great length about the proper training of young bodies for war, was also a devoted breeder of horses who composed a work on equine veterinarian medicine, the Digesta artis mulomedicinae. 40. William’s biography is reverently narrated in the anonymous Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, ed. in abbreviated form by Paul Meyer. Sidney Painter composed the classic English account (William Marshal). See also Georges Duby, William Marshal, The Flower of Chivalry. A good warhorse might cost thirty to forty pounds in the twelfth century (Painter, William Marshal, 43). 41. “Beyond the training sessions came the matches—the organized tournaments, which can be called both sporting fixtures in that they were competitive meetings, and educational classes because they gave further opportunities to learn and practice the techniques of war. The tournament at Blyth in Nottinghamshire in 1256 is a good example of one with an educational purpose: it was held for the benefit of the 17-year-old Edward I, and Matthew Paris observed that the prince attended it ‘so that he might be instructed in military laws’” (Nicholas Orme, From Childhood to Chivalry, 189–90). 42. The positive (that is, pacifist) effects of this control have been sometimes overplayed in critical literature. Chivalry aimed to render the knightly body more predictable and circumscribed, but it still envalued that flesh to the degree that it constituted a violent force. In the words of Richard Kaeuper, “chivalry meant the worship of prowess, and prowess (whatever gentler qualities the idealists wanted to associate with it) meant beating an opponent with really good thrusting and hacking” (“The Societal Role of Chivalry in Romance: Northwestern Europe,” 99). 43. Jeremy Citrome provocatively aligns Charny’s depiction of the body with the corporealities described by Lacan, Butler, and Grosz. Of the passage I have quoted above he writes, “The noble child, at the supposed genesis of his cognitive awareness, absorbs the images of the bodies around him, bodies defined as chivalric by their weaponry, horse, and armor. These keen edges, muscled beasts, and plated contours thus become the template of his own self-perception” (“Bodies that Splatter: Surgery, Chivalry, and the Body in the Practica of John Arderne,” 168–69).

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Notes to Chapter 2 44. Quotations are from Caxton’s translation of a French version of Lull’s book. Lull later equates the horse with the knight’s castle, since both serve to “kepe the wayes and for to deffende them that labouren the landes” (Book of the Ordre of Chyvalry, 41). 45. The Romance of Sir Beves of Hamtoun, ed. Eugen Kölbing, lines 1890–93. 46. See, for example, the jeu de mots on cheval/chevalier in the origin myth for chivalry given by the Lancelot do Lac, ed. Elspeth Kennedy, 1:143. Andrew Ayton cites Noel Denholm Young: it was “impossible to be chivalrous without a horse.” “This was not merely the stuff of romance,” Ayton continues, “for it involved questions of military identity and, indeed, social identity. Military service for the knightly class, whether in fulfillment of feudal obligations or for the king’s pay, was unthinkable without a barded warhorse. The armoured horse was a prerequisite of service; it was, as much as anything, what defined a man-at-arms as far as muster officials were concerned, and it was what set him apart as a member of the military class” (Knights and Warhorses, 23). Cf. David Crouch, Image of the Aristocracy, 124–25. 47. The Merlin Continuation, trans. Martha Asher, in Lancelot-Grail, ed. Norris J. Lacy, 4:231, 272. Kaueper identifies as a special preoccupation of chivalric literature an anxiety over horses in their relation to the limits of the knightly possible, especially in a recurring cluster of equine-directed questions that profoundly interrogates what it means to be a proper knight: “Is an opponent’s horse a legitimate target? Should a mounted man attack one already unhorsed? Should a mounted man ride his great warhorse over an enemy knocked flat on the ground?” (Chivalry and Violence, 170). 48. Leo K. Bustad describes the “human-animal bond” in terms relevant to the link between knight and horse: “a transpecies companionship involving primarily nonlinguistic engagement [that] . . . involves an emotional, enduring, and ethical commitment and a mutual but not necessarily equal (i.e., correspondingly similar) responsibility for one another” (“Man and Beast Interface: An Overview of Our Relationships,” 233). 49. References to Roland are taken from the edition of Frederick Whitehead and the translation of Glyn S. Burgess; quotations from Aliscans are from the edition of F. Guessard and A. de Montaiglon and the translation of Micheal Newth. 50. In writing that last line I realize how potentially “cowboy” it sounds, since the image’s destiny is the lonely last image of twentieth-century Western films, where it is always paired with a sunset. My intention here is to offer the same romanticized (in every sense of the word) depiction of knight-horse relations that chivalric mythology does, and that partly means downplaying a criticism that I hope is nonetheless evident: the circuit of identity that I am describing is always masculinist and often misogynist—again, like chivalry itself. 51. For a discussion of the confluence of Bumke, Keen, and Patterson, see my Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages, 78–79, as well as Kaeuper’s Chivalry and Violence, 11–44 (quotation at 22). On the ability of medieval texts to “both mirror and generate social realities” more generally, see Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages,” 77; cf. Paul Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts, 3–9. Orme treats romance and chansons de geste as educational genres in From Childhood to Chivalry, 82–85. The discussion of Perlesvaus that follows is based upon Kaeuper’s fine analysis.

Notes to Chapter 2 52. The quotation is Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence’s description of why horses exist in a symbolic border state “between civilization and chaos.” I simply add to this the observation that everything she says about the horse is just as true of its rider—in this case, mounted police (Hoofbeats and Society, 121). 53. Perlesvaus, trans. Nigel Bryant, 144; discussed by Kaeuper in Chivalry and Violence, 23. 54. Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History, ed. and trans. Marjorie Chibnall, 4:236– 51. Kaeuper pairs the two episodes in Chivalry and Violence, 25. 55. Chrétien de Troyes Erec et Enide, 3692–700. The episode is analyzed by Hanning in The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance, 64–65 (quotation at 65). 56. The quotation is from Foucault’s The Use of Pleasure, 10–11; cf. the discussion of the intersubjective component of this “art” (203). This emphasis on internal regulation theoretically sets the knight and his horse apart from the equus eroticus as previously described (Aristotle as a pony is a fable of how sexual desire causes the loss of raison), but— as we shall see—chivalry is predicated upon a process of animal becoming that can disrupt the very stability for which it strives. 57. Of course, not everyone finds Perceval’s ignorance of chivalry so easy to countenance; one knight characterizes him as a dolt (sot), and conflates his stupidity with his Welshness (Li Contes del Graal, 242–45). 58. The episode occurred in 1526 and is contextualized within a discussion of the corporal punishment of children in Orme, From Childhood to Chivalry, 33. 59. See William of Palerne, ed. G. H. V. Blunt (quotations from lines 2212, 2601) and Norman Hinton, “The Werewolf as Eiron.” 60. On the “unusually intelligent and high-spirited” Arondel as “one of the characters of the poem,” see Albert C. Baugh, “Convention and Individuality in the Middle English Romance,” 130–31. 61. The death of Alexander’s man-eating mount Bucephalon, his horse since childhood, similarly announces the impending death of the hero in The Wars of Alexander; see Christine Chism, “Too Close for Comfort: Dis-Orienting Chivalry in the Wars of Alexander,” 135. 62. The fabliau is translated by John DuVal in Fabliaux Fair and Foul, 16–25. For the analysis of a Middle High German analogue, Der Pfaffe mit der Schnur, see Mark Chinca, “The Body in Some Middle High German Mären: Taming and Maiming.” Chinca also analyzes a Märe, Die zurückgelassene Hose, that invokes the horse-like Aristotle ridden by Phyllis (192), as well as two “taming of the shrew” Mären in which a husband rides his rebellious wife (205). Malory relates a similarly snide episode in his Morte Darthur, when the devoted hunter Sir Dynas weeps more for the “brachettis” (hounds) that his paramour abducts than for his departed mistress (Works, 2:50). 63. I quote from the edition of Maldwyn Mills in Six Middle English Romances. 64. On the recurring theme of “animal children” in Middle English romances, see Lee C. Ramsey, Chivalric Romance: Popular Literature in Medieval England, 169–86. 65. A medicalized version of this cross-species exchange of milk is found in Albertus Magnus, De animalibus: “When a woman has never conceived a child and she is given mare’s

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Notes to Chapter 2 milk to drink without realizing its source, and immediately afterward her husband has intercourse with her, there is a reasonable chance she will become pregnant” (139). 66. Chanson d’Aspremont, ed. Louis Brandon, 34–35; Aliscans, ed. F. Guessard and A. de Montaiglon, 496–97; Lancelot do Lac, ed. Kennedy, 1:45–47. All three episodes are treated by Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence, 148–49. 67. On the humor of these episodes in relation to their class dynamics, see Krieg, “The Contrast of Class Customs as Humor in Middle English Romance: Clement and Florent in Octavian”; cf. Mehl, Middle English Romances, 113–14. 68. Although the statutory amount for inclusion in knighthood varied somewhat in the first half of the fourteenth century, Peter Coss notes that forty pounds was the minimum wealth in lands to be included in the royal lists of knights ready for service in 1295, 1297, and 1300 (The Knight in Medieval England, 103–04). By the second half of the century, compulsion to knighthood was set firmly at forty pounds. 69. Camille points out that the image has too often been excerpted from its emplacement within the manuscript, and provides a brilliant reading of the mounted knight as part of an identity machine encompassing surrounding text, images, and historical context, and the specific reality the psalter aims to produce. 70. Ayton, Knights and Warhorses, 18–28, quotation at 18. Horses remained integral to the English war machine, most notably as the use of mounted archers grew in the fourteenth century (10). Even as the sheer number of mounted troops increased (especially as the tactic of mounted, swift raid known as chevauchée became central), the deployment of mounted cavalry by the English and then the French dwindled. 71. Camille, Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England, 56. Camille later argues that “we must also try and see this complex image as part of this man’s own quest for self-identity, not only as an image to impose upon others but also one used in order to construct a self. An ailing old man, Geoffrey Luttrell had himself painted as a vigorous knight on his warhorse, perhaps looking back to the days when he could respond to a call for arms and play his part in battle. Moreover, why should not such a glittering image be prospective as well as retrospective? Geoffrey’s son Andrew went into battle against the Scots in 1337 with two such warhorses valued at 12 and 20 marks. If he carried his father’s martial image in his mind as a pattern to follow, it was surely this one from the family psalter” (65–66). 72. On the insurmountable instability of chivalric bodies, see Kathleen Kelly, “Malory’s Body Chivalric.” Jeremy Citrome brilliantly deconstructs this body by reading the anxieties that arise at its very real dissolution in his “Bodies That Splatter.” Citrome maps the ways in which the medicalized body—the Real of the flesh—gives the lie to the chivalric fantasy of impregnable self-completion. 73. Bracton, Laws and Customs of England, 418; quoted by Salisbury, Beast Within, 40. 74. David Crouch analyzes this text dating from early in the reign of Henry I in Image of the Aristocracy, 133. 75. The scene from Aliscans is treated at greater length in my Of Giants, 170. 76. It is important to note at the same time (as Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner does) that the lai is just as much about the unnamed wife and her sexuality. Bruckner compares an-

Notes to Chapter 3 other story about a man, a woman, and a beast: the temptation in Eden (“Of Men and Beasts in Bisclavret,” 258–59). 77. See Boyd, “Sodomy, Misogyny, and Displacement,” and Dinshaw, “A Kiss Is Just a Kiss.” 78. The seminal work on the interrelation of the hunt and bedroom scenes is H. L. Savage, The Gawain-Poet: Studies in His Personality and Background. A good survey of the critical literature that amplified this connection is Anne Rooney, Huntng in Middle English Literature, 159–65. 79. Quotations from the edition by J. R. R. Tolkien, E. V. Gordon, and Norman Davis; translation by Marie Borroff throughout. 80. The quotation is from Thomas Hahn’s account of Gawain’s exemplary body in romance, “Gawain and Popular Chivalric Romance in Britain,” 220. 81. Quoting Augustine in the City of God arguing that a human soul cannot become resident in animal flesh, Joyce Salisbury argues that the early Middle Ages saw humans and animals as wholly separate, while by the later medieval period (e.g., Gerald of Wales) the line separating the two was thin (Beast Within, 1–8). I would argue, however, that within certain textual and cultural registers the separation of human and beast was always and remained tenuous; there is no need to erect a progress (or devolution) narrative. 82. This line of reasoning could be taken farther, even into the vegetal world. The circulation of heat and cold unites the human, the animal, and the plant. See, for example, the Greek medicalization of Ethiopian origin, conjoining black skin to a climate that also produces arid vegetation: Frank M. Snowden, Jr., Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the GrecoRoman Experience, 172–78. On the humoral body of the horse, see Albertus Magnus, De animalibus, 22.55–94. 83. Grosz, “Experimental Desire: Rethinking Queer Subjectivity,” in Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies, 207–27, quotation at 227. 84. Grosz, “Animal Sex,” in Space, Time, and Perversion, 187–205, quotation at 198. 85. The last quotation is Foucault’s famous closing line to The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, 387.

3. Masoch/Lancelotism 1. Uebel’s “Toward a Symptomatology of Cyberporn” is a comprehensive analysis of recent critical work on masochism, as well as a strong argument for why masochism is of special importance at this time. See also Linda Kauffman, Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture, especially the chapter on the “sadomedicine” of performance artist Bob Flanagan (20–37); John K. Noyes, The Mastery of Submission: Inventions of Masochism; Kathy O’Dell, Contract With the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s; John Munder Ross, The Sadomasochism of Everyday Life; David Savran, Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture; Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body. 2. If the number of citations from the work of Chrétien de Troyes in A Thousand Plateaus is any indication, for example, Deleuze and Guattari were deeply influenced by

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Notes to Chapter 3 his work. As will become clear later in this chapter, Deleuze’s “rediscovery” of Masoch has been an important catalyst to much critical work on the subject of masochistic desire. I hope to explore the topic of Deleuze’s Middle Ages at greater length in a future essay.
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zek frames the connection similarly: “History has to be read retro3. Slavoj Z actively. . . . It is only with the emergence of the masochistic couple, towards the end of the last century that we can now grasp the libidinal economy of courtly love.” See his essay “Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing,” in Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality, 89–112 (quotation at 89). 4. Medieval studies learned some time ago the dangers of too hastily deploying modern psychoanalytic categories, especially when such analysis merely pathologizes the past. As Caroline Walker Bynum has demonstrated, describing Margery Kempe’s uncontrolled weeping as a neurotic symptom or diagnosing the refusal of Marie d’Oignies to eat food for fifty-three days as anorexia does little to advance an understanding of such a behavior in its historical context and, more troubling, often imposes a contemporary idea of normalcy on a medieval life, thereby sweeping to the silent margins a figure who embodies a profound challenge to those norms. Recent work by medievalists and cultural theorists alike has insisted that identity can be understood only by reference to its particular embedment within a productive social matrix. Nowhere has the cultural contingency of psychic formations been better emphasized than in recent work on medieval sexualities. 5. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 131–218. For Krafft-Ebing masochism is reassuringly heterosexual, yet profoundly disturbing because the aim of its pleasures are dispersed across so many phenomena (“the perverse instinct finds an adequate satisfaction differing from the normal—in woman, to be sure, but not in coitus,” 132). This heterosexualizing impulse is ultimately belied by the evidence Krafft-Ebing gathers; see, for example, Case 50, a man as entranced by boys in high heels as women (135). Because my chapter details the passion between Lancelot and Guenevere, it too explores a heterosexual [male] masochism, but it is worth noting from the start that my own reading would not be possible without the perverse impetus of recent queer theory. 6. Sigmund Freud, “A Child Is Being Beaten,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, 17:175–204. Kaja Silverman explicates the fantasy at length in Male Subjectivity at the Margins, 201: Phase 1: “My father is beating the child [whom I hate].” Phase 2: “I am being beaten by my father.” Phase 3: “Some boys are being beaten. [I am probably looking on.]” 7. Freud, “A Child,” 185. Silverman writes: “In a move equivalent in daring to Monsieur D’s open concealment of the purloined letter in Poe’s short story, Freud disarms his critic by acknowledging what might have been discovered about phase 2: he admits, that is, to having fabricated that sequence upon which he bases his entire interpretation” (Male Subjectivity, 202). Cf. Krafft-Ebing for a masochist who argues that masochism has no etiology: “If the origin of [my masochistic thoughts] had been the result of any particular event, especially of a beating, I should certainly not have forgotten it . . . the ideas were present before there was any libido” (Psychopathia Sexualis, 149). 8. Through the rehearsal of this narrative, the fantasist’s body gained at the culminating moment a real surplus of enjoyment: his orgasm usually occurred just as the young

Notes to Chapter 3 Phoenicians surrendered to obliteration. The details of the “Moloch phantasy” (as Reik calls it) are scattered throughout Masochism in Modern Man, 41–48 and 55–56. The fantasy came in several permutations, including one with an Aztec setting; no matter how the context shifts, however, my interest is in the Moloch-like idol and the ritual of submission performed to its potency. 9. Silverman, Male Subjectivity, 206. Silverman’s discussion of Reik can be found on
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zek, Metastases of Enjoyment: “What is of crucial importance 189–90, 195–201, 205–08. Cf. Z here is the total self-externalization of the masochist’s most intimate passion: the most intimate desires become objects of contract and composed negotiation . . . the surrealistic passionate masochistic game, which suspends social reality, none the less easily fits into that everyday reality” (92). 10. The words are again Silverman (Male Subjectivity, 198), but they capture the force of Reik’s argument well: “The paradox, the defiance, the secret rebellion, are not accessory elements of masochism, they not only crop up on its surface, but they constitute its basis and essence” (Masochism in Modern Man, 427). 11. Oddly enough, Reik’s one contextualizing gesture is to read the grate that suspends the victims of Moloch above a fire in terms of 1 Corinthians 7:9, “But if they cannot contain, let them marry; for it is better to marry than to burn” (Masochism in Modern Man, 55), rendering the episode an eternal truth about Christian fears of sexuality. 12. Chrétien and his continuator always referred to the romance as Le Chevalier de la charrete (“The Knight of the Cart”), but the work is often called Lancelot or Lancelot du Lac, after its protagonist. The insertion of the nom propre by Chrétien’s readers and critics echoes the similar demand voiced by the characters in the text to know exactly who Lancelot is, as if the name corresponded to the identity of the text—as if the corpus of Lancelot and the textus of Lancelot were one. As we shall see, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch perversely became a similar nom du père. 13. Paris’s groundbreaking “Etudes sur les romans de la Table Ronde: Lancelot du Lac” mints the term amour courtois and locates its origin in Lancelot (519). David Hult excavates some of the cultural history behind Paris’s project in “Gaston Paris and the Invention of Courtly Love.” Sarah Kay succinctly describes this sexuality in Chrétien’s romance as a “disquieting combination of illicit sex and quasi-mystical love” (“Courts, Clerks, and Courtly Love,” 81). Kay argues that courtly love is not easily codified—that, like masochism, it is possessed of a fluid dynamic that changes under shifting historical conditions, and that criticism should map its shifting contours rather than attempt to reify it. See also the important historicization of “Western romantic love” in R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love. 14. Jean Frappier critiques the moralizing stance shared by Paris and Wendelin Foerster (editor of the influential 1889 edition of the romance) in Chrétien de Troyes, l’homme et l’oeuvre, but elsewhere affirms a conflict between Chrétien’s morality and Marie’s command (“Le Prologue du Chevalier de la Charrete et son interpretation”). Further on this “gap,” see Richard L. Michener, “Courtly Love in Chrétien: The ‘Demande d’amour,’” and Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, “Le Chevalier de la Charrete (Lancelot),” 137–38. 15. Bruckner, “Le Chevalier de la Charrete (Lancelot),” 138; see also Shaping Romance: Interpretation, Truth, and Closure in Twelfth-Century French Fictions, 84. Versions of this

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Notes to Chapter 3 “romance” have been a critical commonplace since the late nineteenth century, but for especially evocative formulations of the narrative see Jean Deroy, “Chrétien de Troyes et Godefroi de Leigni, conspirateurs contre la Fin’Amour adultère”; Foerster in the introduction to his edition of the poem (Der Karrenritter); Jean Frappier, “Le Prologue du Chevalier de la Charrete et son interpretation”; Jerome Mandel, “Proper Behavior in Chrétien’s Charrete “; and Peter S. Noble, Love and Marriage in Chrétien de Troyes, 65–82. For a counterargument that reverses the terms of engagement (urging a turn to history to illuminate literature rather than vice versa), see John F. Benton, “The Court of Champagne as a Literary Center,” 563, as well as Laurie A. Finke’s critique, “Sexuality in Medieval French Literature,” 349. 16. As F. Douglas Kelly points out, this line of criticism culminates in the “proof” that “Chrétien’s story of the love of Lancelot and Guenevere was not only the worst of his writings, but was among the worst pieces of literature (if, under these circumstances, it may be called that) the Middle Ages has handed down to us” (Sens and Conjointure in the Chevalier de la charrette, 1; see also 4–21). 17. “extérieure à l’individu, qui à lui seul ne peut ni la créer ni la modifier; elle n’existe qu’en vertu d’une sorte de contrat passé entre les membres de la communauté”: Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de Linguistique Générale, 31; Course in General Linguistics, 14. 18. What follows is a compressed account of the performative or “citational” model of gender proposed by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” Her model is obviously far more nuanced than my summary can indicate here. 19. See McNamara’s “The Herrenfrage: The Restructuring of the Gender System, 1050–1150.” Although the First Lateran Council invalidated clerical marriage in 1132, McNamara does not, of course, imply that the system had been successfully restructured by 1150. Cf. R. N. Swanson, “The ‘men question’ cannot be confined within these date limits” (“Angels Incarnate: Clergy and Masculinity from Gregorian Reform to Reformation,” 161). 20. Georges Duby, Medieval Marriage: Two Models from Twelfth-Century France and The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France. See also Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe. Although Duby has argued that the crisis in matrimony was over by the early twelfth century (The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, 5–8), Brundage insists that it is not resolved until the doctrine of consent is in place, c. 1159–81 (Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe). See also McNamara, “The Herrenfrage,” 20, 29n. 21. Lambert himself narrates the episode in the Historia comitum Ghisnensium; see Georges Duby, Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages, 18. 22. John Baldwin describes the emerging consensus between theologians and canonists as demanding an inflexible combination of monogamy, exogamy, and indissolubility (The Language of Sex: Five Voices from Northern France around 1200, 6). Baldwin rightly underscores that at stake in the matrimonial debate was sexuality itself. 23. Duby, Love and Marriage, 17. This mutuality was instrumental to Hugh’s transformation of love into the sacramentum of marriage and “exaltation” of what Duby labels “personal responsibility” (17). 24. On the invention of the husband in a different context, see Susan Mosher Stuard, “The Burdens of Matrimony: Husbanding and Gender in Medieval Italy.” On the church’s

Notes to Chapter 3 twelfth-century deployment of the couple and the work it did in maintaining male dominance, see McNamara, “The Herrenfrage,” 4–5. These competing significations for marriage are not, of course, wholly amenable to a progress narrative in which one form or the other becomes “triumphant.” As Scott-Morgan Straker has shown using Lévi-Strauss’s notion of reciprocity, for example, the marriage of Henry V to Katherine of Valois (1420) fits the exchange model of aristocratic marriage better than the ecclesiastical one—as, indeed, do most marital unions among the nobility throughout the Middle Ages (“Rivalry and Reciprocity in Lydgate’s Troy Book”). Marriage was (and continues to be) an adaptative social and private relationship built upon a certain amount of fluidity. 25. “Subjected to gender, but subjectivated by gender, the ‘I’ neither precedes nor follows the process of this gendering, but emerges only within and as the matrix of gender relations themselves” (Butler, Bodies That Matter, 7). The discussion that follows is indebted to Butler’s work, especially to “Critically Queer” (in Bodies That Matter, 223–42), which thoughtfully examines questions of agency within identity construction. 26. The quotation is taken from Gilles Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” 12, where it refers to Masoch’s project in his novels, but I would like to fashion a larger claim from it. 27. The conflation of sadism with masochism into a “dialectical unity” is mainly Freud’s accomplishment (Three Essays on Sexuality, in Standard Edition, 7:125–245), but Deleuze goes a long way toward reseparating them: “The concurrence of sadism and masochism is fundamentally one of analogy only; their processes and their formations are entirely different; their common organ, their ‘eye,’ squints and should therefore make us suspicious. . . . Sadomasochism is one of these misbegotten names, a semiological howler” (“Coldness and Cruelty,” 46, 134). 28. Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” 20. He amplifies the point later: “The contract presupposes in principle the free consent of the contracting parties and determines between them a system of reciprocal rights and duties; it cannot affect a third party and is valid for a limited period. Institutions, by contrast, determine a long-term state of affairs which is both involuntary and inalienable; it establishes a power or authority which takes effect against a third party. But even more significant is the difference between the contract and the institution with respect to what is known as the law: the contract actually generates the law, even if this law oversteps and contravenes the conditions which made it possible. . . . The corresponding impulse at work in the case of the institution is toward the degradation of all laws and the establishment of a superior power that sets itself above them” (77). 29. I am using “contract” here in a very loose way to emphasize the consensual model of gender that undergirds the masochisms about which I am writing; I am not implying that masochism cannot exist without a contract in the modern sense of a legalized written agreement between parties. Throughout my discussion I draw upon but modify Deleuze’s work in “Coldness and Cruelty,” making it less psychoanalytic/Lacanian and more Foucauldian by elaborating it within a reading of power and its functions. 30. The quotation is from Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” 10. Cf. Krafft-Ebing: “I feel justified in calling this sexual anomaly ‘Masochism’ because the author of Sacher-Masoch frequently made this perversion, which up to his time was quite unknown to the scientific world as such, the substratum of his writings.” In the second edition of the Psychopathia

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Notes to Chapter 3 Sexualis he goes on to admit that his coupling of the name of a “revered author” with a “perversion of the sexual instinct” has annoyed many of his contemporaries (132). 31. Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art, 39. Although I am interested, generally, in psychoanalytic readings of masochism, I also find Steven Shaviro’s caveat on the subject compelling. He writes that masochism must be theorized as potentially in excess of the social structures through which it becomes intelligible, so that “our society’s ‘symbolic order’” does not stand “as the transcendental cause of gender and sexual oppressions,” but is instead “a concrete (and therefore contingent and changeable) effect and instrument of practices of oppression” (The Cinematic Body, 57–58). 32. Chrétien de Troyes, Lancelot or The Knight of the Cart (Le Chevalier de la Charrete), line 2091. Further citations by line number only; translation has sometimes been slightly modified to make it more literal. I have also consulted the various MS variations and resources recorded in The Charrete Project (http://www.princeton.edu/⬃lancelot/docs.html), most useful because it contains a searchable e-text of Foerster’s edition. 33. “People were summoned as spectators: they were assembled to observe public executions and amendes honorables; pillories, gallows, and scaffolds were erected in public squares or by the roadsides. . . . Not only must the people know, they must see with their own eyes. Because they must be made to be afraid; but also they must be the witnesses, the guarantors, of the punishment, and because they must to a certain extent take part in it”: Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 58. 34. The action of both narratives takes place at the same time, with significant overlap, suggesting that the matrimonial mythologizing of one is connected to the obsessions of the other. In Le Chevalier au lion, Gawain is the knight who castigates Yvain for his uxoriousness and leads him away to the tournament circuit—a performance of masculinity that Yvain learns is incommensurable with his new identity as husband. 35. On armor and the visibility of gendered identity in the romance, see E. Jane Burns, “Refashioning Courtly Love: Lancelot as Ladies’ Man or Lady/Man?” 116. 36. A certain irony is present even in the initial description of the cart, which proceeds for many lines longer than is necessary to convey its signification. Chrétien makes it so grossly shameful that it becomes difficult to take seriously. The effect builds as almost every character Lancelot meets launches into a sudden oratory on the horrible meaning of the cart and the worthlessness of anyone who would step inside; such speeches occur at 320–44, 405–17, 486–91, 575–82, 1665–72, 2211–19, 2594–2614, and 2758–78. This interpretive excess (surplus) that conjoins irony, pleasure, and debasement is at the heart of the masochistic embrace. 37. I’m playing here on Chrétien’s clever pun that revolves around which interpretive context the phrase au noauz (which means both) is articulated into; see 5645 ff. Bruckner reads the tournament episode as mise en abyme in Shaping Romance, 61–65. 38. “The finamen (courtly lover) possesses a special body capable of deferral and lack; it can endure, because it so chooses, and its endurance marks its special aliveness, its power of alteration over its own flesh. Thus the finamen can speak endlessly of its suffering flesh, of the ‘gentil herte’ whose passion or ‘pite’ defines a subject boundlessly aware of and inhabited by an intimate other. It is on the basis of this relation to the intimate other

Notes to Chapter 3 that fin’ amors founds its ascetic timing and its ethics” (L. O. Aranye Fradenburg, “The Love of Thy Neighbor,” 141–42). 39. “Lacan’s point is that the real purpose of the drive is not its goal (full satisfaction) but its aim: the drive’s ultimate aim is simply to reproduce itself as drive, to return to its circular path, to continue its path to and from the goal. The real source of enjoyment is the
i
zek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to repetitive movement of this closed circuit” (Slavoj Z Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, 5). On the necessity of barriers to full enjoyment to
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zek, Metastases sustaining the necessary fiction that such enjoyment in fact exists, see also Z of Enjoyment, 94–95, and Lacan, Encore, 65, and The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 152. 40. Perhaps Guenevere’s masochistic moment is so difficult to sustain because, as Kaja Silverman (following Reik) has pointed out, female masochism is hardly shocking: masochism is traditionally gendered feminine to begin with, so that female masochism “stretches” subjective limits but cannot really exceed them (Male Subjectivity, 190). 41. For example, when it becomes clear to the dameseil accompanying Lancelot through the aventures of the rape tableau, discovery of the comb, encounter with the knight who wants to force his love on her, and lifting of the prophetic stone slab that she will never learn his name of him, she turns back in disgust (2008–10). I take this as a textual signal that the audience is supposed to share her annoyance, foregrounding the question of his identity and its dependent construction again. 42. It would be interesting to connect this “surplus” with the interpretive surplus Marie de France plays with in the prologue to her Lais, lines 9–16. Chrétien likewise toys with this idea of surplus as “significance.” Marie also uses it as a synonym for the sex act in her description of Guigemar’s lovemaking: “bien lur conviege del surplus, / De ceo que li autre unt en us!” (“I hope they will enjoy whatever else others do on such occasions,” 533–34). See Robert W. Hanning, “‘I Shal Finde It in a Maner Glose’: Versions of Textual Harassment in Medieval Literature,” 35. 43. Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” 217. In Male Subjectivity Kaja Silverman follows Bersani in writing that male masochism is a “shattering” experience in which the masochist “leaves his social identity behind—actually abandons his ‘self’” as he moves into the realm of the traditional feminine (190). 44. On martyrdom, masochism, and the queer, see Robert Mills, “‘Whatever You Do Is a Delight to Me’: Masculinity, Masochism, and Queer Play in Representations of Male Martyrdom.” 45. Significantly, Brundage has argued that canon lawyers had introduced an obsession with consummation to theorizing the “fact” marriage by 1140; see Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 188–89. 46. On this point compare McNamara’s summary of the change in gender roles precipitated by the changed rules of marriage in the early twelfth century: “The growing class of disinherited ‘youth’ were obliged to make themselves pleasing to women if they were to compete successfully in securing their lost place in the social order. In life as in literature, the harsh reality was that many men had to put women’s tastes ahead of their own masculine image. Moralists, who were strangely silent about female vanity in the first half of the twelfth century, complained of men’s effeminate fashions. Men who shaved their beards,

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Notes to Chapter 3 curled their hair, and cultivated other courtly vanities were blamed for causing soldiers to be confused with priests or women. Canon lawyers insisted that the consent of the partners was the only requirement for marriage. . . . The ephemeral advantages of women in courtship dictated the ‘unnatural’ subordination of men” (“The Herrenfrage,” 9). 47. Lancelot: Roman en prose du XIIIe siècle, ed. Alexandre Micha, 8:483. 48. One of Chrétien’s sources may have been such a tale, perhaps the same one told in the Vita sancti Gildae, or a version of the story depicted upon the Modena archivolt. 49. See D. D. R. Owen, “Profanity and Its Purpose in Chrétien’s Cligés and Lancelot.” Sarah Kay suggestively ties Cristien, the translator of the Gospel of Nicodemus into French, with Chrétien de Troyes in “Who was Chrétien de Troyes?” 8–13. 50. On the resonance of this scene with depictions of crossing to an Otherworld, see Jeff Rider, “The Other Worlds of Romance,” 115–16. 51. See Peggy McCracken, “The Body Politic and the Queen’s Adulterous Body in French Romance.” The disappearance of the woman’s body (in this case, the queen’s) is disturbingly easy to theorize. Freud has written that dirty jokes perform this vanishing act over the violated body of a woman in order to strengthen bonds between men (Standard Edition, 7:97–102). René Girard introduces the idea of mimetic desire, which deflects desire away from the woman and solidifies instead a connection between men (To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology); a special case of this kind of desire operates, for example, in Malory’s Lancelot, who loves Arthur so much that he commits adultery with Guenevere. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work is also relevant here, especially Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Lacan has much to say about this vanishing body and the impossibility of sexual relations; see, for example, his analysis of courtly love in Ethics of Psychoanalysis, where he describes the Lady as “terrifying, an in
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zek meanwhile aligns the same figure human partner” devoid of personhood (149–50). Z with das Ding, a site of “radical Otherness” and therefore a “kind of automaton, a machine which utters meaningless demands at random” (Metastases of Enjoyment, 90). Medieval historians advance similar conclusions. Christiane Marchello-Nizia (“Amour courtois, société masculine et figures du pouvoir”) writes of woman as “la métonymie du seigneur,” while Georges Duby makes a related conclusion in Love and Marriage, 56–63. For a consideration of this erasure and its replication in criticism, see Laurie A. Finke, “Sexuality in Medieval French Literature,” 352–56; Roberta Krueger, Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance, 39–51; and Peggy McCracken, The Romance of Adultery: Queenship and Sexual Transgression in Old French Literature, 109–10. 52. E. Jane Burns writes that the courtly lady is “nominally invested with the authority of a feudal lord, as she received putative homage from the knight in her service . . . she plays the seemingly empowered lord to his supposedly subservient vassal” (“Refashioning Courtly Love,” 113.) 53. See Bruckner, Shaping Romance, 84–85 and 240–41 n. 31 for this observation and a detailed reading of the links between the author and his fiction. 54. Sarah Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry, 86. On the virtuality (rather than reality) of this supposedly empowered position of the lady, see E. Jane Burns and Roberta L. Krueger, “Courtly Ideology and Woman’s Place in Medieval French Literature,” and E. Jane Burns, “The Man Behind the Lady in Troubadour Lyric.”

Notes to Chapter 4 55. Roberta Krueger accurately calls the moment a “rupture” of Chrétien’s “fictive persona” (“The Author’s Voice: Narrators, Audiences, and the Problem of Interpretation,” 120–21). I am influenced in my reading of the Godefroi episode by David Hult’s persuasive argument in “Author/Narrator/Speaker: The Voice of Authority in Chrétien’s Charrete,” that what really matters in examining the textual dynamics here is not ascertaining who Godefroi was, but rather reflecting upon what possibilities the revelation opens up (see especially 84–85). 56. Holmes argued based on charter and comparative evidence that Christianus was not a common name and, like Baptizatus, was associated with converted Jews, many of whom lived in the area around Troyes. Because almost nothing is known about Chrétien, this hypothesis can be nothing more than speculation. It is interesting to note, however, that the Broce as Juis in Troyes, with its central synagogue, was not far from the cathedral and its school, and that Champagne was home to many rabbis renowned for their learning, including Salomon ben Isaac (Rashi) and his grandson the poet Jacob ben Meir (Rabbenu Tam), who—after being attacked by crusaders—relocated to Troyes. See Holmes and Amelia Klenke, Chrétien, Troyes and the Grail, 5–13, 51–61. 57. For the attribution of the lines to Chrétien see David Hult, “Author/Narrator/ Speaker,” 86.

4. The Solitude of Guthlac 1. Quotations from the Old English Guthlac poems taken from the edition of Jane Roberts, The Guthlac Poems of the Exeter Book. Citations are identified by line number; translations are my own. This chapter was originally conceived as an essay for a collection to honor the memory of Daniel Calder. Although never published in that form, it has benefited enormously from the benevolent critique of Robert E. Bjork, Carol Braun Pasternack, and Lisa M. C. Weston. 2. Felix’s Life of Saint Guthlac, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave; further references by chapter number. Colgrave argues for a date of 730–40 for the text (19); cf. D. P. Kirby, The Earliest English Kings, 131–32. 3. Æthelbald was buried at Repton in 755, marking the crypt and the church erected around it as an important royal site. Wiglaf, a later king of Mercia, joined Æthelbald there in 840, followed by the Mercian prince and martyr Wigstan, d. 849. On the evolution of the site see David Rollason, Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England, 59. 4. Alan T. Thacker, “The Social and Continental Background to Early Anglo-Saxon Hagiography,” D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford (1977), cited by David Rollason, Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England, 118. 5. Kirby provides a full account of the kingships of both Æthelbald and Offa in The Earliest English Kings, 129–36 and 163–84. Felix seems to have been composing the Vita Guthlaci during Æthelbald’s reign (cf. LII), but it is of course unknown when the text was being actively promulgated and by whom. I am arguing for enduring eighth-century appeal. Æthelbald is called rex Anglorum by Felix (Offa will later be called by this title also), while one of Æthelbald’s own charters declares him rex Britanniae. Bede likewise completed his

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Notes to Chapter 4 Ecclesiastical History while Æthelbald was on the throne, and noted the extensive authority of Mercia over the kingdoms of the island. For a reading of the building of the Mercian hegemony under Æthelbald and Offa that stresses the innovative nature of their drive toward “quasi-sovereignty,” see Eric John, Reassessing Anglo-Saxon England, 50–65. Both John and Patrick Wormald (“Bede, the Bretwaldas and the Origins of the Gens Anglorum”) stress that “Englishness” and “Britain” as unifying categories were notional, established and maintained only with great difficulty. Kathleen Davis, following Nicholas Howe, puts it best: “Like all ideologies, the concept of national community is never an ideal separable from reality, but is a way of perceiving given historical traditions” (“National Writing in the Ninth Century: A Reminder for Postcolonial Thinking about the Nation,” 618–19). Cf. Nicholas Howe, Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England, 34. 6. Such overlords were sometimes called a brytenwealda or bretwalda, but the term’s relation to a political reality is difficult to assess. Wormald points out that the noun has a double meaning, “at once southumbrian and pan-British” (“Bede, the Bretwaldas and the Origins of the Gens Anglorum,” 127). Wormald argues against reading an enduring political unity back into Anglo-Saxon England via such terms, emphasizing instead the important religious and cultural function such imaginings of community accomplished; cf. Kirby, The Earliest English Kings, 179, and, for a different view, John, Reassessing Anglo-Saxon England, 21 n. 7. Eighth-century Mercia was clearly not a nation in the modern sense, but I agree with Kathleen Davis that making such a statement should not entail the complete dismissal of the term in attempting to conceptualize Anglo-Saxon community: “The promise of studying medieval nation-formation in the context of postcolonial thinking about the modern nation . . . lies not only in its potential to enhance our understanding of medieval national communities, but also in its ability to show, as medievalists have recently done in regard to other topics, that the medieval difference from the modern cannot be set out in terms of opposition” (“National Writing in the Ninth Century,” 613–14). 8. “nam ille aliorum temporum praeteritis voluminibus inter illos exulabat, quoadusque eorum strimulentas loquelas intelligere valuit” (“for in years gone by he had been in exile among them, so that he was able to understand their sibilant speech,” XXXIV). On the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms as a combining of Germanic invaders with fifth-century Britons into “a hybrid society, Anglo-Saxon in name and language but in blood a successful fusion of the two peoples,” see Steven Bassett, “In Search of the Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms,” 4, 21–22, as well as John, Reassessing Anglo-Saxon England, 6–8. 9. The best treatment of Felix’s citational method of composition remains Benjamin P. Kurtz, “From St. Antony to St. Guthlac: A Study in Biography.” 10. For the life of Paul the Hermit, see Jerome, Vita S. Pauli primi eremitae, PL 23, 17–30; for Cuthbert, see Two Lives of St Cuthbert [the anonymous Vita S. Cuthberti and Bede’s derivative Vita S. Cuthberti], ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave. On the influence of the Vita Antonii and Bede’s Vita Cuthberti, see Kurtz, “From St. Antony to St. Guthlac”; on the importance of the Visio Pauli, a vision of hell, see Antonette diPaolo Healey, The Old English Vision of Saint Paul, 44–45. An extreme justification for hagiographic intertextuality was offered by the anonymous Monk of Whitby in the Life of Gregory: “So let no one be disturbed if these miracles were performed by any other of the saints, since the holy Apostle,

Notes to Chapter 4 through the mystery of the limbs of a single body, which he compares to the living experience of the saints, concludes that we are all ‘members of one another’” (The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great, ed. Bertram Colgrave [Lawrence, KA: 1968], 131; cited by Calder, “Guthlac A and Guthlac B: Some Considerations,” 76). 11. Roberts surveys the materials in “An Inventory of Early Guthlac Materials.” See also The Guthlac Poems, ed. Roberts, 1–12, and her “Guthlac A: Sources and Source Hunting,” as well as Colgrave’s edition of Felix’s version, 19–25. 12. Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel, ed. Charles Plummer, i.42; R. Vaughan, “The Chronicle Attributed to John of Wallingford,” 9; The Guthlac Poems, ed. Roberts, 1–2. 13. Penelope Audrey Shore, “The Cultural Context of the Old English Guthlac Poems,” 8 and 294 n. 14. Roy M. Liuzza evokes this temporal depth well: “The poems on the first folios of the Exeter Book represent not a final authority, but only the surviving witness to a long and complex history of codicological transmission, omission, addition, and revision” (“The Old English Christ and Guthlac: Texts, Manuscripts, and Critics,” 10). 15. Carol Braun Pasternack persuasively argues that Old English poetry is therefore best analyzed as verse sequences rather than as individuated poems; see The Textuality of Old English Poetry, esp. 174–79. 16. For a recent overview of critical practice and an argument for the poem’s connectedness to surrounding text, see Roy M. Liuzza, “The Old English Christ and Guthlac.” Thorpe thought them part of Christ, the preceding work; he abstracted another poem from what is today lines 30–92 and began Guthlac proper at line 93, printing A and B as a single text. Grein followed suit, but restored lines 30 ff. to Guthlac. Gollancz persuasively argued that the questionable lines were a prologue to Guthlac A, but battles over the unity of the piece were long waged, with the result that a great deal of confusion exists when line numbers are cited in criticism and in translations; see The Guthlac Poems, ed. Roberts, 18– 19. Even after the lines were generally accepted as part of Guthlac A, a similar critical controversy has haunted their interpretation, with the introduction often being dismissed as “incoherent even within itself” (Bjork, Old English Verse Saints’ Lives: A Study in Direct Discourse and the Iconography of Style, 28–29). For a mathematical reading of the poem that transforms its text into an explosive geometry that only underscores its potential mutability, see Robert D. Stevick, “The Length of ‘Guthlac A.’” 17. Thomas Hill describes the moment well: “an heroic saint who once defied diabolical enemies in the fens and who is now no longer subject to the uncertainties of time and history” (“The Age of Man and the World in the Old English Guthlac A,” 13). 18. John P. Hermann maps the continuity between Paul’s miles Christi in Ephesians 6:11–17 and Old English spiritual warriors in “The Recurrent Motifs of Spiritual Warfare,” while Joyce Hill argues for taking such “militarizations” seriously as theology rather than, as has too often been argued, an “inappropriate” graft of inherited tradition in “The Soldier of Christ in Old English Prose and Poetry.” On the continuity of audience between AngloSaxon hagiography and heroic poetry, see Stanley Greenfield and Daniel G. Calder, A New Critical History of Old English Literature, 158–82; Edward B. Irving, Jr., “Image and Meaning in the Elegies,” 153; Rosemary Woolf, “Saints Lives,” 219–44; and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen, Guthlac of Crowland: A Study of Heroic Hagiography, 1–4. On the characterization of

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Notes to Chapter 4 Anglo-Saxon saints as heroes, see Jennifer Neville, Representations of the Natural World in Old English Poetry, 123, and Hill, “The Soldier of Christ in Old English Prose and Poetry.” That the Guthlac story participates in a localizable fascination with eremitic life is also likely. As Mary Clayton points out, the Old English Martyrology, “a Mercian compilation probably composed c. 800,” includes nine solitaries among its saints’ lives (“Hermits and the Contemplative Life in Anglo-Saxon England,” 154). 19. On the poem’s multivalent use of had (a term that ranges in meaning from “person” to “order, rank” to “monastic vocation”) see Calder, “Guthlac A and Guthlac B,” 68–69 and Olsen, Guthlac of Crowland, 30–31. 20. Colgrave provides the following useful if terminologically dated note on the line: “There is little doubt that Guthlac would have been familiar with the deeds of the great men of his race through the heroic songs and poetry recited by the minstrel at court or elsewhere. We gather from c.XVIII that the heroic deeds he heard of were partly at any rate concerned with the heroes of his own ancestry, the royal race of Mercia, though on the other hand, one of the features of the heroic poetry that has come down to us is its international character, e.g. Beowulf” (Felix’s Life of Saint Guthlac, 178 n). In The Anglo-Saxon Warrior Ethic: Reconstructing Lordship in Early English Literature, John Hill has emphasized the contingency and open-endedness of this heroic tradition, as well as its susceptibility to transformation for various “political agendas.” 21. “Race” (gens) has multiple medieval significations, as a later chapter will explore, but here the term is used interchangeably with a pluralized conception of ethnicities, tribal and familial affiliations, indicating the continuum of linguistic, juridical, and religious differences that characterized early “Anglo-Saxon” England. In the words of Eric John, “It seems certain that the Germanic tribes of the sub-Roman world were not discrete entities held together by Zusammengehörigkeitgefühl but racially, or at least tribally, diverse in origin. . . . What held them together was probably the search for loot; what kept them together was the transformation of loot into land and the necessity of defending that land” (Reassessing Anglo-Saxon England, 5–6). N. J. Higham provides a succinct examination of AngloSaxon ethnicities in The Convert Kings: Power and Religious Affiliation in Early Anglo-Saxon England, emphasizing “cultural and ideological separateness” within an array of possible similarities (85). 22. For a historical reconstruction of the warband in Mercia, see Richard P. Abels, Lordship and Military Obligation in Anglo-Saxon England, 25–36. Abels argues that Guthlac is leading a “private” warband rather than engaging in service to the king (35, 36, 44). 23. Clare Stancliffe writes that Guthlac was “a potential king, a man of royal blood who gathered a warband about him and lived by pillage, much as Caedwalla had done before he seized power in Wessex” (“Kings Who Opted Out,” 167). 24. Bede will similarly make use of a storm to convey the advent of significant cultural change in narrating the arrival of Saint Germanus to Britain. Demons, terrified that Germanus will cleanse the land of its love of heresies, raise a tempest to prevent Germanus’s boat from reaching shore (Ecclesiastical History of the English People, I.17). Sandwiched between the narrative of invading Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, the account argues for the necessity of the island becoming “cosmopolitan”—that is, argues for the necessary end of

Notes to Chapter 4 the Britons’ reign. Here, as in the Vita Guthlaci, a resistance to the progress of Christian modernity is figured through atavistic devils. 25. See Navigatio S. Brendani Abbatis, ed. C. Selmer, and the translation by J. F. Webb and D. H. Farmer; references are to chapter numbers in both the Latin and English texts. 26. I use “Christianities” (plural) to emphasize the internal heterogeneity of contemporary Christianity. As Carol Pasternack reminded me when revising this chapter, Christian teachings were often not consistent or consistently promulgated; Christian strategies for solving the conflicts with heroic cultures were likewise multifarious and inconsistent. On this pluralization see also Steven Kruger’s review of James Muldoon, Varieties of Religious Conversion in the Middle Ages; and Kathleen Biddick, “Coming out of Exile: Dante on the Orient Express.” 27. On “Germanic” and “Christian” as false binaries masking an inseparable, plural reality, see James W. Earl, Thinking About Beowulf, 106, and Clare A. Lees, “Engendering Religious Desire: Sex, Knowledge, and Christian Identity in Anglo-Saxon England,” 22–23. 28. On Anglo-Saxon penitentials and the regulation of sexuality, see Allen J. Frantzen, “Where the Boys Are: Children and Sex in the Anglo-Saxon Penitentials,” and Before the Closet: Same-Sex Love from Beowulf to Angels in America, 138–83. 29. Quotation from The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 2:3–51. Neville treats the episode at length in Representations of the Natural World, 123–24. 30. Patrick Wormald summarizes Chadwick’s famous argument well: “Early AngloSaxon poets drew their heroes from the Germanic world as a whole, as did the authors of the royal genealogies; theirs was a cosmopolitan rather than national vision” (“Bede, the Bretwaldas and the Origins of the Gens Anglorum,” 103). 31. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and the members of Interscripta, “The Armour of an Alienating Identity,” 13. On the saint’s body (indeed, on the late antique body) as founded upon a similar demand for mimesis, see Peter Brown, “The Saint as Exemplar in Late Antiquity.” 32. Lees, “Engendering Religious Desire,” 23. See also her “Men and Beowulf.” 33. This devaluation of community is what worried Bede so much about hermits and anchorites; see Alan Thacker, “Bede’s Ideal of Reform,” and Clayton, “Hermits and the Contemplative Life,” 155–56. 34. Vita Beati Antonii abbatis auctore Sancto Athanasio, II, PL 73, 125–70. 35. The novelty of Guthlac’s refusal of condemnation is explored by Frances Randall Lipp in “Guthlac A: An Interpretation,” 48–49; Thomas Hill labels Guthlac’s words “surprisingly humane and tolerant” (“Age of Man and the World,” 16). The movement from youthful sin to adult morality also has a parallel in Augustine’s words about the sins of childhood, Confessions, I.vii (II). Based on this passage, Michael Lapidge argues that the intended audience for the text was “young monks who were in danger of being enticed by the pleasures of the world,” an unnecessary limiting of the poem’s ambitions (“The Saintly Life in Medieval England,” 260). 36. Robert Bjork points out that lines 287–89a rhyme verb endings: “By binding the sounds together, they also bind and intensify the meanings: the hostile troop will trample, tread over, tear, wreak their anger on, and bear away poor Guthlac” (The Old English Verse Saints’ Lives, 43).

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Notes to Chapter 4 37. The quotation is from L. O. Aranye Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, “Caxton, Foucault, and the Pleasures of History,” xix. 38. On the continuity between Germanic heroes and monsters, and the relevance of this interrelation to Guthlac A, see Olsen, Guthlac of Crowland, 40–43. The most thorough recent discussion of the monsters of Beowulf is Andy Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-Manuscript. 39. On the utility of various terms for “all-male groups with aggression as one major function,” see Joseph Harris, “Love and Death in the Männerbund: An Essay with Special Reference to the Bjarkamál and The Battle of Maldon,” 78, and Michael J. Enright, “The Warband Context of the Unferth Episode.” On the translation of feara sum (literally, “one of few”) as “alone,” see Roberts’s note on the line in her edition (134). It is interesting to note that whereas in Guthlac B the saint is accompanied to the wilderness by a servant who dwells nearby and visits daily (999–1001), this Guthlac remains utterly alone. 40. Neville makes the point that Old English poetry repeatedly formulates the loss of social structure as crumbled architecture and an inimical natural world; see, for example, Representations of the Natural World, 55, and cf. the section on exile, 84–88. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe writes of the centrality of community to heroic culture, observing that “communal obligations” served to “protect the individual from isolation,” for the “loneliness of a solitary life was greatly feared” (“Heroic Values and Christian Ethics,” 110). 41. On this point more generally, see Hugh Magennis, Images of Community in Old English Poetry; 178–88 specifically examine Guthlac A. On the Wanderer’s exile, see Robert E. Bjork, “Sundor aet rune: The Voluntary Exile of the Wanderer,” and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages, 6–12. 42. See W. F. Bolton, “The Background and Meaning of Guthlac,” 598. 43. On the vexed relationship between the two heroic narratives, see Magnus Fjalldal, The Long Arm of Coincidence: The Frustrated Connection Between Beowulf and Grettis saga. 44. The signification of the wilderness in Beowulf is considered at length by Magennis, Images of Community, 127–43. An interesting recent account of the landscape of monsters in Beowulf is provided by Gillian R. Overing and Marijane Osborn, Landscape of Desire: Partial Stories of the Medieval Scandinavian World, 22–23. 45. Discussion of the socius is dispersed throughout Anti-Oedipus, but see especially “The Inscribing Socius,” 139–45 (quotation at 139). Other Deleuzoguattarian terms are obviously related, e.g., the oedipal, the molar, the striated, the social field, signifiance, subjectification, the “judgment of God.” 46. The BwO is admittedly among Deleuze and Guattari’s most difficult concepts, and its intractability is not helped by their insouciant (but perhaps necessary) refusal to define it. The chapter “How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs?” begins with the flippant, resistant (and typically hilarious) statement “At any rate you have one (or several).” It only gets more complicated from there (A Thousand Plateaus, 149). The BwO is frequently mentioned throughout Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative work; a good starting point is Anti-Oedipus, 9–16, and A Thousand Plateaus, 149–66. The BwO is most straightforwardly a body without organization (no hierarchy of limbs, organic functions, assigned sex roles, and so forth), but includes the nonhuman and for that matter the nonmaterial. It is related to the molecular, the smooth, the multiple.

Notes to Chapter 4 47. Michael Lapidge, “The Saintly Life in Medieval England,” 245, and David Rollason, Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England, 3. 48. Along the same lines, Nicholas Howe describes the continuity that Thomas Jefferson imagined between Hengest and Horsa and the colonization of the United States, Migration and Mythmaking, 1–2. Howe’s nuanced investigation of the overlap between a Christian and a political impetus toward the development of a communal “Anglo-Saxon” identity (both contemporary and retroactively posited in the past) has been foundational to my own thinking throughout this section. 49. Shook, “The Burial Mound in Guthlac A,” 10. For a similarly reverent reading, see Paul F. Reichardt, “Guthlac A and the Landscape of Spiritual Perfection.” 50. Wentersdorf, “Guthlac A: The Battle for the Beorg,” 136. Wentersdorf argues that the episode allegorizes the transformation of pagan England into a Christian land, a provocative reading that fits well with my postcolonial interpretation here. See also Penelope Shore’s argument in “The Cultural Context of the Old English Guthlac Poems,” 282–98. 51. See The Guthlac Poems, ed. Roberts, 137 n. Roberts also argues that bisæce is a legal term related to words employed in the laws and charters, 138 n. 52. The Fenlands ran from Lincoln to Quy (73 miles) and were 36 miles wide at their widest point, covering a total area of about 1306 square miles. H. C. Darby provides a useful discussion and maps in The Medieval Fenland, 2–5; these can be read against the map of Anglo-Saxon settlement by David Hill in his Atlas of Anglo-Saxon England, 12. Crowland was eventually possessed by a loose confederacy of peoples now known as the Middle Angles and was annexed to Mercia by the mid-seventh century (Stenton, AngloSaxon England, 42–43). 53. Michael Wood describes these peoples as only an Englishman could: “Britishspeaking fen dwellers, the itinerant horse dealers and thieves who lived on the fringe of Norfolk society for centuries afterwards” (In Search of the Dark Ages, 35–36). 54. Arthur Gray, “On the Late Survival of a Celtic Population in East Anglia,” but cf. Colgrave’s critique in his introduction to Felix’s Life of Saint Guthlac, 1–2 and 185 n. 55. Writing of Ælfric’s tenth-century England, Kathy Lavezzo observes that a word like þeod could refer at its literal level only to “a distinct people living in a particular territory” rather than to a modern nation-state (“Another Country: Ælfric and the Production of English Identity,” 69). Citing Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner, however, she advances a persuasive argument about the fantasy of national (English-Christian) collectivity that could inhere in the term. It is a similar deployment of such unity that I am arguing for in Felix and the Old English Guthlac poems. 56. Smyth, “The Emergence of English Identity, 700–1000,” 31. Smyth sees in the narrative “the plausibility of an attack by a Welsh army—if not in the Fens—then certainly at the heart of Mercia in c. 730” (32). 57. See the discussion in Jane Roberts, “The Old English Prose Translation of Felix’s Vita sancti Guthlaci,” 365. 58. Felix is at pains to stress that Guthlac has arrived not in some virgin territory, but on ground marked by human history. Guthlac’s tumulus in the Vita appears to be a chambered grave (Romano-British?) that in the past had been opened by robbers in search of treasure (XXVIII).

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Notes to Chapter 4 59. See the “Introduction” to Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, ed. Judith McClure and Roger Collins, xx. McClure and Collins observe later that other than outside of England (e.g. Rome), few people would have considered that “there was a single dominant ethnic group in lowland Britain” or would have used a collective like “the English” (Angles) to mean all of England’s peoples (371–72 n). 60. For a reading of how Mercia overcame this dynamic temporarily under Æthelbald only to fragment again in civil war, then be slowly recomposed as a larger entity under Offa, see P. H. Sawyer, From Roman Britain to Norman England, 99–114, esp. 101. David Dumville uses group names to read histories of racial heterogeneity and complexity in “Essex, Middle Anglia and the Expansion of Mercia in the South-East Midlands,” 126–28. 61. On the economic necessity and political utility of the royal circuit, see Thomas Charles-Edwards, “Early Medieval Kingships in the British Isles,” 28–33. 62. The island’s long history of colonization ensured that each of its “ethnic” populations was actually quite diverse within itself. The Britons had mixed with the Romans from around the empire who had settled there, as well as with Irish invaders; the “AngloSaxons” were a heterogeneous group of peoples; in Scotland Gaelic peoples intermarried with Picts and northern Britons; all these groups did not simply coexist as separate entities but continuously intermingled. Cf. Alfred Smyth, “The Emergence of English Identity,” 24. 63. Hwicce, for example, was a small kingdom, likely a mixture of British and AngloSaxon communities, that was absorbed into Mercia and transformed into an administrative unit as Mercia expanded its boundaries under Penda; see Bassett, “In Search of the Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms,” 6–18, on Hwicce and other political units underlying the Tribal Hidage. For an introduction to the mansuscripts and context of the Tribal Hidage, see David Dumville, “The Tribal Hidage: An Introduction to Its Texts and Their History,” and for a mapping of its place names, see Hill, Atlas of Anglo-Saxon England, 76. Skeptical assessments of the document can be found in Sawyer, From Roman Britain to Norman England, 110–13, and Wormald, “Bede, the Bretwaldas and the Origins of the Gens Anglorum,” 114. 64. The quotation is Wormald’s description of the double meaning of bretwalda in “Bede, the Bretwaldas and the Origins of the Gens Anglorum,” 127. 65. That Offa was also erecting defensive fortifications against Viking incursions has been argued by Jeremy Haslam, “Market and Fortress in England in the Reign of Offa.” 66. The only evidence for a monastery at Repton predating its mention by Felix is Giraldus Cambrensis in his Life of Saint David, who asserts that David founded a house there in the sixth century (De Vita S. Davidi, in Opera, 3:386). 67. These ambitions were not, of course, to be realized, as the erection of Offa’s Dyke concedes. Northumbria, too, remained independent of Mercia, but Æthelbald and Offa’s hegemony over the lands south of the Humber was an achievement not to be underestimated, no matter how precarious or brief. 68. Cf. Patrizia Magli, who observes in a Lacanian vein that the “rhythms and various dynamics” of the face “all contribute to an unstable form. A perpetuum mobile.” Opposed to the totalizing identity (physiognomy) “recognized” in the individualized face is a collection of “actors” (nose, eyes, eyebrows, mouth) that “all belong to the indefinite time of their action, to a fluctuating and unstructured logic” (“The Face and the Soul,” 87). Identification

Notes to Chapter 5 consists of a process of abstraction that attempts to “isolate the face” as “a permanent form . . . to freeze the face’s constant state of flux into a state of immutability” (90). 69. Carol Braun Pasternack, The Textuality of Old English Poetry, esp. 18–26. Pasternack likewise sees a parallel between the critical history of such poems as The Wanderer and their structure as “inscribed verse”: separate and disjunctive movements, lack of a “consistent subjective stance,” framing of smaller movements by “traditional networks of echoically similar statements,” and the prominence of the reader as locus of meaning (36). 70. Clarissa Atkinson cites Felix’s Vita Guthlaci in describing the fens from which Lynn rose, situating the mercantile city in relation to the religious history of its environs (Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and World of Margery Kempe, 67–69). For the Matthew Paris quotation from the Chronica Majora, see Darby, Fenland, 52; and Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim, 73.

5. The Becoming-Liquid of Margery Kempe 1. Having argued already in this book against progress narratives, with their dangerous assumption that the attainment of states of “enlightenment” is permanent, I must admit that this rescue is at best a fragile achievement. See, for example, Mary Hardiman Farley’s reinscription of Kempe as a madwoman: “throughout most of her adult life Margery experienced what we would now call a Personality Disorder. Modern diagnostic criteria can be useful in considering the question of how unusual Margery’s experience might have appeared to her observers” (“Her Own Creature: Religion, Feminist Criticism, and the Functional Eccentricity of Margery Kempe,” 2). 2. Three excellent critical editions of The Book of Margery Kempe (Meech and Allen, Staley, Windeatt) exist, each of which I have consulted. For ease of reference my quotations from the Middle English text as well as modern English translation are from Windeatt (henceforth cited by chapter number alone; here, 78). All references are to Book I unless otherwise indicated with “II.” Windeatt has replaced thorn and yogh with their contemporary equivalents and modernized some other spellings (e.g., sch for ME x). 3. On Kempe’s clothing, see Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern, 141–65, as well as Dyan Elliott, “Dress as Mediator between Inner and Outer Self: The Pious Matron of the High and Later Middle Ages”; Mary Erler, “Margery Kempe’s White Clothes”; Gunnel Cleve, “Semantic Dimensions in Margery Kempe’s ‘Whyght Clothys.’” 4. Danielle Régnier-Bohler, “Literary and Mystical Voices.” On the difficulties specific to women mystics of finding a voice, see Jo Ann McNamara, who stresses that an answering charge of heresy frequently led to death (“The Rhetoric of Orthodoxy: Clerical Authority and Female Innovation in the Struggle with Heresy,” esp. 10–13). Janette Dillon observes that a female mystic was in a difficult position because, should her right to speak be validated, she was then superseding “the very authority that had validated it,” since the church could not claim precedence over God himself (“Holy Women and Their Confessors or Confessors and Their Holy Women?” 128). See also Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism, 4–9.

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Notes to Chapter 5 5. The phallocratic or phallocentric nature of language and its exclusion of women’s self-expressing voice is the critical concern of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and—less straightforwardly—Julia Kristeva (whose idea of the semiotic chora has helped me to frame the extralinguistic nature of Kempe’s cries, but depends heavily upon a model of language that too glibly privileges the maternal and heterosexual). The work of these three theorists has influenced the analysis that follows, as has E. Jane Burns’s use of French linguistic feminist theory to read Old French literature in her important book Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature. 6. The formulation “Margery Kempe Answers Back” is the title of a provocative chapter in Carolyn Dinshaw’s Getting Medieval, 143–82. Kempe’s extraordinary power to challenge and unsettle male authorities is well discussed in Sarah Beckwith, “A Very Material Mysticism: The Medieval Mysticism of Margery Kempe,” and Ruth Shklar, “Cobham’s Daughter: The Book of Margery Kempe and the Power of Heterodox Thinking.” 7. See especially her interchange with the mayor of Leicester (116, 153), as well as the full treatment of the episode in Shklar, “Cobham’s Daughter” (296–97), and Dinshaw, Getting Medieval (154–57). The resonant phrase “apparatus of persecution” is from Shklar (298). 8. See, for example, her struggle against oft-repeated representations of her eating practices (“Fals flesch, thu schalt ete non heryng!”) in chapter 9 of Book II. 9. Barthes states this fact memorably as “The Law is always prepared to lend you a spare brain in order to condemn you without remorse . . . it depicts you as you should be, and not as you are.” See “Dominici, or the Triumph of Literature,” in Mythologies 43–46 (quotation at 44). 10. Sarah Beckwith quotes Jean Gerson’s decree against women teaching in public, then comments “Women could not speak as themselves, but only as visionaries (the instruments or medium of God’s voice), and even then only with great difficulty, for they always had to convince the male ecclesiastical authorities of the validity of their special relationship to God” (“A Very Material Mysticism,” 49). Karma Lochrie argues for Kempe’s latinity, detailing her expertise in negotiating magisterium language; she also suggests that Kempe could read (Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh, 97–134). 11. For a detailed analysis of the tale in its relation to the subversion of ecclesiastical authority, see Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions, 6–11. 12. Critics have noted that the official registers of Arundel (Canterbury) and Bowet (York) do not record encounters with (let alone interrogations of) Kempe. As Staley and Shklar have pointed out, what matters at these moments in the text is ultimately the performance of the bestowal of authority rather than the possibility of a recoverable historical encounter. 13. A debate has long been waged over what component of this intertextual authorization comes from Kempe and what derives from her scribe. Windeatt offers a measured appraisal in the introduction to his edition of the Book: “If her clerical amanuensis did try to impose a conventional sense of order and progression—and there are signs of this (5784–92, 7026–44)—his success was happily limited. A dynamically individual logic and momentum in Kempe’s sense of her material has largely shrugged off clerical convention and gone its own way. A woman who listened so long and so intently to so many holy

Notes to Chapter 5 books might not need a male scribe to translate her feelings into the phraseology of those devotional texts which had most likely provided her with the very idiom through which to structure and express her own thoughts. . . . Although she might not be able to write or revise for herself the account of her experience, the Book taken as a whole suggests someone very much aware of contemporary devotional trends, and not uninformed of how saintly women might be represented” (8–9). For a more general consideration of women and literary authority, see Alexandra Barratt, Women’s Writing in Middle English, 1–16, and for holy women and textual authority, Ian Johnson, “*Auctricitas? Holy Women and Their Middle English Texts.” 14. Cf. Rolle: “Swet Jhesu, thy body is like to a dufhouse, for a dufhouse is ful of holys.” Windeatt treats the reference fully in his translation of the Book (313 n) and in his edition (166), pointing out that Rolle is in turn alluding to both the Song of Songs (2:14) and Bernard’s Sermons on the Song of Songs. 15. It is interesting to note that exactly the same drama has played out critically in the reception of the Book, with Hope Emily Allen’s contextualizing notes to the EETS edition providing the initial impetus for emphasizing Kempe’s participation within a coherencegiving tradition over a singularity that might be dismissed as aberrant or pathological. 16. As Nancy Partner points out, the image is taken from the cruel taunt of a man who rejected her sexually years before, “a small triumph of transformed memory” (“Reading The Book of Margery Kempe,” 41). 17. Windeatt memorably labels Kempe a “neighbourhood prophet,” foretelling the destiny of local sick people and widows (“Introduction” to his edition of Margery Kempe, 27). Deborah Ellis has detailed the influence of home and town on Kempe’s writing in “Margery Kempe and King’s Lynn.” Armstrong explores the “comfortable” and “mundane” nature of Kempe’s language (“‘Understanding by Feeling’ in Margery Kempe’s Book,” 19–25), while McEntire analyzes Kempe’s recurrent scenes of maternity, birth, and midwifery (“The Journey into Selfhood: Margery Kempe and Feminine Spirituality,” 60–61). Aers (Community, Gender, and Individual Identity: English Writing 1360–1430, 78–83), Clarissa W. Atkinson (Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and World of Margery Kempe, 60), and Delaney (Writing Woman: Women Writers and Women in Literature, 86–87) detail how her language is class-bound, especially in its mercantile and economic obsessions. 18. On the influence of university training on the formation of tightly bonded, exclusionary masculine communities, see Ruth Mazo Karras, “Sharing Wine, Women, and Song: Masculine Identiity Formation in the Medieval European Universities.” Authorities sometimes insisted that God would speak to his auditors only in monologic Latin, casting doubt on vernacular (female) mysticism; see Sarah Beckwith “Problems of Authority in Late Medieval English Mysticism: Language, Agency, and Authority in the Book of Margery Kempe,” 183. 19. Karma Lochrie, Translations of the Flesh, 136. Lochrie advances an argument for Kempe’s sophisticated laughter similar in some respects to the one I shall advance about her sobs and roars, but whereas Lochrie must read Kempe’s textual silences to discover such laughter (138), I am most interested in the text’s plenitudinous, nonlinguistic noise. Of Kempe’s tears Lochrie writes, “Each of the occasions of Kempe’s ‘boystows’ tears establishes a place of plenteousness, of abundance—two words used by Kempe again and again

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Notes to Chapter 5 to describe her roarings. This plenteousness, in turn, exceeds the power of her scribe to express or compose. . . . Kempe’s numerous roarings and bodily movings are the result of mystical love and desire for the absent body of Christ. They provide that ‘principle of travel’ by which the excess of love passes through language to those ‘pryueteys’ of private dalliance with God” (195). 20. See Michel de Certeau, “Mystic Speech,” in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, 80–100 (quotation at 90). Cf., in the same volume, “Lacan: An Ethics of Speech,” 47–64. 21. On the graph of desire, see Lacan, Écrits, 306, 313, 315; Mladen Dolar, “The Object Voice,” 9; and the useful explication of the graph in the “‘Che Vuoi?’” chapter of Slavoj
i
zek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology, 87–129. Z
i
zek offers a succinct gloss of the Lacanian object: “[objects] are not on 22. As usual Z the side of the looking/hearing subject but on the side of what the subject sees or hears” (“‘I Hear You with My Eyes’; or, The Invisible Master,” 90). Specific to voice he writes “True, the experience of s’entendre-parler, of hearing-oneself-speaking, grounds the illusion of the transparent presence of the subject. Is, however, the voice not at the same time that which undermines most radically the subject’s self-presence and self-transparence? I hear myself speaking, yet what I hear is never fully myself but a parasite, a foreign body in my very heart” (103).
i
zek, Looking Awry: 23. This description of “the voice without bearer” derives from Z An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, 126–27. The voice in its psychoanalytic extimacy could also be described as queer—see, for example, the description of the “gravely self-sufficient” voice of the opera diva in Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (10), as well as his provocative discussion of the relation of voice to sexuality and body throughout. 24. See especially “Pedagogy, Violence, and the Subject of Music: Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale and the Ideologies of ‘Song,’” in which Holsinger demonstrates the painfully embodied pleasures of medieval musicality. 25. For Rolle’s experience of divine melody, see The Fire of Love, chapters 33, 34. Atkinson contextualizes the phenomenon of holy tears well in Mystic and Pilgrim, 58–66. Bruce Holsinger underscores the somatic effect of the unearthly melody that Kempe hears in “The Flesh of the Voice: Embodiment and the Homoerotics of Devotion in the Music of Hildegard of Bingen,” 92–93. 26. On the special relevance of the imitation of Christ to illiterate lay women, see André Vauchez, Les laïcs au Moyen âge: pratiques et expériences religeuses, 247. Lochrie glosses the imitatio Christi well, writing that it “enlists the powers of the flesh, including the mystic’s desire and affections, in a practice of abjection. In effect, this practice crosses medieval culture’s imaginary zones which preserve the masculine integrity of the body by excluding the perviousness of the flesh, body, and language. Drawing upon the ‘heaving powers’ of the flesh, the female mystic breaks taboos against the female body and defilement. In addition, she places language back in circulation with the flesh” (Translations of the Flesh, 56). See also Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture, and Society in Late Medieval Writings, 80–83; Ellen Ross, “‘She Wept and Cried’”; Joel Fredell, “Margery Kempe: Spectacle and Spiritual Governance”; and Dinshaw’s analysis of Kempe’s imitatio as a disjunctive “roleplaying” and “participatory drama” (Getting Medieval, 157–58). For an interpretation of

Notes to Chapter 5 Kempe’s “suturing herself into the Passion narrative” that ultimately argues against imitatio, see Lisa Manter, “The Savior of Her Desire: Margery Kempe’s Passionate Gaze.” 27. Kempe distinguishes between her weeping and crying throughout her text. For convenience’s sake, when I refer to them together I will use the noun vocalizations, with the hope that this perhaps too blandly latinate word does not overly obscure the impassioned nature of both. I will argue for a continuity between Kempe’s tears and her cries, with the latter being an extremely intense version of the former. For a discussion of both sounds in their boisterousness as a reading (lectio) of Christ’s body, see Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh, 167–202, who likewise sees in Kempe’s tears and cries a relentlessly public performance that differs dramatically from the holy tears of other mystics (196). 28. On the complicated chronological structure of the Book, see Julia Boffey, “Middle English Lives,” 630, and Sue Ellen Holbrook, “Order and Coherence in The Book of Margery Kempe.” 29. Dhira Mahoney similarly calls tears and cries a “substitute for words she cannot find,” functioning as a public, empowering language (“Margery Kempe’s Tears and the Power over Language,” 40). 30. Such moments are often marked by injunctions like those hurled at her by the men near Beverly, “Damsel, forsake this lyfe that thu hast, and go spynne and carde as other women don, and suffyr not so meche schame and so meche wo” (53). For a consideration of Kempe in terms of vocation, see William Provost, “Margery Kempe and Her Calling.” Sarah Beckwith, on the other hand, has offered a sophisticated reading of Kempe’s complex, open-ended (“dialogic”) subjectivity in “Problems of Authority.” 31. On Kempe’s Book as a text that “resounds with many voices,” see Sue Ellen Holbrook, “‘About Her’: Margery Kempe’s Book of Feeling and Writing,” 267. 32. Dinshaw describes this queer difference between Kempe and her potential models well: “We must reckon with the lack of fit between those pious models and the untranscendent particulars of Margery’s own story. And that lack of fit is crucial. Margery may be reenacting saintly exempla, but in an oft-cited moment of competitiveness, she notes that Christ says to her that Saint Bridget never saw him as Margery herself has. . . . Margery weeps more than the apostles, more than the Blessed Virgin Mary, and Christ finally tells her to chill out” (Getting Medieval, 158–59). 33. “Continence and white clothes are effective markers, non-verbal signs, of separation, but a more striking instrument of separation for Kempe . . . is her tears” (Mahoney, “Margery Kempe’s Tears,” 38–39). Cf. Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, Body and Soul, 152. 34. Lochrie examines the medieval desire to “seal” the female body, idealized as private and removed from the world; see Translations of the Flesh, 160–61. On the ways in which a critical desire to immure Kempe can simply reenact these medieval desires, see Aers, Community, Gender, and Individual Identity, 74–75; Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim, 195–220; Beckwith, “A Very Material Mysticism,” 37–40. 35. Margherita, The Romance of Origins: Language and Sexual Difference in Middle English Literature, 17. Margherita writes forcefully against the critical tendency to normalize Kempe via historicist readings that deny her challenging anomalousness to the “androcentric narrative of canonical history” (23).

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Notes to Chapter 5 36. Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions, follows a discussion of Kempe’s frequent rejection from social groups due to her nonconformity with an analysis of an “alternate society” of sympathetic individuals, 47–66; cf. 121–23, 167–70. 37. This emptying of the linguistic of its signifying power contrasts with the vernacularcentered process of kenosis (self-emptying) that Nicholas Watson describes in “Conceptions of the Word: The Mother Tongue and the Incarnation of God”; see especially the section on Julian of Norwich, 118–22. 38. Another good example occurs in chapter 78, where Kempe’s cries add polyphony to a commemoration of the Passion when the singing of priests as they unveil the crucifix on Easter triggers a responsorial flow of cries. 39. Dinshaw observes that Kempe’s “garb signals a disjunction between her multiparous body and her virgin desire,” condensing the kind of category crisis that Marjorie Garber ascribes to the transvestite; see Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 146–49 (quotation at 146), and Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, 17. 40. Kathy Lavezzo reads such scenes as demonstrating a particularly feminine reaction that “Margery’s rhythmic and autoerotic wellings stir in women” (“Sobs and Sighs between Women: The Homoerotics of Compassion in The Book of Margery Kempe,” 181). While I do not want to discount the homoerotic affective component of Kempe’s tears, in my own reading of the text I find that even if women in general are represented as particularly well disposed to Kempe, her vocalizations ultimately carry across genders. Her “wellings” might be better described as “transerotic” because they fly so quickly forth from her body to bring it into contact with a surrounding human and nonhuman world. 41. Owen locates the “Priowrys Chapel” in the south choir aisle, The Making of King’s Lynn: A Documentary Survey, 27. 42. This scene is restaged with some variation in chapter 67, when Kempe removes herself again to the Prior’s Chapel because of the criticism of fellow parishioners of her crying. The sound of her voice travels through the church, attracting a doctor of divinity to whom she successfully communicates her divine inspiration. The episode is followed by another in which a parson publicly validates her crying at a time when she is under intense criticism from a friar for its disruptive force. 43. Other mystics possessed just this gift (Marie d’Oignies, Angela of Foligno, Elizabeth of Töss, Dorothea of Montau), but again what matters here is Kempe’s insistence that these tears operate through her in “synguler” ways. 44. Her tears endure throughout her life, but her crying is limited to a ten-year period following her pilgrimage to Jerusalem. For the circumstances under which her cries subside, see chapter 63. 45. Mahoney sees an interchangeability between Kempe’s tears and her prayers: people ask her to weep at their death beds because they know they are being powerfully prayed for (“Margery Kempe’s Tears,” 43). 46. Hence Donald Howard’s infamous dismissal of Kempe: “There is not in her book a scintilla of traveller’s curiosity, so we get no bananas, giraffes, or elephants from Margery; not even descriptions of the shrines” (Writers and Pilgrims, 35). Cf. Sue Ellen Holbrook, “‘About Her,’” 265.

Notes to Chapter 5 47. The elderly men of the city declare that “thei had nevyr seyn swich beforn,” especially lightning so bright that houses appeared to be burning (132–33). 48. The woman most sorely afflicted by vomiting is a Londoner of higher social status who had previously rebuffed Kempe. The lady’s severe sickness allows Kempe “to helpyn and comfortyn” her. The episode and its relation to Kempe’s tears is well treated by Nona Fienberg, “Thematics of Value in The Book of Margery Kempe,” 140–41. 49. Like all these episodes, several narratives overlap here. Not only does Kempe spectacularly validate herself to a community that has tried continuously to exclude her, she also places her confessor Robert Spryngolde further under her authority by emphasizing that he sought her out to ask if the Host should be carried toward the flames or not. Janette Dillon points out that the episode is part of a pattern of testing enacted by her confessors (cf. chs. 15, 18, 24, 33, 34, 41, 75; “Holy Women and Their Confessors,” 125); such tests are almost always related to Kempe’s tears and vocalizations. 50. See “Object Voice,” 26–27, where Dolar details the doubled jouissance and interwoven presences and absences of this ultimate moment of authority. 51. The adjective is B. A. Windeatt’s in the introduction to his translation of The Book of Margery Kempe, 9, but most accounts of Kempe’s life rely on some adjectival equivalent of “stormy” to summarize its entirety. 52. See especially Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 237–43; quotation at 240. 53. Following Guattari in Molecular Revolution, Reynolds writes at length of the transversal, a territorial deviation “entered through the transgression of conceptual boundaries and, usually by extension, the emotional boundaries of subjective territory” (“The Devil’s House ‘or worse’: Transversal Power and Antitheatrical Discourse in Early Modern England,” 149; quotation above at 157). 54. “Don’t weep. One day we will learn to say ourselves. And what we say will be far more beautiful than our tears” (Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 77). For an interpretation of female mysticism as feminine discourse, see Beckwith, “A Very Material Mysticism.” On Irigaray and Kempe, see also Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography, 74–75. 55. See Eluned Bremner, “Margery Kempe and the Critics: Disempowerment and Deconstruction,” 117–18, 127. 56. Although she does not mention his weeping, Janet Wilson describes such metatextual moments involving the scribe’s “conversion” as the structural enactment of the very disruption Kempe causes to the “religious and social order”; see “Communities of Dissent: The Secular and Ecclesiastical Communities of Margery Kempe’s Book,” 160, 168, 177. 57. See especially Dinshaw’s Getting Medieval, 151. 58. Sedgwick, Tendencies, 5–6. In fact Sedgwick does not align these two exclusions (nor even mention the word “Jew”) in her discussion of Christmas, since she argues that heterosexual identity is not culturally monolithic in the way the holiday is, but Jewishness and queerness have a long history of conjoinment that makes her example far less binary than she thinks. 59. Cecil Roth describes the massacres of 1190 in History of the Jews in England, 20– 22, arguing that Lynn never recovered its Jewish population thereafter (92).

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Notes to Chapter 6 60. The Mandeville-author fantasized that Hebrew was the secret language that Jews preserved within their communities so that when the “Lost Tribes” were released at the Apocalypse, they would be able to communicate with their long-imprisoned brethren and join them in an anti-Christian rampage. Scott Westrem treats the episode’s conjunction of an entrapping linguistic alterity with universal menace in “Against Gog and Magog,” 68– 70; see also Kathleen Biddick, “The ABC of Ptolemy: Mapping the World with the Alphabet,” 275–76. Ruth Mellinkoff notes that in a psalter from Amesbury Abbey, Christ speaks in Latin while the devil speaks Hebrew (Outcasts, 105). Mellinkoff details the centrality of untranslatable Hebrew (the letters of which were often represented pictorially by “Hebrew”style nonsense) to Christian fantasies of Jewish identity in Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages, 97–108. 61. That the Jew did not have to be physically present in order to inhabit this position is well argued by Sylvia Tomasch in “Postcolonial Chaucer and the Virtual Jew,” quotation at 244. Cf. her eloquent observation in “Judecca, Dante’s Satan, and the Dis-placed Jew” that “As often as the Jews are made to disappear just so often do they reappear, precisely because Christian identity is founded upon counterdefining the Jew” (262).

6. On Saracen Enjoyment 1. See, for example, Lisa Lowe’s analysis of Kristeva’s essentializing engagement with non-European cultures in Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms. 2. “Toccata and Fugue for the Foreigner” is the opening movement to Strangers to Ourselves, quotation at 13. Cf. Kristeva’s similar thesis in Nations Without Nationalism, as well as L. O. Aranye Fradenburg’s critique in “‘Be not far from me’: Psychoanalysis, Medieval Studies and the Subject of Religion,” 48–50. 3. I use “Saracen” here instead of “Muslim” in order to mark the category from the start as produced through the passionate investment of occidental fantasies and desires, rather than as a historical marker of a simply misrecognized identity. Similarly, throughout this chapter I employ the adjectives “western” and “Latin” to modify “Christian” vis-àvis the Saracen, but I want to emphasize that such identity markers are just as phantasmatic as “Saracen” itself. In the end, both categories were promulgated to enact an absolute separateness where a certain intimacy in fact held sway. As María Rosa Menocal has eloquently argued in The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage, the neatness of this assumed dichotomy hides historical hybridity and impurity. By denying that the Arab-Islamic world “played a critical role in the making of the modern West,” both medievals and moderns seek to maintain a cultural supremacy. See especially Menocal’s chapter on “The Myth of Westernness,” 1–25, quotation at 6. 4. The lines are quoted from the late-eleventh- or early-twelfth-century “Letter of Alexius Comnenus to Count Robert of Flanders Imploring His Aid” and describes the atrocities of the Turks as they capture the Holy Land from the Byzantines. The text goes on to declare that noble women are being routinely raped, their daughters likewise abused while the mothers are forced to sing “lewd songs.” Men and boys, meanwhile, are being sodomized, sometimes to death. John Boswell provides a fine translation and analysis in

Notes to Chapter 6 Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, 279–80, 367–69. Some versions of the sermon of Urban II urging the First Crusade at Clermont envision similar scenes of violation. Robert of Reims and Baudri of Dol detail atrocities at length, emphasizing the flow of Christian blood against the inherent perversity of the infidels (e.g., Baudri’s Turci spurci, “filthy Turks”), a racializing corporeal rhetoric. See Penny J. Cole, The Preaching of the Crusades to the Holy Land, 1095–1270, 13–19. 5. R. W. Southern argues that this early “lack of rancor” in northern European usage derives simply from geographic remoteness, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages, 18. Other common terms include Mauri (Moors), Ismaeliti (descendants of Ishmael), Agareni (progeny of Hagar), Poeni (Carthaginians). As John C. Lamoreaux points out, eastern and western Christians used these and other terms interchangeably, having inherited them from Roman writings on pre-Islamic Muslims (“Early Eastern Christian Responses to Islam,” 9–11). “Saracen” eventually became the “portmanteau word” for Arabs, Turks, Muslims, and easterners in general (Norman Daniel, The Arabs and Mediaeval Europe, 53; Islam and the West: The Making of an Image, 79). Although “Saracen” is of unknown etymology, Isidore of Seville influentially saw in the word an Islamic attempt to assert legitimating descent from the biblical Sara (PL 82, 329, 333). 6. On these points as well as the Muslim construction of an all-encompassing identity term (“Franj”) for the Christians, see Amin Maalouf’s polemical but useful study The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, esp. 44, 72–74, 87, 261–62. 7. Robert Irwin explicates this Muslim and Christian diversity well in “Islam and the Crusades, 1096–1699,” emphasizing the mosaic quality of this deeply multicultural geography and its attendant political complexities. Lamoreaux points out that many of these minority Christian groups enjoyed under Muslim rule a religious freedom that they did not experience while under the control of the Byzantines. The Nestorians, for example, were able to found their first monasteries in Palestine only after the Muslims rose to power (“Early Eastern Christian Responses to Islam,” 7). 8. Although he posits a medieval origin far more straightforward than the one I argue for here, Edward Said argued throughout Orientalism that the West has never relinquished its fantasy that the East is timeless and immutable. 9. On Peter the Venerable, see James Kritzeck, Peter the Venerable and Islam. Like William of Malmesbury and Thomas Aquinas, Peter would argue that Islam was a deviation from Christian doctrine rather than an independent religion. 10. Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, esp. 197–242, quotation at 197. In this formulation, even Christianity amounts to a form of ethnic identity (251). Gens and natio are both especially slippery medieval words, encompassing a range of affinities that includes people, race, nation, ethnic group, family, tribe. 11. Bartlett, Making of Europe, 240. As will become evident in the discussion that follows, racism’s history seems to me nonlinear (in the sense of the term outlined in this book’s introduction), and I am therefore skeptical of scholarly efforts to locate a demarcative origin for modern racial discrimination (e.g., Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture, 1: “This association between

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Notes to Chapter 6 color and race first became commonplace during the eighteenth century”), or of attempts to keep any geotemporality pure of the possibility of racism. 12. Bartlett argues that “colour racism in the USA” and “Nazi anti-Semitism,” with their insistence on the biological markers of race (visible or invisible), are “relatively insignificant” forms of racism in the Middle Ages (197). In a recent essay, Bartlett has returned to exploring the slipperiness of both race and ethnicity, offering the following deeply sensical observation: “Medieval terminology may have allowed a biological or genetic construal of race, but it also allowed a picture of races as changing cultural communities, often in competition, often forming and reforming, overflowing and cutting across political boundaries, providing identities and claims for their members” (“Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity,” 54). 13. Cadden is referring specifically to the words of Albertus Magnus on the sexuality of black women in his Quaestiones de animalibus, bk. XV, where he argues that “black women are hotter and most swarthy, who are sweetest for mounting, as the pimps say.” See Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture, 163–64 and n. 165. Albertus is certainly not unique in theorizing the sexuality of black women; cf., for example, Abelard: “the flesh of a black woman is all the softer to touch though it is less attractive to look at, and for this reason the pleasure they give is greater” (Letter 4, in Letters of Abelard and Heloise, 140). Hahn describes this “reverie on the sexuality of black women” as a “compelling variation” on the themes of the Letters: “the exotic and the erotic, exclusion and possession, abjection and idealization” (“The Difference the Middle Ages Makes: Color and Race before the Modern World,” 24). De Weever sees in the lines a possible “experience concealed” (Sheba’s Daughters: Whitening and Demonizing the Saracen Woman in Medieval French Epic, 79), but a relationship between black skin and an exaggerated sexuality were commonplace of medieval racial fantasies. 14. It should be asked how sexuality in any time period can be thought without immediate reference to the myriad cultural categories through which it is coconstructed, including race. Postcolonial theorist Anne McClintock has made this point repeatedly; see, for example, “‘No Longer in a Future Heaven’: Gender, Race and Nationalism.” An insightful examination of the mutual construction of race and sexuality can also be found in Robert McRuer, The Queer Renaissance: Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities. The medievalist who has best achieved a complex reading of the multiple overlap of categories of otherness is undoubtedly Ruth Mellinkoff, whose Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages is exemplary in its scope. 15. Friedman provides a prescient discussion of these linkages throughout The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought. The quotation from Hahn is found in his introduction to the special issue of JMEMS devoted to medieval race and ethnicity, “The Difference the Middle Ages Makes,” 4. In the discussion and notes that follow I will briefly trace the contours of recent work by medievalists on race, but I would first like to acknowledge that I was in the audience of the very Kalamazoo panel that Hahn describes with such disappointment. A medievalist just finishing the first year of my first tenure track job in a city where race can never be an abstract issue, I was profoundly challenged by the panel to rethink the direction of my own work.

Notes to Chapter 6 16. Steven F. Kruger, “The Bodies of Jews in the Late Middle Ages,” “Racial/ Religious and Sexual Queerness in the Middle Ages,” “Becoming Christian, Becoming Male?” and “Conversion and Medieval Sexual, Religious, and Racial Categories.” Kruger stresses that the medieval construction of sex, race, and religion must be read simultaneously for their overlap and their distinctive histories. His description of all three categories is worth quoting, since it is one with which I am in agreement: “For the Middle Ages, sexuality, race, and religion are all constructed at least partly in moral terms—as choices that might be changed—and partly as biological difference, which would suggest perhaps a more determinate and unchangeable (sexual, racial, or religious) ‘nature’” (“Conversion and Medieval Categories,” 164). Conversion would seem a good limit case for the articulation of race, just as today scholars examine the phenomenon of racial passing. Conversions were, needless to say, complex phenomena; see, for example, the discussion of the Arabic-inscribed seal of R. Solomon ben Isaac “who has donned the turban,” found in Edinburgh: Joseph Jacobs, The Jews of Angevin England: Documents and Records, 26–27. 17. Suzanne Conklin Akbari, “From Due East to True North: Orientalism and Orientation.” Mary Floyd-Wilson has advanced a related argument for the early modern period, emphasizing the “non-natural” components of humoral theory (climate, diet) in the determination of race: “Temperature, Temperance, and Racial Difference in Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness.” 18. Geraldine Heng, “The Romance of England: Richard Coer de Lyon, Saracens, Jews, and the Politics of Race and Nation” and “Cannibalism, the First Crusade, and the Genesis of Medieval Romance.” 19. Bruce Holsinger, “The Color of Salvation: Desire, Death, and the Second Crusade in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermon on the Song of Songs,” quotations at 157, 159. Holsinger’s essay is especially adept at exploring the colonialist erotics of the female black body, which comes to figure “blackened and feminized Christian subjects who must perform their own ravishment and defeat before they can hope to triumph” (165). 20. Critical race studies is a field too vast to reduce to a footnote here, but a good starting point is the collection edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Race,” Writing, and Difference, especially Gates’s “Introduction: Writing, ‘Race,’ and the Difference It Makes” and Anthony Appiah’s “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race.” I have also found the work of Colette Guillaumin helpful, Racism, Sexism, Power, and Ideology, especially “Race and Nature: The System of Marks” (133–52). Gayle Wald undertakes a valuable and comprehensive survey of recent race theory in the introduction to Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture. Ironically, medievalists and early modernists are turning to race just as some influential contemporary critics are urging new movements away from the category; see Thomas Holt, The Problem of Race in the Twenty-First Century, and bell hooks, Where We Stand: Class Matters. 21. This chapter mainly details the racial alterity of the Saracen but—as the pogroms attending the First Crusade make clear—Judaism and Islam were complexly entwined within the Christian imaginary. Steven Kruger points out that Jewish and Muslim bodies were depicted as substantially different from those of Christians, not just because males had been circumcised, but also for “innate” gender reversals. Jewish and Muslim men were depicted as effeminate (Thomas de Cantimpré infamously argued that Jewish men

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Notes to Chapter 6 menstruate), women as too masculine. See “Becoming Christian, Becoming Male?” esp. 22–26 and notes, as well as Christine Chism, “The Siege of Jerusalem: Liquidating Assets,” 320–21; Heng, “The Romance of England,” 142–43; and R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250, 30–31. Jews were also often “hybridized” with animals as part of a racializing identity machine. The bestiary tradition reads the hyena, a grave robbing predator with both male and female sexual organs, as a figure for Jewish duplicity (Debra Hassig, “Sex in the Bestiaries,” 74), while Mariko Miyazaki details the projection of Jewish racial difference onto the bodies of owls in “Misericord Owls and Medieval Anti-Semitism.” 22. Heng’s history-driven, Foucauldian methodology underscores the overlap among race, religion, gender, class, and nation. She points out that Lateran IV issued seventy canons, a “massive codification of rules” on subjects including heresy, confession, the sacraments, and even the dress “for racial and religious minorities living throughout Christendom” (“The Romance of England,” 137; on black skin and the racializing discourses of the late Middle Ages, see esp. 163 n. 7 and n. 8). On Lateran IV and the sexual anxieties behind making race visible, see also Kruger, “Conversion and Medieval Categories,” 167–68. 23. In his Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience, Frank M. Snowden, Jr. points out that any black or dark-skinned person was ordinarily called an Ethiopian, no matter where in Africa he or she had originated (Aethiops and niger were synonyms). Black-skinned people lived not just in southern Africa, but in the north, including Carthage, frequently making their way throughout the classical period into Greece and Italy as travelers, warriors, and domestic help. Snowden emphasizes that the Ethiopian has too often been dismissed as a purely mythic designation and documents at length the extensive experience of the classical world with nonwhite peoples. Thompson similarly documents Roman experience of dark-skinned peoples, arguing for a division based upon social status rather than race (Romans and Blacks, 30–41, 108–21). 24. On climate and the Ethiopians, see Snowden, Blacks in Antiquity, 172–78, quotation at 172. Homer describes divine visits to the “blameless” Ethiopians, while Diodorus asserts that they were the “first to be taught to honor the gods.” Seneca, Statius, Pausanius, and Heliodorus echo the sentiment (Snowden, Blacks in Antiquity, 144–48). 25. Marian J. Tooley emphasizes that the relationship between climate and complexion was thought to be inverse, so that hot climates produced cool temperaments; according to this formulation, Saracens were therefore by nature sensuous, subtle, and cruel. See “Bodin and the Mediaeval Theory of Climate,” esp. 72–76. For more on climate and race, see in addition to the works previously cited Robert Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 1146– 1223, 201–05; Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century; J. W. Johnson, “Of Differing Ages and Climes”; and Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race, esp. “The Empire of Climate” (1–48). On the humoral body more generally, see Owsei Temkin, Galenism, Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Discipline of Shame in Early Modern England, and Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages. 26. Dorothy Hoogland Verkerk states this sentiment succinctly: “In climatic anthropology, black Africans were the darkest in a whole spectrum of people living around the

Notes to Chapter 6 Mediterranean, down the Nile River valley, and as far east as India. Roman xenophobia was geographically widespread and all-inclusive, not limited to the pigmentation of a people’s skin. In broadly general terms, the paradigmatic division was between Roman and barbarian” (“Black Servant, Black Demon: Color Ideology in the Ashburnham Pentateuch,” 59; cf. her quotations from the astronomer Manilius, 66). 27. Snowden emphasizes the neutrality of color difference to the classical imaginary in Blacks in Antiquity, 176, as well as more generally in Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks, volumes that have been criticized for ultimately providing too affirmative an account of classical racial difference. Hahn, for example, argues that “installing the ancient world as a domain before prejudice amounts to imagining it as before history, so that it stands as a kind of innocent Golden Age” (“The Difference the Middle Ages Makes,” 5). For an argument against reading the history of race back from the systems that eventually dominated its construction, such as slavery, see Emily C. Bartels, “Othello and Africa: Postcolonialism Reconsidered,” esp. 47–48. 28. Courtès “The Theme of ‘Ethiopia’ and ‘Ethiopians’ in Patristic Literature,” 9. Courtès argues, however, that this absence does not indicate an absence of “race consciousness.” Like Devisse (whom he is introducing) and Snowden before him, Courtès is likely being too optimistic in an effort to unify these disparate materials within an encompassing thesis. The discussion that follows is indebted to Courtès’s useful analytic survey of the patristic materials. 29. Cf. Thomas Hahn on the salvific impetus of the Epiphany in its relation to Ethiopia: “Beginning with the church fathers, Christian exegetes understood the Epiphany in terms of the Church’s universal claims, and interpreted blacks as the limit case of human culture. Augustine, for example, declared that the truth of Christianity had been revealed ‘all the way, even to the Ethiopians, the remotest and blackest of peoples’ (PL 36:909)” (“The Difference the Middle Ages Makes,” 28). 30. Boethius, In categorias Aristotelis, 2 (PL 64, 209). He also observes that dark skin in its various degrees is simply caused by blood burnt by the sun; it could therefore potentially happen to any newborn. Courtès argues that Boethius probably “had no concrete image of a black in mind,” that his “point of view. . . like Augustine’s, excludes such a possibility” (“The Theme of ‘Ethiopia,’” 14), but I see no reason to make this statement. 31. Jerome, Tractatus in Psalmos 86.4; cited by Courtès, “The Theme of ‘Ethiopia,’” 27. Courtès provides a full account of the universalizing impetus behind the allegorization of the Ethiopian. 32. Devisse is speaking in broad terms about the fourth through fourteenth centuries; see The Image of the Black in Western Art, 2.1:35. 33. Norman Daniel describes these letters directed to various locations in North Africa as mainly concerning the maintenance of clergy, at first in support of the existing order (Leo X, Gregory VII), then to ransom prisoners (Innocent III), and later to “maintain Christian discipline among the many Latins in the service of Arab rulers” (The Arabs and Mediaeval Europe, 225). 34. Dorothee Metlitzki maps these international connections among the Normans well in The Matter of Araby in Medieval England, 3–12.

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Notes to Chapter 6 35. See Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi Etymologiarum sive Originum Libri XX, 9.2.105. On Ethiopia, see 14.5.14: “Ethiopia derives from the color of its people, scorched by their proximity to the sun.” 36. Albertus Magnus, De natura locorum, 2.3, trans. Sister Jean Paul Tilmann in An Appraisal of the Geographical Works of Albertus Magnus, 101. As Robert Bartlett makes clear, in Albertus’s formulation “over the course of generations, blacks in cold climates would become white” (“Concepts of Race and Ethnicity,” 47). Albertus insists that astrology also plays a part in the determination of bodily difference, since different planets and stars dominate in different zones of the earth. In giving a complete “racial” account of the black body, Albert is demonstrating his knowledge of Greek and Roman authors, who frequently commented upon the “thick” lips, “thick” or “wooly” hair, and “flat” nose of the Ethiopians, though seldom in language as vivid as his own. 37. Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibis rerum, 15.50, trans. John Trevisa, 2:752–53. Cf. “For by the diversite of hevene, face and color of men and hertes and witte and quantite of bodyes ben dyvers. Therefore . . . Affrica [gendryth] gyleful men” (15.67, p. 763). Both passages are treated at length by Akbari in “From Due East to True North,” 23– 25, who also provides an excellent overview of medieval linkages between geography and the determination of skin color and personality. 38. One reason that Mandeville maintains an interest in Ethiopia is to prevent conventionally racialized representations from leaking into his portrayal of the Saracens, whom he casts in a flattering light in order to underscore the failings of contemporary Christianity. Black skin is relativized in the Christian Nubians, of whom he writes: “They are black in colour, and they consider that a great beauty, and the blacker they are the fairer they seem to each other. And they say that if they were to paint an angel and a devil, they would paint the angel black and the devil white” (The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, trans. Moseley, 64). On the relativism of the Mandeville-author, see Mary Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600, 122–61, and Linda Lomperis, “Medieval Travel Writing and the Question of Race.” See also the sensitive treatment of the Travels by Iain Macleod Higgins, Writing East: The “Travels” of Sir John Mandeville, esp. 102. 39. Gregory Moralium libri, sive Expositio in librum B. Job, Bk. 18, ch. 52 (“Aliquando vero Aethiopiae specialiter gentilitas designari solet, infidelitatis prius nigra peccatis”), PL 76, 88. 40. Kathy Lavezzo details the racialized poetics of skin color in Ælfric well, arguing that “while an explicit and fully formulated notion of ‘race’ would not emerge in the West until the Enlightenment, Ælfric’s rhetoric demonstrates well how prejudices based upon fantasies of physiognomic differences such as skin colour extend back into earlier periods” (“Another Country: Ælfric and the Production of English Identity,” 84). 41. On Christian moralization of black skin, see Friedman, Monstrous Races, 64– 66, quotation at 65. A contrary tradition is based on exegesis of a line in the Song of Songs in which the bride declares “Fusca sum et [or sed] decora” (I am black and [or but] beautiful); see E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity, 178–200. Cf. Holsinger, “The Color of Salvation.”

Notes to Chapter 6 42. Thomas of Kent, Le Roman de toute chevalerie, 6708–13. Alexander the Great’s encounter with these people is well analyzed by Christopher Baswell in “Marvels of Translation and Crises of Transition in the Romances of Antiquity,” who writes that in the Ethiopian abandonment of the sex/gender system (only the women know who the fathers of the children are), the “sense of humanity [is] itself undone” (42). 43. Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Chronique des ducs de Normandie, ed. Carin Fahlin (Lund, 1951) 11.141–43, p. 5; cited by Friedman, Monstrous Races, 54. 44. “In partibus Orientis, et maxime in calidis regionibus bruti et luxuriosi homines . . . viam que ducit ad mortem, facile sunt ingressi.” Libri duo, quorum prior orientalis, siue Hierosolymitanae: alter, occidentalis historiae nomine inscribitur (Douay, 1597), vol. 1, chap. 6, pp. 25–26; quoted and translated Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, 279. 45. On the elderly body in the Middle Ages, see Shulamith Shahar, “The Old Body in Medieval Culture,” esp. 162. 46. Not surprisingly, the work of gendering and racing the scientific body was often accomplished by the same writers. Albertus Magnus, quoted above in his full description of the black body, may also have been the author of De Secretis mulierum, which states (for example) that postmenopausal women retain their menses, thereby engendering the bad humors that make them “more venomous” than other women. See Shulamith Shahar, “The Old Body in Medieval Culture,” 163. 47. On the reduction of the three zones of the world (in which Asia—the East—had functioned as the happy mean between the too frigid North and the too warm South) into two (balanced West versus extreme, overheated East), see Akbari, “From Due East to True North.” Akbari points out that in the Christian version of the Ethiopia myth, Noah’s son Ham populates Africa (Ethiopia, Libya, Egypt) because his immoderate behavior proved that he was too hot (Jerome glosses his name “Ham, id est calidus”). Hrabanus Maurus, Isidore, and Hugh of St. Victor all place Ham’s progeny in Africa (22–23). Isidore was most specific: Ham had four sons, three of whom founded African kingdoms, and one of whom (“Canaan”) generated the Afri, Phoenicians, and Canaanites (Etymologiae 9.2.10–12; Akbari, “From Due East to True North,” 33 n. 29). For a sensitive reconsideration of the myth that Ham was the progenitor of dark-skinned peoples destined by God for serfdom or slavery, see Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant, 86–104. 48. Steven Kruger explicates the cultural work of this promulgated ambivalence well in “The Spectral Jew,” as does Sylvia Tomasch in “Postcolonial Chaucer and the Virtual Jew” and “Judecca, Dante’s Satan, and the Dis-placed Jew.” 49. “To kill a saracen was the dream of every [crusading] knight: if he was black, the pleasure and the glory grew. Besides, the term Aethiops no longer designated the vague inhabitant of a nebulous land; to the Crusaders it meant a black Muslim” (Jean Devisse, The Image of the Black in Western Art, 2.1:117). 50. The Latin may in fact be read as indicating that the Ethiopian Saracens are both dog-headed (cynocephalic) and naked because of the sun. On the Borgia world map, see Vicomte de Santarém, Essai sur l’histoire de la cosmographie et de la cartographie pendant le Moyen-Age, 3 vols., ed. Martim de Albuquerque (Lisbon: Administração do Porto de Lisboa,

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Notes to Chapter 6 1989), 3:294. I am grateful to Michael Uebel for pointing out this source to me, as well as for many discussions on Saracens, cynocephali, and category violation. As James H. Sweet has observed, Arabs and Berbers likewise had a long tradition of demonizing dark skin (“The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought”). Ibn Khaldun (fourteenth century), for example, wrote that blacks “possess attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals” (cited in David Brion Davis, “Constructing Race: A Reflection,” 16. 51. See Michael Uebel, “Unthinking the Monster: Twelfth-Century Responses to Saracen Alterity.” Although the critical literature on the otherness of Islam to medieval Christianity is copious, Uebel’s essay is the best recent work to connect Saracen bodies, monstrousness, and Western self-identity. My discussion is also deeply indebted to the following works: William Wistar Comfort, “The Literary Role of the Saracens in the French Epic”; Daniel, Islam and the West, The Arabs and Mediaeval Europe, Heroes and Saracens: An Interpretation of the Chansons de Geste, and “Crusade Propaganda”; C. Meredith Jones, “The Conventional Saracen of the Songs of Geste”; Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History; Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby; Mark Skidmore, The Moral Traits of Christian and Saracen as Portrayed by the Chansons de Geste; Southern, Western Views of Islam; Diane Speed, “The Saracens of King Horn”; W. Montgomery Watt, The Influence of Islam on Medieval Europe. 52. That the Crusades were foundational to Western consciousness seems at this point uncontestable. In Norman Daniel’s words, “there has never been a time when Europe has not, in some form or another, remembered the First Crusade” (The Arabs and Mediaeval Europe, 115). Geraldine Heng has demonstrated the contortions inherent to such acts of remembrance in arguing that romance, the superlative genre of medieval vernacular litera ture, formed in reaction to the unthinkable events at Ma arra an-Numan, where crusading Christians cannibalized the corpses of their Muslim enemy. See “Cannibalism, the First Crusade, and the Genesis of Medieval Romance.” 53. These episodes are treated at length and the relevant manuscript illustrations reproduced in Suzanne Lewis, The Art of Matthew Paris in the Chronica Majora, 99–101 and 269–72. Other writers ascribed his death to dogs, another animal closely allied to the Saracen in the Christian imaginary. For a full discussion of the pseudo-biographies of “Mahomet,” see Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 79–108. 54. Quotation from Gregory S. Hutcheson and Josiah Blackmore’s introduction to Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, 1. Among the many strengths of this volume is its refusal to think sexuality separately from race, so that the sexual otherness of Muslim Iberia in Christian accounts is shown to be inextricable from racial, cultural, religious alterity. See also Sharon Kinoshita’s more detailed reading of the Roland, likewise sensitive to the complexities of gender and race: “‘Pagans are wrong and Christians are right’: Alterity, Gender, and Nation in the Chanson de Roland.” 55. Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Ernest Langlois, 2:2920–24. 56. Aliscans, chanson de geste, ed. F. Guessard and A. de Montaiglon, 6101–02; The Song of Aliscans, trans. Michael A. Newth, 170–71. 57. As Paul Freedman points out, in an age when Christian and human were synonyms, with “Christian” ultimately functioning as a support for dominating identities, any difference was likely to be constructed as inferior-making and unclean (Images of the

Notes to Chapter 6 Medieval Peasant, 2; on the darkening of peasant skin, see 139–43). In general, however, Saracens and Jews were the groups most susceptible to representation as swarthy, “Ethiopian,” or black-skinned, making such darkness a signifier of race more than class. For an example of a thirteenth-century manuscript illustration that depicts Jews as menacing black figures with features elsewhere used to represent Ethiopians or Saracens, see Jean Devisse, The Image of the Black in Western Art, 2.1:80 and plate 35. 58. Kruger gives examples of intercourse with Jewish women being likened to intercourse with animals, as well as references to men burned for such sexual relations: “Conversion and Medieval Categories,” 169 and n.; see also 178 n. 32 for references to Christian injunctions against sexual intercourse with Muslims and Jews. That intermarriage was a fact of the crusader kingdoms is emphasized by Dana C. Munro, The Kingdom of the Crusaders, 119–22. Cecil Roth argues that the distinguishing badges mandated for unbelievers by the Fourth Lateran Council were “to prevent the scandal of unwitting sexual intercourse between adherents of different faiths.” Jews in England were required to wear these sartorial markers by royal decree in 1218, with consistent enforcement arriving after 1253 (A History of the Jews in England, 40, 95). 59. Margaret Adlum Gist provides a list of such marriages across disparitas cultus in Love and War in the Middle English Romances, 58. 60. The dilemma posed by the fact that while black is coded negative, Saracen women must nonetheless be desirable brides for Christian knights is the central focus of Jacqueline De Weever’s Sheba’s Daughters. De Weever makes a strong case for not desiring the whitened Saracen in the way that the heroes of their texts do; a persistent critical problem, she argues, has been the admiration critics unreflectively shower on these women who are, from another point of view, unfaithful murderers, adulterers, and opportunists. 61. Baptism is so efficacious in the romance that it immediately transmutes the formless flesh to which the heroine gives birth after her marriage to the heathen king into a beautiful (because now Christian) baby boy. The King of Tars and the Soudan of Damas is treated by Friedman, Monstrous Races, 65, Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby, 137, and Gist, Love and War, 59. Friedman and Metlitzki also relate the story of the half white, half black progeny of a Christian-Muslim marriage who is likewise whitened by baptism. 62. De Weever, Sheba’s Daughters, 54. On the racism inherent in demonizing portraits of black women, see 100: “When skin color is linked to ideas of inferiority, to notions of savagery, to relegations to the category of the marginal and uncivilized, to the charge of cannibalism, racism is born.” 63. Les Grandes chroniques de France, ed. Jules Viard; A Thirteenth-Century Life of Charlemagne, trans. Robert Levine. Quotation at 9:251 (French), 115 (English); further references parenthetical. I have examined this scene in its relation to medieval notions of hybridity in “Hybrids, Monsters, Borderlands: The Bodies of Gerald of Wales,” 88–89; my analysis here repeats some sentences from that essay. 64. See, for example, black bodies depicted in the Luttrell Psalter and examined by Michael Camille, Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England, 277–84, and Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts, 157. The dark-skinned figure with large lips, enlarged nose, and wild hair who executes John the Baptist (London, British Library, Add. MS 42130, fol. 53v) could easily be numbered among the Cordovan Saracens once they

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Notes to Chapter 6 don their masks. It is worth noting that the “démon aux traits humains deformés et monstrueux” is a twelfth-century preoccupation, especially in sculpture but also in literature; see Edina Bozóky, “Les masques de l’‘ennemi’ et les faux chemins du Graal,” 93. 65. Gabrielle Spiegel writes that the Grandes chroniques “sought to forge a new vision of the French past” in Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France, 312. The quotation “contested past of French history” is likewise from Spiegel, 312; cf. 315–19. On the readership and cultural ambitions of the text, see her Chronicle Tradition of Saint-Denis: A Survey, esp. 76–77. 66. On the giant as an exorbitant marker of racialized otherness, see Dorothee Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby, 192–97, and my Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages, 180. 67. The quotations on the denaturalization of the body are from Carolyn Dinshaw’s definition of the queer in “Chaucer’s Queer Touches / A Queer Touches Chaucer,” 76; see also her Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern, 151–52. That queerness applies to race (and class and species) as well as sexuality is made clear by Robert L. A. Clark and Claire Sponsler in their brilliant essay, “Queer Play: The Cultural Work of Crossdressing in Medieval Drama.” Cf. recent articulations of queer to Gayle Wald’s description of the critique of race as an “anti-essentialist” project focused upon “the instability and fluidity of racial representation” (Crossing the Line, 6). Quoting Charles Chesnutt, she observes that race appears to “‘grip us in bands of steel,’” but these chains are, “upon closer inspection . . . revealed to have been forged in history rather than nature” so that the boundary “of race is subject to ongoing contestation and mutation” (10). 68. See Aliscans, ed. Guessard and Montaiglon, 3214–16 for the episode. De Weever and Holsinger provide several examples of Christians donning blackface to pass as Saracens (Sheba’s Daughters, 15–16; “The Color of Salvation,” 170–71). Mandeville’s Numidians provide another example. Although in general the heat of Nubia “makes its folk black,” sometimes a child not born black must be darkened by other means: “If they do not seem black enough when they are born, they use certain medicines to make them black” (Travels, trans. Moseley, 64). 69. It is also worth mentioning that in the Grandes chroniques the entire First Crusade is performed as an illusion, an elaborate dinner entertainment for Charles V that includes a massive barge sailing into the banquet hall. The episode, depicted in a full-page manuscript illustration and cited in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale, is well analyzed in Anne Middleton, “War by Other Means: Marriage and Chivalry in Chaucer,” 120–21. 70. See Juliet Vale, Edward III and Chivalry: Chivalric Society and Its Context 1270– 1350, 70. 71. Camille describes the scene as a “representation of a representation,” but points out that “The thrust of this insular ideological message, however, is no less ‘real’ for its being a game” (Mirror in Parchment, 60–61). The image is found on fol. 82r of the Luttrell Psalter. In a similar vein, Bruce Holsinger notes that Saracen blackness is often compared to ink so that “Saracen skin becomes a somatic simulacrum of the very act of writing, perhaps exposing an anxious awareness among Christian writers of the fictionality of the ethnic and religious essentialisms they themselves were inscribing” (“The Color of Salvation,” 171).

Notes to Chapter 6 72. The quotation is taken from Baldwin’s essay “Stranger in the Village” in Notes of a Native Son (reprinted in Collected Essays, 117–29, quotation at 123). 73. De Weever, Sheba’s Daughters, 189; A. David Napier, Masks, Transformation, and Paradox, 16. For a wide-ranging discussion of the signification of medieval masks, symbolic as well as actual, see the essays collected by Marie-Louise Ollier in Masques et déguisements dans la littérature médiévale. 74. Daniel, Heroes and Saracens, 50. Daniel memorably calls such celebrants “wineswilling Saracens” (51), and in this impossible figure I would locate the ambivalent heart of Christian fantasy. 75. La Prise d’Orange, ed. Claude Régnier, 1083–89. Earlier in the poem, Guillaume complains of boredom, wishing for a thousand beautiful girls for his and his companions’ pleasure (85–91): the Christians and the Saracens here have the same desires, but the Saracens are the ones who possess that desire’s means to fulfillment. 76. Jacques de Vitry, Liber Orientalis (Douai, 1597), 27; cited by Daniel, Heroes and Saracens, 70. 77. This taxonomy of Saracen pleasures and its explication can be found in Michael Uebel, “Unthinking the Monster,” 274. Norman Daniel details Christian “fascinated horror” at Saracen sexual excessiveness in Islam and the West, 135–61. 78. See Hutcheson and Blackmore’s “Introduction” to Queer Iberia, 1. 79. See Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, 280–81. Mark Jordan reads the inextricability of Saracen sodomy to Hrotswitha’s construction of Muslim otherness in her account of Saint Pelagius’s martyrdom, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology, 10–28. 80. Dolar, “Introduction: The Subject Supposed to Enjoy,” xiii. Dolar usefully translates into more explicitly Lacanian terms the central thesis of Grosrichard’s book. 81. Dolar’s account of Grosrichard’s argument is a complicated one, and propounds that “It is through the supposition of enjoyment in the Other that the subject may get his or her share of enjoyment . . . through the subject’s renunciation [of enjoyment, which] . . . can give consistency to the phantasmatic enjoyment of the Other” (“Introduction,” xxiii). That is, by believing that eastern Other enjoys, by believing in the subject supposed to enjoy, I can renounce my own enjoyment (a perversely enjoyable act) and surrender myself to the despotic regime that is the West as a law-abiding subject. This fantasy “can procure enjoyment only by keeping it at a distance . . . keeping the subject and his or her enjoyment in an ambiguous in-between state” (because a “screen against the impossible Real,” xxii). 82. Enjoyment in the other, it should be noted, helps to explain why Charlemagne texts continue to be created, translated, and consumed in England, even at the turn of the fourteenth century (when three of the four romances in the so-called Middle English “Firumbras” group originated—Sultan, c. 1400, Ashmole Firumbras, c. 1380, Fillingham Firumbras, 1375–1400). I have consulted the two available editions: The Sowdone of Babylone, ed. Emil Hausknecht, and The Sultan of Babylon, in Three Middle English Charlemagne Romances, ed. Alan Lupack. Quotations are from Lupack’s edition of the poem. 83. Strictly speaking, of course, the line is nonsensical in that it compares Saracens who are Moors to themselves, but more generally the simile is typical of the text’s intertwining of excess and racial otherness in paradoxically deflationary ways.

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Notes to Chapter 6 84. Smyser argued that the romance’s most immediate source was an Anglo-Norman romance combining the French Fierabras and the prefatory Destruction de Rome (see H. M. Smyser, “The Sowdon of Babylon and Its Author,” 201–02). In the Fierabras, Charlemagne battles a giant named Effraons and his wife Amiote; Estragote and Barrok supplant these giants in The Sultan and its source (a version of the romance Smyser calls “HD,” see 191)—never engaging Charlemagne, and indicating that the passions of both the AngloNorman and English romancers were invested in narrative spaces other than those inhabited by the putative central figure of their texts. See also Fierabras, chanson de geste, ed. A. Kroeber and G. Servois. 85. Smyser identifies such corporal affronts as a “favorite joke” of the author of the Sultan: Ferumbras decapitates the traitorous porter of Rome via falling portcullis; both Laban and Marsedag of Barbary are cut short from their insults against the Christians by a wellthrown dart (“The Sowdan of Babylon and Its Author,” 212, 216). 86. The Song of Roland: An Analytical Edition, ed. and trans. Gerard J. Brault, lines 1326–34. 87. As Gerald Herman points out, the appellation “Chernubles” participates in a chanson tradition of bestowing a proper name upon a Saracen that emphasizes “a dark skin color” (cf. Cornuble, Nubiant; “Some Functions of Saracen Names in Old French Epic Poetry,” 430). 88. Matthew Paris, for example, almost never darkens the skin of his Saracens, and only sometimes racializes their features, but his Tartars are depicted with distorted bodies, protruding jaws, hook noses. Both his narrative and the accompanying illustration (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 15, fol. 166) envision a tableau of cannibalism and sexual violation. See Suzanne Lewis, The Art of Matthew Paris, 286. 89. Richard Coer de Lyon, ed. Karl Brunner, lines 3198–3226, 3466–3562. In addition to Heng’s thoroughgoing analysis of the cohesive power of the episode in “The Romance of England,” see Alan S. Ambrisco, “Cannibalism and Cultural Encounters in Richard Coeur de Lion,” which argues that the romance employs cannibalism to demarcate the English from the French, an “other who is too close for comfort” (520). 90. In the words of Samir Marzouki, “La chanson de geste est un genre qui bannit l’objectivité” (“Islam et Musulmans dans la Chanson de Roland,” 106). Marzouki argues that the Chanson de Roland works ideologically by transforming the ethnic specificity of Charlemagne’s Franks into a universal Christendom unproblematically marked by first person plural possessives (107), reducing the “Muslims”—many of whom are in fact nonIslamic peoples: les Huns, les Hongrois, les Bulgares, les Pincenois (Tartars)—to a fallen race united by their own idol worship (110). Ultimately, however, even the Song of Roland is more ethically complex than its own delight in identity reduction might suggest: the deadliest threat to Christian integrity is not the Saracens, after all, but Roland’s treacherous stepfather, Ganelon. Peter Haidu details the moral intricacies of the poem well in The Subject of Violence: The Song of Roland and the Birth of the State, esp. 17–35, while Sharon Kinoshita argues that its reductive formulae conceal “the instability unsettling each side of the confessional divide” (“Alterity, Gender, and Nation,” 79). 91. For a strong counterargument that stresses the important ideological work performed by Aude and especially Bramimonde in the poem, see Kinoshita, “Alterity, Gender, and Nation,” 90–102.

Notes to Chapter 6 92. I am thinking here of the pioneering work of Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo.
i
zek, “Re-visioning ‘Lacanian’ Social Criticism: The Law and Its Obscene Dou93. Z ble,” 17. Parts of this essay were incorporated in modified form into his “‘I Hear You with My Eyes’; or, The Invisible Master.” 94. This “radical strangeness” in the Other is the embodiment of what Lacan calls the objet petit a, “the object-cause [or “invisible driving force”] of desire” (“Re-visioning ‘Lacanian’ Social Criticism,” 18). 95. On the utility and limits of Said’s work to medieval studies, see Akbari, “From Due East to True North”; Kathleen Biddick, “Coming out of Exile: Dante on the Orient Express”; Kathleen Davis, “Time Behind the Veil: The Media, the Middle Ages, and Orientalism Now.” 96. The language that the Saracens speak is never identified in this text, but Sarrazinois is a common French designation elsewhere. It should be noted that, unlike many other authors, a consciousness of Saracen linguistic diversity is not alien to the writer of Sultan. When a Babylonian ship captain arrives to announce to Laban that tribute meant for the emperor has been seized by Romans, he speaks through an interpreter (66–67). 97. For a discussion of the signification of invented “Muslim” names in works like the Chanson de Roland, see Samir Marzouki, “Islam et Musulmans,” 107–08. Marzouki observes that these names tend to be constructed around pejorative roots, especially “mal” and “mar,” but a vast number of these words are simply a nonsignifying cacophony of foreign-sounding syllables (“Ce sont des noms qui par leurs sonorités mêmes étaient susceptibles d’éveiller chez l’auditoire la terreur et la répugnance,” 109). 98. On supposed Saracen irrationality and the “crazy” and “confused” structure of  the Qur a¯ n, see Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 57–67. Robert’s paraphrase and reduction are also discussed by Daniel in The Arabs and Mediaeval Europe, 241, and the anxieties behind Peter the Venerable’s translation program are discussed in Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History, 38–44. 99. Smyser (“The Sowdon of Babylon and Its Author”) observes that religious ceremonies are staged repeatedly in order to make their rites familiar, and that “lists of Saracen tribal names crop out in a half dozen places” where the sources and analogues describe “unparticularized pagan hordes” (209). Representing the Saracens as an undifferentiated collective is at least as old as the writings of Erchembert of Monte Cassino (Epitome Chronologica, eleventh century), who described the invasion of Sicily as a devastation wrought by Arabs who poured from Babylon (Egypt) and Africa (Tunisia) like “a swarm of bees.” Norman Daniel treats this episode in The Arabs and Mediaeval Europe, 56.
i
zek describes the necessity of this process eloquently: “The 100. Again, Slavoj Z question of la traversée du fantasme, of how to gain the minimum of distance toward the phantasmatic frame that organizes one’s enjoyment, of how to suspend its efficiency, is crucial not only for the concept of the psychoanalytic cure and its conclusion: today, in our era of renewed racist tensions, of universalized anti-Semiticism, it is perhaps the foremost political question. . . . The foremost problem is not how to denounce and rationally defeat the enemy—a task that can easily result in strengthening its hold upon us—but how to break its (phantasmatic) spell upon us. The point of la traversée du fantasme is not to get rid of jouissance (in the mode of the old leftist Puritanism): the distance toward fantasy means,

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Notes to Chapter 6 rather, that I as it were ‘unhook’ jouissance from its phantasmatic frame and acknowledge it as that which is properly undecidable, as the invisible remainder that is neither inherently ‘reactionary,’ the support of historical inertia, nor the liberating force that enables us to undermine the constraint of the existing order” (“‘I Hear You with My Eyes,’” 117–18). 101. I am quoting from Dolar’s description of Grosrichard’s achievement, but the words fit the medieval romance uncannily well; see “Introduction,” xii. 102. Christopher Tyerman explicates the episode’s importance in England and the Crusades, 1095–1588, 276–80, quotation at 280. Henry Bolingbroke himself was to have brought troops to Africa, indicating how high a profile the undertaking enjoyed. 103. Pointing out that La
amon describes the pagan Saxons as worshipping “maumets,” Dorothee Metlitzki writes that “the Norman conquest of England in 1066 and the Norman capture of Palermo from the Saracens in 1072—the most important victory over Islam in the eleventh century—were intimately related, for ‘Saracen’ had become the generic term for all enemies . . . and what was happening at Hastings was the subjection of English ‘Saracens’ by men who were brothers and cousins of those who were ousting Islam from its strongholds in Europe and the Byzantine empire” (The Matter of Araby, 119). 104. Chism, “The Siege of Jerusalem,” 321. Several chronicle writers insisted that Jews were sending secret messages to Muslims in the Holy Land to warn them of Christian movements (Norman Daniel, The Arabs and Mediaeval Europe, 124–25, 143), while others argued that Islam itself would have been impossible without the influence of the Jews (Daniel, Islam and the West, 188). Guibert of Nogent provides a particularly vivid example of crusaders who on the way to the Holy Land declare that “We desire to attack the enemies of God in the East, although the Jews, of all races the worst foes of God, are before our eyes. That’s doing our work backward.” They gather the Jews into a synagogue in Rouen and massacre them (Self and Society in Medieval France: The Memoirs of Abbot Guibert of Nogent, 134–35). On crusades and the murder of Jews in England, see Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England, 8–10, 18–26. See also the work of Robert Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade and Daggers of Faith: Thirteenth-Century Christian Missionizing and Jewish Response. 105. Folio 94r holds an especially vivid example: a long-nosed man with large red lips and swarthy skin glowers at the crucified Jesus. He is unmistakably a Saracen, except for the fact that he wears the iconic horned miter of the Jewish high priests. Similar “mixed” figures appear in fols. 91v, 92v, and 107r. Michael Camille discusses the portraits in Mirror in Parchment, 282–84. Ruth Mellinkoff describes Saracens wearing the emblematic Jew’s hat in the thirteenth-century Life of Saint Alban, Outcasts, 93. 106. The Saracens of King Horn who ravage the land and slay the protagonist’s father could accurately be described as doppelgängers for the Vikings; Dorothee Metlitzki, on the other hand, wonders if they might not encode a memory of an actual Saracen raid on Ireland from Spain, evidence for which she finds in some Arabic sources (The Matter of Araby, 120–26). Geraldine Heng points out that the palimpsest for Geoffrey’s narration of the invasion of the island by a Muslim king and his 160,000 men is Gildas’s depiction of the Saracens pillaging the land in the De Excidio Britanniae (“Cannibalism, the First Crusade, and the Genesis of Medieval Romance,” 131–32). Robert M. Stein examines the racial poetics inherent in (for example) the “bleomen” and “moni Aufrikan” in La
amon’s rewriting

Notes to Chapter 6 of Wace’s rewriting of Geoffrey (“Making History English: Cultural Identity and Historical Explanation in William of Malmesbury and La
amon’s Brut,” 112). Such narratives, he argues, must be read neither as fantasies nor simple historiography but as “practical social policy,” for at this time elites “began to conceive of secular society as homogenous” and therefore implemented “systematic marginalization, persecution, expulsion, and ultimately extermination of groups imagined as alien” (114). 107. Claire Sponsler, “Alien Nation: London’s Aliens and Lydgate’s Mummings for the Mercers and Goldsmiths,” esp. 230–32. 108. Kathleen Biddick has described the “fractured state of vernacularity” in England in the last quarter of the fourteenth century: The Shock of Medievalism, 46–55, quotation at 54. John Bowers writes of Chaucer’s “aggressive Englishness” in “Chaucer after Smithfield: From Postcolonial Writer to Imperialist Author.” 109. Smyser, “Charlemagne Legends,” 82. 110. Behind my use of “citationality” here is Judith Butler’s argument that discourses gain authority by “citing the conventions of authority.” See Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,” 13. 111. Most noticably in a passage of 111 lines connecting the two French sources and occuring in neither (Smyser, “Charlemagne Legends,” 83). An exception is lines 1541–62, which describe how Roland and Oliver spot Floripas while trapped in prison, perhaps recalling Palamon and Arcite in The Knight’s Tale, and contained in both the Middle English and the Anglo-Norman redactions. 112. Compare General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, lines 1, 10, 11, 97, 98.

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T

Abbreviations EETS JEGP JMEMS NLH PL PMLA

Early English Text Society Journal of English and Germanic Philology Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies New Literary History Patrologia Latina Publications of the Modern Language Association

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Medieval Cultures Volume 32 Edited by Sharon Farmer and Carol Braun Pasternack Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages Volume 31 L. O. Aranye Fradenburg Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer Volume 30 Stephanie Trigg Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern Volume 29 Edited by Kathleen Ashley and Robert L. A. Clark Medieval Conduct Volume 28 D. Vance Smith The Book of the Incipit: Beginnings in the Fourteenth Century Volume 27 Edited by Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger Queering the Middle Ages Volume 26 Paul Strohm Theory and the Premodern Text Volume 25 David Rollo Glamorous Sorcery: Magic and Literacy in the High Middle Ages Volume 24 Steve Ellis Chaucer at Large: The Poet in the Modern Imagination Volume 23 Edited by Barbara Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka Medieval Practices of Space Volume 22 Michelle R. Warren History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain, 1100–1300

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Volume 10 Claire Sponsler Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England Volume 9 Edited by Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in Fifteenth-Century England Volume 8 Marilynn Desmond Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval “Aeneid” Volume 7 Edited by Clare A. Lees Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages Volume 6 Edited by Barbara A. Hanawalt and Kathryn L. Reyerson City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe Volume 5 Edited by Calvin B. Kendall and Peter S. Wells Voyage to the Other World: The Legacy of Sutton Hoo Volume 4 Edited by Barbara A. Hanawalt Chaucer’s England: Literature in Historical Context Volume 3 Edited by Marilyn J. Chiat and Kathryn L. Reyerson The Medieval Mediterranean: Cross-Cultural Contacts Volume 2 Edited by Andrew MacLeish The Medieval Monastery Volume 1 Edited by Kathryn L. Reyerson and Faye Powe The Medieval Castle

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Index

Abelard, 270 Abels, Richard P., 256 Actaeon, 157, 158 Adomnán, 15, 231, 232 adultery, 82, 83, 104 Ælfric, 274 Ælfwald, 118 Aers, David, 164, 263, 265 Æthelbald, 118–19, 145, 253–54, 260 Africa, xvii, 194–98, 200, 201, 218 Akbari, Suzanne Conklin, 192, 271, 274, 275, 281 Alan of Lille, 42, 200 Albertus Magnus, 48, 72, 192, 196–97, 243–44, 245, 270, 274, 275 Alcuin, 130 Alexander the Great, 72, 275 Alfred, King of Wessex, xix–xxii Allen, Emily Hope, 263 Ambrisco, Alan S., 280 Anderson, Benedict, 259 Andreas, 130–31 Andreas Capellanus, 111 Anglo-Saxon England: as construct, 143–45 animals, 42, 47–48, 64; and Jews, 272 Antony, Saint, 28–29, 34, 119, 132 Appiah, Anthony, 271 Aristotle, 45 Armstrong, Elizabeth, 263 Artaud, Antonin, xvii, 233 Arthur, King, 92–93

Ascherl, Rosemary, 240 assemblage (agencement), xiv, 3; as archipelago, 13–16, 231; as calibene, 31, 152; as heterogeneous, 20, 32, 44, 152, 182–84; as inhuman circuit, 37–38, 41– 44, 76; and masochism, 41–44, 79; as queer, 76–77, 79 Asser, xix–xxii astrology, xvi. See also race. Atkinson, Clarissa, 165, 261, 263, 265 Atwood, Elizabeth, 240 Augustine of Hippo, xvii, 2, 4, 8, 75, 126, 185, 195, 196, 229, 231, 245, 257 Aveni, Anthony, 235 Awkward, Michael, 192 Ayton, Andrew, 70, 240, 242, 244 babewyn, xxii Bachofen, Jacob, 111–12 Baldwin, James, 207, 279 Baldwin, John, 248 Balthazar, 198 Barber, Richard, 239 Barratt, Alexandra, 262 Bartels, Emily C., 273 Barthes, Roland, 159, 262 Bartholomaeus Anglicus, 197, 274 Bartholomew, Saint, 120, 139–40 Bartlett, Robert, 191–92, 193, 231, 239, 240, 269, 270, 272, 274 Bassett, Steve, 254 Baswell, Christopher, 275

327

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Index

Bayeux Tapestry, 49, 72 Beckwith, Sarah, 167, 175, 262, 263, 264, 265, 267 becoming, 3, 7, 33, 42–44, 47, 75–77, 169, 183 Bede: Ecclesiastical History, xix, 48, 125, 144–45, 196, 234–35, 239, 253–54, 256– 57; The Reckoning of Time, 3, 14, 25, 229, 231, 233 Benedict, Saint, 25 Benítez-Rojo, Antonio, 12–14, 18, 19, 23, 234 Benoît de Sainte-Maure, 198, 275 Benton, John F., 248 Beowulf, 123, 127, 130, 131, 133, 134, 138; “Last Survivor,” 136 Bernard of Clairvaux, 23, 193 Bersani, Leo, 90, 250, 251 bestiality, 238 Bevis of Hampton, 54–55, 61–62, 72, 202 Bhabha, Homi, 19, 233 Biddick, Kathleen, 229, 237, 257, 268, 281, 283 Bjork, Robert, 134, 147, 253, 255, 257, 258 blackface, 206, 278 Blackmore, Josiah, 208, 276, 279 Bloch, R. Howard, 247 body: as bounded object, xi–xiii; and religious experience, 170; as site of possibility, xiii–xiv, xviii, xxii–xxiii, 147–53 Body without Organs (BwO), xvii, 140, 258 Boethius, 2, 148, 195, 273 Boffey, Julia, 265 Bolton, W. F., 258 Boudica, 142 Borst, Arno, 234 Boswell, John, 208, 268, 275, 279 Bowers, John, 234, 283 Boyd, David Lorenzo, 73, 237, 244 boystows, 155, 174, 175, 180, 186 Bozóky, Edina, 278 Bremmer, Eluned, 184, 267 Brendan, Saint, 129–30

Britons, 117, 119, 142–45 Brown, Catherine, 8, 214, 230 Brown, Peter, 257 Bruckner, Matilda Tomaryn, 87, 113, 244, 247, 250, 252 Brundage, James, 85, 248, 251 Bull, Maurice, 239 Bumke, Joachim, 57, 242 Burger, Glenn, 38, 47, 237 Burns, E. Jane, 110, 227, 240, 250, 252, 262 Burrow, J. A., 228 Bustad, Leo K., 242 Butler, Judith, 26, 85, 235, 241, 248, 249, 283 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 1, 161, 172, 225, 246 Cadden, Joan, 192, 193, 270, 272 Cædmon, 130 Caesar, Julius, 142 Calder, Daniel, 253, 254, 255, 256 Camille, Michael, xvi–xviii, 70, 71, 206, 226, 227, 228, 244, 277, 278, 282 Campbell, Mary Baine, 232, 274 Camus, Albert, 188 cannibalism, 211–12 capitalism, 4 Caribbean, 3, 12–14, 18, 19, 23 Carruthers, Mary, xiv, 226 castration, 80, 198 Caxton, William, 54 celibacy, 82, 85, 128, 131, 139, 147, 148 Certeau, Michel de, 163, 264 Chance, Jane, 236 Chanson d’Aliscans, 56, 65, 72, 201, 202, 206, 242, 244, 278 Chanson d’Aspremont, 65 Chanson de Roland, 56, 58, 200–201, 211– 12, 217, 242, 280 Charlemagne, 201, 203–6, 212–20, 279, 280 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 15, 21–24, 46, 47, 55, 67, 110–11, 156, 202, 220–21, 278, 283

Index

Chazan, Robert, 282 Chesnutt, Charles, 278 chevauchée, 70 Chickering, Howell, 239 children, 51–52, 60, 61, 63, 80, 154, 168, 171, 189 Chinca, Mark, 243 Chion, Michel, 164 Chism, Christine, 272, 282 chivalry, 46–47; as control, 53, 57; in romance, 59–69; training of youths, 51–53, 60 Chrétien de Troyes, 147; authorial voice, 96–97, 109–12; Chevalier au lion, 55, 62, 72, 87, 88, 94, 104, 250; Le Chevalier de la charrete, 78–115; Li Contes del Graal, 59–60; as converted Jew, 114; in Deleuze and Guattari, 245– 46; Erec et Enide, 59, 87, 88, 104. See also Guenevere; Lancelot; masochism Christianity, 14, 18, 24, 48, 120, 124, 150, 193, 280; minority, 269; pluralized, 151, 186, 191, 257; as process, 128, 130, 189, 202 Christine de Pizan, xxvii, 54 circumcision, 189 Citrome, Jeremy, 71, 241, 244 Cixous, Hélène, 262 Clark, Robert L. A., 39, 237, 278 class difference, 64–67, 180 Clayton, Mary, 126, 256, 257 Cleve, Gunnel, 261 Cohn, Norman, 91 Coifi, 48 Cole, Penny, 269 Colgrave, Bertram, 253, 256, 259 Collins, Roger, 260 Columba, Saint, 14–15 Columbus, Christopher, 13 Comfort, William Wistar, 276 community, 125, 131, 182, 203 computus, 4, 25 Connor, Patrick, 120 Copeland, Rita, 114–15

Copjec, Joan, 26 Coss, Peter, 239, 244 Courtès, Jean Marie, 195, 273 courtly love, 82 Crane, Susan, xxii Crouch, David, 239, 241, 242, 244 crusades, 268, 271, 276, 282; and Saracens, 189, 190, 193 Cursor Mundi, 198 Curta, Florin, 231 Cuthbert, Saint, xix, 119, 254 cyborg, xiii cynocephalus, 200, 202 Daniel, Norman, 208, 269, 273, 276, 279, 281, 282 Darby, H. C., 259 Davis, David Brion, 276 Davis, Kathleen, 254, 281 Davis, R. H. C., 239, 240 Dekkers, Midas, 238 De Landa, Manuel, 6–7, 9, 147, 226, 230, 233 Delaney, Sheila, 263 Deleuze, Gilles, 240; and Foucault, 26; on islands, 13; on masochism, 89–91, 102, 249; on time, 7, 233–34 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, xiii– xviii, xxiii, 41–44, 67, 75; desiringmachines, xiii–xvi, 147–48, 226; faciality, 150; rhizomes, 22, 23; socius, 140, 258; unnatural participation, 182– 84. See also assemblage; becoming; Body without Organs; middles demons, 29, 132–53, 164; as bodies in pieces, 149–50; as Britons, 143–44; as community, 133, 164; as sexual temptation, 132 Deroy, Jean, 248 Derrida, Jacques, 26, 85 desire: and excess, 81, 115, 117; as nonhuman, xvi, 44, 147, 221; and suffering, 82 Devisse, Jean, 196, 273, 275, 277

329

330

Index

De Weever, Jacqueline, 202, 207, 270, 277, 278, 279 Dickman, Susan, 172 Dillon, Janette, 261, 267 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 8, 32–33, 38–39, 47, 73, 162, 172, 185, 206, 235, 237, 244, 261, 262, 264, 265, 266, 267, 278 disability studies, xii, xiii Dolar, Mladen, 163, 181, 208–9, 217, 264, 267, 279, 282 Dollimore, Jonathan, 85 dominatrix, 43, 108 Douglas, Mary, 281 Dream of the Rood, 130 Dublin, 20 Duby, Georges, 58, 86, 108, 241, 248, 252 Dumville, David, 260 Duns Scotus, 9 Earl, James W., 257 Edward I, 51, 241 Edwin, 48 Eleanor of Aquitaine, 111 Elliott, Dyan, 236, 261 Ellis, Deborah, 263 England and Englishness, 182, 187 enjoyment, 166; and fantasy, 207–9, 213; as jouissance, 214, 218, 282; in the Other, 213–18; and sacrifice, 208–9 Enright, Michael J., 258 Erchembert of Monte Cassino, 281 Erler, Mary, 261 Ethiopians, 194–99 Euripides, 45 Europe: as a construct, xvii, 13–14, 231 evolution, 6, 230 Exeter Book, 121–22, 152 exile, 135–36 Fabian, Johannes, 20, 230–31, 233 fabliaux: Des tresses, 62–63; Le Débat du con et du cul, xviii; Les Quartre sohais Saint Martin, xviii Fanon, Frantz, 207

fantasy: and enjoyment, 207; traversée du fantasme, 217–18, 281–82 Felix (Life of St. Guthlac), 117–20, 127–29, 133, 143–45, 149–53, 253 Felski, Rita, 5–6, 229, 230 feminism, xii, xxiii, 6, 38, 78, 188 Fenlands, 118, 137–38, 142–43, 153, 259 Fernaguz, 204–5 Fienberg, Nona, 266 Fierabras, 202, 212 “Fight at Finnsburgh, The,” 133 Finke, Laurie, 235, 248, 252 Fjalldal, Magnus, 258 Flanagan, Bob, 245 Flores, Nona C., 238 Floyd-Wilson, Mary, 271 Foucault, Michel, 59, 81, 235–36, 240, 243, 245, 250; as antihumanist, 41, 77; and Guthlac, 116–17, 120, 146, on sexuality, 39; on time, 24–34 Fradenburg, L. O. Aranye, 8, 21, 233, 235, 237, 238, 250–51, 258, 268 Frantzen, Alan J., 35–37, 41, 43, 47, 52, 135–36, 228, 235, 236, 237, 257 Frappier, Jean, 247, 248 Freccero, Carla, 233, 235, 237, 258 Freedman, Paul, 275, 276–77 Freud, Sigmund, 41–43, 79, 83, 237–38, 246, 249, 252 Friedman, John Block, 192, 270, 274, 275 Fries, Maureen, 175 Fuss, Diana, 225 future: as open, 7, 182 Galehaut, 106 Galen, 197 Garber, Marjorie, 225, 266 Gates, Henry Louis, 271 Gaunt, Simon, 237 Gawain, 48, 55, 73–75, 93–95 Geertz, Clifford, 4, 229 gender, 2, 82, 107; as relational, 85, 101, 128, 133; universalizing models, xii, xvi

Index

Genet, Jean, 39 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 219, 282–83 Geoffroi de Charny, 53, 63 Gerald of Wales, xvi, xviii, 200, 233, 245, 260 Gervase of Tilbury, 16, 232 Gimpel, Jean, 227 Girard, René, 252 Gist, Margaret Adlum, 277 Glacken, Clarence J., 272 Godefroi de Leigni, 82, 112–13 Grandes chroniques de France, 202–6, 278 Gray, Arthur, 259 Green, Judith, 240 Grendel, 133 Griffin, Miranda, 227 Grosrichard, Alain, 213, 279, 282 Grosz, Elizabeth, xxiii, 7–9, 76, 148, 228, 237, 241, 245 Guenevere, 88, 92–93, 95, 99–104, 108 Guibert of Nogent, 200, 208, 282 Guillaumin, Colette, 271 Gupta, Akhil, 229 Gurevich, A. J., 229 Guthlac, Saint, xix, 116–53; death, 120; descent and youth, 118, 126–27; and Mercia, 121–22; solitude, 126, 131, 135, 139, 147–48, 151; as warrior, 123–28, 131–35, 139–40, 143–44 Guthlac A, 119, 120–26, 129, 131–42, 152–53 Guthlac B, 119, 134 Hahn, Thomas, 192, 198, 245, 270, 273 Haidu, Peter, 280 Halberstam, Judith: and Ira Shapiro, 225 Hall, Edward, 4 Halperin, David M., 38–41, 44, 47, 71, 237 Hanning, Robert, 54–55, 59, 105, 243, 251 Haraway, Donna, xiii, 225 Hardiman, Mary, 261 Hardt, Michael, 226 Harris, Joseph, 258

Haslam, Jeremy, 260 Hassig, Debra, 272 Hawking, Stephen, 5 Hayles, N. Katherine, 225 Healey, Antonette diPaolo, 254 hemorrhoids, xix–xxi Heng, Geraldine, 192–94, 271, 272, 276, 280, 282 Henri d’Andeli, 45 Henry IV, 51 Henry of Avranches, 120 Herman, Gerald, 280 Hermann, John P., 255 hermits, 126 heterosexuality, xi, xx, 39, 85, 87, 100, 105, 128, 262 Higgins, Iain Macleod, 274 Higham, N. J., 256 Hill, David, 259, 260 Hill, John, 256 Hill, Joyce, 255 Hill, Thomas, 255, 256, 257 Hindman, Sandra, 56 Holbrook, Sue Ellen, 265, 266 Holmes, Urban T., 114 Holsinger, Bruce, xx, 23, 165, 193, 227, 237, 264, 271, 274, 278 Holt, Thomas, 271 homosexuality, 128, 208 hooks, bell, 271 horse: and chivalry, 46, 51–71, 93, 95; and human desire, 42–46, 53, 66–67, 71; medieval uses, 48–49; relation to rider, 49–50 Howard, Donald, 266 Howe, Nicholas, 254, 259 Hugh of St. Victor, 86 Hult, David, 253 human: limits of, xii–xviii, 41–44, 76–77 humanism, 40–41, 75 humoral theory xiii, 75–76, 194–96, 198 Huon de Bordeux, xviii husband: invention of, 86–87, 248 Hutcheson, Gregory S., 208, 276, 279

331

332

Index

hybridity, 12, 175; cultural, 130, 254; human and nonhuman, xiii, 43, 47, 64, 182–84, 272; methodology, xxiii, 6; monsters, xviii, 47, 209 Hyland, Ann, 240 Iberia, 191, 193, 276, 279 Iceni, 142 India, 3 Iona, 15 Ireland, 16, 130 Irigaray, Luce, xxiii, 184, 262, 267 Irving, Edward B., 255 Irwin, Robert, 269 Isidore of Seville, 196, 197, 269, 274, 275 Jacobs, Joseph, 18, 271 Jacques de Vitry, 198, 208 Jerome, 156, 177, 178, 195, 197, 254, 273, 275 Jews, 24, 114, 170, 193, 220, 229; and English history, 17–18, 185–87, 219; and fantasy, 189; and gender, 272–72; and Margery Kempe, 185–87; massacres, 185, 213, 217, 282; as queer, 185; and Saracens, 201, 219, 271–72, 282 Job, 181 John, Eric, 119, 254, 256 Johnson, Ian, 262 Johnson, J. W., 272 Jones, C. Meredith, 276 Julian of Norwich, 169 Kaeuper, Richard, 57, 65, 239, 241, 242 Kaplan, Amy, 233 Karras, Ruth Mazzo, 263 Kauffman, Linda, 245 Kay (Arthurian knight), 64, 92, 93 Kay, Sarah, 110, 226, 227, 247, 252 Keen, Maurice, 50, 57, 239, 240, 242 Kelly, F. Douglas, 248 Kempe, Margery, 153, 154–87, 246; clothing: 156, 158, 176, 180; and community, 173–78, 182–85; crying;

155–56, 166–79; dislike of oaths, 156– 58; and storms, 179–85; touch, 162, 182; voice, 156, 166–79, 182–87. See also boystows; Jews Kibler, William, 108 King Horn, 219, 282 Kingsley, Charles, 141 Kinoshita, Sharon, 280 Kirkpatrick, Robin, 235 Koestenbaum, Wayne, 264 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 79, 83, 90, 246, 249–50 Krieg, Martha Fessler, 243 Kristeva, Julia, xxiii, 5, 188–89, 218, 220, 262, 268 Kritzeck, James, 269 Krueger, Roberta, 252, 253 Kruger, Stephen, 39, 192, 229, 237, 257, 271, 272, 275, 277 Kurtz, Benjamin T., 254 Lacan, Jacques, xxiii, 80, 85, 96, 163, 207, 218, 241, 252, 281 Lamoreaux, John C., 269 Lancelot: and chivalry, 94–95, 98–99; as Christ figure, 106–8; mysterious identity of, 92–103; and selfabnegation, 96–98; sexuality, 103–5; as youth, 65 Lancelot do Lac, 242, 243 Lapidge, Michael, 257, 259 Latour, Bruno, 5, 6, 50, 229, 240 Lavezzo, Kathy, 259, 266, 274 Lawrence, Elizabeth Atwood, 52 Lees, Clare A., 130, 131, 134, 235, 257 Le Goff, Jacques, 4, 24, 229, 234 Leonardo da Vinci, xi Levine, Robert, 9–11, 229 Lewis, Suzanne, 276, 280 Lipp, Francis Randall, 257 Little Hans, 41–43, 45, 67, 237, 238 Liuzza, Roy M., 255 Lochrie, Karma, 39, 183–84, 235, 237, 262, 263, 264, 265

Index

Lombard, Peter, 86 Lomperis, Linda, 274 London, 17, 20, 24, 219 Lowe, Lisa, 268 Lucretius, 148 Lull, Ramon, 51, 53–54, 58–59, 242 Luttrell, Geoffrey, 69–70, 244 Luttrell Psalter, xxii, 69–70, 206, 219, 277, 278, 282 Maalouf, Amin, 190, 269 Macey, David, 235 machine. See assemblage Magennis, Hugh, 258 Magli, Patrizia, 260–61 Mahoney, Dhira, 172, 265, 266 Malory, Thomas, 83, 243, 252 Mandel, Jerome, 248 Mandeville’s Travels, xviii, 197, 268, 274, 278 Mannyng, Robert, 49 Manter, Lisa, 265 Marchello-Nizia, Christine, 252 Margherita, Gayle, 172, 265 Marie de Champagne, 82, 83, 97, 108–13 Marie de France, 46, 55, 62, 72–73, 251 marriage, 85; and chivalry, 61–62, 72; and consent, 86, 88; and gender, 82, 85–86 Marx, Karl, 147 Marzouki, Samir, 280, 281 masochism, 43–44, 78–115; as assemblage, 79; and consensual gender, 88– 91; contemporary, 78–81; and heterosexuality, 246; and history, 81, 112; and social critique, 80–81, 88, 90–91 Matter, E. Ann, 274 Maurice, Saint, 198 McClintock, Anne, 17, 19, 232, 270 McClure, Judith, 260 McCracken, Peggy, 252 McEntire, Sandra, 263 McNamara, Jo Ann, 85–86, 248, 249, 251–52, 261 McRuer, Robert, 237, 270

Meade, Marion, 111 Mehl, Dieter, 243 Mellinkoff, Ruth, 268, 270, 277, 282 Menocal, Maria Rosa, 228, 231, 233, 239, 268, 276, 281 Mercia, 48, 116–53, 254; making of, 145–46 Merlin Continuation, 55, 242 Metlitzki, Dorothy, 273, 276, 278, 282 middles, 3, 19, 21, 23, 147, 151–52 Middleton, Anne, 278 Miller, James, 235 Mills, Robert, 38, 251 Miyazaki, Mariko, 272 Mohammed, 200, 208, 210 Moloch fantasy, 79–81, 98, 247 monsters, xviii, 33, 63, 123, 133–34, 192, 195, 202 Moore, R. I., 272 Moses, 181–82, 198 Munro, Dana C., 277 nation, xxiii, 146, 182. See also AngloSaxon England; England and Englishness; Mercia Neville, Jennifer, 256, 258 New York City, 10–11 Nicodemus, 107, 205 Nirenberg, David, 15–16 Noble, Peter S., 248 Northumbria, 14, 260 Noyes, John K., 245 Octavian, 63–69 O’Dell, Katherine, 245 Offa, 118, 119, 143, 253, 260 Ogiers le Danois, 48, 56 O’Keeffe, Katherine O’Brien, 258 Ollier, Marie-Louise, 279 Olsen, Alexandra Hennesey, 134, 255, 256, 258 Opinicus de Canistris, xvii–xviii Orchard, Andy, 258 Orderic Vitalis, 57–58

333

334

Index

Origen, 195 Orme, Nicholas, 241, 242, 243 Osborn, Marijane, 258 Oswald, 14 otherness (psychoanalytic), 188, 208–9, 213, 217 Otuel, 202 Overing, Gilian R., 258 Ovid, xviii, 148, 157 Owen, D. D. R., 252 Painter, Sidney, 241 “Pangur Ban,” 47 Paris, Gaston, 82, 108, 109, 247 Paris, Matthew, 153, 200, 261, 280 Parnet, Claire, 42, 238, 240 Partner, Nancy, 263 past: as active, 7, 204; as impediment, 132–33; openness of, xxiv, 19, 167 Paster, Gail, 75–76, 272 Pasternack, Carol Braun, 151, 253, 255, 257, 261 Patterson, Lee, 3, 8, 57, 228, 233, 234, 239, 242 Paulinus of Nola, 197 Paul the Hermit, 119, 132, 254 Pearsall, Derek, 22, 111, 234 Perlesvaus, 57 Peter the Venerable, 191, 215, 269, 281 Petroff, Elizabeth Alvilda, 168, 261 physiognomy, 189 Picasso, Pablo, 46 Picts, 14–15 Pliny, 194, 196 postcolonial theory, 3, 11–24, 189 Pratt, Mary Louise, 232 Prester John, 198 Probyn, Elspeth, 238 Prose Lancelot, 106 Provost, William, 265 psychoanalysis: and universalism, 189– 90, 218. See also enjoyment; fantasy; Lacan, Jacques; otherness; Reik,
i
zek Theodor, Silverman, Kaza, Z

queer theory, xii, xxiii, 36–41, 71–77, 185, 188, 246 race, 2, 11, 256; and astrology, 208; and class, 201; in classical texts, 194–195; and climate, 194, 196–98, 272; components of, 191–94; in humoral theory, 194, 198, 200; as imbricated category, xxiii, 192–93, 198–99, 201, 276; as mask, 203–6, 207; as nonuniversal, 189, 209; in patristic exegesis, 195–96; and queerness, 39; and racism, 192, 195; and skin color, xi, 192–202 Raimbert de Paris. See Ogiers le Danois Ramsey, Lee C., 243 Randall, Lillian, 238 Régnier-Bohler, Danielle, 157–58, 261 Reichardt, Paul F., 259 Reik, Theodor, 80–81, 83, 114, 247 Repton, 118, 145, 149, 150 Reynolds, Bryan, 183, 267 Richard Coer de Lyon, 211–12, 280 Richard II, 98 Riddy, Felicity, 71 Rider, Jeff, 252 Rivière, Pierre, 26–34, 120, 152, 238 Robert, Phyllis, 234 Roberts, Jane, 119, 124, 253, 254, 259 Roland, 204–5, 211, 212, 216, 219 Rollason, David, 145, 253 Rolle, Richard, 166, 169, 170 Roman de la Rose, 201 Rooney, Anne, 238, 245 Ross, Ellen, 264 Ross, John Munder, 245 Roth, Cecil, 267, 277, 282 Rubin, Miri, 75, 226 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, 90, 111, 114, 247 sadism, 89 Said, Edward, 213, 269, 281 Saladin, 200

Index

Salisbury, Joyce, 72, 239, 244, 245 Saracens, 63; and chivalry, 46; and climate, 192; as collective term, 190, 219, 269; and fantasy, 189, 208–9; and horses, 56; language, 209, 214, 215, 281; versus “Muslims,” 268, 280, 281; and race, 189, 202–6; Saracen women, 6, 201–2, 214, 277; as Saxon, 219, 282; sexuality, 208; skin color, 198–206, 209 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 39, 40, 188 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 84–85 Savage, H. L., 245 Savran, David, 245 Sawyer, P. H., 145, 260 Schmitt, Jean-Claude, 229 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 38, 79–80, 185, 252, 267 sexuality, 26, 34, 36–38, 40–41, 78–79, 128, 139, 192, 260; as nonbiological, 185; as nonhuman, 43–44, 147–48 Shaffer, Peter, 45 Shahar, Shulamith, 275 Shakespeare, William, 62, 98 Sharpe, Richard, 231 Shaviro, Steven, 148–49, 245, 250 Shklar, Ruth, 262 Shook, Laurence K., 141, 259 Shore, Penelope Audrey, 138, 255, 259 Silverman, Kaja, 80–81, 83, 246, 247, 251 Simpson, James, 233 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 73–75 Sisam, Kenneth, 121 Skidmore, Mark, 276 Slemon, Stephen, 234 Smith, D. Vance, 8, 227, 228 Smith, Sidonie, 267 Smith, Susan L., 238 Smyser, H. M., 280, 281, 283 Smyth, Alfred P., 143, 259 Snowden, Frank M., 245, 272, 273 Solomon, 81 Southern, R. W., 269, 276 Speed, Diane, 276 Spiegel, Gabrielle M., 228, 242, 278

Spivak, Gayatri, 232 Sponsler, Claire, 39, 219–20, 235, 237, 278, 282 Staley, Lynn, 182, 262, 266 Stancliffe, Clare, 256 Stein, Robert M., 282–83 Stenton, F. M., 121, 122, 259 Stevick, Robert D., 255 stirrup, 49–50 Stivale, Charles, xv Stock, Brian, 228, 233 Straker, Scott Morgan, 249 Strohm, Paul, 8, 230, 234, 242 Stuard, Susan Mosher, 248–49 subjectivity, xii, xxiii, 78, 163, 178, 188, 217 Suleri, Sara, 18 Sultan of Babylon, 207–21, 279 surplus, 79, 103, 250, 251 Swanson, R. N., 248 Sweet, James H., 276 Tacitus, 127, 142 Temkin, Owsei, 272 Thacker, Alan T., 253, 257 Thomas à Becket, 22 Thomas Aquinas, 269 Thomas of Kent, 197, 275 Thompson, Lloyd A., 272 time, 1–34; types of, 4–5; the untimely, 18 Tomasch, Sylvia, 187, 234, 268, 275 Tooley, Marian J., 272 tournaments, 53, 87, 95 Trevisa, John, 274 Tribal Hidage, 145 Turks, 190, 268, 269 Tyerman, Christopher, 282 Uebel, Michael, 78, 200, 202, 226, 239, 245, 276, 279 universalism, 189 unnatural alliance, 43 Vauchez, André, 264 Vegetius, 241

335

336

Index

Verkerk, Dorothy Hoogland, 272–73 Vikings, xx–xxi Villard de Honnecort, xvii, 226–27 voice, 163–64 Voyage of Saint Brendan, 197 Wald, Gayle, 271, 278 Wales, xix, 16, 60, 227, 243. See also Britons Wallace, David, 17–18, 230 “Wanderer, The,” 135, 136, 137 warband, 127–28 Warren, Michelle R., 8, 18, 230, 232 Washington, D.C., 20 Watson, Nicholas, 8, 266 Watt, W. Montgomery, 276 Wei, Ian, 228 Wentersdorf, Karl P., 142, 259 werewolf, 61, 73 Wessex, xxi

Weston, Lisa M. C., 253 Westrem, Scott, 268 Wheeler, Roxann, 269–70, 272 White, Lynn, 239 William of Malmesbury, 138, 269 William of Palerne, 60–61 William the Conqueror, 72 William the Marshall, 52–53, 241 Wilson, Janet, 267 Windeatt, B. A., 262–63, 267 wonder, 1, 38, 44 Wood, Michael, 259 Woolf, Rosemary, 255 Wormald, Patrick, 122, 254, 257, 260 Wulfhere, 118 Ziolkowski, Jan, 238
i
zek, Slavoj, xxiii, 103, 163, 213, 217, 246, Z 247, 252, 264, 281, 281 Zodiac Man, xv–xviii

Jeffrey J. Cohen has written a series of books, essays, and articles examining the complexities of identity (human and otherwise) in the Middle Ages. His scholarly work has long explored the relation between marginal phenomena like monstrosity to the establishment of cultural norms. He is the author of the book Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minnesota, 1999); the editor of Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minnesota, 1996) and The Postcolonial Middle Ages; and the coeditor of Becoming Male in the Middle Ages and Thinking the Limits of the Body.